G as in Good H as in Happy

Sentimental about The Choice

Our favorite Steve Hutchens, the Sober Sage of Wisconsin, has a riff on marriage, and a few good comments follow.

Can't argue with finding "a man with a strong sense of duty and honor, a man who keeps his promises, whose first concern is serving God well." Ladies, if you're not finding that, start looking elsewhere, or reap the whirlwind. The sorting mechanism is first, character. After that, frisson and potential are worthy considerations. It's very good to get a Myers Briggs Type Index consultation from a good marriage counselor, too. But first: character, character, character. Accept no substitutes. Truth is Beauty.

Nostalgia for the days of "arranged" parental choice is in our opinion misplaced, except for a fortunate minority. Considered advice, whatever its source, is enhanced by being well-known to the advisor. But parental agendas? Too many, too often concealed, except for the very humble and wise who have "done their inner work." Churchgoing no guarantee here, alas.

Small Mercies are Mercies

August 29, 2005

At 6:30 a.m. CDT, WWL-TV, the most reliable streaming video, reports that broadcasting has been interrupted at points, and has moved to LSU facilities. Sustained winds hover at 60 mph, with occasional gusts to 105. [Update: NOAA weather makes the wind at the N.O. airport 86 mph.]  A minor turn has re-aimed the most destructive storm quadrant. The fiercest winds are reported to be in a 10-mile band around the hurricane eye, and the margin of passing-by New Orleans is approximately 20 miles. 

Areas of devastation and dislocation and loss and clean-up are to be expected; but New Orleans, with the eye still 30 degrees of longitude south, is so far dodging the massive effects that lead to catastrophe-scenario flooding.

An un-inundated New Orleans will be a great mercy. In words from the Catherine of Siena Institute:

ask for an army of angels to protect, warn, guide, and deliver those in danger.

Update: 8. 30.05. The army of angels may at this point need to be clouds of helicopter rescuers, as rumors of ill-tended pumps and levees comes to light. Save lives, then deal, unsentimentally, with the hazards of ignoring geophysical reality.

Made Us Smile

Thumbs-up, graduation, dad and son.

Coming to Our Senses...

...can mean just that. John Maeda is an exemplary blogger in our estimation for primarily that reason. Close attention to the senses in the moment, and a willingness to let emergence and iteration determine the next thing. We're not alone. He is sought after.

Today he considers the difference between seeing and hearing, the continuous flow of the latter contrasted with the natural and reflexive "blink"-editing by the eye.

We ourselves often think with amazement about the division of time into days. The requirement that animals like ourselves sleep every 24 hours, the perceptual new beginning that springs from that, the re-set of the timer, is miniaturized into the blink. 

Also, his senses and his tasks equal enlightenment.

Go to the dump.
Do not pass go.
Move directly to gratitude.

No More a Stranger Nor a Guest

A few weeks ago, Chez Dilys sent a little delegation down to San Antonio to study screenwriting-storytelling with representatives from Barbara Nicolosi's Act One enterprise. The deal-sealing feature of the mini-course was Barbara's idea of "haunting moments" in films -- eloquent unlabored images of beauty, shock, and wonder that still the mind, touch the heart, and feed the soul with a mysterious nostalgia. How to identify, and, if the muse is willing, how to tell stories as settings for those moments.

Examples offered by Act One instructors include the assembling Shawshank Redemption prisoners in a desolate exercise yard beneath soaring-soprano Mozart; an end to disorder when in Fargo the pregnant police chief rests next to her husband as the ominous theme music becomes a baby's music box; and the last scene of Places in the Heart, where communion in a country church lifts earth to heaven, chronos blooming into kairos, long-lost faces smiling at last beside us again.

At home among spring birds' nests and his several little boys with their make-believe transparent paint, Tony Woodlief in a recent post marries the daily world of mopping up -- eeuw! -- the baby to the brightness and joy of a glimpsed eternity. As we all do, he has a stake in both realms. The difference is, he knows it. A top-notch writer with sophisticated narrative moves, president of a real-deal university research institute for interdisciplinary research and application in the humane sciences, he willingly and urgently acknowledges that from some perspectives we are all only children. Blessed and beloved children.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) paraphrased the 23d Psalm and others set it to music:

The sure provision of my God
Attend me all my days.
O may thy house be mine abode
and all my work be praise.
There would I find a settled rest
while others go and come;
no more a stranger or a guest,
but like a child at home. 

Unstinting Plenty

April 4, 2005

Flower Blog.

Via What If.

Already, or Soon

April 2, 2005

"Do Not Be Afraid," John Paul called out to the world.

London Times' notice here.

Update: 

Forgiveness.

And from the NY Post,

A dying Pope John Paul II scribbled down a final message last night to his close friends, begging them not to cry.

I am happy and you should be as well, the note read. Let us pray together with joy.

Earlier, he had written regarding life that has no limits in time or space.

 

Via Web Elves.

I have looked for you, now, you come to me. And I thank you. (April 2, 2005, in extremis, perhaps addressed to his young followers.)

Via The Anchoress, who links the reliable John Allen.

Stories, Austen in Austin

March 11, 2005

One of our most enjoyable correspondents comes from [we take a wild leap of inference from his name] a Chinese family.  He informs us that he learned his English diction from Jane Austen, and a fine clear style of expression it is, too.

We thought of him last night when we pulled out the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.  Austen's heroines, especially when portrayed by an actress with a heartshaped face, a china-doll complexion, and the merrriest of smiles, deliver the gift of inspiration over and over. Independence and self-management, kind deference where due, scorn where earned, and candid desire. 

Touchstone Magazine's recent discussions (here to here) considering the subtle internal corruption of a steady diet of provocative, pert, ironic and often ignorant entertainment touched off a good bit of earnest ridicule, especially from young Evangelicals hoping to make a living as film reviewer or playwright. It is a difficult question to argue in the post-modern transgressive intellectual environment (though less so for unabashed dinosaurs); but surely each self-aware person has a standard that when violated leaves a streak of grime on the sensibility.  Like taste of all kinds, perhaps that standard cannot be argued or imposed, but is disregarded by each of us at peril of calloused conscience and diminished joyous sensitivity.

The arc of the story of Miss Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy touches on the really big issues of life, generation after civilized generation. Loss and retrieval of reputation and regard. Self-sacrifice whether in patience or the secret expenditure of fortune to redeem another's folly. Mercy and justice and beneficent uncertainty demonstrated through laughter at hysterically-self-absorbed mothers, weak and well-intentioned fathers, vain, jealous, and culpable silly sisters. We clutch the edge of the leaping dinghy as the current shivers the sturdy craft nearly swamped in the wrenching pathos of disappointment and disgrace, onward through the pianoforte swell as open sensual sympathy dawns, finally landing safe at harbor for deeper, hidden, adventure in the sublime delayed rewards of the church bells and blossoms of a Shakespearean comic wedding.

Our own view of Lent, as of everything else, is ungovernably hedonistic, even if perhaps that is theologically askew. We use it to disengage from attachments that are, in fact, a drag on our true happiness.  That is, the flavors of CSI and Survivor are not very good for us, just as a meal with too much meat, salt, and sugar stimulates and starves in the same mouthful.  Pride and Prejudice is a perfect substantial salad, fresh from the cultivated earth, good for an evening and beyond, we dare not hazard just how far.

Toe-tapping Statistics

March 7, 2005

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-1874)(portrait) was a Belgian mathematician, astronomer, statistician, and sociologist known for his application of statistics and probability theory to social phenomena, an explanatory and predictive technique we now take for granted.

Quetelet was struck by the fact that human traits and abilities follow the same distribution curve as do errors of measurement [the bell curve]. He concluded that all human beings, like loaves of bread, are made in one mold and differ only because of accidental variations arising in the process of creation. Nature aims at the ideal man, but misses the mark and thus creates deviations on both sides of the ideal. The differences are fortuitous, and, for this reason, the law of error applies to these distributions of physical characteristics and mental abilities. --Morris Klein, Mathematics for the Non-Mathematician.

If everyone were identical, there would be no culture or communication.  Culture mediates difference.

If there were no end to the characteristics constituting the human kind, the unlimited possibilities would defeat themselves, commonality would dissolve, and each would be adrift in cosmic loneliness.

However challenging, it's just about perfect in this fine balance, says The Resident In-House Defender of the Beneficence of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Threatening to perform an unscheduled unique-but-recognizable Joy Dance.

Update: Dance premature.

Chilling paper by Nick Bostrom, Yale-to-Oxford philosopher, argues that
--major deliberate biological re-design is on its way,
--evolution is no longer (?) trustworthy enough,
--concern for human "identity" is not a priority value,
and
--a no-appeal single-point-of-control-system thus may be inevitable and desirable, in spite of such downsides as the [increased] risk that an oppressive regime could become global and permanent.

Bell curve to flat line, ideas have consequences.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Pilgrims...

March 1, 2005

from The Anchoress, welcome. Glad to learn we're left-ward of something.