https://t.co/KIBdKRbMJi
(https://twitter.com/PeterSinger/status/1344228570781007872?s=02)
Really, kinda. G.H. Palmer brought James to Harvard and taught young William Marston, whose suicidal impulse was checked by philosophy.
Here's a story I'd like to see on the big screen. But thanks to the negative buzz around WW 1984, I've discovered Jill Lepore's compelling account of the real story behind "Diana Prince"...
"What checked Marston’s hand as he held the vial [of poison acid] was the study of existence itself. There was one course he loved: Philosophy A: Ancient Philosophy. It was taught by George Herbert Palmer, the frail, weak-eyed, sixty-nine-year-old Alford Professor of Philosophy and chairman of Harvard’s Philosophy Department. Palmer had thin, long white hair, bushy black eyebrows, blue eyes, and a walrus mustache. He lived at 11 Quincy Street, where he pined for his wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, who had been president of Wellesley College, an advocate for female education, and a suffragist. She’d died in 1902. He refused to stop mourning her. “To leave the dead wholly dead is rude,” he pointed out, quite reasonably.14 Early in his career, Palmer had made a luminous translation of the Odyssey—its aim, he said, was to reveal “that the story, unlike a bare record of fact, is throughout, like poetry, illuminated with an underglow of joy”—but his chief contribution to the advancement of philosophy was having convinced William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana to join what became known as “the Great Department”: Harvard’s faculty of philosophy.15 The key to teaching, Palmer believed, is moral imagination, “the ability to put myself in another’s place, think his thoughts, and state strongly his convictions even when they are not my own.” He “lectured in blank verse and made Greek hedonism a vital, living thing,” Marston said.16 In the fall of 1911, Philosophy A began with a history of philosophy itself. “According to Aristotle,” Palmer told his class, as Marston sat, rapt, “the rise of philosophy has three influential causes: freedom, leisure, and wonder.” For weeks, he raved about the Greeks: they, to Palmer, were geniuses of dialectics and rhetoric. After Thanksgiving, he lectured on Plato’s Republic; by December, he was expounding on how man was “a rational being in a sensuous physical body,” underscoring, as he often did, that by “man,” he meant men and women both. He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. “Girls are also human beings,” he told them, “a point often overlooked!!”17 The equality of women was chief among Palmer’s intellectual and political commitments, and it was a way, too, that he remembered his wife. George Herbert Palmer, who saved Marston’s life, was faculty sponsor of the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage."
"The Secret History of Wonder Woman" by Jill Lepore https://a.co/hJ0TTzx
"Those meetings really could all have been emails..."
"Boy, Time really flies when everyday is joyless and exactly the same."
"Yes, I came back. I always come back."
et al
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2020-in-review/instagrams-favorite-new-yorker-cartoons-of-2020?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/they-said-it-maybe-4d7ec1d3715e?s=02
from This Day
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-november-30-2020/
The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-november-27-2020/
Rebecca Solnit's classic manifesto for walking and how it vitalizes the mind: https://t.co/9lpAM3EqsT
(https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1321798442218303489?s=02)
Has it really been over three months since my last post here? How time flies, when you're busy posting to three other blogs almost daily. Some of those posts have noted and celebrated life's delightful springs, at some point I should go back and replicate them here. But time and life are short, as Richard Rorty noted in this late-life lament. It reminds me that Charles Darwin also looked back with regret at not having devoted more time to poetry (and music).
The Fire of LifeBookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) tweeted at 5:46 PM on Tue, Jul 21, 2020: Credibility Crooners: Tom Wright v Francis Collins. Religion and science have rarely clashed as dramatically as they do here. We have seen Tom's majestic book roost before and though Francis puts up a fierce fight he is doomed. He goes down playing, like the band on the Titanic. https://t.co/FFhBhdUfHo (https://twitter.com/BCredibility/status/1285707667386904579?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13
“In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” Emerson’s great call for religions to evolve, reject the “monster” of superstition and embrace the natural “miracle” of existence, delivered on this date in 1838. https://t.co/bUlG0GH4UQ— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 15, 2020
“William James cannot save your life”-well, that depends (as we pragmatists say) on what you mean by “save” @JohnKaag @John_Banville— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 2, 2020
https://t.co/m1QKlGi4xe via @Lit_Review
“Robert Silvers, editor of nyrb, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’” Mine too, but too bad he didn’t drink (not that he needed an additional exciter of the Yes function). https://t.co/m1QKlGi4xe— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 2, 2020
"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
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
 | Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) |
Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters thebookoflife.org/why- | |
 | 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... | |
Charles Darwin (@cdarwin)1/11/15, 6:51 AM"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
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