Adams’s benediction

"May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof" —John Adams

Letter to Abigail Adams, 2 November 1800

https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L18001102ja

World Series

When the Yankees and Dodgers faced off Friday night, it was their 12th World Series contest—the most of any two teams in Major League Baseball history—but the first in 43 years.

Their second matchup in 1947 saw the first integrated World Series, with rookie Jackie Robinson playing first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In their last 11 World Series showdowns, the Yankees are 8-3 against the Dodgers.

https://bit.ly/3C8sPG8

In dog we trust

"Fred was an unbeliever. He worshiped no personal God, no Supreme Being. He certainly did not worship me. If he had suddenly taken to worshiping me, I think I would have felt as queer as God must have felt the other day when a minister in California, pronouncing the invocation for a meeting of Democrats, said, "We believe Adlai Stevenson to be Thy choice for President of the United States. Amen."

I respected this quirk in Fred, this inability to conform to conventional canine standards of religious feeling. And in the miniature democracy that was, and is, our household he lived undisturbed and at peace with his conscience.

I hope my country will never become an uncomfortable place for the unbeliever, as it could easily become if prayer was made one of the requirements of the accredited citizen. My wife, a spiritual but not a prayerful woman, read Mr. Eisenhower's call to prayer in the Tribune and said something I shall never forget. "Maybe it's all right," she said. "But for the first time in my life I'm beginning to feel like an outsider in my own land."

Democracy is itself a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have. And so when I see the first faint shadow of orthodoxy sweep across the sky, feel the first cold whiff of its blinding fog steal in from sea, I tremble all over, as though I had just seen an eagle go by, carrying a baby."

— Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White
https://a.co/6BGuL0j

The St. Louis Hegelians

 "...civilisation, he knew, requires more than labour; it also needs thought, which is what Brokmeyer had come to the US to do:

On the upper shelf, I have Thucydides, Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, ‘The Republic of Plato’, with the dialogues called Critias, Parmenides, ‘The Sophist’ and the ‘Metaphysics’ of Aristotle. On the second shelf I have the works of Goethe and Hegel, complete. On the third, I have Shakespeare, Moliere, Calderon, and on the lowest shelf I have Sterne and Cervantes.

Thus, the few worldly possessions that adorn the cabin of a St Louis ironworker: the wisdom, from worlds both ancient and modern, of ‘those who have made man’s life human.’ Labour provides the means of satisfying the hunger of the body; reading and thinking, the hunger of the soul. But a good life can be formed only in the unity of these two essential activities: man does not live on bread alone, nor can he live without it. And Brokmeyer’s book – a Bildungsroman styled in diary form à la Thoreau – shows how it’s done:

I find it an excellent practice to put a page, or paragraph, of Aristotle, Plato or Hegel to soak – that is, transfer it to my memory in the morning and take it with me to my work. During the jostlings of the day it usually works itself into clearness of meaning, so that when I look at it again at night and trace its connections, all obscurity has vanished.

Brokmeyer’s range of interests was broad, his studies omnivorous. But his thinking ultimately orbited one book, which stood as the sun of his intellectual cosmos: Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812-16). ‘It was his one Supreme Book,’ Snider writes in 1920 in his history of the St Louis movement, ‘his Bible; it meant to him more than any other human production.’

...‘The real work of the St Louis Movement,’ writes Snider, ‘was done individually, or in little groups and classes … Its life pulsed in the small coteries which met usually in parlours or private rooms for the study of some special book or subject.’ Membership was small – it never numbered more than 100 – but the participants were eager and dedicated. The day-to-day activity of the Society was guided by Harris’s steady hand; Brokmeyer supplied the spirit and the vision. The Society thought of itself as a university, a place from which to observe and strive for understanding of the entire scope of the natural and human worlds, but in an entirely unofficial sense: it maintained no affiliation with any college or university in St Louis or elsewhere. Members met at each other’s homes, at city libraries and at a building rented by the Society (located, at one point, in North St Louis on Salisbury Street). Younger members were typically pupils who studied with Harris for free; other members, ones closer to being philosophic equals, would share recent articles and discuss matters intellectual and literary.

But because of the unprofessional, unremunerative nature of their activity, members had to pursue other vocations to win their bread. Brokmeyer left the foundry for politics in 1866, and was eventually elected Lieutenant Governor of Missouri; Harris and others taught children in the city’s schools; Snider had come to St Louis as the movement’s only college-level educator, teaching Latin and English at Christian Brothers College. Harris and Brokmeyer’s entry into politics, and their ultimate departure from St Louis, would eventually result in the movement’s decline and dissolution; and aside from the Journal – the first such philosophical periodical on US soil, home to early works by Josiah Royce, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, among others – they left very few artefacts behind by which to be remembered...

their primary legacy was the seriousness with which they approached the philosophic enterprise, and their refusal to consider philosophy as anything less than an absolutely necessary part of a complete human life...

As disciplinary philosophy grew in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League,’ writes John Kaag in ‘America’s Hands-On Hegelian’ (2016), ‘Brokmeyer spent his evenings with his native companions on the plains, teaching them to read – from Hegel’s Logic...’ 

A fitting image, perhaps, for what philosophy itself might look like after its retreat from the ivory tower and return to the wilderness of everyday human life..."

Aeon

Unwise

Of course it was

It was on this day in 1892 that the Pledge of Allegiance was recited en masse for the first time, by more than 2 million students. It had been written just a month earlier by a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy…

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-82c?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Mary Oliver's canine pedagogy

 The Poetry Teacher

The university gave me a new, elegant
classroom to teach in. Only one thing,
they said. You can't bring your dog.
It's in my contract, I said. (I had
made sure of that.)

We bargained and I moved to an old
classroom in an old building. Propped
the door open. Kept a bowl of water
in the room. I could hear Ben among
other voices barking, howling in the
distance. Then they would all arrive —
Ben, his pals, maybe an unknown dog
or two, all of them thirsty and happy.
They drank, they flung themselves down
among the students. The students loved
it. They all wrote thirsty, happy poems.

https://voetica.com/poem/5712