Knowledge of things nearly eternal

A mild and misty Monday morning.  

Today, standing at my favourite morning spot, the mountains behind me, the woods full of wildlife surrounding me and the cries of the seagulls almost the only clue to the presence of the great lake below me, a snatch of a quotation came to me out of the autumn mist, and sent me running home to Rachel Carson. Not for the more famous Silent Spring, but for her first book, Under the Sea Wind, and this passage:

"To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. These things were before man ever stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, throughout the centuries and ages, while man's kingdoms rise and fall."

I'd say that just about covers it.

Portrait: http://www.chatham.edu/host/library

Quote of the week No. 50 : On Patience

Nineteen degrees at 8am, with a good cooling breeze. Could do with a bit of rain.

Living in Carmine Superiore these last few years, I have learned many things. How to light a fire, how to pluck a chicken, how to walk quietly in the woods, how to save a life, how to find my place in the family I made. Most particularly, I have learned patience. 

I live in the land of Leonardo, who wrote:

“Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.”

Powerless to vex your mind... Yes.

Quote of the week No. 49

"Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

                                                                                                   -- Nathaniel Hawthorn


Pic: Val d'Err, Grigioni

Quote of the week No. 48

"It is at the edge of a petal that love waits."

- William Carlos Williams

Quote of the week No. 47

Beside the footpath, Savognin.

"I think it annoys God if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice." 

- Alice Walker, The Colour Purple.

Quote of the week No. 46: On dogs and other animals

Since the arrival of Jakob! Lord of Misrule, I have probably read more dog-training handbooks than I read babycare books. The latest is by "dog whisperer" Cesar Millan, entitled Cesar's Way (recommended), and the following left me wondering:

"...in order to have a balanced dog, you must provide three things: 50% exercise, 25% discipline and 25% affection..."

What did it leave me wondering? It left me wondering whether it might work for husbands... 

Quote of the week No. 45 : On guests

Coolish and overcast. Damp after light unaccustomed rain.

There is, I'm told, a Russian proverb which goes like this: 

"The guest has not to thank the host, rather, the host should thank the guest."

After a week in which Carmine Superiore has been visited by hundreds of intrepid walkers, and our house in particular has been graced every day by the presence of guests who arrived from the length and breadth of Europe, the day promises to be a quiet one.

Before 'normal' life resumes (it's all relative), I'd like to say thank-you in the Russian way to all who came to our home, and made our Easter so happy and, having mixed business with pleasure, so productive. 

And thank-you to all who came to Easter Mass, for which the church of San Gottardo, jewel of Lago Maggiore, was heaving at the seams.  

Spasibo!

Quote of the week No. 44

This week's weather has been over 10° at the 8am checkpoint and in the mid-20s in the afternoons. Bright sunshine but with a reality-check wind.

Seen on an old Fiat Panda similar to ours but quite a lot less battered:

"Before you laugh at my car, finish making the payments on yours."

I guess that's the right attitude to have in a world in financial crisis...

Quote of the week No. 43 : On pride

Overcast, almost preternaturally still. Warmer, though, thank God!

Satan fallen from Heaven in
 Gustave Doré's illustration for
Paradise Lost.

Pride is the seventh of the Seven Deadly Sins, and while it is closely associated with vanity - the all-consuming passion for one's own appearance - it's much more than this.  When pride is of the Seven Deadly Sins variety, it is so great, so all-encompassing, so mind-altering, that it squeezes out all but the self, even - and this is the Sin bit - God Himself, whatever you conceive Him to be. Satan's sin was the sin of pride, and we all know what that led to...the message of Milton's Paradise Lost is that pride is particularly deadly because it is the sin from which all others arise. And this isn't just a Christian preoccupation either. You just have to take a glance at Oedipus Rex or the Oresteia, to see that the Ancient Greeks, as an example among many, saw hubris - their version of pride - as sowing the seeds of tragedy.

This is not your normal pride. Not the understandable glow one feels at some particular success. Deadly pride is selfishness to the nth degree. My life. My body. My abilities. My status. My possessions. My achievements. My opinions. My experiences. My suffering. My pain. My way. 

Pride eclipses not only the spiritual in the minds of the prideful, but also leaves no space for other people. It finds its outlet in disrespect for others, in the fascistic determination to impose one's own view of the world on others, in an inability or unwillingness to feel empathy or compassion. 

Pride cannot accept fault. Pride twists the truth, always ready to lay the blame at someone else's door. 

Pride believes that it is either loved to distraction or hated to annihilation. There's only one step between pride and paranoia.

As Iris Murdoch wrote: "The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession".

It's up to you.

Quote of the week No. 42 : On envy

Carmine Superiore is awash with running water: coming out of the sky, off the stone roofs, dashing down the sloping cobbled streets. I'm reminded of the rain on the worst night of our renovating lives, and am glad our house is no longer a forest of props and our roof is on the top rather than in bits in the street.

My ongoing, ad hoc, and rather scientifically dubious researches into Catholicism turn up the Seven Deadly Sins, those evils that lead us away from a state of 'charity' (surprisingly similar to the Buddhist 'compassion') and into other sins, venal or mortal. 

Anyone who saw Se7en will know that the Seven Deadly Sins are envy, greed, lust, pride, wrath, sloth and gluttony, and this week, I've been thinking a lot about envy. I've come to the conclusion that envy is different from jealousy in that jealousy requires three people - the loved, the beloved and the enamoured gooseberry - whereas envy requires only two - the envied and the envious. Envy doesn't seem to be born of any kind of love (even love of oneself is missing here), but of comparing ourselves to others: the young professional envies his colleague his car, the neighbour envies the next-door's way with marrows, the put-upon envies another's freedom, the poor envy the rich, the old and ugly envy those who are younger and more attractive, those without children envy those with, and those with children envy those without. The saint envies the sinner and the sinner envies the saint. Envy differs from all the other Deadly Sins in that it has no pleasure in it - even wrath has the pleasure of release - but envy only destroys. As the anonymous saying goes (roughly) 'the envious poison their own banquet and then eat it'. 

Of course, many these days would say that envy is not a sin in that it generates the desire for all those consumer goods on which the world turns, and I recall someone once saying that without envy, democracy would collapse. Certainly, without envy, the network of amateur spies that kept the gulags full would not have existed.

Plenty of pithy one-liners can be found on the subject of envy, but here's one that sums up the View from Carmine Superiore...

William Penn (1644-1718), the founder of Pennsylvania:

"The [envious] are troublesome to others ... but a torment to themselves." 

I guess old Willie would have had some trouble with the troublesome, given that he was basically an estate agent who somehow ended up the "absolute proprietor" of the Province of Pennsylvania, and I think he nailed it when he pointed out that envy is more self-destructive than destructive of others.

Oh yes, and why is envy green-eyed? Because, as so often, Shakespeare said so!

Quote of the week No. 41

Another sunny autumn day - early mists followed by azure skies topping off tasteful autumn colours. Temperatures still in the high teens.

The woodland floors are damp and musty, and scattered with fat, shiny, sweet chestnuts - at five euros a kilo in the supermarket, I'm training the children to load their pockets with the fattest and the shiniest every day.

Talking of whom, I see that Eric Hoffer agrees with me...

"Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love." 

It's good to have B-B back! 

Quote of the week No. 40 : A Greek proverb

Hot and sunny for the first day of the loooooooong holidays, with a refreshing, windsurfable breeze. 






"As long as you have the blessing of your parents it does not matter even if you live in the mountains."

Now I wonder what it is that the Greeks have got against mountains? After all, some of the best gods live in them...




Pic : Baita, Alpe Devero

Quote of the week No. 39 : On education

After a week of on-and-off rain, Saturday has dawned grey and rainy. The view from my kitchen window is of rain-slick granite roofs and wet trees interlaced by streaming mist. 

Plato (428/7 BC - 348/7 BC), Athenian philosopher who really needs no introduction, least of all from me. 

"The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things."

I wonder what Plato would have made of Gormiti, Ben 10, et al? And I wonder whether he would have approved of car-less Carmine...

Quote of the week No. 38 : On housework

A mere 12°C at 8:30am, after two days of rain (soft rain, hard rain, torrential rain, cats-and-dogs rain). Some sunshine amid the 50% cloud cover adorning the sky in tattered remnants, like net curtains after the kittens have had their claws out.


Now for the Quote of the Week :

"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day..."

Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908-1986) French philosopher, existentialist, Marxist, Maoist, feminist, social theorist and novelist who enjoyed a polyamorous relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. 

I wonder how much time she devoted to the torture of Sisyphus. Next I wonder whether I would be let off the chores if I had such an expansive name, and could command all those -ists, to say nothing of the terrifyingly intellectual lover...

Quote of the week No. 37 : On spring

Yesterday started strappy-top sunny and ended woolly-socks overcast.  

Which reminds me. I've been meaning to post this quote for a long time:

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), English novelist and social reformer. The most popular English writer of the Victorian era and still one of the most quoted after Shakespeare. Yes, that's him there, the one with the wickedly sexy beard and the brutal comb-over.


"Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade." (Great Expectations)


I'd say that about sums it up.




Pic swiped from Wikipedia, with thanks.

Quote of the week No. 36 : On learning

Six degrees at 8:30am. Sunny, but with a stiff wind sending glittering white horses galloping across the lake, and spray erupting upwards from the harbour walls and cliff sides.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784), the French philosopher and writer, was one of the giants of the Enlightenment, and, together with Jean Le Ronde d'Alembert, compiled what is considered to be the first real encyclopaedia, a project that consumed twenty years of his life. The Encyclopèdie was to enable any person who could read access to knowledge on any subject, and not just those already covered by the universities, and in this sense it was a deeply revolutionary work. It may be no coincidence - although not a simple one - that the French Revolution itself took place only five years after Diderot's death.

As one might imagine, Diderot thought a lot about learning, and where the ordinary person might come by it. But for him simply having access to books and the ability to read them was not enough. For him, information, facts, knowledge needed to be systematised and presented in all its many facets in order for real learning to take place. He wrote :

"The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes."

Almost three hundred years later, in 2004, the number of new books published in the English language alone was a staggering 450,000 - that's almost a book a minute. And if that's not enough, I wonder what Diderot would have thought about the Internet...

Frontispiece snaffled from Wikipedia.

Quote of the week No. 35 : A very special talent

Almost 7°C in the bathroom today. Beats four. Beats two. Whispy clouds, struggling sunshine, something of a breeze.

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German-born writer, poet and painter, who lived at the end of his life just down the road from here at Montagnola.

"Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object."

Quote of the week No. 34 : On self-determination

Dry, overcast and wintry. Minus one at 8:30am. I giorni della merla, day two.

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), American politician, orator and freethinker.

"Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence.

Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result."

Quote of the week No. 33 : paying for it

"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it."

Richard Lamm (b. 1935), American politician and accountant.

Quote of the week No.32 : just think

Five degrees at 8:30am, with a triumphant, choir-of-angels after-the-rain sunrise.

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."

William Arthur Ward (1921-1994), American author of witty aphorisms for such august journals as Reader's Digest. It's not Dante, it's not Goethe and it's not even Wordsworth, but it is to think about.