Author: Sysadmin

An inspirational quote from Robert F. Kennedy that seems to fit the current political climate in the U.S. (history is not my forte but RFK seemed to have a keen sense of race relations in the sixties):

“Aeschylus…wrote, ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’ What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

I was able some years back to see this quote at the tombstone of RFK in Arlington National Cemetery. It was from impromptu remarks he made to African Americans the night that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4, 1968, about two months before Kennedy himself was shot dead.

This notion of wisdom emerging from suffering almost “against our will” reminds me for some reason of a saying financial traders used to have about long-term optimism despite short-term volatility and fear: “the market climbs a wall of worry.” Hopefully the current U.S. political climate is such a “wall of worry” that can be surmounted.

One of my bosses in the news business used to call overly optimistic language from public officials “happy horses—t.” Haha. Anyway, the above sentiments are sincere. 

Mainly waiting now. What did John Lennon say? “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” And Warren Zevon sang, “Looking for the next best thing/Looking for the next best thing/I appreciate the best/But I’m settling for less/’Cause I’m looking for the next best thing.”

But I’m okay. Someone else said there is a certain solace in fine material things when more cerebral and spiritual things (or personal relations) don’t seem to be enough. When we are thinking maybe too “deeply,” material things like keeping a clean home or owning attractive things don’t seem to matter at all.

Have said this before but am moving house soon. I am looking forward to it. I gave up a certain amount of independence in the past few years and it was damaging. This move will hopefully be part of regaining independence and healthier living.

Thoughts about waiting. I have heard one of the sharpest critiques a woman can give to a man who is courting her is that he is impatient. But impatience can affect us in many other facets of life than just romance.

Sometimes patience is almost physiological for me. My nervous system and metabolism speed up when I am anxious. I think this phenomenon often leads to addictive behavior. There is a saying that addicts are more sensitive, and I think it is the nerves mainly.

It is, of course, a balance. The secret to happiness, some say, is having something to look forward to. But you can anticipate too much to the point of anxiety and lose the momentary satisfactions of life. Balancing present and future. And then there’s the past, at times a gentle refuge and at times a haunting nuisance.

This may be a bit labored, but I do like to write one blog a day. Thoughts today on the sense of public achievement and success versus the sense of failure. I think the duality of this really damages many people’s psychology.

It helps to have a belief in something larger than ourselves to prevent our individual sense of worth or worthlessness from driving us insane or into despair. I suppose the issue is whether you choose a worthy larger cause or identity. Larger causes can get us into terrible evils, “the banality of evil,” just doing what you’re told because you submit abjectly and think the authorities always know better than you. Of course, you don’t want to be a monstrous egotist either. Ayn Rand made a distinction, as I recall, between egoism and egotism, one being positive and the other negative. But I never really understood Rand.  And people I know who have read her novels say she was an interesting philosopher but a horrible novelist.

I used a few of Sean O’Casey’s plays in the book this site is promoting. One of the themes of his Dublin plays seemed to be the priority and importance of domestic and family life over political campaigns and causes. The idea seemed to be that being loyal and good to your family matters more than careers or campaigns, which only seem to lead to tragedy in his plays. It’s a simple moral. I used to tell my students the messages of poetry are usually very simple; it’s the way they are delivered that affects us.

Went for a walk on the beach this evening. It looks like I will be moving to a place without beaches soon, so I am trying to enjoy the one here as much as possible now. I took it for granted earlier, as people often do with their environments when they have lived in them a while. When I lived in DC, I took a lot of the monuments, museums, and history for granted.

We saw a guy on the beach meditating. I had seen him there before. He was in an Asian meditating position, I think it’s a Buddhist one, sitting with legs crossed and hands held on his knees with palms upwards. Meditation doesn’t work very well for me, but I agree with the goal of calmness and focus. For me, thinking of series of words and prepared text is better to bring order and calm.

There are two brief poems about the sea and the beach that I like in particular. The first is actually a song by U2 called “The Ocean” (an aside, my Mom, an editor, has pointed out there is an important difference between the words “ocean” and “sea”):

A picture in grey
Dorian Gray
Just me by the sea

And I felt like a star
I felt the world could go far
If they listened
To what I said, the sea

Washes my feet
Washes the feet
Splashes the soul of my shoes

The other is by E.E. Cummings, or e.e. cummings, as the case may be:

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is also a stirring and distressing but also oddly calming poem about a waterfront that you can find on poets.org.

It’s Sunday. I tried to make it a day of rest but also a bit of walking and exercise. The priest today recommended prayer and some reading of scripture. I read a funny (to me) mock review of the Bible by the Italian thinker Umberto Eco that went something like, “it’s a well-written book, but there’s too much sex in it for my taste.” Haha.

I went to the local convenience store to cash in some small winning lottery tickets, but a sudden, heavy thunderstorm shut down their satellite-run scanning machine for winning tickets, so I was stuck there, not wanting to get soaked. Another customer offered to drive me back to my humble abode. She was an older woman who said she was from suburban Maryland but had an apartment here in Florida. I didn’t mention I had grown up mainly in suburban Maryland, or the derogatory joke DC people told about Montgomery county, Maryland, where I had lived:  “loco in Moco,” as in all Montgomery county people are crazy.

We put her things in the back of her SUV, and I pulled my outer shirt up over my face because I had lost track of my Covid-19 mask. I mentioned that a lot of the land across from where I lived in this area as a child is now developed into fancy beach houses but was only wild woods back then, and that I was a reporter and teacher for a while, now an independent writer, and looking for something new. I may have talked too much on the drive to my place. She was nice enough but told me to take care. I always wonder when people say that.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” –Samuel Johnson.

I used to agree but have changed my mind. There are other reasons, whether or not you’re a blockhead, or as my Dad used to call me and my two brothers, a jughead, a jarhead, or a junkhead.

An important reason is organizing your thoughts. Some people are naturally ex temporaneous talkers, but some of us need the written word to know what we really think about something. “I write entirely to know what I think,” said, I think, Joan Didion. There is also a certain humble satisfaction in simply ordering your thoughts, especially when they are chaotic or confusingly digressive.

Sometimes for me this is as simple as writing a checklist of what to do the next day. At better times, it takes the form of an orderly and persuasive essay. Or a mildly interesting blog.

Thinking of special relationships, personal and political between the U.K and the U.S. Just read a review in The Wall Street Journal of a new book called  The Churchill Complex about the “special relationship” between the two countries since Winston Churchill, son of an American mother and British father, forged an alliance with the U.S. that helped defeat the Nazis. The book traces the bilateral relationship since before WWII through the intervening decades, including the partnership of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in the second Iraq war and the current so-called bromance between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

One of my first published essays was a piece I wrote for my college’s student newspaper my senior year. This was in the fall of 1992 following the signing earlier in the year of the Maastricht Treaty that founded the European Union. The opinion piece was based on skepticism about the EU that I experienced during my junior year abroad in London, 1991-92. One of my history tutors there worried that EU standardization would change British higher education for the worse, possibly doing away with the tradition there of small tutorial meetings to supplement lectures. I sensed other reluctance in the country about European unification.

My best friend in London was a British German-language specialist and has since become a high school German teacher in the U.K. who often travels to Germany with students. He seemed welcoming of unification but also liked U.S. culture and was open to me as an American. I think culturally and ethnically, the U.K. on some levels has stronger ties with the U.S. than it does with continental Europe. Both the U.K. and U.S. have large Germanic ethnicities and have similar economic traditions. Our literature, plays, and films seem to cross-fertilize.

On a personal level, I related easily to British classmates during my junior year abroad. My English “mate” turned out to be my best friend from my college years, one with whom I have stayed in touch to this day.  The opinion piece I wrote during my senior year raised questions about whether the U.K. would assimilate easily into the E.U. A Swedish neighbor in my dormitory hall in the U.S. took issue with the piece, and I felt like I may have overstepped my bounds, being perhaps presumptuous about my expertise. But it seems now that the essay had some merit.

I have similar reservations about the book this site is currently promoting. I am an outsider analyzing Irish literature and culture in-depth. While I am confident in the research, I wonder how Irish people will react to what the book proposes. It could be taken as derogatory on the one hand or as chauvinistic on the other. I hope academic objectivity and rigor place it on more neutral territory.

By my count, there have been three books published in the last 15 years with the title, at least in part, of Alone Together.  In my book, I quote the line “alone together so much shared” from Samuel Beckett’s odd, eerie, but also beautiful play about solitude and memory Ohio Impromptu. In some ways, the play is about the solace of reading, its two characters being Reader and Listener. But I also treat alone together as an Irish bull, a contradiction in terms that has a potentially deeper meaning.

The more recent works came to my attention today as the result of a book review in The Washington Post (I left DC several years ago and may never return but still subscribe to the city’s “newspaper of record” as a way of staying in touch with media that is more liberal than I might otherwise gravitate toward). The book in question, Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19, looks a bit opportunistic and trendy/timely in ways that seem negative or at least maudlin and navel-staring to me. Based on the review, the writers seem to be locked into their homes and feeling sorry for themselves. I guess that describes almost all writers. Haha.

But I am grateful at least that this new book made me aware of another one, most recently published in 2017 (first published in 2011), called Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by an MIT professor named Sherry Turkle. This one seems to get more to an issue that has creeped up on me in the past five or so years. I have always been susceptible to escapism in the form of literature, plays, music, and movies. But this book seems to deal with a more recent phenomenon that affects many of us to greater or lesser degrees, namely, how online interaction is replacing and in some ways degrading human sociability. I may get a copy of Turkle’s book.

But back to art. Sigmund Freud said something like, “the poets got there first.” And I think “alone together” was a phrase and idea that Beckett reached ahead of his time in some ways. More recently, an episodic TV series that I like, Black Mirror,  aired a good episode called “Smithereens” about a man who has abused a social media platform like Facebook and blames its founder, a Mark Zuckerberg-like character played by Topher Grace, for the resulting loss of his wife’s life. Interestingly Grace’s character is taking a “digital detox” away from online contact when the deranged user of his platform tries to reach him. This is a roundabout way of saying I think we have something to learn from art. Sometimes it gets to the point faster than science.

Finished a three-day scouting trip to Asheville, NC, today and had my schedule clear this morning, so I went for a walk in the neighborhood just north of downtown. I hiked to the Omni Grove Park Inn, a grand arts and crafts style hotel that opened in 1913 and has hosted numerous U.S. presidents and other eminent people. It has its own understated golf course and a scenic view from a terraced backyard patio on the slope of Sunset Mountain.

The inn is gracious enough to allow visitors who aren’t staying in rooms there to tour the property and use its café. I got a coffee and croissant sandwich and found a seat on the patio viewing other Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance beyond the golf course. It was a very relaxing place to read, with a gentle guitar instrumental piped over the tables. The area had a heavy thunderstorm the night before, and a soft mist covered the hillsides in the distance, creating a cool, otherworldly vibe. It made me think of nature poetry like Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” which includes the lines:

“For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.”

But there was nothing sad about the music the Inn was playing, and the staff were cordial and helpful. If you’re willing to splurge on a vacation hotel, this place might be worth the premium pricing. In addition to golf, it has a mountain hiking trail and a lavish spa. It looks like rooms go for about $260-$550/night. My own hotel budget is currently in the sub-$100 range, but a man can dream.