Into the Heart of Life: Richard Powers on Living with Bewilderment at the Otherworldly Wonder of Our World – The Marginalian

Maria Popova again has me thinking this (like its predecessor "Overstory") would be a good text for Environmental Ethics. Bioethics too.

"…Set sometime in the near future, when our search for life beyond the Solar System has come to its inevitable fruition, [Bewilderment] tells the story of a thirty-nine-year-old astrobiologist and his neurodivergent, frightened, boundlessly courageous nine-year-old son, searching together for other worlds and instead discovering how to reworld ours with meaning. 

Radiating from their quest is a luminous invitation to live up to our nature not as creatures consumed by "the black hole of the self," as Powers so perfectly puts it in his talk, but as living empathy machines and portable cosmoses of possibility, whose planetary story is yet unwritten…

As the father searches for other worlds, he is savaged by despair at humanity's catastrophic mismanagement of this one, haunted by the growing sense that we couldn't possibly be good interplanetary emissaries until we have become good stewards of our own home planet. But each time he hits rock bottom, he bounces back up — as we all do, as we all must in order to go on living — with rekindled faith in what we are capable of…"

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/06/26/richard-powers-bewilderment/

Cheers! (a personal note)

Celebrating my first alcohol-free anniversary, of my own free will.


http://dlvr.it/T9xFLb

Martian dawn

Th'ds

Sorry, not sorry

He says he won't forget where he came from, but he can't even remember where he was just a few years ago. Now in league with Mephistopheles, he's a long way from home.

RWE’s Div School Address

On this date in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson (books by this author) delivered a commencement address to the Harvard Divinity School. Emerson had graduated from Harvard Divinity in 1826. Before he graduated, he had given a lecture called "The American Scholar" to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa society, in which he spoke of his philosophy of transcendentalism. The speech was published that same year. It made Emerson famous, and it brought the ideas of transcendentalism to young men like Henry David Thoreau.

Emerson had been a Unitarian minister, but he had resigned and was becoming very critical of the current practice of Christianity, which he made clear in this commencement address. He said: "The true Christianity — a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man — is lost." Many in the audience were incensed by Emerson's speech, particularly the older faculty and ministers. It was 30 years before Emerson was invited back to speak at Harvard.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-monday-july-b2d?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

“What this landscape is meant to look like”

Is It Too Late to Save the Southern Grasslands?

"…I recently went looking for the grasslands restoration projects newly established at Radnor Lake State Natural Area and Warner Parks, both in Nashville. With the spring wildflowers already bloomed out and the fall wildflowers still setting buds, July is not the ideal time to visit a grassland restoration site, but I was thinking about the buffalo — that magnificent creature we nearly drove into extinction but saved at the last minute — and I wanted to see some of the many restoration projects that are springing up here as awareness of what this landscape is meant to look like continues to grow..."

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/opinion/saving-southern-grasslands.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Story of Philosophy's "splendid hallways"

One of my undergrad profs denigrated Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, but its "lush, well-constructed sentences" were part of what first drew me to take his class.

"If one grew up with the Book-of-the-Month Club, some corner of a book-shelved house remained forever The Story of Civilization, his eleven-volume, six-million-word chronicle written over half a century and coauthored in later years with his wife, Ariel. The club offered it for decades as an inducement to join, and sold thirteen million of them. An independent scholar who operated outside academe’s protections and won both the Pulitzer Prize (1968) and Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), Durant jump-started then fledgling Simon & Schuster in 1926 with The Story of Philosophy, the all-time best-selling book about its subject if one excepts the Bible. It’s at least arguable that Durant’s maverick life and stimulating prose cross-fertilized each other.

Born in North Adams, Massachusetts, Durant headed to St. Peter’s Academy in New Jersey in his teens. At first a Catholic seminarian, he soon turned agnostic and socialist, got a job as a reporter at the New York Evening Journal, and merged his progressive interests with a passionate desire to bring the pageant of Western thought and culture to the masses... one wandered happily with Durant through his lush, well-constructed sentences, splendid hallways connecting gilded rooms in a Byzantine palace."

America the Philosophical" by Carlin Romano: https://a.co/bXO8jAC

Americana

It's been fun exploring the intersection of American life & culture with classic American philosophy, about which there's much to be said. "Wildness" runs deep in these barely-united states...


http://dlvr.it/T9WYnZ

Guts

Post by @reboomer

View on Threads

He also said: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

An appalling place, lacking insight

Ray Kurzweil Still Says He Will Merge With A.I.

Now 76, the inventor and futurist hopes to reach "the Singularity" and live indefinitely. His margin of error is shrinking.

...He recalled a conversation with his aunt, a psychotherapist, when she was 98 years old. He explained his theory of life longevity escape velocity — that people will eventually reach a point where they can live indefinitely. She replied: "Can you please hurry up with that?" Two weeks later, she died.

Though Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil's prediction that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor and futurist will live forever.

"I think a world run by 200-year-old white men would be an appalling place," Dr. Hinton said. nyt

Well, unless we eliminate the threat of dementia (and patriarchy) first, maybe...

Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything

My dad always remembered his childhood journey through Europe. Now, with Alzheimer's claiming his memories, we tried to recreate it.
by Francesca Mari

Your father has no insight,” a neurologist at the Memory and Aging Center at U.C.S.F. told me last year, after meeting him for the first time. Insight was defined by the psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis in 1934 as “the correct attitude to a morbid change in oneself.”

That sure sounds applicable to current political events.

“Insight” is something we’d like to think we can get from philosophy and expansive reading and reflection, but so much finally depends on neuro-physiology. And genes. And luck.

“the most hopeful form of patriotism”

Loving America Means Expecting More From It

"…In this country we have come to see patriotism as a positive account of our history that treads lightly upon the nation's sins. The Fourth of July in particular is a time to wrap ourselves in the flag, grill some meat and run through a playlist of songs with lyrics lauding Americana. Talking about slavery, Jim Crow, economic exploitation and what happened to Black soldiers after they finished their service ruins the vibes.

It costs nothing to sing along to "God Bless America." It requires much more to believe in a place that has failed you.

As an African American who speaks on anti-Black racism, I often hear the refrain, "If you hate America so much, you should leave." But I don't recount my grandfather's story because I hate America. I tell it because to omit stories like his would only hinder us from becoming a better country. On the other side of honesty is the possibility of change. For me, telling the truth is the most hopeful form of patriotism..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/opinion/patriotism-july-fourth.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Independence Day

Self-reliance is a noble intellectual goal, it means thinking for yourself (not by yourself) and accepting responsibility for your presence and activity in the world.


http://dlvr.it/T97986

Stay curious

Like we were saying last night in our first Americana class, the great "sin" against Philosophy is stubbornly dogmatic incuriosity.

"In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information... what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious)."

Wonderful read from a wonderful mind: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/04/09/george-saunders-uncertainty/