Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids.
Unknown author. The Architecture Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained. New York: DK Publishing, 2023. (see page 22)
More from the picture books are underrated file.
Category: amreading
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Found this one late. Will add to the original list of seven.
The decay of the body is irreversible. Death is non-negotiable. After that, what’s left? Stories. But not just the stories as the story tellers remember them and then recounted them to others. The stories that people adapt from other people’s stories which then are retold, remade, and handed down until only their essence remains.
Matt Zoller Seitz -
His annual letter has arrived at last.
Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome tax collector; it’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations – epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. As a consequence, people who dwell in the mountains tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans or Highland Scots.
Wang, Dan. March 4, 2023. https://danwang.co/2022-letter/Can’t help but read this in the light of a Star Wars pilot script. Imperials, rebels, dissenters? Wasn’t Hoth a giant ice mountain? Or at least it had a mountain range. Also, see the dwarves from the Hobbit. Proper dissenter-rebels they were too.
Extending the observation further. Are mountain visitors dissenters, rebels, and subversives? Or only permanent residents?
Plenty of mind expanding ideas and observations in this year’s edition.
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The Kathrine Rundell cluster reading continues. This from her book Super-Infinite.
Here she gives a brilliant breakdown on the practice of common placing through the eyes of John Donne.
The practice of commonplacing – a way of seeking out and storing knowledge, so that you have multiple voices on a topic under a single heading – colours Donne’s work; one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition and ends up somewhere fresh and strange.
Hoarding can have negative connotations, but for commonplacing it’s required:
Because, simply, Donne wouldn’t be Donne if he hadn’t lived in a commonplacing era; it nurtured his collector’s sensibility, hoarding images and authorities. He had a magpie mind obsessed with gathering.
Commonplacing isn’t chewing up ideas and spitting them out. It’s combining disparate ideas into five course suppers.
Crucially for Donne, though, the commonplace book wasn’t designed to be used for the regurgitation of memorised gobbets: it was to offer the raw material for a combinatorial, plastic process.
From scraps to wholes. Also Dr. Johnson wasn’t a Donne fan.
For Donne, apparently unrelated scraps from the world were always forming new wholes. Commonplacing was a way to assess material for those new connections: bricks made ready for the unruly palaces he would build.
Donne’s heterogeneity, which so annoyed Johnson, wasn’t a game: it was a form of discipline. Commonplacing plucks ideas out of their context and allows you to put them down against other, startling ones.
Donne used the term “commonplacer” first?! Of course.
It’s telling that the first recorded use of the word ‘commonplacer’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is Donne’s.
The Dutch scholar Erasmus was also a commonplacing forefather. He codified the practice:
The commonplace book allowed readers to approach the world as a limitless resource; a kind of ever-ongoing harvesting. It was Erasmus, the Dutch scholar known as ‘the prince of the humanists’, who codified the practice. The compiler, he wrote, should ‘ make himself as full a list of place-headings as possible’ to put at the top of each page: for instance, beauty, friendship, decorum, faith, hope, the vices and virtues. It was both a form of scholarship and, too, a way of reminding yourself of what, as you moved through the world, you were to look out for: a list of priorities, of sparks and spurs and personal obsessions. Donne’s book must surely have had: angels, women, faith, stars, jealousy, gold, desire, dread, death. Then, Erasmus wrote
whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is especially striking, you will be able to note it down in its appropriate place; be it a story or a fable or an example or a new occurrence or a pithy remark or a witty saying or any other clever form of words…Whenever occasion demands, you will have ready to hand a supply of material for spoken or written composition.
Who is the ideal commonplacer?
The ideal commonplacer is half lawyer, building up evidence in the case for and against the world, and half treasure hunter; and that’s what Donne’s mind was in those early days.
Rundell, Katherine. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. ( see pages 36-39)
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Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Ballad of the Subway Train was so difficult to track down, I had to capture it here.
It’s a gem.
A rhyming, celestial, origin story of the subway.
Hard to top that.
Long , long ago when God was young,
Earth hadn’t found its place.
Great dragons lived among the moons
And crawled and crept through space.
Ten thousand thousand years they lived,
And climbed the hills of night.
Their eyes were as the whizzing suns;
Their tails, sharp flails of light.
They bunted meteors with their heads
While unseen worlds dropped by;
And scratched their bronzy backs upon
The ridges of the sky.
The aeons came and went and came
And still the dragons stayed;
Until one night they chanced to eat
A swarm of stars new-made.
And when God saw them fully gorged,
Their scaly bellies fed,
His anger made the planets shake
And this is what he said:
“You have been feeding, greedy beasts,
Upon the bright young stars.
For gluttony as deep as yours —
Be changed to subway cars!
“No more for you infinite space,
But in a narrow hole
You shall forever grope your way,
Blind-burrowing like the mole!
So in the earth the dragons crawl
In murky, human roads.
The glory of the heavens once –
They carry human loads.
Creatures that the gorgeous sun
Face to face had seen,
Now are lighted by thin darts
Of limpid red and green.
And when you’re grinding through the dark
Aboard those “devilish cars,”
They really are the dragons who
Licked up the swarm of stars.
Bishop, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (LOA #180) (Library of America). New York City: Library of America, 2008. ( see pages 183, 184) -
This is the first line/verse from Beowulf that captured me:
I have never seen so impressive or large
an assembly of strangers. Stoutness of heart,
bravery not banishment, must have brought you to
Hrothgar.”
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc“Stoutness of heart” depicts strength, resilience. Something to aspire to.
If you’re looking to read more classics this year, Seamus Heaney‘s translation of Beowulf is an approachable entry point.
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A sad day for football. A sad day for the world.
By all measures, Gianluca was a gentleman. He lived out the lesson Don Angelo taught him at 10 years old. A lesson we could all embrace.
At the oratorio, Don Angelo, a football-loving priest, supervised our games. He wasn’t a coach, just a man who loved the game, with the special gift of knowing how to relate to kids and sort out the squabbles. Come to think of it, he was the only adult I worked with as a boy to whom teaching values was more important than teaching football.
I remember one day when he was refereeing a game and a player on the opposing team passed the ball back to the goalkeeper, who slipped and fell over. All he could do was lie on the ground and watch the ball roll past him into the back of the net. I was ten and I suppose I had an undeveloped sense of right and wrong, but it seemed unfair that the goal should stand. The next time the ball was in our area, I handled it blatantly, trying intentionally to give away a penalty. It was my way of leveling things.
Don Angelo saw it rather differently. He rushed over, picked up the ball and began to lecture me. ‘No! We don’t do things like that! he said. ‘I know why you did it. You didn’t think the previous goal should stand and you wanted to even things up. You think this is sportsmanship? This isn’t sportsmanship. Sportsmanship is accepting what happens on the pitch, whether it’s to your advantage or disadvantage…‘
To this day, it’s probably the only ‘life lesson’ I was explicitly taught on a football pitch (apart from the ones I picked up indirectly). Don Angelo illustrated how, in life, when things happen that are beyond your control, you have to accept them and move on. You can’t right a wrong by committing another wrong. It’s not the most profound message, but it stuck with me all these years because such moments were rare.
Vialli, Gianluca, Marcotti, Gabriele The Italian Job: A Journey to the Heart of Two Great Footballing Cultures. London: Bantam Press, 2007. (see page 70,71) -
First appearing in his Essay “On Living in an Atomic Age“. Lewis answers the question – how to live in a time of uncertainty?
Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plagued visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night….The first action to take is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb come when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
Baxter M. Jason, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022. (see page 14)Whatever 2023 brings, let’s heed these words.
Do human things. Live.
Happy New Year!
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I think reading and annotating books is thing I do best – it’s my most sharply honed skill. But that in itself has no market value, even though it has great value to me personally. And I find that difference interesting.
Jacobs, Alan. Homebound Symphony, my skillz. December 13, 2022.I’d argue reading and annotating books does have market value. It’s the soil that allows all the other “market value” skills to grow from.
To be a professor, writer, and observer, one must read and capture thoughts in the margins well. Honing this skill must lead to new, important insights, no?
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Hogsmeade looked like a Christmas card; the little thatched cottages and shops were all covered in a layer of crisp snow; there were holly wreaths on the doors and strings of enchanted candles hanging in the trees.
Rowling, J.K.. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks for reading.
Floodlights and Goalposts 