Happy anniversary from the bard

31 years ago today-

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

    --Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

 

 

Butterfly in the sky

We watched this great new documentary last night. Wish I coulda shared it (again) with Older Daughter.

Reading Rainbow was a big part of the best years of my life, c.'95-'02, when I got to spend my days with our daughters in their most impressionable years. We'd watch the show and then go find the books at the old Bellevue public library (before or after playing at the Red Caboose Park* next door).

I used to sing the song with them a lot, too. 🎵"I can go anywhere... I can be anything..." 🎵

 

LeVar's later podcast is also great. In the last episode's epilogue he tells us to "keep looking up." Great advice at any age. But you don't have to take my word for it. 

 

*UPDATE, 5.30.24. Unsettling coincidence: on the day I mentioned our good old times at the Red Caboose Park, this (I learned this morning) also happened: 

Teenage boy killed, sister injured in Bellevue park shooting

A 15-year-old male is being charged in the shooting, according to MNPD. https://www.wsmv.com/2024/05/30/teenage-boy-killed-sister-injured-bellevue-park-shooting/

 In gun-besotted America, there are no innocent and protected places of play anymore. The victim was 13.

Sane advice

"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours."

 
--Jane Kenyon, born on this day in 1947

Otherwise...

Four physicists

 and at least one philosopher.

Einstein, Hideki Yukawa, John Wheeler, and Homi Bhabha in Marquand Park, Princeton, N.J, 1954.

“It gives me great pleasure, indeed, to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.” – On receiving Lord & Taylor Award, 1953.

• “At least once a day, allow yourself the freedom to think and dream for yourself.”
• “I thought of that while riding my bicycle.”
• “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth”
• “It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere."
• “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." -to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)
• "Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
• “I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”
• “Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.”
• “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
• “Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.”

"The Northern Lights I Did Not See" (the cosmic light I did)

I didn't either, nor did I bother to point my phone at them. It's the sort of experience that needs to be unmediated. But that un-diminishing sense of smallness, the sense of scale that elevates the mind and heart can be got at second-hand. It's the cosmic perspective.

"…I felt small, which I expected to feel, and untroubled by my smallness, which I did not. Standing beneath the open sky, pondering an event that was happening so far away as to be incomprehensible, reminded me again of my own infinitesimal role within a system whose magnificence even the most brilliant of my kind can understand in only the meagerest measure — if only briefly, such moments have a way of making my earthly worries seem more manageable…" —Margaret Renkl

Elbert Hubbard's morning mantra

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

BUT, Marc evidently did NOT say…

Epictetus, the Roman slave, and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, taught a similar gospel: “When you arise in the morning think on what a precious privilege it is to live – to breathe – to think – to enjoy – to love! God’s spirit is close to us when we love. Therefore it is better not to resent, not to hate, not to fear. Equanimity and moderation are the secrets of power and peace.” Elbert Hubbard, “The New Thought”

Hubbard (no relation to L. Ron) allegedly also said:

• “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”
• “Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.”
• “Happiness is a habit—cultivate it.”
• “Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer the goal.”

Britannica bio...

An American original

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fERNixxZXqM

But can it philosophize? (Rhetorical question)

"A student shares his iPad screen with OpenAI's new AI model GPT-4o, and the AI speaks and helps the student learn in real-time.

The world just changed forever. Every student will now have his own personalized tutor."

[ 🎥: @openai ]

https://www.threads.net/@evolving.ai/post/C666S8sIYCw/?xmt=AQGzBf4B58Hj1X6DZw8sqUQ3tlMkhr-5x2eoWvCMkBZ4Ag

Possibilism & hope

"…I share the view that a Trump election would pose immense damage to American political and legal systems. But in the scientific world we would continue to move forward with new vaccines for breast cancer, new drugs to combat obesity and new CRISPR gene-editing techniques to treat sickle cell and other diseases.

How can we weigh democratic decline against lives saved through medical progress? Of course we can't. As my intellectual hero, Isaiah Berlin, might say, they are incommensurate yardsticks — but that does not mean that they are irrelevant to our well-being.

And no one can accuse me of ignoring the problems that beset us at home and abroad, for they have been my career. They've left me a bit too scarred to be a classic optimist. Hans Rosling, a Swedish development expert, used to say that he wasn't an optimist but a possibilist. In other words, he saw better outcomes as possible if we worked to achieve them. That makes sense to me, and it means replacing despair with guarded hope.

This isn't hope as a naïve faith that things will somehow end up OK. No, it is a somewhat battered hope that improvements are possible if we push hard enough.

In 2004 I introduced Times readers to the story of an illiterate woman named Mukhtar Mai, whom I met in the remote village of Meerwala in Pakistan. She had been gang-raped on order of a village council, as punishment for a supposed offense by her brother, and she was then expected to disappear in shame or kill herself. Instead, she prosecuted her attackers, sent them to prison and then used her compensation money to start a school in her village.

Instead of giving in to despair, Mukhtar nursed a hope that education would chip away at the misogyny and abuse of women that had victimized her and so many others. Then she enrolled the children of her rapists in her school.

Mukhtar taught me that we humans are endowed with strength — and hope — that, if we recognize it and flex it, can achieve the impossible."

Nicholas Kristof 

Chasing Hope

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/opinion/journalism-reporting-progress.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Reasons to Have Hope

"More than three-quarters of Americans saythe United States is headed in the wrong direction. This year, for the first time, America dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries in the World Happiness Report. Some couples are choosing not to have children because of climate threats. And this despair permeates not just the United States, but much of the world.

This moment is particularly dispiriting because of the toxic mood. Debates about the horrifying toll of the war in Gaza have made the atmosphere even more poisonous, as the turmoil on college campuses underscores. We are a bitterly divided nation, quick to point fingers and denounce one another, and the recriminations feed the gloom. Instead of a City on a Hill, we feel like a nation in despair — maybe even a planet in despair.

Yet that's not how I feel at all.

What I've learned from four decades of covering misery is hope — both the reasons for hope and the need for hope. I emerge from years on the front lines awed by material and moral progress, for we have the good fortune to be part of what is probably the greatest improvement in life expectancy, nutrition and health that has ever unfolded in one lifetime..."

Nick Kristof

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/opinion/journalism-reporting-progress.html

HDT (and WJ & Frank Bascombe) on words

But he'd still agree: Life and reality cannot and must not be reduced to "talk, talk, talk! ...words, words, words…"

"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself."
Henry David Thoreau, who died on this day in 1862

 

It’s gonna take way more than a day

"Saturday, May 4, is the National Day of Reason!

With Christian nationalist influence in Congress, and with the threat to our judiciary looming large, it has never been so important to affirm our commitment to the constitutional wall of separation between religion and government, and to celebrate reason as the guiding principle of our secular democracy. Learn more"

https://www.nationaldayofreason.org/about

The Holdovers

 We saw this last night. Good message for all teachers, especially those on the edge of burnout. Young people really are our future. We need to prepare them for it. And trust them.

Hoping for a sea-change

My mostly-retired philosopher pals, having (like my semi-retired minister pal) too much time on their hands, started another too-early-in-the-day text thread.

The discussion of academic presidents who are also humanities scholars led one of us to say "there won't be many Shakespeare scholars in [U.S.] presidential suites in the future..."

That led me to point out that POTUS likes to quote Seamus Heaney:

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change…

Another of us said that's pretty highbrow.

And someone said something about Ted Lasso.

So I said Heaney's not so highbrow (Joe's definitely not), his poem can be rephrased in Ted Talk:

"So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. 'It's the hope that kills you.' Y'all know that? I disagree, you know? I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you. See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief."

Ted's pretty wise:

"What I can tell you is that with the exception of the wit and wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes, not much lasts forever."

But he's a highly improbable sort of coach, apart from being hired to lead a professional English football club when his only experience is High School (American) football:

"For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It's about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field."

Nick Saban said that too, said my pal the 'bama fan. But of course his alums had a different notion.