Alan Jacobs

James Wright, I am tired of renting my life, and of the leaves I do not rake on the lawn I do not own. Though I have a magic phone that knows how to find my global position and contains 116 visions of my vivid, bright children and 7 recordings of the same Bach Suite for Cello I never tire of. I miss the home where my children live, though I’m glad of the mortgage I lack. When the hawk in the gray sky of my head dives at the prey scurrying out from my past, I slip hands (I once believed I controlled) over the lighted screen to call a free woman I love. Wraiths, I say, hovered, all night. Beneath her digital breath, so steady and audible she could be near, if she could, I hear: “No. They do not own your head.“ Which also I fail to possess. Nor do you, though I’ve kept you there for years. Your hammock, borrowed, lines strung slack across my memorial, unmown yard (also the dense brown thatch full of rabbits and voles in the medians of roads the dead men built for me to skitter down) forms God’s loose net to catch and release my lazy literal-minded ass while I text hundreds of letters to children and lovers, while I upload the thousands of pixels of color I keep taking on loan from the sky.

—for John Ballenger

First appeared on a postcard to John Ballenger, and then in Relief

[gallery] thingsmagazine:

Instant Corbusier

God is not hidden to us; He is revealed. But what and how we shall be in Christ, and what and how the World will be in Christ at the end of God’s road, at the breaking in of redemption and completion, that is not revealed to us; that is hidden. Let us be honest: we do not know what we are saying when we speak of Jesus Christ’s coming again in judgment, and of the resurrection of the dead, of eternal life and eternal death. That with all these there will be bound up a piercing revelation―a seeing, compared to which all our present vision will have been blindness―is too often testified in Scripture for us to feel we ought to prepare ourselves for it. For we do not know what will be revealed when the last covering is removed from our eyes, from all eyes: how we shall behold one another and what we shall be to one another―men of today and men of past centuries and millennia, ancestors and descendants, husbands and wives, wise and foolish, oppressors and oppressed, traitors and betrayed, murderers and murdered, West and East, Germans and others, Christians, Jews, and heathen, orthodox and heretics, Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Reformed; upon what divisions and unions, what confrontations and cross-connections the seals of all books will be opened; how much will seem small and unimportant to us then, how much will only then appear great and important; for what surprises of all kinds we must prepare ourselves. We also do not know what Nature, as the cosmos in which we have lived and still live here and now, will be for us then; what the constellations, the sea, the broad valleys and heights, which we see and know now, will say and mean then.

[gallery] A misty morning on (and above) the Brazos and the Bosque

[gallery] coolest wood stove EVAR

[gallery] erikkwakkel:

sexycodicology:

Details from the rear cover of the Lindau Gospels.

Gilt silver, enamel, and jeweled bookcover

[Probably Salzburg, ca. 760–90]

Earlier binding used as lower cover on Lindau Gospels, Abbey of St. Gall, Switzerland, late ninth century

350 x 275 mm

Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1901; MS M. 1

Source: http://j.mp/1eJFIlc

A book cover that looks like jewelry. And it’s over a thousand years old! Awesome.

The 2012 Greendex survey found that people in poorer countries feel, on average, much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in rich countries. The places in which people feel least guilt are, in this order, Germany, the United States, Australia and Britain, while the people of India, China, Mexico and Brazil have the greatest concerns. Our guilt, the survey reported, exists in inverse proportion to the amount of damage our consumption does. This is the opposite of what a thousand editorials in the corporate press tell us: that people cannot afford to care until they become rich. The evidence suggests we cease to care only when we become rich.

An extraordinary sight: raptor central this morning at Mother Neff State Park

[gallery] Thanksgiving morning walk at Mother Neff State Park

Our comments on life and affairs were bright and amusing, but brittle… because there was no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them. Bertie [Bertrand Russell] in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally. A discussion of practical affairs on these lines was really very boring. And a discussion of the human heart which ignored so many of its deeper and blinder passions, both good and bad, was scarcely more interesting.