The Cage

Our modern lives bring to mind a pacing tiger in a cage:  Potential power—and beauty—in carefully proscribed movement, going nowhere. But we hold the key to the cage. What would happen if we decided not to live our lives in captivity?

Secret to Long Life

Should I reach advanced age, I feel that it is my principal duty to, when asked the secret of my longevity, attribute it to my worst habit.

All Things to All Men

Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom:

Modern protestants are in the main prepared to be all things to all men, like St. Paul, but unfortunately this is not in order that they may save some but in order that they may be like all men.

In the inspired words of Terry Scott Taylor, from Dr. Edward Daniel Taylor's Miracle Faith Prickly Heat Telethon of Love:

And now here they are, the all Christian female mud-wrestling missionaries, Prickly Heat International's own Sister Sludge and the Mudhoneys, to perform interpretative mud-wrestling accompanied by a Prickly University Racially Integrated Singers and Orchestras, to perform one of the great hymns of the faith, Big Guns.

The Natural Environs of the Useless

There's no place like
   bureaucracy
to hide a
   mediocrity.

A Word To The Wise

Piet Hein, Grooks:

Let the world pass in its time-ridden race;
   never get caught in its snare.
Remember, the only acceptable case
for being in any particular place
   is having no business there.

Loneliness

Loneliness is at its most intense in crowded places.

On Learning

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition:

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learnéd usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

So many people behave as if learning ought to be confined to a carefully circumscribed period of life, including many highly-credentialed and otherwise intelligent people. This has always seemed very odd to me (except perhaps during finals).

Memorandum

Our operating policy
   (borne out in practice too):
Never use a whole ass
   when half-an-ass will do.

Dedicated to artificial deadlines and the automatic responses they engender in project managers.

A Good Day

Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset:

The day that followed was a good day; one of those days that do not greatly matter in the pattern of things, but linger, comely-shaped and clear-colored in the memory when the days of splendor and disaster have become confused.

Apologies to Canada

If a loonie will buy
you a peek at her thigh,
   That's a whore, eh?

And that's as far as I'll take that.

An Untimely End

Eventually he expired, slowly poisoned by the daily ingestion of a toxic polymer, unknowingly caused by his too vigorous scraping of yogurt from its plastic container.

I'll Title This In a Bit

There are few worlds more magical–or more mythical–than a procrastinator's Later.

Sunday Night Bedtime (1998)

This is something that I wrote about my boys back in 1998, when John was two years old and Matthew was one. It's hard to believe they were ever that little.

I hear the sound of gentle snoring
    From the bedroom down the hall
And see the shapes of little fingers
    Casting shadows on the wall

Blankets cover little bodies
    Warm and sleeping in their beds
Preparing for adventures known
    To little dreams in little heads

Maybe the Communists Were Onto Something

Nah.

Self-Defeating

I wrote this some time ago, and was reminded of it when reading an excerpt from The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis:

When Thought contends that minds emerge
from random patterns in a surge
of neurons firing as they must, it
gives me then what cause to trust It?

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

A Failure of Memory

Recalling what you once could do
   Can make you feel so old
Imagine just how young you'd feel
   If you only didn't know

Busyness

Observation: It is generally the busiest who do the least, and the least well.

A Certain Conviction

If I wanted to, I could;
   I am yet convinced of it.
Therefore I remain unchanged;
   Listless body, idle wit.

Inspired by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher:

Die sichere Überzeugung, daß man könnte, wenn man wollte, ist Ursache an manches guten Kopfes Untätigkeit, und das nicht ohne Grund.

One Body, Many Parts

The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body.

He was the appendix. Of him, the best one could hope for was that the body was not too remote from civilization when he finally exploded.

Perception

To make a clever man believe
That you are different than you seem
   Is harder still than to assume
The form you wish him to perceive

I've been reading (very slowly) through Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Sudelbücher, and came across the following aphorism, which I liked and—lacking the sense of a wiser man—decided to recast as a poem in English.

Kluge Leute glauben zu machen man sei, was man nicht ist, ist in den meisten Fällen schwerer als wirklich zu werden, was man scheinen will.