"With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor..." (New York Times, 4.12.07)
Just as I prefer literary existentialism to the philosophical kind, the passing this week of Kurt Vonnegut reminds me that my disdain for philosophic pessimism does not extend to the sensibility behind "Slaughterhouse Five," "Breakfasts of Champions," "Cat's Cradle," et al. Philosophically I could never endorse Vonnegut's disgusted remark that "evolution can go to hell" if we're its product; but I know what he was saying, and it makes me smile. So does his next observation in A Man Without a Country, which leavens contempt for Mark Twain's "damned human race" with the acknowledgement that on evolution's time-scale we did just get here. (See Carl Sagan's "cosmic calendar".) We can cut ourselves a little slack, and a little hope.
Verlyn Klinkenborg: "The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be... No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith." In mine too.
Springs
"The worm at the core of our usual springs of delight can tun us into melancholy metaphysicians. But the music can commence again, and again and again, at intervals."
I'm a philosophy prof at a large state university in middle Tennessee. This is my personal blogsite, not sponsored by or otherwise officially related to my school; views expressed are my own.
“We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr.-his last speech, April '07
You've got to be kind
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (and see Mr. Rogers, below)
"Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail."
Jailbird, prologue
The real you
The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new... when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life.” Alan Watts
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." Carl Sagan
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." Carl Sagan
A net for catching days
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.” Annie Dillard, The Writing Life... Popova on Dillard
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” Vita Sackville-West
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” Vita Sackville-West
“I’m a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. I see it happen all the time. Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don’t think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don’t sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won’t be sitting there.” Flannery O'Connor
Updike on waiting for inspiration
When asked in 1978 about his writing process, Updike said, “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them, you will never write again.”
After the birth of his third child, he had rented an office above a restaurant in Ipswich, and spent several hours each morning writing there. Throughout his 50-year career, he remained devoted to that schedule, writing about three pages every morning after breakfast, sometimes more if things were going well. He said: “Back when I started, our best writers spent long periods brooding in silence. Then they’d publish a big book and go quiet again for another five years. I decided to run a different kind of shop.” WA
Baseball by John Updike
It looks easy from a distance,
easy and lazy, even,
until you stand up to the plate
and see the fastball sailing inside,
an inch from your chin,
or circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.
The grass, the dirt, the deadly hops
between your feet and overeager glove:
football can be learned,
and basketball finessed, but
there is no hiding from baseball
the fact that some are chosen
and some are not—those whose mitts
feel too left-handed,
who are scared at third base
of the pulled line drive,
and at first base are scared
of the shortstop's wild throw
that stretches you out like a gutted deer.
There is nowhere to hide when the ball's
spotlight swivels your way,
and the chatter around you falls still,
and the mothers on the sidelines,
your own among them, hold their breaths,
and you whiff on a terrible pitch
or in the infield achieve
something with the ball so
ridiculous you blush for years.
It's easy to do. Baseball was
invented in America, where beneath
the good cheer and sly jazz the chance
of failure is everybody's right,
beginning with baseball.
"Baseball" by John Updike, from Endpoint. © Knopf, 2009
easy and lazy, even,
until you stand up to the plate
and see the fastball sailing inside,
an inch from your chin,
or circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.
The grass, the dirt, the deadly hops
between your feet and overeager glove:
football can be learned,
and basketball finessed, but
there is no hiding from baseball
the fact that some are chosen
and some are not—those whose mitts
feel too left-handed,
who are scared at third base
of the pulled line drive,
and at first base are scared
of the shortstop's wild throw
that stretches you out like a gutted deer.
There is nowhere to hide when the ball's
spotlight swivels your way,
and the chatter around you falls still,
and the mothers on the sidelines,
your own among them, hold their breaths,
and you whiff on a terrible pitch
or in the infield achieve
something with the ball so
ridiculous you blush for years.
It's easy to do. Baseball was
invented in America, where beneath
the good cheer and sly jazz the chance
of failure is everybody's right,
beginning with baseball.
"Baseball" by John Updike, from Endpoint. © Knopf, 2009
==
Walking
“Every morning," reported his friend Miles Malleson, "Bertie [Russell] would go for an hour’s walk by himself, composing and thinking out his work for that day. He would then come back and write for the rest of the morning, smoothly, easily and without a single correction." Gymnasiums of the Mind
"...from his university days he would walk at least 20 miles every Sunday, and recounts how some of his peers at Cambridge walked much more." The Connection Between Walking and Thinking
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts." Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust... On a childhood of reading and wandering
Montaigne's garden
"I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about IT or - still less- my unfinished garden" Montaigne
(I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.)
I believe, in truth, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself... we seem dead and buried already. … Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.
Earthrise
 | Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) |
Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters thebookoflife.org/why- | |
Five Books
 | Five Books (@five_books) |
The 'father of science fiction' HG Wells suffered terribly from class anxiety. Huxley and Woolf thought him 'vulgar' == Five books on... | |
Winterton C. Curtis
My first landlord was an old zoologist at the University of Missouri named Winterton Curtis (1875-1965). He was one of the scientific experts not allowed to testify at the Scopes Trial in Dayton TN in 1925. My parents (and I) rented rooms from him in his home on Westmount in Columbia Missouri while Dad attended Veterinary school at Mizzou in the early '60s, and later maintained a cordial friendship with him. He used to visit when I was a kid and pull dollar bills from my ears. Dad thought that must be why I was always so fascinated by the concept of evolution.
----"A damned-yankee professor in Little Dixie" (1957)
----Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology (1921)
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy
Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation
Hanne Strager, A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything
Dr. Curtis wrote, in 1921,
The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology
The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology
Of the Scopes Trial itself, he wrote of the 1925 Dayton Tennessee spectacle:
The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial
The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial
Requiescat in pace, Dr. C.
A selective evolutionary bibliography:
Michael Boulter, Darwin's Garden: Down House & the Origin of Species
Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr, Darwin: A Graphic Biography
Matthew Chapman, Trials of the Monkey (Darwin's great-great...grandson comes to Dayton TN)
Winteron C. Curtis, "A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial" from D-Days at Dayton: Fundamentalism vs Evolution at Dayton, Tennessee (1956)
----Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology (1921)
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
Jay Hosler, Sandwalk Adventures (a graphic novel)
Rebecca Stott, Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists
And don't overlook the compendious website Darwin online.
Darwin discussion questions, quotes etc. here.
Je suis Charlie
Charles Darwin (@cdarwin)1/11/15, 6:51 AMProceeding on foot
==
"And maybe this is what I have learned more than anything from my great-great-grandfather: to keep my eyes and my mind open, to enjoy the wonders of nature and never cease to ask questions." Sarah Darwin, foreword to "A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything" by Hanne Strager
We all need a philosophy...
"That's my new philosophy."
Philosophers' Song
"...nothin' Nietzsche couldn't teach ya..."
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"You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody. You're all individuals."
"I'm not." (Monty Python's "Life of Brian")
"There is something devastatingly hollow...
...about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it." John Lachs
Freedom and Limits: the Philosophy of John Lachs
==
Conference in Berlin honoring John Lachs, August '2015 :
http://berlinphilosophyforum.org/category/aaev/program/ …
http://berlinphilosophyforum.org/category/aaev/program/ …
"Immediacy and the Future" by Phil Oliver, Berlin Practical Philosophy International Forum
"I'd like to have an argument..."
"No you wouldn't!"
I don't do Facebook...
...but I'll be your friend. “The thing I remember best about successful people I've met all through the years is their obvious delight in what they're doing and it seems to have very little to do with worldly success. They just love what they're doing, and they love it in front of others.” Mr. Rogers, echoing Mr. Vonnegut (above), also said “There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.” ― Fred Rogers
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The Director
Ray Lankford's bat
in the hands of a great ex-catcher
"KO"
Great nickname for the pitcher who shut out Hillwood in the postseason opener!
It's her time
The clock on my office wall
Hobbes
"It cannot be always seaside...
...even as it cannot be always May, and through the gaps thought creeps in." H.G. Wells
Be best
Song of the Open Road
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose...
I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also...
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth...
Allons! the road is before us!
Look up
Chocorua autumn
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