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Steal, Share, Keep Going
From Austin Kleon’s blog.
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Culture & Invitation
A culture, particularly one such as ours, is a continuity of feelings, perceptions, ideas, engagements, attitudes and so forth, pulling in different directions, often critical of one another and contingently related to one another so as to compose not a doctrine, but what I shall call a conversational encounter. Ours, for example, accommodates not only the lyre of Apollo but also the pipes of Pan, the call of the wild; not only the poet but also the physicist; not only the majestic metropolis of Augustinian theology but also the “greenwood“ of Franciscan Christianity. A culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by the explorers; it is composed of light-hearted adventures, of relationships invented and explored in exploit or in drama, of myths and stories and poems expressing fragments of human self-understanding, of gods worshipped, of responses to the mutability of the world and of encounters with death. And it reaches us, as it reached generations before ours, neither as long-ago terminated specimens of human adventure, nor as an accumulation of human achievements we are called upon to accept, but as a manifold of invitations to look, to listen and to reflect.
— Michael Oakeshott, “A Place of Learning.”
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Blackberries, south Georgia, USA.
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Go to the Limits of Your Longing
Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht,
dann geht er schweigend mit ihm aus der Nacht.
Aber die Worte, eh jeder beginnt,
diese wolkigen Worte, sind:
Von deinen Sinnen hinausgesandt,
geh bis an deiner Sehnsucht Rand;
gieb mir Gewand.
Hinter den Dingen wachse als Brand,
dass ihre Schatten, ausgespannt,
immer mich ganz bedecken.
Lass dir Alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken.
Man muss nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste.
Lass dich von mir nicht trennen.
Nah ist das Land,
das sie das Leben nennen.
Du wirst es erkennen
an seinem Ernste.
Gieb mir die Hand.
Rilke
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Walter Anderson, “Two Stags Fighting” 1952 - from the Ocean Springs Community Center Murals in Ocean Springs, MS.
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Lidnisfarne
Lindisfarne Gospels, St. Matthew (Chi Rho) (detail), Second Initial Page, f.29, early 8th century.
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Musik fürs Abend
Now listening: Klaviertrio f-moll, op. 65, Dvorák, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Trio. 🎵
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Saulėlydis
“Saulėlydis” (Sunset) by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, 1908. Discovered his work today via an article at Plough Weekly.
We’re setting the skies afire but Lord don’t they burn with a beautiful light…
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Goals, 3. June 2021
- In bed by 2230, arise by 0605.
- Continue physical therapy exercises.
- Start watching the essential films. 🎥
- On the list: Amadeus, Lord of the Rings
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Standing and Speaking: the Commons
“We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said.” // Wendell Berry, “Standing by Words”; quoted by Alan Jacobs in “Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics Towards the Future” (2018).
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Tending the Fields
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to tell. /// Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
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A Little Fellow
Southern Hognose Snake (Heterodon simus), south Georgia. 🐍
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Aspiration
… and my aspirations / will lead me higher than my present station…
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Vocabulary
… many of our vocabularies are evanescent because of their highly limited explanatory power. /// Alan Jacobs
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Proximity
Proximity breeds care. /// Wendell Berry [Image: Sandhills Lupine, south Georgia]
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Experience & Philosophy
“What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.” /// C.S. Lewis, Miracles
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You Must Change Your Life
“Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
///
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle
und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
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Benediction
What I had come to know (by feeling only) was that the place’s true being, its presence you might say, was a sort of current, like an underground flow of water, except that the flowing was in all directions and yet did not flow away. When it rose into your heart and throat, you felt joy and sorrow at the same time, and the joining of times and lives. To come into the presence of the place was to know life and death, and to be near in all your thoughts to laughter and to tears. This would come over you and then pass away, as fragile as a moment of light. /// Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
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