The Suicide of the Arts and the Fables

“You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.”

We are doomed by mass idiocy, half-wit artists, and obscurantist academics. Intellectual life as we once knew it is dead. Or so says Mario Vargas Llosa... One wonders if unwise Amazon is much different to many other halfwitted employers

This Leah Sottile WaPo piece on bees is excellent in many ways

Russ Fox, Up In Smoke…Again. Tax life is hard for Marijuana businesses, even legal ones

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  The Suicide of the Liberal Arts, by John Agresto (former president, St. John’s College):

[T]his tension between getting an education—specifically a liberal arts education—and studying something practical or simply going off to work was hardly unique to me. Yes, this “liberal education” is worth something. But so is making, doing, building and working—so is knowing other good stuff. And that tension—between the practical and productive on one hand, and the intellectual and more academic or cultural on the other—has been and still is at the heart of America’s historical ambivalence toward liberal education.

It was a flower.

It was alive and wonderful.

It gave the gardener hope and made him want to work even harder.

Literature, art, music, architecture, religion, and science all have canons. What about the ingredients stirred into the taste of our times ...

Was Nabokov an American writer? He thought so. "I am as American as April in Arizona," he said. But where did his "Charles Atlas muscle-man" prose style originate?... Soft Slavic Touch »

 “Only monarchs, media dragons, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we" ...

The night loves the stars as they play about the Darkness … the day loves the light caressing the sun … We love … those who do … because we live in a world requiring light and Darkness … partnership and solitude … sameness and difference … the familiar and the unknown … We love because it’s the only true adventure …

Be reckless when it comes to affairs of the heart.

[…]

What I really mean … is be passionate, fall madly in love with life. Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”

Offer yourself to the world — your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart — with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.

To grow in love and service, you — I, all of us — must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success… Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn — that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.

Palmer’s second point of counsel speaks to the difficult art of living with opposing truths and channels his longtime advocacy for inner wholeness ...

*What no one tells you about moving to New York

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