Alan Jacobs

thingsmagazine:

Bolsa Bass

All the Valley’s talk about transhumanism, human potential, life extension, and generally “changing the world” is a bunch of hooey. It’s a myth — in the pejorative sense of that term. It’s a fluffy religion meant to snooker young professionals into giving their employers everything they have and working their brains down to the myelin until they become too old to be relevant anymore.

No, it’s worse than that.

They don’t get too old to be relevant. They get too old to be cheap.

I was a gardener. Well, I am a gardener, but a sadly reduced one, in every sense. I have a small paved rectangle of London garden, full of pots, with a cherished 20-year-old corokia, and two pittosporums, and various fuchsias, and Convolvulus cneorum and hakonechloa grass and euphorbia and heuchera and a Hydrangea petiolaris all over the back wall. It gives me much pleasure, but is a far cry from what I once gardened – a half acre or so that included a serious vegetable garden. All I can do now is potter with the hose in summer, and do a bit of snipping here and there, thanks to the arthritis; forget travel, what I really do miss is intensive gardening. Digging, raking, hoeing. Pruning a shaggy rose: shaping for future splendour. Dividing fat clumps of snowdrops: out of many shall come more still. And that was – is – the miraculous power of gardening: it evokes tomorrow, it is eternally forward-looking, it invites plans and ambitions, creativity, expectation. Next year I will try celeriac. And that new pale blue sweet pea. Would Iris stylosa do just here? Gardening defies time; you labour today in the interests of tomorrow; you think in seasons to come, cutting down the border this autumn but with next spring in your mind’s eye.

The truth is that persecution against Christians, ideologically speaking, is an equal-opportunity enterprise. One thinks, for instance, of the famous martyrs of the liberation theology movement, such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, or the six Jesuits and two women murdered in El Salvador in 1989. There’s also Guatemalan Bishop Juan José Gerardi, beaten to death in 1998 two days after releasing a report on his country’s civil war that heavily criticized the army and right-wing paramilitary groups. More recently, there’s American Sr. Dorothy Stang, murdered in Brazil in 2005 for advocacy on behalf of poor and indigenous Amazonians; or Indian Sr. Valsha John, slain this past year for defending members of the tribal underclass against expropriation of their land by coal mining companies.

Defending persecuted Christians, in other words, is hardly an effort that should concern the political and theological right alone. Styling anti-Christian persecution as a political football is not only an obscenity, but it’s factually inaccurate.

We have this weird, romantic, fundamentally sensual idea of books, one that approaches fetishization in its own right. We experience them by touch, by smell – both the books and by extension the spaces that the books are in. And we experience books in terms of time. In a world that seems both temporal and violently atemporal, they are profoundly time-laden.

With a Spartan rigour which never ceased to amaze his landlord-grocer, Nietzsche would get up every morning when the faintly dawning sky was still grey, and, after washing himself with cold water from the pitcher and china basin in his bedroom and drinking some warm milk, he would, when not felled by headaches and vomiting, work uninterruptedly until eleven in the morning. He then went for a brisk, two-hour walk through the nearby forest or along the edge of Lake Silvaplana (to the north-east) or of Lake Sils (to the south-west), stopping every now and then to jot down his latest thoughts in the notebook he always carried with him. Returning for a late luncheon at the Hôtel Alpenrose, Nietzsche, who detested promiscuity, avoided the midday crush of the table d’hôte in the large dining-room and ate a more or less ‘private’ lunch, usually consisting of a beefsteak and an ‘unbelievable’ quantity of fruit, which was, the hotel manager was persuaded, the chief cause of his frequent stomach upsets. After luncheon, usually dressed in a long and somewhat threadbare brown jacket, and armed as usual with notebook, pencil, and a large grey-green parasol to shade his eyes, he would stride off again on an even longer walk, which sometimes took him up the Fextal as far as its majestic glacier. Returning ‘home’ between four and five o’clock, he would immediately get back to work, sustaining himself on biscuits, peasant bread, honey (sent from Naumburg), fruit and pots of tea he brewed for himself in the little upstairs ‘dining-room’ next to his bedroom, until, worn out, he snuffed out the candle and went to bed around 11 p.m.

Dying in Svalbard is hard—being buried is, in a way, much harder. While survivors tried to give these men a decent Christian burial, sufficient to last them until the Resurrection, burying bodies in permafrost doesn’t always work so well. Over the years, the annual freezing and thawing of the ground just below the surface has the curious effect of gradually raising up large objects to the surface—most notably, coffins and their contents. Over the course of centuries, these whalers’ bodies have slowly been raised up—not by Christ, but by ice.

This is most visible and striking at another whalers’ cemetery, in the nearby Magdalenafjord. There, a promontory juts out into the fjord, a low hill now known as Gravnesset: “Grave Point.” Over a hundred whalers have been buried there over the years, though their rest has hardly been undisturbed, and the point is now strewn with pieces of coffin and bits of bone. Off limits to tourists after years of molestation, what remains of these whalers are now the playthings of curious polar bears.

slimjimstudios:

L.

minimalmac:

minimaldesks:

Workspace with a view.

The chair makes it.

Let’s see … uncomfortable chair, view promising maximal distractions, coffee cup between you and your keyboard — I don’t think you’re going to get a lot done with that setup.

Reading Chekhov for a few minutes makes you better at decoding what other people are feeling. But spending the same amount of time with a potboiler by Danielle Steel does not have the same effect, scientists reported Thursday.

A striking new study found that reading literary fiction – as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction – leads people to perform better on tests that measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.