Saturday, November 11, 2023

Fire Serpent and Water Mountain IV

 Beginning -- Previous


Tera had not flown since the day she had left Davir. She did not remember much of the experience at the time, so it was almost as if it were completely knew when the chariot rose and she looked out the hatch window as first the land, then the clouds, swiftly fell below her. Uncle Llew, beside her, did something with the chariot controls -- she had only the faintest notion how any of it worked -- and leaned back.

After a while he said, "This will be the last time for a while that we can really speak alone. The clan is making sure the house is ready, but what that means is that every servant will be a spy in someone else's employ, and most of the building will probably be filled with artificial eyes and ears."

"Are they really that nosy?" asked Tera.

"I am understating it. The City runs on gossip and family politics run on information and I am a natural target for curiosity. For the most part, we will simply have to assume that every conversation is overheard. So anything we need to discuss privately needs to be discussed now."

He fell silent and said nothing else, until Tera asked, "Is there anything we need to discuss privately?"

"Yes," said Uncle Llew, sighing. "I am sorry. It is a difficult topic for me. I have not talked about it with anyone for nearly a thousand years, and the last time, your mother and I had a very serious argument about it. But the story will likely color how others react to us, so you need to know it. I suppose the point at which to begin was that there was a longstanding feud between our family and one of the Wenovar families; it was a minor feud, mostly bickering. But then came Mael Four-Dury, who became the Wenovar representative on the Crew, and, as the Wenovar in those days held the captaincy, he became Captain. He was a charming, persuasive man who carried people before him; he was also ruthless and cruel, and he escalated the feud until your mother and I came home one day and found our parents poisoned.

"Poisoning a Davnan is not an easy task; if we can survive it, we will. To do it requires considerable care and forethought. It was obvious that it was not accidental, and it was obvious to us who had done it. Mael tried to kill us, as well, and the whole thing broke out into a brutal war. Mael had managed the matter quite well; many people did not believe at first, and he was a persuasive and manipulative man. The Embiadwe clan stood with us, because we were clan; the other four clans were against us. They no doubt thought that the Embiadwe would surrender in short order. What actually happened was that we had many more resources than they knew, and our clan brought the other four to their knees. I killed Mael and his accomplices myself. We would have won, but at the last moment a number of the other Embiadwe families struck a deal with the other clans: hostilities would cease, the Embiadwe would receive the captaincy, and in exchange your mother and I would be exiled for a hundred years. Your mother and I could not agree on what we should do in response, so we left and never returned." He sighed again. "In any case, Davnan memories are long, and there is bad blood between me and almost every family in The City, nearly a thousand years of non-reconciliation, and thus we are going to see if some reconciliation is still possible, for your sake. I have something I want to give to you."

He held out a pendant on a chain and she took it; the pendant was a pair of wings, connected by a gem, under which in very fine engraving was the symbol for Metal Sun, her mother's emblem-name. " Your mother wore it when she was a little girl. I found it not long ago; I am not even sure why I have it, but it is fortuitous. It is a cleverly made little thing; if you are wearing it, it will prevent some -- not all, but some -- forms of eavesdropping, and there is little lever here around the gemstone -- " -- he took it from her and showed her, a little bit of metal that curved around the side, and then gave it back -- "and if you pull the lever down while wearing it, it will alert me that you are in trouble. I hope you never have to use it, but we can never tell."

She put it around her neck. Uncle Llew became busy with something about the chariot controls, and Tera went back to looking at the clouds beneath them. Eventually Llew said, "We are above The City and are approaching First Landing; you should see it in a moment when we get below the cloud cover."

What does one imagine when one hears the name, "The City of the Gods"? Tera had always imagine great spires gleaming in the sun, adorning a vast city of alabaster and gold, busy and full of traffic, with flying chariots everywhere. The City of the Gods was nothing like this. There were no spires. There was no alabaster and gold, nor any traffic of chariots. In fact, as far as Tera could see once they dropped below the clouds, there was not even any city in The City of the Gods. All she saw were mountains. To be sure, they were extraordinary mountains, beautifully rugged and forested and (in a few cases in the distance) snow-capped. Seeing them from the air was breathtaking. But there was no city. She looked and looked as Llew wove through the mountains, but it could all have been pristine wilderness for all that she could see.

"First Landing is directly up ahead," Llew said.

It took a moment but gradually she could make out a number of buildings in the valley ahead. They were not great spire-buildings, although a few were perhaps two or three stories tall. They were not densely clustered, being mostly scattered here and there in pell-mell fashion among what she could now begin to see were orchards and gardens and perhaps small farms. The closest to anything like a city was the small cluster of about a dozen buildings that they were approaching.

"Tiny Hamlet of the Gods," said Tera aloud.

Uncle Llew laughed. "You are not thinking on a sufficiently bombastic scale. First Landing is not The City; First Landing, which is this whole valley, is the plaza of The City. The City covers this whole spur of the Great Mountains, running from south of First Landing to a bit beyond North Landing, forty miles to the north. Outside of First Landing, North Landing, and Great Lake Harbor, the whole thing is divided into family estates, which of course are not piled on top of each other. We have to land in the Clearing; chariots are not allowed in The City, except for flying in and out, or on city business."

They touched down, opened the hatch of the chariot, and stepped out. The air was a bit cooler than it had been in Mizur, but was fresh and clear. As Uncle Llew removed their luggage from the chariot and closed and locked it, she looked around at the beauty of the mountains rising around the valley. 

"Hallo!" someone shouted. He turned out to be a man, brown-haired and with skin that was a golden tan like Uncle Llew's, perhaps a shade darker.  Uncle Llew's face on seeing him set into an expressionless mask. 

"Llew!" said the man, as he came closer.

"Amaethon," said Llew in a tone of voice that would have frozen a lake. They clasped hands briefly and kissed each other perfunctorily on both cheeks. Llew stepped back and said, "Tera, this is Amaethon Five-Dury, the Captain; Amaethon, this is my niece, Tera Three-Tery."

She courtseyed in goddess-princess fashion, which he seemed to find charming. He clasped her hands briefly the way he had clasped Llew's, and kissed her quickly on both cheeks. "Welcome! It is good to have a new clanswoman!" He turned back to Llew. "There is a carriage coming to pick up your bags, but in the meatime, the Embiadwe are running the Tavern this half-month, so come and have a pint so we can get reacquainted."

"That would be delightful," said Uncle Llew, the chill in his voice taking on a sarcastic edge that made clear to everyone that he would not find it delightful at all. But they all went to the Tavern, which was a building just north of the Clearing.


to be continued

Friday, November 10, 2023

Lion of Rome

 Today is the feast of Pope St. Leo I, Doctor of the Church, also known as Leo the Great. From his Sermon 22:

Whoever then you are that devoutly and faithfully boastest of the Christian name, estimate this atonement at its right worth. For to you who wast a castaway, banished from the realms of paradise, dying of your weary exile, reduced to dust and ashes, without further hope of living, by the Incarnation of the Word was given the power to return from afar to your Maker, to recognize your parentage, to become free after slavery, to be promoted from being an outcast to sonship: so that, you who were born of corruptible flesh, may be reborn by the Spirit of God, and obtain through grace what you had not by nature, and, if you acknowledge yourself the son of God by the spirit of adoption, dare to call God Father. Freed from the accusings of a bad conscience, aspire to the kingdom of heaven, do God's will supported by the Divine help, imitate the angels upon earth, feed on the strength of immortal sustenance, fight fearlessly on the side of piety against hostile temptations, and if you keep your allegiance in the heavenly warfare, doubt not that you will be crowned for your victory in the triumphant camp of the Eternal King, when the resurrection that is prepared for the faithful has raised you to participate in the heavenly Kingdom.

Dashed Off XXXII

 It can make a surprising amount of difference to one's account of friendship whether one takes the paradigmatic version to be mother and child (Aristotle) or peers (most modern accounts). For instance, while both require equalities, the maternal case much more clearly involves one party *making* equalities *for particular purposes*. This happens in peer friendship, but more sporadically, as the peer cases presuppose a generic equality.

All things are suspended from God, all things are mediated through God, all things are completed in God.

variations on sacrifice depending on whether the consecration destruction is ontic, moral, jural, or sacral

It is right to call the Eucharist 'the Lord's Supper', because it is not a supper in imitation of the Last Supper but in very truth the Lord's Supper.

Impanation does not allow an actual parallel with the Incarnation, and this is shown by Holy Saturday. Union with divine person maintains the corpse of Jesus as properly Christ's, but nothing of the sort happens in the destruction of the bread. Further, a nature being assumed by a divine person makes it fitting for reconstitution in glory in that ature, whether the assumption is direct (Christ) or indirect (Church), and this is not a negotiable principle; but it is mind-boggling to thik of all the Hosts ever devoured being reconstituted in glory like some sort of heavenly bread museum, and all of the communion wine ever drunk being reconstituted in incorruptible glory, like some undrinkable wine lake.

Adams is right that 'commemorating by repeating' is important for the Eucharist, but fails to recognize the full importance of the Ascension and Session.

The inability to see that people who do evil things also do good and great things is a serious moral deficiency, second only to the inability to see that people who do good and great things also do evil things.

-- Ransom's depiction as Pendragon in That Hideous Strength may be allusion to the French poem, "Floriant and Florete".

"The white serpent will go in company with the half man full of wisdom through the forest of Nartes, when the white serpent will herself return and leave the half man full of wisdom." Vita di Merlini

Despite interesting touches in apocryphal gospels, the canonical four are at every point, even at only a literary level, higher than they are. This literary superiority can only be explained in two (nonexclusive) ways: superior talent of authorship, or that the canonical gospels  are the telling of a true, or at least true-ish, story, by people with incetive to tell *that story*, as best they can. The apocryphal gospels give us accounts that are clearly given for other reasons than the story itself.

the liturgy (likewise rosary, Stations of the Cross, hymns, Christmas pageants) as "a kind of apocryphal gospel lived out" but not in challenge to the four (Luke Timothy Johnson)

actions that take time but if done habitually ofte put is in a better position to get the most out of the rest of our time -- commonly noted examples are reading, exercise, and prayer

Titus 3:5-7 and baptism as ex opere operato

In historical explanations, the cause is always a matrix of causes.

"The greatness of a philosophy is its power of comprehending facts. The most characteristic fact of modern times is Christianity." William Wallace

Free will explains sin ot immediately but by way of a system of probation.

The handiness of a rule informs us about the world; the handiness of a language also informs us about the world.

Every sense has its 'synthetic a priori' built into its sensory organs.

From our bodies we gain a aesthetic orietation of forward and backward, which we use in our sensing of change, and thus apply to time as the measure of change.

We receive the breath that carries us to the image.

'Making a choice' is a broader concept than 'choosing' and includes (e.g._ initial planing or preliminary decisions that are not the choice itself.

physical theory:
colloquial language [ ordinate language [ technical metalanguage [ object language of formulas
physical experiment:
colloquial language [ ordinate laguage [ metalanguage of forumulas [technical object language

construction -> expression = intension
construction + expression -> application = conceptualization + extension

Love of wisdom loves to love wisdom.

Despite its limitations, the Linnaean binomial nomenclature system has been one of the most effective cotnributions to scientific inquiry, creating in effect a perpetual honors system around discoverers being able to name their discoveries, while keeping this in a manageable and coherent form.

Acts 2:46-47 & 6:7 parallel to Jesus' growing favor with God and man (Lk 1:80, 2:40).

Discussions of sovereignty have often been hampered by equivocation on the word 'absolute' -- between the absolute as nonrelative and the absolute as maximal, between the 'universal' sense of absolute and the sense of being absolute in a domain.

God is our patria.

becoming the sacrifice we already are (Augustine)

"Biblical 'methods' are *theories* rather than methods: theories which result from the formalizing of intelligent intuitions about the meanings of biblical texts." John Barton (Reading the Old Testament)

Redaction begins from the beginning of authorship; the first author is the first redactor, redacting as the very text is being written. But redaction is still distinct from authorship.

The Zohar gives three levels to understanding Torah: seeing the clothes (the narrative story), seeing the body (the commandments and ordinances), seeing the soul (higher mysteries); the author takes the third to be the foundational and essential principle.

kosher practice a sign of the Election of Israel (Lv 20:24-26)

The conventions of genres are constituted by and to an extent only understood within the communities that generate them.

translations, paraphrases, inspired-by retellings

A translator must see the translation as instrumental to the translated.

It is impossible really to translate wholly by one method; the diveresity of language will in itself impede this.

God made Pharaoh bold that God would not defeate a frightened weakling.

sacrifice as bringing near to God

ton Hagion kai Dikaion  -- Acts 3:14
Archegon tes zoes -- Acts 3:15
Archegon kai Sotera -- Acts 5:31

euxanen (= grew): Lk 1:80, Lk 2:40, Acts 6:7, Acts 12:24, Acts 19:20, 1 Cor 3:6

Nothing is permissible except as God permits it; but God permits all the trees of the garden save one in all of our actions.

Human dignity is not a 'moral status'; it is (like humanity itself) partly unearned and partly earned, partly inherent and partly a completion of what is inherent. It affects rights insofar as it affects what is due, but it is not exhausted by its affecting what is due.

The value of freedom of speech does not, contrary to many liberal philosophers, rely wholly on reasonable procedures of inquiry and debate; this is because speech is the expression of persons and is part of their own self-governance. The reverse is in fact true: we have reasonable procedures of inquiry and debate in order to have better, more effective, freedom of speech; the procedures are means to the bene esse of freedom of speech, which is oe aspect of personal self-governance.

Dignity only grounds rights insofar as it is part of common good.

(1) the self-evident
(2) the evident
(3) what tends toward being evident
(4) what has makrs showing a connection to the evident
(5) what has marks suggesting a connection to the evident

Gn 1:31 & the glory of the cosmos

"Christian faith does not merely contemplate what God has done; it receives it as done for us." Barth

The accuracy of polling always depends on the understanding of the polled.

Large Language Models as imitating how fiction-writing works

causality, intelligibility, and sublimity as paths to God

When people say that life or the world are ambiguous, they almost always mean merely that it takes thinking.

What is sometimes called the 'problem of hell' is completely and wholly the problem of the limits of punishment, and nothing else.

How does marriage contain grace?
-- has to have two aspects: presence, but not merely presence *to* but also presence *in* (Most accounts do not recognize this and only give presence to)
-- the senses in which something can be in a contractual relationship
-- perhaps mutual habituation (marriage as habitual act) is relevant
-- perhaps analogy between the way things can be 'store of value' and presence in marriage qua sign

How does marriage cause grace?
-- Several points here -- needs to be instrumental cause, appropriate to effect, involving the covenant itself, and retaining marriage's preeminence as sign
-- the senses in which contracts and covenants are instruments
-- signs as instruments in communication
-- spouses as mutual signs within covenant

principiation as the most fundamental ground of ownership and belonging

Marriage must be:
free -- age, abduction, coercion, incapaicty
full -- disparity of cult, public perpetual vow of chastity, lack of form
faithful -- prior bond, orders, crimen, propriety, exclusion of fidelity
fruitful -- impotence, refusal to have children
--> the relationship impediments (consanguinity, affinity, public propriety, adoption, spiritual relationship) don't really fit this well
--> of course, some of these are cautionary, by ecclesiastical law, and others intrinsic, by divine institution

canon law as the shepherd's staff of the pastoral ministry of the Church

A person learning from geniuses becomes like a reflected network of geniuses; a genius learning from geniuses becomes like a very well structured reflected network of geniuses.

subsidiarity of magisteria

The local church is the universal Church sojourning at a place (cf. The Martyrdom of Polycarp).

the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of being a man or a woman

All political instruments eventually spoil and rot, whatever the ideas behind them.

To consider being without also considering the true, the good, the beautiful, is already to begin falling into ruin.

Human society shifts around our fictions, as can easily be seen in matters of tourism; but it is not merely in tourism that it does so, but to some extent everywhere.

Canons of textual criticism like 'lectio brevior potior' seem often to rest on hypotheses about copying, psychology, and transmission that were never examined or confirmed.

Note that Palamas takes negative terms like simplicity and immutability to describe divine energies.

It is only by the tenuous connection of our intellects and wills to God that we are free at all, and we cannot obtain our true freedom short of the beatific vision.

The more democratic a state is, the more it needs a citizen body with a lot of leisure time.

Wednesday, November 08, 2023

Music on My Mind

 

Hidden Citizens, "Casualty".

Tuesday, November 07, 2023

The End of University Education

 Cautious and practical thinkers, I say, will ask of me, what, after all, is the gain of this Philosophy, of which I make such account, and from which I promise so much. Even supposing it to enable us to exercise the degree of trust exactly due to every science respectively, and to estimate precisely the value of every truth which is anywhere to be found, how are we better for this master view of things, which I have been extolling?...

 I am asked what is the end of University Education, and of the Liberal or Philosophical Knowledge which I conceive it to impart: I answer, that what I have already said has been sufficient to show that it has a very tangible, real, and sufficient end, though the end cannot be divided from that knowledge itself. Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward. And if this is true of all knowledge, it is true also of that special Philosophy, which I have made to consist in a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches, of the relations of science to science, of their mutual bearings, and their respective values. What the worth of such an acquirement is, compared with other objects which we seek,—wealth or power or honour or the conveniences and comforts of life, I do not profess here to discuss; but I would maintain, and mean to show, that it is an object, in its own nature so really and undeniably good, as to be the compensation of a great deal of thought in the compassing, and a great deal of trouble in the attaining.

[John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Part I, Discourse 5.]

Monday, November 06, 2023

Fire Serpent and Water Mountain III

 Beginning -- Previous

Chapter Two: The Terror of the Gods Returns to The City of the Gods

The rest of the summer after the visit of the gods settled into ordinary routines as the borrowed servants were sent back with generous compensations and the Hall of the Fire Serpent became quiet again. Every so often, Ioan, the forester's boy, would drop by for a game of hide and seek, or Tera would spend some time talking with Lyko, the boy who drove the supply wagon up to the Hall each week, or she would let herself be fussed over by Deyavara, the old woman who came up with Lyko each week to look after various housekeeping matters.  Uncle Llew spent much of his time in his workshop, as he often did during summer, although they still met at meals. Sometimes too he would be away for a day, looking after business in the realm of Mizur. Tera. Tera herself, when neither Lyko nor Ioan nor Deyavara were around, buried herself in her studies; she had nightmares of reaching The City of the Gods and being shown up as an ignoramus. Flowers and fires were the subject of study; she enjoyed both subjects more than most, but she was often frustrated at herself, not feeling that she had any good grasp on either.

"You should relax," said Uncle Llew. "Shifting fire requires a precision that can only be gained by trying and re-trying, and living things are among the most difficult things to shift, since they keep trying to reassert their preferences."

"Even flowers?" asked Tera skeptically.

"Especially flowers," said Uncle Llew dismissively. "Extremely stupid organisms, not at all cooperative."

It was the right thing to say; his dry contempt for the cooperativeness of flowers made her laugh, and eased her worries for a while. But she felt at other times as if she must be unusually stupid, despite his firm assurances that most of the gods were much more stupid than she was.

In those days she often thought of her first meeting with Uncle Llew, when she was twelve years old. Growing up as Goddess-Princess of Davir, she had vaguely known that her mother had a brother, and at some point (she did not know when) she had learned his name was Llew, but other than that, she had known nothing about him. Then the terrible time had come, her mother's death, and she had found herself standing in a cold courtyard as Llew's chariot descended from the heavens. She felt dark and numb and slightly bitter inside. The hatch on the chariot opened, and Llew had stepped forth. It was a strange moment. Despite never having seen him, she recognized him immediately. He looked very much like her mother. The sight of him was like a sharp spear to the heart.

Tera's father, the king of Davir, stepped forward, welcoming Llew (calling him "Your Splendor") and introducing him to Tera. Llew politely acknowledged her, then said to her father, "I will need to see her immediately."

Llew was taken into the room where her mother's body lay, covered in a fine cloth. He pulled back the cloth, and it was at that moment, for the first time, that Tera felt that she and Uncle Llew were on the same side. His face crumpled almost immediately, and he sighed, shaking his head, saying, "She was so young." She knew exactly how he felt. He had proceeded to examine the body. At the time she had not known what he was doing, although now she knew he was carefully examining its possibilities. Tera and the king and the rest of the court waited in silence as he did so. Finally Llew raised his head and said in a voice he tried and could not quite succeed in keeping bland, "I can confirm that it was from natural causes."

He sighed again, looked at Tera a moment, then asked her father, "Does she know yet?"

The king shook his head. "No, Your Splendor."

Llew looked off into the distance a moment, then said, "I should see her room and her effects. I recommend you take the time."

Llew went off to look through her mother's possessions, while her father stood there awkwardly with her. She had always been closer to her mother. As king, he was always busy and often away, and when he was not, it was still awkward, because as goddess-princess she outranked him. He was always impeccable in his courtesy, and she did not at all doubt that he had some warmth for her, but their states of life put them at infinite distance from each other, separated by the unbridgeable social chasm between Vilim and Davnan, man and god.

"I am afraid we will be parting soon," he said to her. "Your uncle will take you to Mizur for training as a goddess. Now that your mother is gone, no one here can do that."

"Can I come back to visit?" she had asked.

"Of course," he said. "You will always be the Goddess-Princess of Davir." But the tone of his voice and the sad smile with which he said this suggested that he did not think she would return any time soon.

And that was that; they said no more on the subject, and he went off to look after the complicated matters that arise when a god visits. That evening, however, the Minister of the Right Hand had come to her, saying, "Your Glory, His Splendor wishes to speak with you in the morning hall."

The morning hall was a small side hall in the palace, with a marble floor and a fireplace. They had set a table in the middle of it, at which Llew sat, looking listlessly over what seemed an account book. When he saw her, however, he put the book away and stood, smiling, gesturing to another chair at the table.

When they were both seated, he said to her, "They tell me that you have a talent for finding things. Is that true?"

"I suppose so," she said.

"When you find something, what is it like?" She did not understand the question, and he followed with, "What do you do when you find something?"

She spread her hands. "I just look where it is most likely to be found. That is all."

Llew smiled slightly and sat back in his chair. "It is more than that, though, is it not? You can find things that no one else can. Your father mentioned that you once found a room that no one knew was there. How did you do that?"

"It just seemed like there should be a door where the wall was," she said. 

"But they had to open up the wall to find the door. You could tell it was there when no one else could." She acknowledged it, and he went on. "Our family has a talent for seeing the ways things can be. All the Davnan have it to some degree, but we usually go beyond that." He sat forward, his elbows on the table and his hands clasped just under his chin. "Can you tell the difference between me and everyone else?"

"Yes," said Tera. "You seem less flat and things seem to change around you, like a light, except that it's not visible in the way light is."

He nodded. "That is it exactly. Do you see it all the time, or just when you concentrate?"

"All the time."

"Interesting," he said, half to himself. Then to her: "That suggests that you have a particular talent for seeing the ways living things can be."

He pulled a coin out of some pocket or other and showed it to her. "This is an ordinary coin," he said. He placed it on the table. "This coin has endlessly many possibilities. It is here, but it can be anywhere in the universe." He moved it with his finger. "When it moves, its possibilities in a sense remain the same; it can be anywhere in the universe. But some possibilities are more available. This is the fundamental principle of the art of the Davnan: Everything is possible, but possibilities are not equally available."

He took his finger off the coin, but it continued to move in a slow, leminiscate motion. "The coin can be anywhere, but it is most easily where it is, and then a little less easily in the places right around it, the places you could move it to with a little nudge of the finger. It could also be elsewhere." He tapped the coin and it disappeared -- or rather, it first was there in the center of the table and then it was on the edge of the table. "In the ordinary course of things, those are not as available." He tapped it again, and it was back in the center, moving in its figure-eight. "But we Davnan have a natural talent that lets us shift how available different possibilities are. On a very small scale, we do it naturally, effortlessly, instinctually. You have probably done it without realizing it; things become a little easier to move, a little easier to carry, a little easier to see or hear, than they would likely have done on their own. It is our fundamental difference from the Vilim; we carry our luck with us. With practice, we can do much more. And when you are old enough, you will be Enrolled on the Manifest and have access to the Oracle, which lets you be more precise, and to the Engine and the Vaults, which let you act on an even greater scale."

The coin on the table stopped moving. "Shifting possibilities comes with a cost. You cannot make one possibility more available without making other possibilities less available, and it is not an equal exchange. Make a possibility a little more available and another possibility becomes much less available. I could make things appear from nowhere, but by making these unlikely possibilities very available, other possibilities would have to become unavailable; without training, I might accidentally reduce all the available possibilities of this table, or this palace, or everyone in it, or my own body until it crumbled into dust, able to be almost nothing."

Tera looked at her hands. "You are saying why I need to go with you."

Uncle Llew nodded. "Yes, particularly at your age. You are entering what my mother called the Hard Years; your ability to shift possibilities will increase rapidly, but your sense of your limits is still not very well defined. During that time, you are a danger to yourself and others, unless there is someone who can guide you through it. I am very sorry about it," he said sympathetically, "but you cannot stay here. Things will be different in a few years, when you are trained enough to be Enrolled."

They left Davir the next day, and she had not yet returned.


to be continued

Links of Note

 * Daniel Star, The truth of photographs, at "Aeon.co"

* Michael Walschots, Wolff on the Duty to Cognize Good and Evil (PDF)

* Robert Bartlett, How Many Medieval Saints Are There?

* Lorenzo Sartori, Model Organisms as Scientific Representations (PDF)

* Congratulations to Alexander Pruss for being recognized by Guinness as the male climber with the fastest mile on an indoor climbing wall.

* Michael Waddell, Thomas Aquinas and Resurrection of the (Disabled) Body (PDF)

* David Polansky, What States Are Made Of, at "Strange Frequencies"

* Charles H. Pence, Origin's Chapter IX and X: From Old Objections to Novel Explanations: Darwin on the Fossil Record (PDF)

* Rebecca Mason, The metaphysics of social kinds (PDF)

* Br. Noah Sell, The Catholic Political Philosophy of J. R. R. Tolkien, at "The American Postliberal"

* Simone Guidi, The Truth We Know: Reassessing Suarez's Account of Cognitive Truth and Objective Being (PDF)

* Heather Carson, Educating the Whole Child, at "Intellectual Takeout"

* Alexis Deodato S. Itao, Homoiosis Theoi: Plato's Ultimate Educational Aim (PDF)

* John Pfaff, Millions of Uncounted People in Prisons (Sort Of), at "Prisons, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Punishment", discusses the difficulties of getting a good count of how many people are in prison.

* Noah Greenstein, The Paradox Paradox Non-Paradox and Conjunction Fallacy Non-Fallacy (PDF)

Sunday, November 05, 2023

To Love that Well which Thou Must Leave Ere Long

 Sonnet 73
by William Shakespeare 

 That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.