How Doctors Die

Interesting link via Elena on how doctors die. (Hint: they're not keen on chemotherapy.)

Book Quotes

Found from various & sundry places...this first quote is an argument against nominating Newt Gingrich for president.

Shakespeare seems to have sensed very early—what the world at large has still to learn—that he who cannot rule himself is not entitled to rule a city, still less a nation. - Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare"

*

After the birth of a human being his early years are obscurely spent in the toils or pleasures of childhood. As he grows up the world receives him, when his manhood begins, and he enters into contact with his fellows. He is then studied for the first time, and it is imagined that the germ of the vices and the virtues of his maturer years is then formed. This, if I am not mistaken, is a great error. We must begin higher up; we must watch the infant in its mother's arms; we must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind; the first occurrences which he witnesses; we must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which will rule his life. The entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child. - Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"

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Unlike every other famous tourist sight Mitchell had seen in his life, the Acropolis was more impressive in reality; no postcard or photograph could do it justice. The Parthenon was both bigger and more beautiful, more heroically conceived and constructed, than he’d imagined. - Eugenides's "The Marriage Plot"

*

a snapping turtle lumbered down the center of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet. His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell.

the drowned boy blurred as much by memory as by water, molded toward an essential, remote ideal. Longing, of course, become its own object, the way that desire can make anything into a god. - Doty's "Fire to Fire"

If Thinking With the Church Were Easy, Everybody Would Do It

Here's National Review's take on the new translation:

On Looking Forward to Friday (in this case, today)

There's a thin line between passion and pathology, goes Heather King's motto, and similarly there's a thin line between looking forward to some earthly good and looking TOO much forward to it. "Seek first the kingdom of God and all else will be added," is gospel truth.

There's a catch-22 nature to addiction and/or looking too forward: something has to be really good for it to be looked forward to too much. By striving to find transcendent experience one is unwittingly striving to find addiction. You can't really have one without the other, it would seem. Drug addicts have found the most obvious and seemingly dependable source of pleasurable experiences while simultaneously finding the most addictive and destructive. And, of course, the thrill wears off even as the need for the the substance doesn't.

I suspect one reason to not to look forward so much is because by definition you're not living in the moment. By definition you are, in a sense, "wishing your life away" and we know how precious life is. It's not particularly helpful or conducive to gratitude, to be bummed that it's Monday instead of Friday, say, and gratitude is arguably the mark of true religion.

Happened across a Psychology Today link:

The circuitry connecting the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum is a beautifully crafted machine for learning what you like and pursuing it with single-minded purpose. Its fuel is dopamine. And this machine sends messages directly to the premotor and motor cortex. It guides behavior, action, in pursuit of the good things in life...We can learn to go after anything, full bore, if it attracts us. And that's how we get ahead in life.

But it's also how we get addicted. The goal-pursuit circuit is a bit too flexible. Cocaine high. Oh yeah. That feels good. Want more. Got to get it. That drink at the end of the day. Feels good. Want it. Stop at the liquor store on the way home. These tendencies eventually cause us a lot of suffering, but they are simply byproducts of a brain that evolved to seek rewards, based on their attractiveness, and to pursue them with almost relentless energy.

When your back-ache gets bad enough, you start doing physio or yoga, so that you can use your upright spine to its best advantage. When your addiction gets bad enough, you'd best figure out how to use the goal-pursuit circuit for what it's designed for: to be successful and happy, to avoid suffering, and—of course—to feed the little ones back at the cave.

David Foster Wallace

Heather King references a David Foster Wallace book in her post title here and mentions a New York magazine article:

Eugenides got to know Wallace, with whom he’d had a ­rapid-fire correspondence about religion after the publication of Infinite Jest. Like Eugenides, whose search for faith is a major element of The Marriage Plot, Wallace quietly sought out spiritual answers and flirted with joining the Catholic Church, as Karr later did. (When they were together, they tried to pray every day.) He told Eugenides those letters held a lot of meaning for him.

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Heather has some sharp pictures of her Christmas decorations on her blog:

RSS Roundup

Some interesting tidbits found here and there... On "iPad madness" Pat Snyder writes:

I cannot blame readers alone for this electronic indulgence, though. The iPad bug had been building over two months of schlepping a laptop to graduate school classes in positive psychology – a field that ironically (1) teaches that buying more gadgets does not bring lasting happiness but simply sentences us to a “hedonic treadmill” and (2) warns against being a “maximizer” – that person who goes nuts trying to make the right choice out of way too many choices.

“Are you someone who has trouble choosing just the right dish on the menu?” the professor had asked. “Do you get stuck looking for the very best solution?” He urged us to become “satisficers” instead – people who do not agonize but go for the “good enough” choice.

From Brother Charles at A Minor Friar on the new translation:

I certainly notice how I hear the Latin behind the English (is that the right metaphor?) I hear the mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa in the new English Confiteor, the double dicens before the words of consecration in the way we now say 'saying' instead of 'said.' And of course I hear the calix sanguinis mei and the pro multis. Does this mean anything that I should hear the Latin under the English? I guess that goes to some of the hard questions at hand. What does Latin mean for western Christianity? Is it a historical accident? Or does God mean for it be that way? I think most folks I know would subscribe to the former theological assumption. For a sort of sed contra on a similar question on the history of human language and revelation, go read the Pope's infamous Regensburg speech, not the part that caused all the trouble, but the part about the Septuagint.

From Msgr. Pope:

I, like you, have read with interest the reactions of many to the new translation, after its first week of use. Most of the remarks I have read are quite positive. A smaller, though not insignificant number, are negative, some strikingly so...There is one strain of negative reaction I would like to address however, since it goes to the heart of a common misunderstanding of the Liturgy. The negative reaction basically stated is:

I can’t easily understand what Father is saying in those long, run-on sentences. It doesn’t make sense to me and I get lost in all the words.

...But here we come to an important insight that, though it is not politically correct, is still true: The priest is not talking to you. He is not directing the prayer to you, and the first purpose of the prayer is not that you understand it perfectly. The prayer is directed to God, (most often, to God the Father). The priest is speaking to God, and is doing so on your behalf, and that of the whole Church. And God is wholly able to understand the prayer, no matter how complicated its structure.

Too often in modern times we have very anthropocentric (man-centered) notions of the Sacred Liturgy...Intelligibility, while not the most important thing, IS important... But, frankly, it is not essential. Otherwise the faithful could not validly attend Mass in foreign lands, and the Mass could not be offered in Latin.

Fr. Barron's Documentary

Watched some of Fr Barron's Catholicism project on EWTN. Nice. Preferable to the book, since when he's discussing some overly familiar aspect of the Faith I can zoom out/zone out and let the amazing photography flow over me. It's part travelogue, or virtual pilgrimage, and I wondered, while he explained dark night of the soul so confidently, whether he'd ever really experienced it. It seems like the vast majority of us haven't and yet that seems to be the key to life because it gets us close to God. To see the prison wall where that great spiritual giant, St John of the Cross clambored down was something else. Or to see Lourdes, or the convent of the great St Teresa of Avila. Pretty cool.

The Sea

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul...- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can... There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." - Moby-Dick

Let's Play...Why's My Bookbag or E-Reader Equivalent So Heavy?

From Mark Doty's "Fire to Fire":

...a snapping turtle lumbered down the center of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet. His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell.

From Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville:

Henceforward every new discovery, every new want which it engendered, and every new desire which craved satisfaction, was a step towards the universal level. The taste for luxury, the love of war, the sway of fashion, and the most superficial as well as the deepest passions of the human heart, co-operated to enrich the poor and to impoverish the rich.

*

From the time when the exercise of the intellect became the source of strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy...

From Goddard's "The Meaning of Shakespeare":

This was Shakespeare’s enunciation of a belief he never abandoned: that ideal young manhood is a union of masculine and feminine qualities. “Men who have the woman in them without being womanized,” says George Meredith, “they are the pick of men.”
*
There are two ways of fitting into one’s environment that are as opposite as night and day. To fit into one’s age as mud does into a crack, or to be molded by it as putty is under a thumb is one thing; to fit into it and to use it creatively as a seed fits into and uses soil is quite another.
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In proportion as they master them, men grow skeptical of their own professions. When they come to know them, they see through them.
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It would be folly to try to subsume Shakespeare’s works under one head, but, if we were forced to do so, one of the least unsatisfactory ways would be to say that they are an attempt to answer the question: What is the cure for chaos?

First Sunday of Advent

So it's the First Sunday of Advent. It's the beginning of the church year, which is a far meaningful beginning than January 1st, the secular beginning. I surprised myself by stumbling on the "And with your Spirit" several times at Mass. I think I only got it right twice out of five tries. I thought that since the Eastern rite says "and with your spirit" that I would have little trouble with it. I guess not, especially since they chant it and we say it. But it's good as a dose of humility!

Our pastor mentioned the image of God as potter in the first reading and I thought about how often that image has occurred to me in only a spiritual sense, as if we were made, physically, independent of Him! But the pastor spoke of it mainly in terms of our physical selves, how each of us ("even twins") is unique. And so there's another reason to thank God. Too often I completely ignore the fact of my physical creation; I take it for granted or minimize it.

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(Before I forget, Fr. Martin in "Between Heaven and Mirth" humorously mentioned a spiritual adviser who told him he was 'shoulding all over himself', a rather colorful image of those who are always saying, 'I should do this, I should do that...').

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From the unlikely source of the novel "The Marriage Plot" by Jeffrey Eugenides, a character in the story describes reading St. Teresa of Avila's "Interior Castle", quoting the saint as saying that those who find themselves in the castle at all ought be grateful: "it's a great gain that they found their way in at all." Perhaps it's a temptation to a "reduction of desire," as Heather King put it, but I do sometimes think that instead of complaining that I'm not at the fourth or fifth or seven level of the castle that I should be thankful merely for the fact that I've been Baptized -- even if I'm still in the swamp outside the castle to borrow from the saint's imagery.

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Potent gospel last Sunday, perhaps the most potent of all. It's the daunting Matthew chapter 24 in which we learn how we are judged. And I thought about how Christ is indeed hungry, thirsty, naked, in prison, ill, because He is within the least of us. It goes beyond mere identification with, or empathy for. The verses I often have taken as a very hard goal for us to achieve, can also be taken another way: as a way of saying how much He loves us. It's not enough to do good, the pastor says, but to see Christ in what we're doing and who we're doing it for.

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Wow, Jennifer of Conversion Diary says what I've been thinking:

"The same force that drives people to slot machines is what drives me to my computer. I realized that when I mindlessly get online, every time I click it’s like pulling the lever on a slot machine and hoping to hit the jackpot. I’m hoping to hit a virtual jackpot — a blog post that changes my life, an email that blows me away, a hilarious video on YouTube, etc. And the truth is that there’s enough stuff online that if I clicked on enough links or spent enough time on email I would get that payoff I’m looking for. But, just like with slot machines, I need to be careful about spending endless amounts of time just sitting around pulling the lever."

Of Human Bloggage

Really I just wanted to blog this because I like the title. I never come up with good titles.

One thing that's sort of surprising about blogs is that it doesn't seem like very many are glorified diaries. (Or maybe I just don't read them.) It's pretty darn rare where you see someone writing, "Today I went to the grocery store and had dinner with X followed by a movie." You'd think there would be a lot of crossover between diaries and blogs*, but so many people - at least in the Catholic blogosphere - have profound things about politics, religion or culture. That's more helpful to the audience, and is more audience-centric. The trip log feels inappropriate simply because I can't think of any other Catholic blogs post long trip logs like that. It feels nakedly self-indulgent. It's funny that even in something as idiosyncratic and independent and (mostly) invisible as our blogs we still want to conform to everybody else's. We are social animals indeed.

* - perhaps that's what Twitter/Facebook have become for some.

Ye Olde Trip Log

Saturday

Modern technology's weak link is the battery. Freshly charged keyboard died immediately upon entry and now I'm left high and dry for the week. But who cares when we're above the clouds and the sun is present and it feels idyllic just being on the plane, the gentle motion, those surprisingly tasty airline cookies simply via association.

We got upgraded to an exit row and have legroom aplenty. The flight's only two hours and I wish it could be longer to half-sleep, half-dream, think of the past, of band camps in spring, of how we have this entire continent of memory and yet can only access such a pitifully small fraction of it, at least on earth.

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Check-in smoothly. Best Western rules. To the beach! I forget, when landlocked, how when I get to the sea I want to read sea books, mythical books really, books that contain no dialogue but the sea's breath, a vast compendium of ocean poetry linked together. "Now the scalloped sea engulfs me....".

Sea reads are not the only type appealing on trips: travelogues in general are, notwithstanding the difference, say, between strolling through Paris and lounging on a beach. I'm reading John Baxter's "The Most Beautiful Walk in the World" about Paris and he mentioned something I hadn't heard before: the English love sun, the French love shade. Makes sense given that only "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun."

We spend the day on the sands but dusk comes early to mid-November Florida. It changes the color of the Gulf from a leaden flatness to a brilliant white, at least where the sun strikes it. Winds produce a fine spray of white sand; like mist it travels over the malleable hillocks.

SUNDAY

1988. A poet in Monterrey, California. I was there on vacation and his book seemed a vast improvement over the kitschy souvenirs, for what could improve upon a poet of the place? More than even rock or soil, a writer sings of the distilled essence. And yet that particular souvenir gathered dust. I was more interested in collecting than in experiencing. I was more interested in the idea of re-experience than in actual real-time experience. And yet I knew, or suspected, that the book couldn't live up to my idea of the place, and so it goes... It's like love or God: you feel no one can live up to your idea of love so you collect glimpses, fragments of love and put them away for a rainy day, not realizing every day is a rainy day.

Felt good to be back at the beach, despite the long delay (3pm). The day got behind us too quickly: Mass at 10am after which we went a mile down the rode to see a professional sand sculpting display (they even charged an entrance fee but it was quite worth it), followed by lunch at the Beached Whale. Time spun away from us and it was with a sense of relief I regained a temporary beachhead and the quiet - the blessed quiet! - of wind and wave. We'd been pummeled by noise at the restaurant, where a thousand screens showing pro football games were accentuated by whoops and hollers. Before that we rode 9 miles along a busy thoroughfare with plenty a motorbike. Yes it was good to arrive back at the beach, pleasantly fatigued and ready for books and beer and the music of the breeze.

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It's been surprisingly difficult to figure out nationalities just from appearances. For example, I rode up the elevator with one of the more American figures I'd ever seen, like John Wayne with a off-brand ball-cap and that all-American touch of impatience. But when he spoke to his wife I couldn't even identify the language. In hindsight, he held his books - yes, plural, another dead giveaway - too high against his chest. American men are taught from little on that the higher books are held against the body the more feminine the pose. Plus the books were enclosed in a ziplock bag, which seems, again in hindsight, a bit fussy for the average laid-back American paperback reader. Leider (German word for 'unfortunately') I couldn't see the title of the books, nor did I ask him where he was from. He looked pretty blue-collar to be taking books to the beach.

Another difficult case was the man wearing a large hat and a Speedo swimsuit. That would suggest not an American, but he had such a Texas look about him, and he was overweight, which is an American characteristic.

*

And so to the electric prose (literally): the Kindle and its pleasing array of literature. I feel a bit of a pull to continue reading about glamorous Paris though the scene in front of me is glamorous as well: the swells of waves beyond which carry a pirate ship, complete with authentic-sounding booms (I know, because I've heard pirate ship cannons in movies).

I read in the Paris book of how Hemingway said that the modern world is so full of mechanical oppressions that it's a good thing we have alcohol as a mechanical relief. Surely we're now more, in ways technological, even more mechanically oppressed now. Or not. I don't feel particularly oppressed at least at this particular moment. And I don't think of Hemingway as in any way worthy of emulation except in his writing prowess.

The early retreat of the sun cannot be reversed - at 4:50 it's sitting low in the sky, sort of like the way men are supposed to carry books. Sandpipers hunt and stilt-walk their way along the shallows. The sand under my feet is packed neither too hard or too loosely. All of these facts seem somehow of import.

MONDAY

Steph woke up with a mild sickness and so it was to the doctor we went, a walk-in clinic, where the old gathered in the waiting room as if in living proof that as we age we breakdown, and all "getting better" is merely temporary. They come to the clinic honestly and we see our future: one of us routinely waiting in doctor's offices or emergency rooms as if it were a hair appointment. It's not unpleasant, reading the Kindle with the distraction of the noise of Kathy Lee Gifford on the television. Most of the visitors are neither reading nor watching tv but simply sitting and waiting with perhaps the patience of an older generation, or one comfortable with, and interested by, their own thoughts. I hadn't seen Kathy Lee since the days of Regis's little show and I wondered if she'd been able to resist the omnipresent desire of older women to go under the scalpel. She looked fake-young to me, with long yellow hair. In this world the phrase, "She's looking older," is apparently worse than "She looks like she's had surgery" and I think we're the poorer for it. Taking care of oneself is great but knives, well...A huge billboard in our neighborhood, advertising for a politician named Young, says it all concerning our society: "Act Young, Be Young, Vote Young".

Afterwards there was the issue of the prescription, with the closest pharmacy cross island. We waited for a trolly, not the most punctual of modes of transportation for the patience-impaired. Vacation has unwittingly forced me to slow down. After a wait we made our way down the long Estero Boulevard of paradise regained to the CVS. American efficiency reared its pretty head and within ten minutes we had the medicine, after which we waited 45 minutes or so for the next trolley, after a few false starts of "special trip" vehicles.

Back at the hotel by 1:30pm, and to the beach I went. Under the Brisbane-ish sun I ran down the beach a mile and back, enjoying the second half more than the inertia-breaking first half. I decided an early happy hour was in order and proceedeth thence to open a Dogfish Head "Rasion D'Etre". I sit in the same spot, the spot where the sun unfailingly seems to shine as if making a path to the sea just for us. Shining diamonds crystal in front of me while the pirate ship booms. Two German lesbians lay out to my right, an extended family to the left.

The weak link in this vacation is the food: breakfasts are continental with hard-boiled eggs, functional only. Dinners are micowaveable since there is no conventional oven. So it's not a pretty picture unless and until we go out, which we did on Sunday with a sun-defying visit to The Beached Whale (whose t-shirts we definitely don't want). The carbo-rich breakfasts and dinners make me feel as though the weight is being put in exponential fashion.

The childhood pool game Marco Polo is being played nearby. We varied it, back in the late '70s, by replying "Polo, ol' chap". I think we thought Marco was British or something. Plus it was a cheeky way of saying "you can't catch me", via the extra syllables said in that detached 007 way.

TUESDAY

The definition of a leisurely morning: a walk on the beach with the concomitant pleasure of a shoreline of seashells that line the Gulf like trinkets. Early on we have the beach nearly to ourselves while later many share the view. I find myself looking, as often as not, towards the empty terraces and balconies that lace the shoreline. So many vantage points from which to see the sea, so many with that same exhilarating scene from lofty heights.

Then we got on our bikes and headed towards the "Times Square" area for an American breakfast at a Greek cookery. Yum, if undaring. We followed with a bike-ride past the pastel buildings of the Square to the quiet harbor before putting out to Bowditch Point, at the extreme end of the island.

To the beach at 11am where I started to run: oh how I'd secretly craved a run! I sprinted down the beach "like a gazelle" Steph said. I felt in better shape today than the first day down here. Beer and sun will make me run. (Er, that didn't sound right.) Who wants to read when there's ground to cover, fleeting sand underfoot, barefoot down the beach past gliding pelicans and piping sand pipers (I refer to pretty much all sea birds other than gulls as 'sand pipers' because it's the only type I know.)

Speaking of Europe, my "can you spot the European" game show continues with today's slam dunk: a blonde woman with bunched shoulders wearing white shoes with black socks. Nothing says "European" like an unlikely flirtation with black. The easy way to tell a foreigner is simply anytime you notice them, since one tends not to notice the overly familiar. Thus when I was talking to a guy from Ottawa, technically a foreign country but who gave off all the signals of an American, I said without realizing he was one: "there are a lot of foreigners here." Not that there's anything wrong with foreigners of course. Some of my best friends happen...

Is the popularity of tattoos a metaphor for the modern tendency towards short-term thinking and live-for-the-minute? The conventional wisdom is that tatts may look good now, but will they when you're 60? "They're not thinking about 60," goes a school of thought. On the other hand, if everyone in your generation is getting tattooed, then it seems like what "looks bad" will be culturally defined downward by the time they get to 60. In a sense it seems a risk worth taking given how much beauty is culturally influenced. What surprises me about tattoos is how there's a segment of the population that becomes addicted to it, and keep going in for more.

The vacation is starting to get long in the tooth, Thursday being our last full day. I feel a bit nonplussed about it, assuming I know what nonplussed means and I'm not sure I do but I know what I'd like it to mean. Saturday was a travel day, Sunday a semi-travel day given the long journey down Estero, and Monday a semi-travel given the illness. Today is the first full day of beach, nothing but beach.

WEDNESDAY

Woke up with disquieting dreams, including one in which I was back in high school and the powers-that-be suddenly added a new requirement: crucifixion. Yes, we all would be crucified our senior year. Needless to say I was very upset and agitated about this development. Perhaps this speaks to my subconscious protest to our having to give ourselves completely to God. Needless to say we Christians are expected to, if not be crucified, at least carry our cross towards that end. Perhaps it's guilt at being able to go on so many vacations.

So it's day five already and a bit of fatigue has resulted from the fatigue and exercise. The weather ebullient, as it has been all week, although tomorrow is supposed to cool down, relatively speaking. This week the weather has been decided warmer than normal, for which I am not ungrateful.

Got out by 10:30 or 11-ish and enjoyed the fine sea breeze while reading the surprisingly engaging "Eyewall", about a fictional cat-5 hurricane striking a Georgian sea island. A nice light beach read, perhaps the pluperfect one. No "Drood" today, though a spot of Kingsley Amis' "Every Day Drinking".

The great hours at the beach are 10:30am-12:30pm and 3pm-5pm. In the first, you get the "thrill up your leg" as Chris Matthews might say that the day is young and the sun is high and you're high on that sunshine. By 12:30 or 1pm, I feel ready for some movement, exercise, something else. Too much sitting/laying about. By 3pm, I'm usually drinking, which is its own reward as drink and drug (can't we say "and/both" despite Chesterton's admonition that both drunk and teetotaler miss the fact that alcohol is a drink, not a drug.)

Spotted an amorous display of affection involving a guy wearing a speedo. Is that a wise move given the visibility of sexual appreciation in the male? A good reason not to wear speedos. Speedos often reflect the quintessential mistake: "as I think, so will females". "Skin to win" is a mostly ironclad rule from the male perspective but most females are not so sight-motivated. Of course I generalize here. Some men have an exhibitionist fetish (hence the prevalence of male streakers and Anthony Wiener-type tweets.) There's nothing quite as dispiriting as seeing a group of naked bikers with the great majority being male.

The sun is so blinding off the water that when people walk by they become silhouettes, surrounded by the glory and glamour of the sun. Even average-bodied figures become as transfigured, acquiring a kind of transcendence and poetry.

4:30 and the clouds have blocked the sun to egregious effect. Cool winds zephyr up our legs and down our backs. I put on a shirt and Steph covers with a towel. Beer, the great warmer-upper, helps but the cloud bank is huge and extends for half the sky and it's cool as an Irish fall evening. Boats nod in the choppy waters. The wind feels exhilarating, it gives a feeling of windswept nostalgia like the grainy videos of JFK at the Cape. Or it could be that no one is more melodramatic than me on the penultimate day of vacation (or really any day on vacation for that matter).

Never bet against the Sunshine State. No sooner had we retreated to our unit when the sun shone bright beneath a huge dark slab of cloud. The sliding doors, facing west, flood the room with savor-able light. Parisian painters of the 1800s used to appreciate the "melancholic light" of 5-7pm. Me, I appreciate any given that I live in Columbus, aka "Cloud-umbus".

And now the sun begins its precipitous decline. 5:20 and we live on borrowed time -- but then don't we anyway? Isn't all time borrowed? Meanwhile Steph is reading my Kindle (I've created a monster!) and so I can't get back into Goddard's rich Shakespearian feast.

So the winds blow through the hunter-green fronds of the palm in front of our balcony. A single spear juts from the base of the palms. White sand and water complete the endlessly appealing backdrop. And sky - so much sky! The fronds wave as if weaving goodbye; they look so creaturely for plant life.

THURSDAY

It's funny what the water brings in. Yesterday a half-pumpkin the size of a canned ham. Also an ear of corn. But no note in a bottle, alas. Until yesterday the beach was clean as a lick, with just light-colored shells undulating along the shoreline. Then, apropos of nothing, driftwood and bamboo sticks in quantity appear, marking the beach with dark matter for a mile or more.

Lots of "Heaven and Mirth" followed by a mirthful 20 minute run followed by a beer & malted milkshake runs. The weather is of paradise, which is how Ft. Myers markets itself. To my knowledge no one calls Vegas, or the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls paradise but I saw two road signs claiming such, and one bike rental operator refer to the sunshine, warm temps and beach as such.

"A fish just ran over my foot!" complains a 20s-something youth. A lot of rowdy "civilians" (non-hotel residents) at the beach today, presumably because of the holiday.

Overheard elsewhere: "The water is muddy-looking, probably from the dredging they're doing." There is a sand restoration project going on as I write this: a big ship in the distance runs an underwater tube to the shoreline from which great gobs of sand are emitted.

FRIDAY

So it's "Black Friday", so-called because it's when retailers get in the black economically but for me it's a black Friday because I'm heading north back to the land of cold and shadow.

We got up early and walked the beach one last time. The sunshine state delivered yet again, I thought to myself. On the ride to the airport we met yet another transplant: this time from Tennessee by way of Michigan, last time via New Jersey. Tempting that... I like that Steven Riddle move south.

On the Cusp of Weekend

Lazy Dog in His Natural Habitat


Last night suckled two fine beers, different as night and day but equally refreshing: a Columbus IPA with its apricot-y high hops flavor followed by the ever-rich Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, another local brew. I used to be dubious of Ohio beers, as if their popularity was a sign of bias or "homerism", but these two brews are as fine as any I've tasted.

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Just me, for about ten minutes yesterday, before the Blessed Sacrament. Honored to be guarding the Host. Then an older woman happened in and slowly made her way a few rows in front of me. In her hands was "Shirt of Flame". I felt a moment of connection with Him, the small feeling that my donation to the reading table was not in vain!

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Very enjoyable half-hour at my desk today reading of the magical prose of Jeffrey Eugenides. Ah I've been going through fiction withdrawal without realizing it! What pleasure in his printed word I took, savoring the highly digestible sentences. Poetry without affectation, I tell ya.

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Likely made a tactical error in blowing off the Lunch & Learn yesterday, the AVP's pet. Admin assistant threw me under the bus by mentioning loudly that I wasn't there, something that wasn't lost on my boss yesterday. I chided her this a.m.: "You busted me out didn't you?" I should've picked up on the signal that this wasn't an optional meeting by the fact that she kept asking us if we were going to be there: the quintessential "tell". The usual corporate passive-aggressive enforcement tactic. I'm somewhat glad I didn't fall for it. (Famous last words.) The meeting, about the financial concept of goodwill, gave me an excuse: "I didn't go because I already know what Goodwill is - I donate there!". Hardee har har. (As always, your experience of humor may vary.)

Link O'Rama

Compare and Contrast What Our Libraries Say About Us.

Tales of a Bibliophile

Good stuff, found here, on Arthur Balfour's reading habits:

...From Blanche E.C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour K.G., O.M. F.R.S., Vol. 1. (G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1937), pp. 135-136. Blanche Dugdale was Arthur Balfour's niece.

Nothing ever interfered with his reading. He always had several books on hand at once. The latest work on science might be found propped up on the mantelpiece of his bedroom to vary the process of dressing, and Lady Frances once declared that she suspected him of "making a raft of his sponge" to support a French novel while he took his bath. It was seldom that some work by Edgar Wallace or P.G. Wodehouse was absent from his bedside after these authors rose to fame, and the table by his arm-chair was always heaped with books of history, or Memoirs. It would be difficult to define the limits of his reading. Its range could astonish even his oldest friends, as for instance when, staying with Lord and Lady Desborough at Taplow Court on the eve of a General Election, he carried off to his bedroom a manual on chess, a game which since his boyhood he was never seen to play. Serious fiction was perhaps the only class of book upon which he was cautious of embarking. He never began a new novel until he was assured that it ended well. If no such assurance was forthcoming, he fell back upon Scott, Jane Austen, Kipling, and Stevenson.

He chose "The Pleasures of Reading" for the subject of his Rectorial Address to St. Andrews University in 1887, and there gave his personal answer to that most personal of questions—what to read and how to read it. Mr. Frederic Harrison had lately given forth some portentous warnings against "gorging and enfeebling" the intellect by over-indulgence in carelessly chosen literature. Balfour suggested that the analogy between the human mind and the human stomach might be pressed too far. He had never himself met the person whose natural gifts had been overloaded with learning. No doubt many learned people were dull, but not because they were learned. "True dullness is seldom acquired. It is a natural grace, the manifestations of which, however modified by education, remain in substance the same." People should not be afraid to read what they enjoyed. Idle curiosity, so-called, was a thing to be encouraged. Here follows a passage which might well mislead posterity into supposing Balfour a newspaper addict, ingeniously defending his favourite vice. The exhaustive study of the morning and evening papers was "only a somewhat unprofitable exercise of that disinterested love of knowledge that moves men to penetrate the Polar snows, or to explore the secrets of the remotest heavens.... It can be turned, and it should be turned into a curiosity for which nothing...can be wholly alien or uninteresting."

Such being his views, Balfour was naturally a lavish book-buyer. The library at Whittingehame is a large room, well stocked before his day with standard works of every kind. Soon it overflowed, and other rooms were lined with shelves. His own sitting-room was packed from floor to ceiling, mainly with books on philosophy and theology, and its sofas were heaped with flotsam and jetsam of current publications. The books at Whittingehame had an alert look about them, as if expecting to be pulled out at any moment. They were, in fact, often temporarily lost, for the ever-growing library was too large to be kept in order by the family's spasmodic efforts at arrangement, continually begun, but never ended. If Balfour was found wandering down the corridor at unwonted hours he was most likely in search of some book, and his relations would rush to proffer conflicting evidence about the present position of the missing volume.

"Read everything you find interesting and nothing that you don't," was nearly the sum-total of his advice to the younger generation with regard to literature. It sounded easy, yet to try to keep up with him along any of his primrose paths to knowledge, was to discover how deceptive was that apparently leisurely pace.