Eventually, One Gets Old Enough To Really Appreciate Proust

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COVID-19 has shown that pandemics can seriously affect people’s physical and mental health. Stress, anxiety and depression have increased around the world, with the greatest effects for those living under the strictest lockdowns. Many people’s physical activity levels also fell during lockdown. Gardens, though, can help us push back against these negative effects.

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Study finds vaccine booster shots effective as WHO Europe head says they’re ‘not a luxury’

Washington Post: “Booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are highly effective against both coronavirus infection and severe covid-19, Israeli scientists reported in a new paper that supports the idea of administering a third dose as protection against the virus wanes. Researchers at a variety of Israeli institutions looked at data from the nation’s Health Ministry for 1.1 million people 60 or older this month. On July 30, Israel became the first country to make booster shots available to people in that age range who had been fully vaccinated with two shots of the Pfizer vaccine at least five months earlier. The United States plans to start offering booster shots to most people Sept. 20 if the plan is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The World Health Organization has repeatedly urged wealthy nations to hold off on booster shots of the coronavirus vaccines until people in poorer countries can get their first doses. But Hans Kluge, the head of WHO Europe, on Monday called additional doses valuable for those most at risk as he raised alarms about rising coronavirus cases on his continent.

A third dose of vaccine is not a luxury booster taking away from someone who is still waiting for a first jab,” Kluge said at a news conference. “But it’s basically a way to keep the people safe, the most vulnerable. But at the same time, we need to share. So we need to do it all.“

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Eventually, One Gets Old Enough To Really Appreciate Proust

"Like Marcel, we've spent decades building our models of the world, and like him we're starting to see them for the gimcrack that they are. We're beginning to sense just how much effort is involved in holding a person together." - Literary Hub

To Become Our Best Selves'

Only Shakespeare, Dryden and Milton are cited more often than Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). We learn from W. Jackson Bate’s biography the importance of Bacon to Johnson and his great book:

“Longinus speaks of the influence of great models in enabling us to become our best selves. The formative influence here was the greatest master of compression in English style, Francis Bacon, whose works Johnson had been reading for the first times while gathering quotations for the Dictionary, and ‘from whose writings alone,’ he said, ‘a Dictionary of the English Language might be compiled. . . . The extent to which he assimilated Bacon has not been recognized. Yet one of his primary themes, from The Vanity of Human Wishes (1748) to Rasselas (1759), is a development of Bacon’s treatment of the whole psychology of wishing and of hope, and in particular of boredom and satiety.”

 

Consider the opening sentence of Bacon’s essay “Of Empire,” which both stylistically and in terms of thought might have been written more than a century later by Johnson: 

 

“It is a miserable state of mind, to have few things to desire, and many things to fear; and yet that commonly is the case of kings; who, being at the highest, want matter of desire, which makes their minds more languishing; and have many representations of perils and shadows, which makes their minds the less clear.”

 

Bates says Bacon provided Johnson with “an ideal of style involving a union of compression and metaphor, of practical wisdom and imagination.” In his Adventurer essay published on this date, August 28, in 1753 --  two years before his Dictionary came out – Johnson begins by citing what is probably Bacon’s best-known phrase, from “On Studies”:

 

“It is observed by Bacon, that ‘reading makes a full man, conference [conversation] a ready man, and writing an exact man.’

 

“As Bacon attained to degrees of knowledge scarcely ever reached by any other man, the directions which he gives for study have certainly a just claim to our regard; for who can teach an art with so great authority, as he that has practised it with undisputed success?”

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