“She recognized the foxglove leaves of the riding and knew, more or less, where they were.”
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover
Liberal Arts Learning Goal: Know facts, terms, and person important to an art or discipline
“Nothing can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of Science and Literature. Knowledge is in every Country the surest basis of public happiness. In one, in which the measures of Government recieve their impression so immediately from the sense of the Community as in our’s, it is proportionably essential.
To the security of a free Constitution it contributes in various ways: By convincing those, who are entrusted with the public administration, that every valuable end of Government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people: And by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of Society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last, and uniting a speedy, but temperate vigilence against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the laws.”
George Washington, 1st State of the Union Address, January 8, 1790
God is not alone. Adam is.
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
The rabbit was eating peaches fallen from the tree. She looked up at me as if to say, “Who are you to visit me as the sun is setting and the night begins to fall?”
I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
Theodore Roethke, “The Far Field”
Writes Professor Emeritus Ben Blum:
Zen is about nothing
Numerous books have been written about it
They mean nothing
From 35,000 feet it’s hard to see what’s on the ground and nobody on this airplane is looking. We are heading back to Chicago and I am remembering that Carl Sandberg poem about the train rushing to Omaha. “I met a man on a train and asked him where he was going and he said, ‘Omaha.’”
I flew from Boston to El Paso via Chicago on Sunday and the scene on the plane then was a little different but essentially it was the same.
On the first leg of the flight, from Boston to Chicago, though it was summer and dawn, everyone drew down the shades over the cabin windows and took out their handhelds and fell into them so that there seemed to be no world outside, no world around us. There was nothing but the rows of seats facing in one direction and slumped heads and the glow of tiny screens, a constellation of little screens that glowed but bore no starlight.
In the airport in Chicago, men in shorts and women in halters streamed down the corridor in a ceaseless stream heading God knows where while the voices on the TV monitors inveighed and indicted and then we filed again onto the airplane.
On the second leg of the flight, morning now, from Chicago to El Paso, the shades on the windows were already drawn and no one thought to open one. The handhelds emerged. We were a congregation of dreamers looking nowhere but inward. We landed in El Paso.
So I flew across a continent on a sugar day of summer nullifying America. Where birds are hatching and people live and love, I saw nothing.
But when you stand with your legs on the ground and behold what’s before you, the world shimmers with beauty. This photo shows me (that’s my shoulder intruding into the lower right of the image) standing at the bank of the Rio Grande River near Las Cruces, New Mexico. In reality, a glorious mountain rises where this photo shows merely a pale white sky. It’s hardly a photo. It’s all I could capture while I held my laptop in my hands and snapped a shot as the glare from the sun made the screen invisible to me. It’s an intimation of what is.
O beautiful river!
… an idea quite strange to him had lodged in his brain. Why is it that the hate of man–even of a man like Franco–dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence –for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?
Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote (1982)