Sunday, March 17, 2024

With a twist

https://www.threads.net/@secularstudents/post/C4ldY7RpyuK/?xmt=AQGzS4EPsZQrPIeTnFjkg65_dfbvAoTPAeUoISINPLSjvQ

Hannah Arendt and the art of beginning afresh: “we are free to change the world”

Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.

[…]

She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

She too lived in a "post-truth era," she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/03/15/we-are-free-to-change-the-world-hannah-arendt/

Rachel Carson's lost ode to the science of the sky

"A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."

https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/regret-sky-arendt

Conscious addition: Barzun on reading

"Reading of course can easily be nothing more than a way to kill time; but if it is calculated and intense, it is a steady extension of one's life.

If life is measured by consciousness, one whose mind is full lives longer than one whose mind is empty — just as one who is awake 18 hours a day lives longer than one who sleeps away every 12 hours.

You can add to life by adding to the quantity of conscious moments through reading."

— Jacques Barzun

https://substack.com/@poeticoutlaws/note/c-51709813?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Friday, March 15, 2024

The deep thrill of teaching

"I have projected a process of choice and shape as if teaching were really what the ancients and their Renaissance emulators said it was, a sculpting process, whereby the clay or stone or wax, inorganic material but malleable, could, through choices, be made to take a shape that nature never saw, a shape art supplies to the stuff the world provides. While I do not think teaching is as painless or effortless as I may have made it sound, I do believe it is essentially the ethical and aesthetic activity I propose. I do believe that it involves the making and setting of right and wrong choices in the interests of a larger, shaping process and that the deep thrill a teacher can experience comes from the combination of these activities, so that you feel what you think, do what you talk about, judge as you talk about judgment, proceed logically as you reveal logical structure, clarify as you talk about clarity, reveal as you show what nature reveals-all in the service of encouraging the student in imitation and then repetition of the process you have been summoning, all so that the student may turn himself not into you but into himself. - - A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI, A Free and Ordered Space"

"BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti" by Anthony Valerio, Robert Brower: https://a.co/8bbPUDD

"to organize the daylight"

"There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. - -A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI, "The Green Fields of the Mind""

"BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti" by Anthony Valerio, Robert Brower: https://a.co/cii31HQ

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