The pre-dawn walk with Angus is one of the best times of my day, especially as I usually listen to the Church of England’s service of Morning Prayer as we walk. This morning’s service was especially lovely.
Yesterday evening as I was setting the table I experienced The Transfiguration of the Watermelon.
Watched: High and Low — for the third time. An absolutely bonkers and absolutely brilliant movie, profoundly influential on everything from Schindler’s List to modern heist movies to any number of animes. 🍿
Currently contemplating: Portfolios of Ansel Adams by Ansel Adams, John Szarkowski. I bought this book in 1982, but this is the first time I’m going through it systematically and very slowly. 📚
Ansel Adams, Moon and Half Dome (1960). Larger version here, and you have to see the larger version. It’s worth remembering that, as Louise Story wrote some years ago, “Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter. Nor is it easy to stand where he stood and capture the same images.”
When I finish reading James on Spencer, as when I finish reading Robinson or David Bentley Hart on Dawkins or Tallis on Dennett or Midgley on everybody, I appreciate again the infinite variety of consciousness, the plurality of its ends. Its excessiveness.
And James's last point reminds me why people like Hart and Robinson and Tallis and Midgley keep having to do this over and over again: it's about desire. Some people want the mind to be a machine, and they will jerry-rig the worst arguments together in order to have it so, and they will patch those arguments as many times as they need to. It's a longing to be unburdened from consciousness, to just be chemicals again. Some people desire this, as some people think Maria the robot from Lang's Metropolis is hot. I don't get it, but it's clearly a real thing that people feel. The facts, however, do not care about their feelings, any more than Maria the robot does.
Walking Angus this morning we passed a house with an enormous murder of crows on it, maybe thirty or forty of them, all cawing as loudly as possible. I remembered E. B. White’s poem:
In their assemblies at the edge of town,
Crows introduce resolutions, then vote them down.
How many times in summer, waked early by the mosquito,
Have I lain listening to the crow’s loud veto!
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The Separation of the Learned from the conversible World seems to have been the great Defect of the last Age, and must have had a very bad Influence both on Books and Company: For what Possibility is there of finding Topics of Conversation fit for the Entertainment of rational Creatures, without having Recourse sometimes to History, Poetry, Politics, and the more obvious Principles, at least, of Philosophy? Must our whole Discourse be a continued Series of gossipping Stories and idle Remarks? Must the Mind never rise higher, but be perpetually “Stun'd and worn out with endless Chat / Of WILL did this, and NAN said that.” This would be to render the Time spent in Company the most unentertaining, as well as the most unprofitable Part of our Lives. […]
In this View, I cannot but consider myself as a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation; and shall think it my constant Duty to promote a good Correspondence betwixt these two States, which have so great a Dependence on each other. I shall give Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company, and shall endeavour to import into Company whatever Commodities I find in my native Country proper for their Use and Entertainment.