It stands to reason...

‘Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.’

—  from The Alchemist of Paul Coelho

Exciting as iodized salt

In the world, as in our lives, much good can be accomplished with simple, quotidian thoughtfulness.  It turns out that if you want to help impoverished people in the third world, the most bang for the buck can be obtained from iodized salt, for lack of which people are suffering classic thyroid symptoms:  low energy, susceptibility to infection, and depressed mental acuity.

Nicholas Kristof’s column in today’s NYTimes

Empathy

One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river.

“Look at the fish swimming about,” said Chuang Tzu, “They are really enjoying themselves.”

“You are not a fish,” replied the friend, “So how can you truly know that they are enjoying themselves.”

“You are not me,” said Chuang Tzu. “So can you truly know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?”

Zen stories

There is a long and ridiculous history of psychological literature denying that animals have an inner life, and attributing all empathetic behaviors to instinct and reflex.
New Scientist article

L’existentialiste malgré lui

I am nothing
I shall always be nothing
I cannot wish to be anything.
Aside from that, I have within me all the dreams of the world.
...
the Tobacco Kiosk owner has come to the door and is standing there.
I look at him with the discomfort of an half-turned head
And the discomfort of an half-grasping soul.
He shall die and I shall die.
He shall leave his signboard and I shall leave my poems.
His sign will die, and so will my poems.
And soon the street where the sign is, will die too,
And so will the language in which my poems are written.
And so will the whirling planet where all of this happened.
On other satellites of other systems something like people
Will go on making something like poems and living under things like signboards,
Always one thing facing the other,
Always one thing as useless as the other,
Always the impossible as stupid as reality,
Always the mystery of the bottom as powerful as the mysterious dream of the top.
Always this or always some other thing, or neither one nor the other.
...
(If I married my washwoman’s daughter
Maybe I should be happy.)
...
I enjoy, in a sensitive and capable moment
The liberation of all the speculations
With the conscience that metaphysics is a consequence of not
feeling well.
...
The man has come out of the Tobacco Kiosk (putting change in his trousers?).
Ah, I know him: he is Esteves without metaphysics.
(The Tobacco Kiosk owner has come to the door.)
As if by a divine instinct, Esteves turned around and saw me.
He waved hello, I greet him “Hello there, Esteves!”, and the universe
Reconstructed itself for me, without ideal or hope, and the owner of the Tobacco Kiosk smiled.

— from Tobacco Kiosk, by Fernando Pessoa

‘Collect the rocks that they throw at you — they will be the base of your pedestal.’

«Il faut collectionner les pierres qu’on vous jette. C’est le début d’un piédestal.»

Hector Berlioz was born this day in 1803.  I had wanted to write about Berlioz the madman, the opium eater who composed brilliant, eccentric music, that couldn’t stick with one melody for more than a few moments. 

Musical opinion labeled him a freak...It became customary to think of him as a phenomenon uniquely eccentric and sui generis, and of his admirers as a race apart.  - David Cairns

What I found in his biography was a more responsible, though passionate man.  He was better known during his lifetime as a critic and a conductor than a composer.  I can’t think of an activity that requires more focus and presence of mind than conducting a symphony orchestra.  He had great respect for other composers and artists of his era.  He once designed to murder the family of the intended fiancée who called off his nuptials, but later behaved responsibly toward women despite his intense passions.

Listen to his Roman Carnival Overture

This Life, which seems so fair

This Life, which seems so fair,
Is like a bubble blown up in the air
By sporting children’s breath,
Who chase it everywhere
And strive who can most motion it bequeath.
And though it sometimes seem of its own might
Like to an eye of gold to be fixed there,
And firm to hover in that empty height,
That only is because it is so light.
But in that pomp it doth not long appear;
That which is most admired devolves to nought,
As thought it erst derived, and turns to thought.

— Wm Drummond (of Hawthornden), born this day in 1585
(with liberties by your editor, JJM)

Study what thou art
Whereof thou art a part
What thou knowest of this art
This is really what thou art.
All that is without thee also is within.

L. van Beethoven, man of the people

It’s easy to think of Beethoven’s arrogance as a disdain for people who had less talent than he.  But that’s not the way it seemed to him.  He thought of himself as a champion of the common people, against pretensions of the stuffy aristocrats.  He once had an extended visit with the poet (scientist and philosopher) Wolfgang Goethe, for whom he had great respect, but commented ‘The Court suits him too much. It is not becoming of a poet.’

When his clothes became impossibly shabby his friends crept into his dwelling one night and substituted new ones. Beethoven never noticed the difference when he dressed the next morning.

It has been said that all of Beethoven’s personal excesses date from his loss of hearing, which was horribly painful physically as well as emotionally isolating.  Considering the gifts Beethoven has left to us, it would be charitable of us to believe it.

Beethoven stories
Listen to Alla Danza Tedesca from String Quartert Op 130.

Today is Beethoven’s birthday.

Unity of life

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

— Rabindranath Tagore

Infinity

It’s easy to say ‘infinity’.  We imagine it as simply larger than whatever is at hand.  But it is a marvelous exercise to try to conjure infinity by scaling the mind up, contemplating larger and larger entities.

Jorge Luis Borges, in one of his trademark short vignettes of unimaginable imaginativeness, describes a library that contains not just every thought but every possible combination of symbols (limited to 400 pages of text):

All—the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language . . .

Brian Hayes reviews The Unimagineable Mathematics of Borges’s Library of Babel

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

— David Whyte

The trumpet shall sound, and we shall be changed

Listen, from Handel’s Messiah

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.

— from the end of a very political Nobel lecture by Harold Pinter, 1930-2008
Pinter graphically catalogues the imperial sins of the US government, and Britain’s complicity in these crimes, then talks about the writer’s role in awakening a benumbed public to the need for moral resistance.  Watch and listen to the same lecture

Kabalevsky

Born this day in 1904, Dmitri Kabalevsky was a composer of entertaining music for the masses, just what the Politburo ordered.  His most memorable pieces were created for children, and they are delightfully playful, inventive and fun to play.

Listen to two of them that I have played since childhood:
                     Joking                    Sonatina