2 July 2006

“The world around us is of baffling complexity and the most obvious fact about it is that we cannot predict the future. Although the joke attributes only to the optimist the view that the future is uncertain, the optimist is right in this case: the future is unpredictable. It is, as Schrodinger has remarked, a miracle that in spite of the baffling complexity of the world, certain regularities in the events could be discovered.”

~ Eugene Wigner 

Emotional weariness can give rise to a loss of enthusiasm for life, but despair can only arise when to this is added a form of intellectual arrogance – none of us knows enough to be without hope.

~ Josh Mitteldorf

1 July 2006

“The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.”

~ Eugene Ionesco

30 June 2006

      Late Ripeness
 
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

~ Czeslaw Milosz is 95 today

29 June 2006

“As human beings, we are groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange universe into which we are born. We have many ways of understanding, of which science is only one. Our thought processes are only partially based on logic, and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires and social interactions. We cannot live as isolated intelligences, but only as members of a working community. Our ways of understanding have been collective, beginning with the stories that we told each other around the fire when we lived in caves. Our ways today are still collective, including literature, history, art, music, religion, and science.”

~ Freeman Dyson, in a NYReview of Daniel Dennett's book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

28 June 2006

While the popular media portray global warming as a classic struggle between environmentalists and the economics of consumption, the Rocky Mountain Institute has been propounding a more optimistic view for 25 years now.

The essence of the RMI perspective is that saving energy in buildings and cars is so much more profitable than drilling holes in the ground and refining petroleum that no matter what benighted policies are pursued by our governments and their corporate patrons, there will continue to be steady progress toward energy efficiency.

27 June 2006

Love in the Guise of Friendship 

Talk not of love, it gives me pain,
For love has been my foe;
He bound me in an iron chain,
And plung'd me deep in woe.

But friendship's pure and lasting joys,
My heart was form'd to prove;
There, welcome win and wear the prize,
But never talk of love.

Your friendship much can make me blest,
O why that bliss destroy?
Why urge the only, one request
You know I will deny?

Your thought, if Love must harbour there,
Conceal it in that thought;
Nor cause me from my bosom tear
The very friend I sought.

~ Robert Burns

26 June 2006

“In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations.  . Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.”

~ Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

Russell goes on to remind us that machines have displaced labor to such an extent (1932!) that one man’s toil is no longer a precondition to another man’s leisure.  Oppression of labor remains in our culture essentially as a bad habit!