Bertie Russell, meliorist

 Yesterday's gorgeous sunny harbinger of spring, a sleeveless bikeride, two dogwalk 60s sort of day that we get randomly and delightfully in winter here in the mid-south, has yielded to clouds and a forecast of rain. Not complaining. Take delight where it comes, and anticipate more. 

Of course, weather finds other ways to try and kill us down here. So do our politicians. Pick your poison. I sometimes imagine what life would be like in New England. Would I have learned to love cross-country skiing and snowmobiling and seven or eight months of what we call winter? It sure looks great on screen, on Trout and Coffee and Ally Marie.

Imagination is one of our best tools, it enables us to describe and re-describe our lives and dreams. To dream, perchance to live. If you can think it you can maybe make it, or not. Either way, a flexible imagination is insurance against the possibility-denying platonic temptation to lock ourselves into an upper-case Reality without the prospect of amelioration. And we desperately need amelioration.

While I was out walking and riding in the sunshine yesterday I took Lord Russell with me. The BBC just brought out his inaugural Reith lectures of 1948, "Authority and the Individual." Younger Bertie was a platonist--"brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark"--, but he got over it. He became a meliorist. He grew up, into the understanding that our hopes, “though as yet they are largely frustrated by our folly,” remain “within our reach.” A better politics, a stronger democracy, a heritage of values still worthy to transmit to our heirs, remains a possibility.

Keep hope alive.

And that's how I think I'll conclude my remarks in Chicago next weekend at the APA, where it will probably not be sunny and sixty-something. It wasn't the last time I was there this time of year, right before everything locked down. But it'll be a nice place to visit again.