A Celestial City

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“History,” Dr. Durant and his wife once remarked, ”is above all else the creation and recording of the intellectual, moral and aesthetic heritage of mankind; progress is the increasing abundance, use, preservation and transmission of that heritage.”

“To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes but also as a remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, philosophers and lovers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.”

I came across this sentence: “Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions and cultures simply died off.” And as I am still sort of bored, and can hear my mother saying, “Go read a book,” I walked into the living room and pulled A Study of History Volume X: The Inspirations of Historians; A Note on Chronology (Toynbee, 1954) from the shelf. And then I searched my card catalog for Toynbee, and came across Durant’s obituary in the NYT (November 9, 1981). Nice sentiments, I thought.

Crappy Old Quote of the Day | “The Allegory of Love”

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Allegory

“The function of allegory is not to hide but to reveal, and it is properly used only for that which cannot be said, or so well said, in literal speech. The inner life, and specially the life of love, religion, and spiritual adventure, has therefore always been the field of true allegory; for here there are intangibles which only allegory can fix and reticences which only allegory can overcome.”

–C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

The Quotable Lewis (1963)

We had “allegory” as a Word of the Day once.

My! That was fun! Who remembers Words of the Days? Every morning a new random word. Breakfast table filled with crappy old– and I do mean old– dictionaries. Every evening at supper we’d read our sentences using The Word. Chris & Nick must have been out hunting on Allegory Day. Mike was here; it was the year A. Leland lived here. Daughter C was still/again here.

Here’s what I said after posting all of our sentences:

Reflecting on these sentences, I bet dollars to donuts this is the one & only blog on the whole entire World Wide Web that has Plato, Bunyan, Frost, and the classic, The City Mouse & The Country Mouse in the same post.

Big Food Favorite Recipe: Key Lime Pie I

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A repeat worth repeating.

Good for second breakfast!

KEY LIME PIE I

Print Recipe

Ingredients
  

  • 9 inch baked pie shell
  • 1 can sweetened condensed milk
  • Green food coloring
  • 6 Tbsp sugar
  • 4 eggs separated
  • ½ C lime juice
  • ½ tsp cream of tartar

Instructions
 

  • Preheat oven to 350o. Mix condensed milk, egg yolks, and lime juice well. Beat 1 egg white and fold into lime mixture. Add green food coloring to get desired color. Pour into pie shell. Beat remaining egg whites stiff, adding sugar and cream of tartar. Spread meringue on top of lime mixture, spreading to edge of crust. Make a few peaks. Bake until meringue is nicely browned (about 10-15 minutes).

I’m bored

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It’s not like I don’t have plenty to do but I’ve taken myself off the good pain meds b/c I’m not really in pain and I don’t like the side effects, nor do I like the phrase, “the mechanism of action is unknown” but it down regulates mu receptors, and I don’t want to engage in activities that could potentially cause pain. One activity I would sorely love to do is lay out all of the tablecloths and linens Mr. Big Food’s Aunt Bea sent me last week. They look just beautiful, but unfolding and refolding tablecloths is a 2-handed activity, so it will have to wait.

So I’m bored. Yesterday I 1-handed typed out a longish post that had something to do with Stu Kauffman and complexity theory (sort of) and trying to make the point that you should be critical of what you read. I suppose I could come back to that. Boooring. Not right now.

So I’m bored and then I thought “How can this be? You have crappy old books!” I picked up the first one I happened to pass, Gregg Shorthand Dictionary Anniversary Edition (1930) and wondered if it is possible to do shorthand on a keyboard.

Pitman shorthand isn’t very practical in modern society because it relies heavily on thick vs. thin lines. Today’s writing instruments offer very little variation in that regard – because the days of the flexible fountain pen have tragically long since passed. (Of course, you could argue that shorthand in general isn’t practical in modern society, but then you wouldn’t be reading this post.)

That cracked me up.

Gregg shorthand is entirely possible in today’s world of boring pens and pencils. The speed of Gregg Shorthand comes primarily from:

  1. Alternative letter forms that are faster and easier to write than our traditional alphabet.
  2. A list of “brief forms” (abbreviations) for common words. For example, “men.” instead of “morning”.

For the first step, learning the letter forms is quite easy and takes very little practice. For the second step, most of the refinement in Gregg Shorthand over time has primarily been tweaking the brief forms: how many, and what they are. Learning the brief forms is not easy, and takes a lot of memorization and work. https://www.leeholmes.com/blog/2014/04/04/gregg-shorthand-from-a-regular-qwerty-computer-keyboard/

Dude then goes through a few numbers on shorthand speeds, wpm typing speeds, & such.

To improve either your Gregg Shorthand skills, or regular typing skills, you may be able to increase your speed even further through regular learning and use of brief forms. But how? By integrating it into your regular daily typing, that’s how.

Attached to this post is a simple “Shorthand Keyboard” application to let you do exactly that.

The idea, as I currently understand it, is that you type in the brief form, and the app converts it to the long form.

TTYL!

Aurgh.

Crappy Old Quote of the Day | Talking “grown-up”

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Aging

“Funny to think we’re both elderly, isn’t it? And what a sham this business of age is. Do you (except physically) feel older than when we saw the hedge pig and played gramophone records to one another? I don’t a bit. My own pupils still seem to me in many ways older than I. Indeed (nice men as many of them are) I am a little worried by the fact that so few of them seem ever to have had youth as we had it. They have all read all the correct, “important” books: they seem to have no private & erratic imaginative adventures of their own. (I suppose the explanation is that I am the last person who is likely to hear of such things even where they exist. I mean, with me they’re all talking “grown-up” as hard as they can. Yet I don’t know: the modern world is so desperately serious. They have a taste for “books of information.”)”

–C.S. Lewis, The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (5 January 1947)

The Quotable Lewis (1963)

Whatever happened to “Welcome”?

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  • $24.99
  • $24.99
  • $24.99
  • $21.99
  • $15.99

I guess I’m getting rather prudish in my old age because I don’t think these are funny at all. I find the ones with flowers particularly objectionable.

You live a shitshow and have bitches for friends? What does this say about you? You are a miserable piece of shit living a shitshow life that your bitches for friends find funny? This is not by any standard a way to live a human life. Go for it if you want but it ain’t all that hard to do better. You could start by having some respect for yourself and your friends– at least for those who refuse to go away. You could set some standards. It may well be that you live your shitshow life in a shithole but you could get off your lazy ass when your friends are coming over and gussy the joint up a bit. You could welcome them to your home.

Your shitshow life lived with you bitch friends in your shithole is nothing to be proud of! (of which to be… whatever).

Try this, instead–

$22.99

Don’t you feel better already?

Crappy Old Quote of the Day | Arrested Development

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Adulthood

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

–C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” (1952)

The Quotable Lewis (1963)

“the serendipity of discovery”

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The store retains its Back Bay charm by offering something that online book shopping can’t: the serendipity of discovery that only comes from browsing shelves of old books and the guidance that only a curmudgeonly old bookseller can offer.

https://www.avenuevictorhugobooks.com/about/

Found at AoSHQ Sunday Morning Book Thread.

The Farm Circle | Perspectivalism

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L-R: Newcomer Jo Anne, Greg who shared a story from back in his grad school days that made me laugh, Manny & Susan originally from The Northeast, Patrick native Mississippian, Nedah also a native, Mr. Big Food

Nedah changed her perspective on the room by moving the lectern to the corner. A move I approve!

This meeting of The Farm Circle was down a couple of folks. What Neil is doing hanging around Farmville, North Carolina has been explained but still remains… strange. Almost all of the food at social hour was eaten. Good! Talk and discussion in the Apartment Lecture Hall lasted over two hours. Communing at social hour, another couple. Best Farm Circle Philosophy Live! so far.

Nedah was Mr. Big Food’s pre-doc from 2015-16. Her family has a farm outside of Jackson. (This week she brought a bunch of figs from their trees!) She did her undergrad in Philosophy at Millsaps College, and then did a Masters in Neurobiology working in Mike & Lique’s* neuroanatomy lab at Univ. of Mississippi Medical Center. This is how we came to know Nedah. She is now a Doctoral Candidate in The History and Philosophy of Science Department at University of Pittsburgh. More specifically, she’s a grad student of The Center for Philosophy of Science. Her talk was a work-in-progress of the first chapter of her dissertation.

* Dictionary definition of Lique: Bitch.

For who don’t know how really good philosophy is done, you start off by making the other guy’s argument better than they he make makes it themselves himself. And then you present a case study that tears the argument to shreds.

Nedah is on her way!

Selections from TWiP

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UPDATE! SueK tells us it’s “Polly gone.” God she’s smart! I never would have figured it out. Thanks, SueK!

I know the feeling.
I don’t get this one.

The Week in Pictures.

Crappy Old Quote of the Day | Cataract of Nonsense

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History, Importance of

We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

—C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, “Learning in War-Time” (1939)

Cataract: a descent of water over a steep surface; a waterfall, especially one of considerable size.

Thanks, J-Man!

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The J-Man & Bebe left yesterday. I did not cry. I thought* seriously about crying, but I did not cry.

What a help The J-Man was to 1-handed me and to Mr. Big Food. And what a pleasure to have him around for a few days! He knows the lay of the land so well– though he did have a misadventure with some fireants, and that first day outside in the Mississippi heat really snookered him. But man, not only did he catch me up on some garden work, he made progress. Patio hasn’t been so clean in ages.

Rocky & Missy didn’t miss a beat when they saw him! Nor Bebe when she saw her old friends, and reacquainted herself with the Lake, and the Apartment. She’s such a goof.

And then there were suppers & movie watching! Like old times.

The funniest episode was when Miss M and I realized we could induce some cognitive dissonance into ‘Phens brain– which is psycho-babble for messing with a 4-year olds’ head. The J-Man had come down from the Apartment– where he & Daughter C used to live– to take the dogs on an afternoon walk. She and ‘Phen and I were Skyping, I switched the call to my portable phone, and walked out toward the Workshop just as Bebe was rounding the corner.

“‘Phen! Who’s this?”

“It looks like Bebe!!”

Note. Looks like. Not getting anything past him. Bebe belongs in North Carolina, not Mississippi.

Repeat.

And then I pointed the camera at The J-Man– who was all smiles.

“UNCLE J!!!”

“Hey Buddy!”

“UNCLE J!!!”

“Hey, ‘Phen!”

“Where is Aunt C?”

Cognitive dissonance accomplished.

Thanks, again, J-Man. We love you!

  • This is wrong. I didn’t *think * about crying. I thought about *not* crying as I was deciding to not cry. All of our thoughts about our thoughts– our meta-thoughts– are silly. I just didn’t want to make the J-Man feel bad.