“Beauty is the experimental proof that incarnation is in fact possible.”
Simone Weil on Christmas.
25-Dec-09Christmas with Fyodor.
25-Dec-09“You asked just now if there is in the whole world a being who could and would have the right to forgive. But there is such a being, and he can forgive everything, forgive all and for all, because he himself gave his innocent blood for all and for everything…and it is to him that they will cry out: ‘Just art thou, O Lord, for thy ways have been revealed!’”
Astonishing.
22-Dec-09Again, so good to have Sullivan back. Who writes posts like this? Who has readers like this? Sheer supergay yule pathos.
More on healthcare.
22-Dec-09From Marc Ambinder.
‘The Nympholepsy of a Fond Despair.’
21-Dec-09“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ is marriageableness. All that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or she the money to marry with, and conditions conforming? ‘Tis ‘the nympholepsy of a fond despair,’ say, rather, of an English boarding house. Suicide is more respectable.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoting Byron with the “nympholepsy of a fond despair” line.
This is a bit harsh, but calling this dreaming of a good-hearted, misunderstood, gorgeous, single, smouldering nobleman possessed of a thousand-room mansion a “nympholepsy of a fond despair” is utterly priceless.
Just to offer another perspective:
“Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen.” – Macaulay
And a third:
“When I take up one of Jane Austen’s books, such as ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his liking, and he would probably say so.” – Mark Twain
The J Train.
20-Dec-09A few friends got some real experience with the J train last night – in a blizzard no less – coming out to decorate the Christmas tree with me and sing a few old songs. It reminded me of the following story:
A friend called me up after flying out of New York, very excited. The plane had swooped over Queens and Brooklyn, and she said, “John, I saw the J train!!” Knowing that her knowledge of New York geography might not be entirely reliable, I asked, “How did you know it was the J train?” She said, “It wasn’t moving at all!” Which, I thought, probably was a pretty good indicator.
Health Care Options.
18-Dec-09If the bill is as bad as Howard Dean tells us – and I think Dean has some credibility on this issue – then the right thing to do would be to kill the bill. It would be interesting to see if Obama would be willing to veto it if it passed. That would be interesting theater, but I suppose everyone in the Democratic Party would prefer to not pass anything than for that to happen. But intelligent criticism of the bill appears to indicate that it might make things worse rather than better.
My inclination would be to attempt to go back to the November elections and get the few more votes that were needed. And of course, being a pamphleteer at heart, I would turn this into a moral issue and go for the throat, as I hear people are now doing with Joe Lieberman, saying he will be personally “causing” thousands of deaths. For me the unacceptable cases are the medically related bankruptcies. If I were Obama I’d round up a stadium-full of people who have been through this, and unleash them on every Republican senator. Surely some Republican voters are Christians? Who don’t believe that men should have to sell their children’s home to pay for their wife’s cancer hospitalization? Who know that greed is a sin and not a virtue?
But if it’s merely about making us all sign up with another corporation, it’s useless to me. What will happen to a person like myself who had an income of about $1000 in 2009? What does a mandate to buy insurance mean to such person?
Climate Change Skepticism.
18-Dec-09In a piece about the Copenhagen talks, the Economist points out that “there are virtually no climate-change sceptics in China.” They mull over why this might be so, but don’t give any convincing reasons. I’ve never been to China, but hearing people talk about it, it seems like a place where pollution is so bad it’d be hard to accept the naive/cynical claim that human beings can’t change their environment. One friend told me of air which crunched in his teeth. This was not, he believed, due to “natural cycles” or anything like it, but was “anthropogenic.”
Most climate-change skeptics today live far from the chemical processes that make a high-energy lifestyle possible. But I bet the closer you live to these processes the more you’ll believe that our cumulative actions can cause impressive amounts of harm to the natural conditions of life.
Happiness.
15-Dec-09I remember reading of Goethe, a man so blessed that some have said he lived the fullest human life ever, that he said that in all his life he never had forty consecutive happy days. Senior year of college, after turning in my thesis, I put myself to this challenge, and had twenty-five consecutive happy days. This is not at all a bad run, for a human being. But on the twenty-sixth day, for no reason, I was unhappy. I’ve not made it to so many as twenty-five since, I don’t think.
I’m at ten straight happy days now. Wish me luck.
Mayhem in Queens.
22-Dec-09Stories of airline horrors at JFK, which seems likely to be the case until Christmas Day. Delta having one person at the checkin desk, six hour waits, and so forth. Police called in to quell the angry mob. Where is all the money going in these industries? The employees are not well paid. There aren’t ten employees per customer, the way you see in provincial Italian museums or places like that. It’s not like the airline industry is obsolete (“no one flies anymore”) – we’re not talking about the wagon-striping industry. My flying over the past year has been limited, but the planes I have been on have always been full, even to places like Riverton, Wyoming, where I’ve flown four times in the past year and a half.
The same thing with the auto industry – it’s simply not the case that people don’t drive cars anymore, and that explains the troubles of the industry. There is money in cars and air travel, and it’s going to someone. There’s enough money at Delta to double the check-in staff at the largest airport in the largest city in America (and by doubling I mean bring in one more person per shift). I read that Delta’s CEO Richard Anderson made $11 million in his first four months at Delta in 2007; maybe digging into that a bit would get a flight attendant or two, whose median salary is less than $40,000?
And what about an Amtrak that can get people where they need to go in high-density corridors like the coasts? (One of our oldest posts on this topic here.)
The old saying is that money is like manure (substitute stronger words if you like), and is only any good if it gets spread around.