By the bishop
1 Song
The Girl From Ipanema By Stanz Getz and Joao Gilberto Featuring Antonio Carlos Jobim
1 Quote
Isaiah 6:8
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
Isaiah 6:8 New International Version (NIV)
1 Idea
Legality and Morality
What is legal is not necessarily moral and what is illegal isn’t automatically immoral. Some laws are morality laws and some laws come from bureaucratic bloat and some from partisan compromise and the list goes on. One easy example, the kind to which I am not referring to, is jaywalking, the act of crossing the road where there is no official crossing point.
One example is when slavery was legal. I am in no way saying that slavery is or was moral.
Another example is the right to refuse service. Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s moral. Plus the reverse its not moral to force someone to serve someone else.
Don’t let laws guide your morality otherwise you will be dictated to by the winds of the day.
1 Poem
I still recall … By Alexander Pushkin
I still recall the wondrous moment: When you appeared before my sight As though a brief and fleeting omen, Pure phantom in enchanting light. In sorrow, when I felt unwell, Caught in the bustle, in a daze, I fell under your voice’s spell And dreamt the features of your face. Years passed and gales had dispelled My former hopes, and in those days, I lost your voice’s sacred spell, The holy features of your face. Detained in darkness, isolation, My days began to drag in strife. Without faith and inspiration, Without tears, and love and life. My soul attained its waking moment: You re-appeared before my sight, As though a brief and fleeting omen, Pure phantom in enchanting light. And now, my heart, with fascination, Beats rapidly and finds revived Devout faith and inspiration, And tender tears and love and life. Translated by Andrey Kneller
1 Picture
Roman Capriccio: The Colosseum and Other Monuments
1 Essay
Riotous Genius
Wallace’s grim fate left me worried that going back to read him for the purposes of this essay would be, at best, a bittersweet experience. It wasn’t. He was such an egghead that the lingering memory of his work can be one of difficult, sometimes opaque brilliance, but the actual experience of reading it is riotous. Even in the shadow of his suicide, Wallace’s voice on the page is so distinctive and so human (if a little Rain Man-y at times) that he seems to remain alive, which I guess is the ultimate test for all writers, eventually. Up until 2 a.m. reading his essays the other night, I only felt a twinge of sadness after I put down the book and went to bed.
Even when he was writing about depression or delusions, Wallace could stick the landing on jokes like nobody else. Take this long sentence from Infinite Jest:
He’d kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents, vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be fumigated at once and then began running around hunched and pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they continued to ooze through the room’s electrical outlets and scurry repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men in custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting that the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be fumigated.
Oddly, it’s the writing that tends to get lost in discussions of Wallace, whose brains and ambitions often receive focus at the expense of his actual sentences. There was something physical about both him (a lumberjack of a guy with a Mount Rushmore-sized head) and his prose that made people consider him in a way they normally reserve for athletes, not authors.
But it isn’t Wallace the inscrutable colossus who will last, it’s Wallace the careful craftsman. Here are just a very few (criminally few) of the images I rediscovered in the days immediately after his death:
On campaign-trail beverages: “coffee that tastes like hot water with a brown crayon in it.”
On a veteran New York Times reporter: she wore “a perpetual look of concerned puzzlement, as if life were one long request for clarification…”
On a third-party candidate winning the presidency in the imagined future of Infinite Jest: “…the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it…”
From The Broom of the System, his first novel: “Through the giant window high over the cubicle a thin spear of the orange-brown light of a Cleveland sunset, saved and bent for a moment by some kindly chemical cloud around the Erieview blackness, fell like a beacon on the soft patch of cream just below Lenore’s right ear, on her throat.”
On the protagonists in John Updike’s fiction: “Though usually family men, they never really love anybody — and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women.”
On South Carolina during the 2000 presidential campaign: “You can tell it must be spooky down here in the summer, all wet moss and bog-steam and dogs with visible ribs and everybody sweating through their hat.”
One more, also about South Carolina: “The central-SC countryside looks blasted, lynched, the skies the color of low-grade steel, the land all dead sod and broomsedge, with scrub oak and pine leaning at angles, and you can almost hear the mosquitoes breathing in their baggy eggs awaiting spring.”
I’ve seen entire horror movies that aren’t as creepy as the last nine words of that sentence, and I’ve read poems that aren’t as lyrical.
John Williams
1 Question
How do we handle emotions more generally?
Massimo Pigliucci