A most extraordinary mathematical proof

Reminded recently by Richard Dawkins¹ of Aldous Huxley's mostly forgotten classic novel of eighty years ago, Point Counter Point, I've been reading it again, and last night I arrived at the passage whose "extraordinary proof" Dawkins quoted:

"Mutton must be going out of fashion," sail Illidge. "Like God," he added provocatively, "and the immortal soul." Lord Edward was not to be baited....[Illidge] was interrupted and Lord Edward saved from further persecution by the ringing of the telephone bell.
    "I'll deal with it," said Illidge, jumping up from his place.
    He put the receiver to his ear. "Hullo!"
    "Edward, is that you?" said a deep voice not unlike Lord Edward's own. "This is me. Edward, I've just this moment discovered a most extraordinary mathematical proof of the existence of God, or rather of...."
    "But this isn't Lord Edward," shouted Illidge. "Wait. I'll ask him to come." He turned back to the Old Man. "It's Lord Gattenden," he said. "He's just discovered a new proof of the existence of God." He did not smile, his tone was grave. Gravity in the circumstances was the wildest derision. The statement made fun of itself. Laughing comment made it less, not more ridiculous. Marvellous old imbecile! Illidge felt himself revenged for all the evening's humiliations. "A mathematical proof," he added, more seriously than ever.
    "Oh, dear!" exclaimed Lord Edward, as though something deplorable had happened. Telephoning always made him nervous. He hurried to the instrument. "Charles, is that...."
    "Ah, Edward," cried the disembodied voice of the head of the family from forty miles away at Gattenden. "Such a really remarkable discovery. I wanted your opinion of it. About God. You know the formula: m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought? In which case you have m equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing? Doesn't it?" The diaphragm of the telephone receiver was infected by Lord Gattenden's excitement forty miles away. It talked with breathless speed; its questions were earnest and insistent. "Doesn't it, Edward"? All his life the fifth marquess had been looking for the absolute. It was the only sort of hunting possible for a cripple. For fifty years he had trundled in his wheeled chair at the heels of the elusive quarry. Could it be that he had now caught it, so easily, and in such an unlikely place as an elementary schoolbook on the theory of limits? It was something that justified excitement. "What's your opinion, Edward?"
    "Well," began Lord Edward, and at the other end of the electrified wire, forty miles away, his brother knew, from the tone in which that single word was spoken, that it was no good. The Absolute's tail was still unsalted. [pp. 134-135]

Lord Gattenden's "proof" does have a certain charm about it, don't you think? I still think it's a nice maneuver, poetic, whimsical. Even Bertrand Russell was initially, if only briefly, convinced by the ontological proof, whose real power, of course, is to console those who already believe.
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1. The God Delusion, 2008 edition, p. 108

Home, revisited

The topic of home came up over lunch today. My friend said that she has many, many times dreamed of home, her actual physical, recognizable home. To her, "home" seemed to have much deeper significance than the place where your toothpaste or the coffee beans are (as I suggested in my post, "Rounding third," the other day). She thought it was more a question of the people who live (or lived) there with you, and, going by the recurrence of her dream, it also seemed to be a particular, very special place. I had to agree that "the people" in my home too (my wife and our dog, Wally) are essential—so much so that I didn't even think of defining home in terms of them. They were just part of the indivisible "we" from whose point of view I wrote. Wherever "home" was, it was our home.

But no particular physical place seems to have the power to be home for me. I've been amazed over the past few weeks how quickly I've detached myself from our home of twenty-five years, with its rooms and gardens in which I spent literally thousands of hours. I have no sense of longing for that place. (My first few years in North Carolina, I amused myself when asked if I missed California by looking at my watch and saying something like, "About seventeen minutes so far." That is not a judgment about California, which is a fine and beautiful state, not to mention generally more liberal politically than North Carolina is.)

No, I am "at home" in our apartment. I look forward to returning there this evening. To having dinner there. To walking Wally in the apartment complex after dinner. To sitting down there to watch some episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Season Four, before perhaps reading another few pages of Pinker or a chapter of John Mortimer's first wife Penelope's novel about their marriage. (His second wife was also named Penelope.)

Home in the sense of a particular, continuing place just doesn't seem to make it for me. I suppose this could derive from my childhood experience of moving around a lot as my dad looked for work following World War II. I was born in 1943, when he worked in a naval ship yard in Alameda, California. I attended five schools in the first grade before we settled down and I finished the grade in Liberty School, a country six-year elementary school outside Petaluma, California. Except for almost a year away again during the sixth grade (to a logging camp at four thousand feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where my father dynamited terrain for the construction of roads), I finished my elementary schooling at Liberty School and went into the town of Petaluma for the seventh grade, before we moved again to the town (Tulare, in the San Joaquin Valley) where I attended eighth grade and high school.

Besides, philosophically, I am clear that even "my home on earth" is transient. I was born, and I will die. Home here has been wherever I and my people at the time were, us and our toothbrushes (Wally has one too). Many of those people have died and, contrary to the belief of many of them while they lived and of a number of their survivors, they are not in some other home now awaiting our arrival.

"The American Dream"

What "American Dream"?

Barack Obama's presidential campaign seems to be going with "The American Dream" mythology. A couple of weeks ago, a glossy flyer from his campaign featured a graphic with the phrase, "Reclaiming the American Dream." And yesterday arrived a letter (signed by Senator Obama and addressed to me "personally") asking for a contribution, implicitly to help him and others "reclaim the American Dream." Just what dream isn't spelled out.

The letter refers to dreams "of some factory workers," "of a woman who works the night shift after a full day of college," "of a young woman who was tricked into buying a home she couldn't afford," and "of a mother who gave Barack a bracelet inscribed with the name of her son." I guess people are expected to fill in the blanks and imagine whatever dream they want.

A book reviewed in today's New York Times Book Review has the subtitle, "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream." What dreams will its readers fill in the blanks with? The dream that by believing hard enough you can get whatever you want ("God willing"), even a born-again Christian in the White House? The dream that America can keep all of the Mexicans out? The dream that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals will just shut up and go back into their closets? The dream that everyone will watch Fox News and agree that the government is right about everything?

Some flip-side dreams: In America, you can be free of religious oppression. In America, if you can get across the border and establish yourself, you can make a new life. In America, you and your partner will receive equal treatment, whatever the gender of your partner. In America, can should be able to have free, objective, informed discussion.

The Wikipedia's American Dream entry mentions getting stuff (material, position, power, leisure, whatever your goals area) by dint of hard work, but it's obvious that hard work is not the first thing that comes to the mind of many an American dreamer. The blue collar worker who votes Republican seems to dream of making it someday and becoming one of George W. Bush's "have mores," forgetting that Bush had connections and was a legacy admit at Yale. Under the right circumstances hard work isn't necessary, as the career of Bush himself illustrates.

Many a reader of People Magazine seems to dream of attaining the lifestyle of Brad and Angelina (if you just follow their careers closely enough and read all of those glossy magazines at the supermarket checkout).

Many still seem to dream that Americans old enough to vote will inform themselves and vote intelligently, even though we know that millions of Americans don't vote, and millions more vote the way their pastor or Fox or someone else with a special interest tells them to. As George Carlin said, "It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

"The American Dream" has become such a hackneyed phrase, I'm surprised that Obama and advertisers and the authors of books are still trying to exploit it. Maybe they know something about the American public that I continue to dream isn't so.

In America, there seems to be a dream for everyone. In America, you can dream on.

Garfield was assassinated, wasn't he?

Besides the sheer intellectual excitement and gratification afforded by Steven Pinker's 2007 book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, I much enjoy his examples. Some are overtly political, as when he writes:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

This sentence appeared in George W. Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003. It referred to intelligence reports suggesting that Saddam may have tried to buy five hundred tons of a kind of uranium ore called yellowcake...During the occupation it became clear that Saddam had had no facilities in place to manufacture nuclear weapons, and probably had never explored the possibility of buying yellowcake from Niger. In the words of placards and headlines all over the world, "Bush lied."
    Did he? The answer is not as straightforward as partisans on both sides might think...
    So did Bush lie? A strong case could be made that he did. When Bush said that the British government had "learned" that Saddam had sought uranium, he was committing himself to the proposition that the uranium seeking actually took place, not that the British government believed that it did....[pp. 6-8]

Other of Pinker's examples are simply curious...and informative:

Conundrums of causality are not just law-school exercises. On July 1, 1881, President James Garfield was waiting to board a train when Charles J. Guiteau took aim at him with a gun and shot him twice. Both bullets missed Garfield's major organs and arteries, but one lodged in the flesh of his back. The wound was minor by today's standards and needn't have been fatal even in Garfield's day. But his doctors subjected him to the harebrained medical practices of the time, like probing his wound with their unwashed hands (decades after antisepsis had been discovered) and feeding him through his rectum instead of his mouth. Garfield lost a hundred pounds as he lingered on his deathbed, succumbing to the effects of starvation and infection eighty days after the shooting. At his trial, Guiteau repeatedly said, "The doctors killed him; I just shot him." The jury was unpersuaded, and in 1882 Guiteau was hanged—another man whose fate hinged on the semantics of a verb.[pp. 86-87]

An earlier page of Pinker's book had made a subtle reference to the identity of the other man. The verb in that case was "is."

Rounding third

I've felt this morning as though I were again a potent young male brimming with juice and the motive energy to deliver it in continual spurts of seminal fecundity. (Either feeling that way or like a middle-aged female novelist making up phrases for her next commercial romance?)...At any rate, my almost manic sense of having so many ideas desperately wanting to be expressed inspires the lust for life I sometimes feel in whose sway I simply do not want to die, must not die yet, not yet.

Alas, the young-male metaphor is, in fact, just a metaphor for this gray-headed sixty-five-year-old. Yet the feeling of that restless sexual motive is real and does, as I say, seem apt for the élan vital (or something) that was sweeping through me...Was sweeping through me? Yes, now it seems already to have died down and left me in its wake rational and contemplative. But hopefully not spent. So many ways to go, in which to head?

Home

On a particular day in early May our move from the house of twenty-five years to the temporary apartment (on the way a few weeks later to the new house abuilding) arrived at that point where we had to start sleeping in the apartment, which I may have thought could never for a moment achieve the status of "home." On that day, and for a couple of days thereafter, both of us (my wife and I, not to mention perhaps our dog) were confused and ambivalent about what to call "home." The day after our first night in the apartment, for example, one of us said, as we returned to the old house for some more things to remove before the closing, "Let's go back home...."

But for weeks now we've referred to the apartment as home. I call my wife from the sidewalk waiting for the bus to tell her I'm leaving work, I'll be home soon. Or last night, at the president's barbecue, we looked at each other and one of us said, "Ready to go home?" (Ready to go home and watch another episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"?....) I noticed, even on our vacation in California, and on Bainbridge Island, that we spoke of "going home," back to my sister's house from the harbor after getting off the boat from Santa Cruz Island, back to our daughter's condo from watching "Iron Man" at a movie theater, back from the Suquamish Museum or from the Naval Undersea Museum to my high school Latin teacher's condo we used on Bainbridge Island for our last three nights on the West Coast.

What makes a place home? Possibly it's its having the sheets you slide between to sleep at night. Or the place where you park your toothbrush and dentifrice. Where the coffee beans are in the morning. Something utterly basic and essentially everyday. Even the visiting team's third-base coach unselfconsciously waves his (or her) runner..."home." Home is where you score?

Eating other animals: Is it humane?1

One of my "new ten commandments" (#5 in the post linked to) is to treat all living creatures humanely. An old friend and I have been comparing our philosophies with respect to other animals. We agree on humane treatment. Gorillas shouldn't be killed in order to cut off their hands to use as ashtrays, for example. Hunters shouldn't kill animals for sport. But I go further than my friend in being sympathetic with vegans whose abstinence from eating flesh rests on their moral position that animals (including fish) should not be killed in order to be eaten (or raised in ghastly industrial circumstances for that purpose).

Not all vegans base their abstinence on that moral position. My friend himself is a vegan, but for the reason that it is healthier not to eat meat. And I am not a practicing vegan at all. My position is "purely philosophical" and, I suppose, in some way hypocritical (even though I freely admit it).

One thing that plays into my "philosophical veganism" is the concept of compassion as presented in the popular book How to Want What You Have, by Timothy Miller, which I read some years ago. Miller doesn't talk about compassion (so far as I remember) with respect to animals other than humans, but I found it impossible, from a broadly philosophical and moral viewpoint, not to apply it to all living creatures. Miller's concept relative to humans is that one person isn't any more derserving than the next person. He recommends that the principle of compassion guide our moral choices, the way we treat other people.

Obviously, that's a profoundly Gandhian or Jesus Christian point of view. Meekness. One doesn't have to "believe in God" to find the concept powerfully attractive, as I do. My political philosophy is grounded in the belief. This explains why I so loathe the George Bushes of the world (overprivileged, underdeserving), why I am a "liberal," why I vote "for the common good" rather than to benefit my own pocketbook, why I am so critical of "popular [materialistic] culture"—perhaps even why I am critical of sports fanaticism.

I just wanted to put this out there, while I'm contemplating it anew. Thank you, my old friend.
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1. I toyed with titling this post more simply just "Eating animals: Is it humane?," but I realized that would include cannibalism, which I trust we need not get into.

In memoriam: George Carlin (1937-2008)

As a friend wrote to me today, I say to you:

Click on this link to go to [a site where you can link to] YouTube and hear Carlin's routine on "Stuff." It is hysterical.

Wikipedia entry.

Flawless flawed

The 2007 film "Flawless," directed by Michael Radford and starring Demi Moore and Michael Caine (yes, Ms. Moore is billed before Mr. Caine), is an engaging enough heist film, but unlike some of the diamonds involved, is not itself flawless. Diamond company executive Laura Quinn's choice to be a giver is merely tucked on at the end, which might be okay if the film makers gave up their conceit that the film is somehow about her decision. The choice needs to have been dramatized.

Any Yalies still proud that Bush went to Yale?

During lunch my wife was reading "Doonesbury." She smiled and said, "Trudeau's having more of his fun today at Bush's expense. He's another Yale graduate embarrassed that Bush went there too."

"I wonder how many are still proud of it?" I'd learned, from the president of Yale himself, that quite a few Yalies were quite proud of it (as late as two years ago, at any rate).

But not me. My own Bush embarrassment has of course been on record for years, since I wrote for my 40th class reunion,

In 2001, with chagrined incredulity and embarrassment, I learned that Yale would bestow an honorary degree on George W. Bush. As a citizen, I thought that Bush’s unmerited and highly questionable attainment of our Presidency had been embarrassment enough.
    ...So Bush had given a bad name to legacy admissions policies, to America’s way of choosing a President, and now to the granting of honorary degrees. [The complete text was published on this blog as part of my 2006 correspondence with Yale president Richard C. Levin¹.]

If anyone reading this knows (or knows of) a Yale graduate still proud that our Great Decider went to Yale, please be kind enough to comment here and let me know. Don't bother to mention Joseph I. Lieberman. I know about him.
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1. My correspondence with President Levin was published on this blog in June 2006. My first letter to him appeared on June 25, 2006.

The second season

Friday and last night, I watched the ten episodes of the second season (2001, according to Wikipedia) of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I watched them in such quick succession that they're mostly a blur in my memory already, but I remember that I liked them very much. And one of them (though not the best of the lot) I do remember quite well because of its hilarious (and all-too-true) comment on people's religious behavior.

I'm referring to Episode #9, "Baptism," in which the sister of Larry's long-suffering wife Cheryl (played sympathetically by the lovely Cheryl Hines) is getting married. Now Cheryl and her sister aren't Jews, and while Cheryl may be married to one, her sister will have none of it and has prevailed on her fiancé to convert to Christianity in order to become her husband. He is to be baptized into the faith immediately preceding the wedding.

Predictably (for nothing ever goes quite according to plan for Larry) Larry and Cheryl's itinerary from L.A. to Monterey gets derailed and they arrive late for the proceedings. Larry staggers out of their rental car into the woods and walks a few feet before spotting down below two men standing in the edge of a fast river, one of them apparently trying to drown the other—the one with the apprehensive look on his face. Right, the apprehensive one is Cheryl's sister's about-not-to-be-a-Jewish fiancé.

Well, anyway, Larry (always eager to help and try to make things better) spontaneously yells "stop" and starts to run down the hill. Startled, the church officiant who has been in the act of dunking the fiancé lets him go, and the bride and the rest of the wedding party, after turning around briefly to see where the "stop" came from, turn back to the river to see the fiancé starting to be carried downstream. They all rush into the river to save him from drowning.

You've got to see this for yourself, but the upshot of it is that the groom refuses to go back into the river to complete the baptism, claiming that during the moment he was initially dunked he had the impression that something or someone was telling him that it just wasn't right, what he was doing.

"Not right to become a Christian," his horrified bride asks?

"No, no, not that," he says. "Wrong to renounce my Jewness." [That isn't the actual dialogue, but I'm too lazy today to go transcribe the exact words, which of course are better than my paraphrase and deserving to have you find out for yourself by renting the DVD.]

The episode ends in the more or less standard way of Larry (joined in this case by Cheryl) looking into the short distance trying to make sense of it all as the Christians on one side and the Jews on the other jeer and shake their fists at one another.

Larry David, at least the TV persona

Having tired of "House" (and wondering how Hugh Laurie continues to endure the title role), I'm glad to have discovered "Curb Your Enthusiasm," starring its apparent creator (as himself), Larry David, who we're given to understand had something big to do with "Seinfeld."¹ The program seems to have debuted on HBO in 2000 (according to the Wikipedia).

I wonder whether one of the "big things" Larry David did on "Seinfeld" was to create the character of George Costanza, whom my wife couldn't stand (or the character Elaine, whom she can't stand either) and thinks the Larry David character resembles. I can see the resemblance, but the Larry David character seems much more sympathetic to me. Rather, George Costanza didn't seem sympathetic at all (although I find it impossible to dislike Jason Alexander in the role, same as I find Julia Louis-Dreyfuss too appealingto dislike her as Elaine). And the Larry David character somehow seems very sympathetic. To me.

The character seems driven to try to be liked but cursed by a warped sense of what he should do (and not do) to obtain the result, his actions usually turning out disastrously, mainly for himself. I much enjoy the artistry of the elaborate plots the writers have devised to bring these disasters about, with Larry David inevitably left standing there looking into the near distance trying to absorb the pain of it all and understand once again where he went wrong.

The same as when we walk dazed out of a darkened movie theater, with its gigantic screened faces and jacked-up sound, and we find ourselves taken over by one of the dominating characters (so that we hear ourselves talking with his voice and moving our bodies the way he does), I've started occasionally to have the unelected sense that I'm myself Larry David, in all his sympathetic foible and bewilderment. I think I've become a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" fan not only because I'm hooked on the artistry of its writers (although I don't care much for the "Woodly Allen style" of improvisation or for the hand-held camera), but also because I identify with the Larry David screen persona, however like or unlike the unsympathetic George Costanza he may be.

The resource center also has the DVDs for Seasons Two, Three, Four, and Five. You know I've the second to start watching this evening!
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1. According to the Wikipedia, Larry David "teamed up with Jerry Seinfeld to co-create the television series 'Seinfeld,' where he also acted as head writer and executive producer. David's work won him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993. In 1999, he created and stars in the HBO series 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' an improvised sitcom in which he plays a fictionalized version of himself."

In memoriam: Bertrand Russell as a student at Cambridge

From my first moment at Cambridge, in spite of shyness, I was exceedingly sociable, and I never found that my having been educated at home was any impediment. Gradually, under the influence of congenial society, I became less and less solemn. At first the discovery that I could say things that I thought, and be answered with neither horror nor derision but as if I had said something quite sensible, was intoxicating. For a long time I supposed that somewhere in the university there were really clever people whom I had not yet met, and whom I should at once recognize as my intellectual superiors, but during my second year, I discovered that I already knew all the cleverest people in the university. This was a disappointment to me, but at the same time gave me increased self-confidence. In my third year, however, I met G. E. Moore, who was then a freshman, and for some years he fulfilled my ideal of genius. He was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of inspiration, and with an intellect as deeply passionate as Spinoza's. He had a kind of exquisite purity. I have never but once succeeded in making him tell a lie, and that was by a subterfuge. "Moore," I said, "do you always speak the truth?" "No," he replied. I believe this to be the only lie he had ever told. [The Autobiography of Bertrand Russel: 1872-1914 (Volume I), pp. 84-85]

One week ago today

"Jim Rix will be at the Tulare Historical Museum in Tulare [California] today to sign copies of his chilling book Jingle Jangle, the story of his cousin who was sentenced to death row in Arizona for a murder he didn't commit." That's the opening of Lewis Griswold's May 18 notice, "Writer signs book today about justice gone wrong," in The Fresno Bee. The notice goes on to say:

Rix grew up in Tulare. He has been friends since grade school with Tulare County Superior Court Judge William "Bill" Silveira.

The judge liked the book so much as a cautionary tale of justice gone wrong—"it caused me to examine my conscience as a judge," Silveira said—that he encouraged his old pal to come to their old hometown and talk about it.

The reading was also noticed by Luis Hernandez in the Tulare Advance-Register, "Union grad, author returns for book signing":

Retired Tulare County Superior Court Judge William Silveira says Jingle Jangle is a must read, even if the book doesn't paint a flattering picture of the judicial system.

And by Julie Fernandez in the Tulare Voice Weekly, "Former Tularean's Book a Reality Check":

"This is an important book," said retired Tulare County Superior Court Judge Bill Silveira, who was a classmate of Rix at Tulare Union High School. "This book is not just a story of someone who was on death row and gets freed because of actual proof of innocence. This goes far beyond that."

Ms. Hernandez's notice is the most thoughtful of the three, so it's unfortunate that it doesn't appear to be on the web.

Only Griswold's notice, however, includes the information that Rix "is now writing a movie proposal" (the premise of which is that, contrary to Griswold's statement that Rix's cousin was freed because "the real killer was caught," the real killers are still at large).

Idiotology

On March 18, 1958, the physicist Max Born wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell (then 85) in which he said:

I have read Khrushchev's long declaration in the New Statesman. I find it just as depressing as the letter from Dulles [Eisenhower's Secretary of State] published some weeks ago. The commentary by Kingsley Martin that these fellows are amazingly similar in their mental make-up is quite correct. One could just as well call them Khrushless and Dullchev, and, what they believe in, not an ideology, but an idiotology....

Russell replied on the 22nd:

Thank you very warmly for your letter of March 18 which expressed feelings exactly similar to my own as regards Khrushless and Dullchev and what you so aptly call their idiotology. I am sending my reflections on this matter to the New Statesman where they will be published shortly....[The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Volume III, p. 136]

I hadn't seen the obviously apt word "idiotology" employed relative to the Busheviks of our own era, but when I googled on it, the first hit was an article titled "Idiotology" (posted Sunday, 29 February 2004) in American Pundit. It begins:

There's a military term for President Bush's policy making process: incestuous amplification. It's defined as, "A condition in which one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation."

Bush has again shown his intolerance for dissenting viewpoints by firing the two members of his Council on Bioethics who advocated research on human embryo cells. He replaced them with three new members including, "a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out against the research that the dismissed members supported, and another who has written that abortion is immoral and biotechnology is a threat."

Of course no one but Bush himself really knows what his policy making process is like, but there have been a couple glimpses into it by high-level administration officials. John DiIulio, Bush's former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio told Esquire. "What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Mutatis mutandis.

A photographer's eye to believe in

If seeing is believing, then only go to my friend Ken Marks's flickr website to believe you may never have seen a better set of nature photographs. Three examples (on which you may click to see larger):

A fall scene from Nova Scotia

A scene from the Utah canyonlands

Sparrow on a rusty gate

Ken uses a Nikon D300 Digital SLR camera.

Sometimes, if rarely, smoking saves your life

I found Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philsophy such a good read, I decided to read his Autobiography as well. I'm enjoying it even more than his history of philosophy, and there have been many, many passages I'd have liked to share, and might have shared if I hadn't been so preoccupied lately with moving out of our house of twenty-five years. Last night, for the first time in several weeks, I felt relatively relaxed, and today I feel up to reporting the following amusing passage. Soon after World War II, when Russell was about 75 years old, and

In the same year that I went to Germany, the Government sent me to Norway in the hope of inducing Norwegians to join an alliance against Russia. The place they sent me to was Trondheim. The weather was stormy and cold. We had to go by sea-plane from Oslo to Trondheim. When our plane touched down on the water it became obvious that something was amiss, but none of us in the plane knew what it was. We sat in the plane while it slowly sank. Small boats assembled round it and presently we were told to jump into the sea and swim to a boat—which all the people in my part of the plane did. We later learned that all the nineteen passengers in the non-smoking compartment had been killed. When the plane had hit the water a hole had been made in the plane and the water had rushed in. I had told a friend in Oslo who was finding me a place that he must find me a place where I could smoke, remarking jocularly, "If I cannot smoke, I shall die." Unexpectedly, this turned out to be true. All those in the smoking compartment got out by the emergency exit window beside which I was sitting. We all swam to the boats which dared not approach too near for fear of being sucked under as the plane sank. We were rowed to shore to a place some miles from Trondheim and thence I was taken in a car to my hotel.
    Everybody showed me the utmost kindness and put me to be while my clothes dried. A group of students even dried my matches one by one. They asked me if I wanted anything and I replied, "Yes, a strong dose of brandy and a large cup of coffee." The doctor, who arrived soon after, said that this was quite the right reply. The day was Sunday, on which day hotels in Norway were not allowed to supply liquor—but, as the need was medical, no objection was raised. Some amusement was caused when a clergyman supplied me with clerical clothing to wear till my clothes had dried. Everybody plied me with questions. A question even came by telephone from Copenhagen: a voice said, "When you were in the water, did you not think of mysticism and logic [which was the title of a book Russell published in 1917]?" "No," I said. "What did you think of?" the voice persisted. "I thought the water was cold," I said and put down the receiver. [Volume III, 1944-1967, p. 21]

Clematis

Last photo of it I'll ever take

Today is the first day that my wife and I are no longer the legal owners (since 1983) of the home where glories this clematis (and several other clematises and many other flowering or merely leafing plants).

Arbor in early evening

Touched by Photoshop's colored pencil

Arbor rose

Arbor in early evening

Feathers and flowers

By the way, William Shakespeare is generally thought to have been born on this day in 1564—444 years ago.

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown....
            – The Merchant of Venice

Spring and All (title of a poem by William Carlos Williams)

Before we leave our home of 25 years in a few short weeks, I'm looking around at our glorious, last springtime here...[click on a photo to enlarge it]

103 years ago today

My father was born on this day in 1905. Over the years of my own adulthood and middle age I've seen so much of my father in my own mannerisms of body and speech, and yet he remains largely an unknown man to me. That is, though I perhaps knew him as well as most men know their fathers, I feel that there's more about him that I don't know and never even suspected than that I did come to know.

Somehow, beginning as a bookish teenager, I felt there was a kind of divide between him and me, a division that afforded me much grief of longing, particularly during my late twenties and my thirties, when my own children were young. I felt a mysterious need to connect with my dad, to somehow get on the same wavelength of understanding and feeling. It's hard to define what the "connection" would have been, or exactly what was missing that I thought needed to be there. I never felt that the connection got made or the missing parts got filled in. At some point in the final years of his life (1976-1980) I accepted that they never would. I even convinced myself that that was okay, even though I don't really think it was.

Could it have been a simple failure to really know that he loved me, or a failure on my part to really appreciate him, to understand to what extent his life had consisted of pleasure, to what extent of pain? He grew up the oldest child of a large family. At an age when I was reading books, attending school everyday, preparing for college, he was working a mule in the fields (in Arkansas) to help feed his brothers and sisters. That is, he didn't have my "advantages," and ironically it was probably those very advantages that constituted the gulf that I felt divided us. My so-called advantages pushed me into a world more of the mind and the imagination than of everyday, present reality.

Anyway, Dad, I just wanted to tell you again, as I did my best to tell you almost thirty years ago, that I love you. I still love and always will love you, even if my understanding of you was imperfect and my memory of you is at best an approximation of who you really were. And thanks again for everything.

25 years later: ready to let go

We'll be downsizing soon (moving to a smaller house on a smaller lot), and I've spent much of this weekend removing from our attic the rest of the boxes (mostly) that I didn't bring down last weekend. Much of the stuff I found up there had been...well, "stuffed" is the appropriate term...stuffed up there soon after we moved in in 1983. And not thought of since. Until today. And today we're mostly doing what we might have done twenty-five years ago: throwing it away.

I'm naturally wondering what we thought we were keeping it for. Probably not for any practical reasons, but just in order to buy some time to distance ourselves from the past it represented so that we'd become ready, someday, to let it go. And today, indeed, we're not feeling much attachment to any of the stuff at all. We're long since ready to let it go and be done with it. Dusty boxes, moldy paper...faded or forgotten memories.

My wife did set aside her tassel from the mortarboard she wore for high school graduation (45 years ago), however. And I set aside my "Youie Journal" from 1989, intending before I recycle the paper to try to read and understand what I was experiencing that manic summer when I imagined that The She-God fancied me.

What happened since then?

Today a friend wrote and said unto me:

While reading this (from your "A history not of God, but of the idea of God" post)...

..."create a sense of him for myself." For several months now I have much enjoyed the freedom from any such sense whatsoever. If it's "obvious" to some that God exists, it's just as obvious to me that there's no such X.

...I remembered you used to believe in "the goddess," a concept you had arrived at yourself. So at least up until or at that time, I can only imagine you must've had some sense that there was some kind of "higher being." What happened since then?

And what I wrote back and said unto her I would like to share with all readers of this blog:

I realized that I was wrong. Before that, I was still laboring under the apprehension that there might be "God," and I preferred to think of her rather than of him (or it). The goddess was also my way of thumbing my nose at the he-god people. But over the course of time I realized that there seemed to be no little justification for going the full monty and thumbing my nose at the whole god concept. Not that thumbing my nose was the object, but I do admit seeming to need to go through such a phase. I think I resented how most of world civilization seems to have conspired to foist god-belief onto everyone, from the cradle.

The real advantage of throwing over the god concept is that I no longer have to bear the burden of its baggage. Everything is much simpler, sort of à la Occam's (or Ockham's) razor. It seems more and more obvious to me that most theological constructions (which can become church dogmas) are attempts to apologize for (in this context, that means create rationalizations for believing) things that seem pretty far-fetched (if not downright stupid or even immoral, such as animal sacrifice, not to even mention various shameful practices regarding slaves and women, the latter being considered a sort of slave themselves, or at least a class of property belonging to men).

Mementos

In order to remember what the heck I was going to do before I got distracted, I've finally had to resort to the technique of the character Leonard in the movie "Memento" (2000: Christopher Nolan). You may recall that Leonard had a short-term memory deficit particularly severe for someone trying to find the man he thinks killed his wife. He was continually writing down clues and appointments as he tried to piece¹ things together. (Leonard, by the way, was played, appropriately, by Guy Pearce>.)

Not only is my short-term memory not what it used to be, but also, in this e-mail and telephone and open-office-door age, I am continually being interrupted, even on a good day. And besides, I've always liked the high-energy way of trying to do several things at once. I still can, except that, more and more, some of the things I'm juggling fall to the ground and roll under a table, where they may or may not be discovered.

So...make a note! Put it where I can see it! Check the pile! Don't let the mementos accumulate! Keep on top of things! Don't lose my ass!

And good luck!
_______________

1. Ha! Minutes after posting this, something didn't feel right in my addled brain, and I finally realized that I'd originally written this as "pierce"; of course, now that I've corrected it, my parenthetical about Guy Pearce isn't nearly so effective.)

Happy new year, those April Fools among you!

According to my old friend Pennell Rock (who was in the class ahead of me at Yale):

Did you know that before Pope Gregory in the sixteenth century, the new year used to begin on April 1? Those who did not get the message that the year now started on January 1 and continued to celebrate it with the arrival of spring came to be known as "April Fools."

And, as Pennell also says:

So all blessings and best wishes for the new year!

Learn more about Pennell and his life of sensitive reflection.

A challenge to Joe

This post follows that posted last Sunday, March 23

Dear Joe, I hope this finds you and your family well. My wife and I have been extra busy lately with our planned household move, and I'm neglected my blog. But today, while going through boxes from the attic (to decide what to throw away, what to donate to charity, what to try to sell, what to keep), I remembered my comment in last Sunday's post (made on Thursday, March 27) to Tom Sheepandgoats, in which I made a joke:

I forgot to ask Joe whether there really is a new book out titled The Dawkins Delusion. Have you heard of it? I guess I should amazon it....Yes, Amazon.com lists The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, by Alister E. McGrath and Joanna Collicutt Mcgrath...Oh, no! Joe'll probably start quoting it to me now.

I guess the italicized sentence wasn't a joke at the time, actually, although I meant it good-naturedly.

What I got to thinking today was that it need not be an annoyance for you to quote the McGrath & McGrath book to me (as it certainly is, generally, whenever anyone quotes the Bible to me). I am already on record (in a comment on Tom's blog) that my third reading of Dawkins's The God Delusion will be a critical reading, with me suspending my belief as much as I can and challenging his arguments.

The McGraths have presumably read Dawkins very critically indeed, so arguments they make against his position would be good for me to consider as a tool to assist my own critical reading....

So, if you read their book and feel inclined to quote one or more of their arguments against Dawkins, well, then feel free to do so! I'll consider what they (and you) say and do my best to respond in an intelligent and fair manner.

Thank you much, Joe. I appreciate it.

What we like to do for fun

This dialogue follows that posted Saturday, March 22

From Joe to Moristotle

You smiled...I thought at best you would roll your eyes.

I think we both think that each other's words are empty. Not really sure about your religious tracts comment. I could accuse you of reading atheist tracts. Fact is we both look at the same facts and interpret them differently.

As for Leviticus and Numbers, The Mosaic (Moses, Leviticus and stuff) Covenant