We'll See what happens

One must read, try to possess by memory, and be possessed by the very best that has been imagined, cognitively apprehended and expressed powerfully. Thinking clearly and well is based upon memory. Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well, and democracy will not survive.

2

Settled Things Strange: And Yet the Books

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are, ” they said, even as…

2 days ago -

1

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

ayjay:

Doc Watson, “Down in the Valley to Pray”

2 days ago -

11

We are not in a state of “divine discontent”; we are in an entirely human and entirely reasonable rage.

G.K. Chesterton in Utopia of Usurers (via gkchestertonquote)

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7

The men in the workshops told me stories about the master craftsmen who once worked in Hatton Garden. “We had one old Jewish chap I used to sit next to, called Lapidus,” said Dave Harris, a former diamond-cutter, “who had been born in Russia in about 1860. He ran away from home and got apprenticed in Germany, earning nothing. He told me he used to lodge in a room with just a bed and a chair and live on bread and water. In the 1900s he moved to Paris and became a master jeweller and in the 1920s he moved to England. He was in his late seventies when he came to us. He worked piecework, so his wages never came to more than three pounds a week, but he made the most exquisite pieces of jewellery I’d ever seen, which often took him up to three months to make. The most beautiful thing I saw him produce was a rose-shaped diamond brooch, set in 18-carat gold, with enamelled petals, covered in precious stones and diamonds, commissioned by a Russian princess.”

In those days every pearl that ended up in a British jewellery shop, every precious stone, every diamond, rough or cut, came through Hatton Garden. Today the majority of the jewellery sold in the street is either cast or imported. A few of the master craftsmen remain but when they die, their knowledge will be lost.

New Statesman - Paved with gold (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

2 days ago -

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At 9 o’clock (the Opera began at 8) a lady came in and sat down very conspicuously in my line of sight. She remained there until the beginning of the last act. I do not complain of her coming late and going early; on the contrary, I wish she had come later and gone earlier. For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly if someone had killed it by stamping on the beast, and then nailed it to the lady’s temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to bear the operation. I am not, I hope, a morbidly squeamish person; but the spectacle sickened me. I presume that if I had presented myself at the doors with a dead snake round my neck, a collection of black beetles pinned to my shirtfront, and a grouse in my hair, I should have been refused admission. Why, then is a woman to be allowed to commit such a public outrage? Had the lady been refused admission, as she should have been, she would have soundly rated the tradesman who imposed the disgusting headdress on her under the false pretence that ‘the best people’ wear such things, and withdrawn her custom from him; and thus the root of the evil would be struck at; for your fashionable woman generally allows herself to be dressed according to the taste of a person who she would not let sit down in her presence. I once, in Drury Lane Theatre, sat behind a matinee hat decorated with the two wings of a seagull, artificially reddened at the joints so as to produce the illusion of being freshly plucked from a live bird. But even that lady stopped short of a whole seagull. Both ladies were evidently regarded by their neighbors as ridiculous and vulgar; but that is hardly enough when the offence is one which produces a sensation of physical sickness in persons of normal human sensibility.

G. B. Shaw, 1905 (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

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So for [furniture maker Harrison] Higgins, there is no simplistic opposition between nature and culture, between a pristine creation and human artifice—the creative “work of our hands” that gives birth to artifacts, to cultural goods. To the contrary, good artifice is its own kind of grace: to make is to serve, is to bear God’s image to and for the creation. A Christian theology of creation is not the same as Mother Earth mythologies of ‘the natural’ that ultimately end up lamenting humanity’s presence as a blight on creation. No, we worship the Maker of all, the Artificer we come to know in Jesus of Nazareth, the son of a carpenter. A Christian affirmation of the goodness of creation is also an affirmation of artifice — redeeming the very word, we might say, from its association with the fake and the faux. In an older sense, artifice attests to creativity and craft.

Jamie Smith, “Artificial Grace: Why the Creation Needs Human Creativity.” I might add that when we say Jesus was a carpenter, the Greek word there is tekton: maker, builder. (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

4 days ago -

7

The dragon is certainly the most cosmopolitan of impossibilities

G.K. Chesterton, written at age 16, quoted by Masie Ward (via gkchestertonquote)

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Certainly, God has given a sign of Himself in the greatness and power of the cosmos, from which we may dimly perceive something of the power of the Creator. But the real sign that He chose is hiddenness, from the wretched people of Israel to the child at Bethlehem to the man who died on the Cross with the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). This sign of hiddenness points us toward the fact that the reality of truth and love, the actual reality of God, is not to be met within the world of quantities but can be found only if we rise above that into a new order. Pascal expressed this idea in his marvelous doctrine of the three orders. According to him, there is first of all the order of quantities—and that is enormous and infinite, the inexhaustible object of natural science. Beside that, the order of mind, the second great realm of reality, appears, on the basis of quantity, as simply nothing, since quantitatively it takes up no space whatever. And nonetheless, a single mind (Pascal mentions the mathematical mind of Archimedes as an example)—a single mind, as we were saying, is greater than the entire order of the quantitative cosmos; because mind, which has neither weight nor length nor breadth, is able to measure the entire cosmos. Yet above that, again, stands the order of love. That, too, is, in the first instance, simply nothing in the order of “mind,” of scientific intelligence, as represented by Archimedes, since it cannot be the object of scientific demonstration and itself contributes nothing to any such demonstration. And nonetheless, a single motion of love is infinitely greater than the entire order of “mind,” because only that represents what is a truly creative, life-giving, and saving power. God’s incognito is intended to lead us onward into this “nothing” of truth and love, which is nevertheless in reality the true, single, and all-embracing absolute, and that is why in this world He is the hidden One and cannot be found anywhere else but in hiddenness.

Pope Benedict XVI, The Hidden God (via themorningstars)

(via triadic)

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npr:

nprfreshair:

hwentworth:

Internet’s over, people. Maurice Sendak just won.

Fresh Air remembers Maurice Sendak

Higher praise there could not be. —Wright

npr:

nprfreshair:

hwentworth:

Internet’s over, people. Maurice Sendak just won.

Fresh Air remembers Maurice Sendak

Higher praise there could not be. —Wright

(via alissawilkinson)

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