I'm a lousy photographer

My wife has a much better eye for composition. She's been trying to teach me the basics.

Beyond the basics: I like this man's take on the profession.

In the night

One of the former leaders of our men's Bible study is in memory care, with hospice helping and not long left.

In the middle of the other night the nurses heard music from somewhere, and finally traced it down to his room, where he was singing hymns.

In a different kind of prison, one with bars of sickness and of failing mind, he was, like Paul and Silas, still singing.

Gratitude

For the Fourth we went to the "biggest little parade" in Token Creek. They had about 17 "floats" and a street dance afterwards. The rain held off until the parade ended, but the dripped probably didn't damped spirits much. The Token Creek tradition is for water fights between the float riders and the spectators. And between spectators.

In the pre-game water fights, one family had equipped their youngsters with heart-shaped backpack water bladders connected to small squirters. I wish they'd had those when I was young. We made do with what few unbroken water pistols there were--the seams always cracked--and syringe bodies.

The littlest girl in the group—perhaps 5 years old—was short enough that she kept getting squirted in the face in the melee. She would wince, almost cry, grit her teeth, grin, and squirt back.

I took a brief hike down Portage to see the rest of the short parade route, find out how long were the food lines, and learn where the portajohns were. I saw nobody I knew, but I got more attention than I expected. After I rejoined the family I realized that I was pretty much the only man present with a button down shirt and long pants. Everybody else was dressed for a splash in the heat.

Before the parade began someone sang the Star Spangled Banner, of course, followed by a recording of "Proud to be an American."

I wondered, not for the first time, if that's the right framing. I'm proud of the ugly kludge bookcases I made so many decades ago. They fit the purpose and have for many family moves. They're something I did.

I'm grateful to be American. I'm grateful to be a man (and I trust my wife is grateful to be a woman). I'm proud to have helped in several experiments, and grateful for the chance. I'm grateful for our children.

As for the larger American project, I have not served in office or in the military, though I have done some teaching (and paid my taxes and looked for the least objectionable candidates and helped with a friend's unsuccessful campaign). I've tried to live and teach Christian values and the courtesies of the culture. I'm not sure those are enough to give me the right to be proud of my contribution. I suspect gratitude is safer for the soul.

Doxology

I've sung it thousands of times, but had never heard about Thomas Ken before. Maybe he would have liked it that way.

All Praise to Thee My God This Night has as the last verse: "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow" -- the famous doxology.

Ken sounds like he would have been a good man to know.

Wikipedia claims that he wound up crossways with Gilbert Burnet, of whom I had also never heard before, and of whom it was said "Indeed it was not easy to wound Burnet's feelings. His self-complacency, his animal spirits, and his want of tact, were such that, though he frequently gave offence, he never took it." I think I've known a few like that.

Hunger and thirst

Someone pointed out that while you could go a day without drinking anything, it was nearly impossible, if you were interacting with other people, to go a day without justifying yourself. Sometimes even when alone, we make excuses to ourselves for the less reputable memories.

Perhaps the "hunger and thirst for righteousness" is really very common, but we go hunting for it in the wrong places: Do-it-yourself frameworks (If I do X, Y, and not Z I'm good), excuses, or persuading (or intimidating) other people into affirming you.

All instead of wanting real righteousness and finding the One who can make it right.

Scott Adams will be missed

By some.

I regret not taking the time to explore an observation I made years ago at UW, and tried to measure where Dilbert cartoons could be found and what fraction they were of displayed cartoons on doors and bullitin boards.

From time to time I had reason to stroll through some of the engineering buildings, or chemistry or match, and now and then the business school. Fifteen/twenty years ago Dilbert was all over the place in physics (I had some) and computing and engineering, but not at the business school. Other cartoons appeared there, so it wasn't a department dictum on decorum.

I wish I'd checked on life sciences and arts and language too.

Since Dilbert so often skewered pointy-haired bosses and HR, it's no surprise that the strip wouldn't pop up on grad student doors so much in those regions. (Not that HR has many grad students – the relative number of grad students would skew total counts to the hard science departments.)

From the speed with which the strip was dropped I suspect there was great relief in the relevant management and HR corporate quarters at the excuse for revenge.

I read in one of his books, as an aside, his explanation for a positive thinking approach – that good luck came to those who claimed it would come. It seemed a kind of magical thinking for someone who professed to be quite rational.

He announced that he was taking Pascal's Wager when he no longer had anything to lose. That doesn't seem quite cricket, but I suspect God will take him anyway – perhaps to his surprise.

And perhaps he'll learn what might have been.

Lewis has Aslan tell Lucy that nobody is ever told what might have happened. In one sense that's true. We're linear people, and absorbing the branching tree of life's possibilities is more than we were made to understand. But I wonder if being confronted with who we could have been is part of Judgment Day.

A star

I don't recall ever having seen any movies with Brigitte Bardot, though somehow she has always been on the radar. I gather from Althouse's post that the New York Times didn't like her much ("crazy cat lady"?). She had a great deal of happy sex appeal, but from the summary of her personal life I gather that some of that was based on illusion.

She quit the movie business and devoted her life to animal welfare, which was probably far more satisfying. (We would not have seen eye to eye, I'm afraid.) She had the wealth and fame to be able to get up the Enarques' noses about immigration and get away with only fines she could easily pay. I'd bet that increased her popularity.

I read a few years ago in National Geographic (so take it for what it is worth) that an Inuit boy's great accomplishment would be to kill a polar bear by himself, but that some of those who succeeded committed suicide not long after--perhaps there were no obvious challenges left in life. If your great accomplishment was to be a sex-kitten for a few years, the rest of life would seem pretty empty -- unless you found a new career that didn't demand youth and classic beauty. But when, whenever you put out a press release, the media kept using your old sex-kitten pictures, would it feel like they were trying to push you out of your new career and into your lost old one?

Yes, there were some pictures of her from later in life. The ones that weren't might get to be exasperating.

Born and/or made

AVI linked to an essay dissecting twin studies.(*) David Bessis wrote a book (which I have not read) which sounds interesting and useful, but I suspect overclaims. "People think that it (mathematics) requires a special gift or that comprehension is a matter of genes. Yet the greatest mathematicians throughout history, from René Descartes to Alexander Grothendieck, have insisted that this is not the case. Like Albert Einstein, who famously claimed to have “no special talent,” they said that they had accomplished what they did using ordinary human doubts, weaknesses, curiosity, and imagination."

I'm not on the same level as those fellows, but I'm well better than average at math.

I only know that by comparison.

I don't feel particularly smart.

It's trivial for me to find problems that stump me. There are people who can solve those problems--and in an academic environment I meet them.

Being acutely aware that a colleague can easily deal with things that puzzle me is a ticket to imposter syndrome. I can't have the same painful awareness of the things that puzzle my colleague that I know how to deal with. Once you've solved a problem it seems easy, so the world is full of hard problems and all I solve are the easy ones.

I don't think that a researcher is always, or perhaps even often, going to be the best judge of how smart he is. An honest man or woman will be honestly humble, a member of the society of the puzzled.

Further, when you're surrounded by the best, that becomes your normal. At Princeton, Einstein didn't run into a lot of people who were no good at math.

FWIW, I suspect that most people are capable of understanding much more math than they dream. Mathematicians are born, but they need to train their minds in ways of looking at things, and with "crystallized intelligence" (standing on the shoulders of giants) even those of us who aren't great geniuses can learn how to make contributions.

I've griped before that advanced math books (and papers) often throw theorems at you without enough examples or motivation. That's not how they did the work to get there -- they played with examples, had some motivation to point them the way they did, and they did a lot of noodling around trying this approach and that.

(*) I'd always wondered how often it would happen that twins would be broken up to different homes. Among other details Bessis dug up, many of the separated twins were raised by relatives in their extended family, so their environments may not have differed that much.

Humor

I wonder how far that's true.

AVI has written a good deal on humor not aging well, and that may be related--the jester is putting together something temporary. That could get hard on you (as the title Treadmill to Oblivion suggests).

I generally do pretty well adding light humor to a conversation, and provide my share of Dad jokes, but if you corner me and say "Tell a joke" the headlights glare in this poor deer's eyes.

And I've found that after the conversation, no matter how many bon mots flew, I rarely remember any of them. They were things of the moment: yes, apples of gold in pictures of silver, but maybe more like unkeepable manna than actual gold.

I hesitate to draw conclusions from this: some people have written enduring humor. But a lot of times humor doesn't keep well, or translate well. In good conversation it doesn't have to, because for the moment it's alive. I wonder how much of our humor is taking these evanescent butterflies and tying windup motors to them to make them show up when I want them to.

Intelligence

Hiroo Onoda came to my attention again today. He was the Japanese soldier who held out for 29 years after the war's end. He was celebrated in Japan on his return, though not so much in the Philippines, where he may have killed 30 civilians over the years.

He and the others (who eventually died/surrendered) rejected the leaflets and even letters from the soldiers' families (!!) as tricks. A "Japanese adventurer" found him, and arranged for his former commander to order his surrender.

Onoda had been trained as an intelligence officer.

Go figure.

Maxims revisited

Going on from a maxim, I decided to have a look at the most famous: Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims by François duc de La Rochefoucauld

Most of the corpus is clever, though not always edifying or wise. A little acquaintance with The Four Loves clears out some confusion he suffers from. It took me quite a while to read through the work, not because I was slow, but because I found the cynicism (especially about love) a bit hard to take. ("63.—The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation." Um. No.)

A few caught my eye.

• 8.—The passions are the only advocates which always persuade. They are a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.
• 36.—It would seem that nature, which has so wisely ordered the organs of our body for our happiness, has also given us pride to spare us the mortification of knowing our imperfections.
• 127.—The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.
• 150.—The desire which urges us to deserve praise strengthens our good qualities, and praise given to wit, valour, and beauty, tends to increase them.
• 152.—If we never flattered ourselves the flattery of others would not hurt us.
• 159.—It is not enough to have great qualities, we should also have the management of them.
• 300.—There are follies as catching as infections.
• 313.—How is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
• 318.—We may find means to cure a fool of his folly, but there are none to set straight a cross-grained spirit.
• 327.—We own to small faults to persuade others that we have not great ones.
• 372.—Most young people think they are natural when they are only boorish and rude.
• 423.—Few know how to be old.
• 432.—To praise good actions heartily is in some measure to take part in them.
• 437.—We should not judge of a man's merit by his great abilities, but by the use he makes of them.
• 439.—We should earnestly desire but few things if we clearly knew what we desired.
• 442.—We try to make a virtue of vices we are loth to correct.
• 462.—The same pride which makes us blame faults from which we believe ourselves free causes us to despise the good qualities we have not.
• 477.—The same firmness that enables us to resist love enables us to make our resistance durable and lasting. So weak persons who are always excited by passions are seldom really possessed of any.
• 481.—Nothing is rarer than true good nature, those who think they have it are generally only pliant or weak.
• 483.—Usually we are more satirical from vanity than malice.
• XXIV.—The most subtle folly grows out of the most subtle wisdom.
• LXXVI.—Many persons wish to be devout; but no one wishes to be humble.
• LXXXII.—It is more easy to extinguish the first desire than to satisfy those which follow.

Some of these are really good: "To praise good actions heartily is in some measure to take part in them." That may sound a hair familiar: "he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward."

Attempting maxims

From Anecdotal Evidence, a citation of Hazlitt: "Here his maxim almost succeeds:"

The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savours less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people’s virtues.

"Provocatively true but too long, too blunted. One sentence is usually best. Two will work when the spring is wound sufficiently tight."

Let's sharpen that thing up a bit. We confess proudly, as though our offences were grander than others' virtues.

Give it a shot.

Feiffer

I remember mostly liking Jules Feiffer when I was adolescent. His "Marriage Manual" seemed, to an "outsider," cynical enough to be realistic.

But older me found him "OK in small doses," and his thoughts on marriage missing the points. His dancer might dance for hope, but in the end there never seemed to be any.

I read a collection of his work that covered several years, and some years were downright bitter. Every now and then he hit the nail exactly, and for those times I'll be grateful.

LA thoughts

The fires are far from the places we used to live, before we left in '63. The closest I've been since then was at meetings at UCLA, which may be threatened in the next few days. (I was offered a post there once, with a raise--but when I looked at cost-of-living it would have been a disastrous pay cut.)

I remember very little of the town. Most of what I know about it has come through pop culture, which is why Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" keeps coming to mind when I hear reports mentioning Santa Monica.

The contrast of that song is a bit jarring; "have some fun" vs evacuations and loss. But looking over the lyrics it seems as though part of the "fun" is the (lesser) contrast between the revelers and the busy or sleeping mundanes. I wonder if they'd have as much fun if the revels were a community dance, with everybody participating, instead of just a select few at night while everybody else sleeps.

That's a rabbit trail; coming back to the main track:

What can we do to make houses more resistent to fires? Metal roofs would help (it was something like a factor of 5 more expensive than asphalt shingles when we checked; it may be less now. Still it represented an investment of something like 1/3 the nominal value of the house.) Window frames that don't melt in the heat. Siding that doesn't allow embers to get stuck in cracks, and resists burning.

And the painful parts: trees away from the house (no shade), bushes away from the house (gardening and flowers), and so on.

I suppose if we want to build in flood plains we have to build for floods, and if we want to build in chaparral that burns regularly we need to build to resist burning.

Fixing that will take a while, though. In the meantime, they'll have to build more of the same, assuming they can get permits (never a foregone conclusion in California).

Rituals

BBC has an article about how rituals help us connect; little things that we do together. The interview doesn't go into how to create them, or if robust ones only arrise spontaneously, and I'm not buying the book right now to find out.

It struck me that there might be a dark side--rituals that disconnect and repel us from each other. Are there rituals in unhappy marriages, or rituals that reinforce solitude?

Some tribal recitations are ritualistic, even though they're not actions, for example the conversational challenge/response that assures your comrades that you're still one of them."

Decades ago we got a year-long subscription to Chocolatier (I think that was the name) magazine. Out of the 12 issues we recall nothing but the recipe for cranberry nut bars, which everybody liked and we've made every year as a Christmas bar since: a spontaneous tradition. In the other direction, early in our marriage we didn't do anything in particular for Advent, but some time ago we decided to make the Advent candle time a tradition, and barring the sometimes illness it has been so ever since: deliberately creating a tradition, with our particular flavor.

Olympic tempest

Drag queens (those I've seen pictures of) create a caricature of femininity and mock it. The point of mockery is to offend. They were used in the Olympic tableau to mock and offend. So I conclude the the Olympic organizers' non-apology's claims that they regret that people were offended and that it was meant to be "inclusive" are both false. This would remain true whether or not the designers were as innocent of Western art as they imply they were.

Pray to Live

by Henri J.M. Nouwen Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic

It's a short book. The first half is Nouwen's description of his life and ideas, and the second half is quotations from Merton's work that illustrate the description.

Merton could be contradictory--saying one thing one time and the apparent opposite another.

His personal journey looking for solitude left him with a more expansive idea of how to achieve it, and the conviction that solitude made him more part of the community.

He flirted with notions from Zen, noting commonalities in practice of meditation, but was alive to the radical difference between that and Christianity.

He held a "we're all sinners" approach. The quotations from My Argument with the Gestapo are less than compelling literature. I hate to say it, but Merton sounded holier-than-thou. He grew sorry for some of his earlier attitudes, perhaps this was among them.

His writing on the early civil rights movement dug in hard into the importance of white repentance and being taught and transformed by the prophetic vision of the oppressed blacks. Some of it sounds very weird over 60 years later. The intervening years haven't been kind to the nice binary he worked from.

Merton wanted to be a hermit; he sought a union with God he thought was only possible in solitude. His attitude towards solitude changed with time, but he always seemed to have the conviction that the contemplative life was superior.

I'm not sure that's quite accurate. It seems to prefer "dis-incarnation", looking behind everything in creation to find God in "pure" form. But although some contemplation seems important to keep us from getting distracted by the superficial, it isn't obvious that it is a good ultimate goal. If we were to empty ourselves of all acts and thoughts and try to apprend God in as unmediated a way as possible, we would still be as limited by our own nature as if we were singing hymns in the choir.

I've tried to puzzle through aspects of incarnation, although not to my complete satisfaction, and my tentative opinion is that God knew what He was doing when He gave us bodies and announced that it wasn't good for man to be alone. Not all the time, anyway--Jesus went off away from His friends to pray alone, so some alone time is important.

Despair and purpose

The hymn had the line "threatens the soul with infinite loss." When do we see that infinite loss?

Despair testifies to that loss. Nobody cares if a leaf blows. If the stakes in our lives were as trivial as that, mere chance or determinist, why would we care? If there were no purpose, if nothing mattered, winning and losing would be so much dust, of no more account that yesterday's breakfast.

But despair says that the significance of success or failure in life is greater than the life itself. Some despair that there is any purpose in life, their pain testifying to how important a purpose would be.

Despair doesn't see the whole picture, of course, and so it expedites the very infinite loss that it dreads.

Joy

AVI has been thinking along similar lines.

There's an apparent paradox here. Most of the greatest joys in life come from being able to use the gifts you've been give to serve people you care about.

Nobody likes being treated as a servant.

Requiem for Battleship Yamato

by Yoshida Mitsuru (translated by Richard Minear)

Yoshida was one of the few survivors of the Yamato (the world's largest battleship, not a spacecraft). In 1946, shortly after the end of the war, he wrote a memoir, which the censors didn't allow to be printed. He tinkered with it, and various versions were published after the end of censorship. This translation is based on the last, from 1952.

Yoshida was a junior officer, not from the naval academy, who wound up spending most of the battle on the bridge. He survived thanks to a series of coincidences and lucky timings (e.g. the whirlpool from the ship's sinking was dragging him down, but the second magazine explosion changed the water flow and pushed him up).

It is written in present tense, but his memories may have the benefit of years of contemplation. The original work was shorter, and allegedly more antagonistic to the Americans and in solidarity with the dead--I'd be interested in reading that one too, but I gather it hasn't been translated. FWIW, he converted to Christianity in 1948, in between editions.

The sailors all knew this was a "special attack" and that they were going to die. A great deal of the book is what this knowledge means to him and to the others he knew, and about the conflict between wanting to live, wanting to die nobly, and wanting to at least accomplish something. And what does it mean for one to live and another to die? He records some mental arguments with a judge. He also describes some of the people he knew onboard (not all died then), and sometimes what he knows of their families.

FWIW, a subordinate who does not immediately salute is supposed to be punched in the head.

I'm not sure he cites the rebelliousness of some of the trainees in school accurately--or perhaps there's a translation problem. But then, perhaps utter obedience isn't incompatible with a semi-anonymous "This is stupid" note.

Read it.

UPDATE: A couple of things I didn't know: The captain had leeway to change the mission to fit the circumstances, and, though it was a closely guarded secret, the Yamato had enough fuel to return from Okinawa if the captain chose. And, when the ship's list was obviously fatal, the captain issued "all hands on deck" instead of "abandon ship". More might have swum to safety if they had known to get off right away.