Think of all the history you’ve read. It started somewhere.
It started at absolute zero, is what you thought.
Just because you couldn’t know what came before.
But imagine: something did.

"To help the graduates find rightness, two addresses are at the heart of the exercises ceremony.
 One is by a poet, who reads a work written for the occasion.
 The other is by an 'orator,' a guest invited to offer timely discourse."

From this morning's New York Times—

Related material—

Immediately following Inspector Pine in this morning's Times  obituary list
is Virginia B. Smith, a former president of Vassar College. Smith died at 87 on August 27.

From her obituary—

Ms. Smith is survived by her partner of 57 years, Florence Oaks.

Background—

1. The Burning Man in Bester's classic The Stars My Destination,
2. The not-so-classic Hitler Plans Burning Man, and
3. The cult film The Wicker Man

Commentary on The Wicker Man—

Originally The Wicker Man  was not well-received by critics in the UK. It was considered
to be bizarre, disturbing, and uncomfortable, with the hasty editing making the story confusing
and out of order…. Today this movie is considered a cult classic and has been called
the “Citizen Kane  of horror films” by some reviewers. How did this film become a cult classic?

Real estate motto— Location, Location, Location.

Illustration— The fire leap scene from Wicker Man, filmed at Castle Kennedy—

From August 27—

In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews a summer thriller
by Kevin Guilfoile.  The Thousand  is in the manner of Dan Brown's
2003 The Da Vinci Code  or of Katherine Neville's 1988 The Eight .

From the review—

What connects these disparate events, it turns out, is a sinister organization
called the Thousand, made up of followers of the ancient Greek mathematician
and philosopher Pythagoras (yes, the same Pythagoras associated with
the triangle theorem that we learned in school).

As Mr. Guilfoile describes it, this organization is part Skull and Bones,
part Masonic lodge, part something much more twisted and nefarious….

The plot involves, in part,

… an eccentric artist’s mysterious masterwork, made up of thousands of
individually painted tiles that may cohere into an important message….

Not unlike the tiles in the Diamond Theory cover (see yesterday's post)
or, more aptly, the entries in this journal.

A brief prequel to the above dialogue—

In lieu of songs, here is a passage by Patrick Blackburn
more relevant to the art of The Thousand—

See also the pagan fire leaping in Dancing at Lughnasa.

    And so she did.

Related material: This journal on August 29, 2010, and the phrase "attention must be paid."

Related posts— 6/04 and 8/04.

"preparing wills and deeds and contracts."

Related material—

• Will
  
• Deed
  
• Contract
  

Sarah McLachlan—

Ooh you're working
Building a mystery
Holding on and holding it in
Yeah you're working
Building a mystery
And choosing so carefully

"It's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment
of the Talented in the scheme of things."
– Anne McCaffrey

From this journal on August 23,
a look at Resurrection Road  in M magazine—

Notes for an unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald—

"There is a place for a hint somewhere
  of a big agent to complete the picture."

These two posts are from February 4, 2010.

See also an Oxford Journals essay from that date.

The "Jenny" here refers to both Tuesday's Log24 post Page Mark and to a post from Dec. 29, 2005 …

Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell, SciFi channel, 7 PM tonight

Jenny O’Hara

“This world is not conclusion;
a sequel stands beyond.”
— Emily Dickinson

When Ivan was 12, Hitler invaded Austria, prompting his decision never to bring children into this world. At the age of 16, before fleeing Vienna, he bribed the secretary of Nazi leader Hermann Goering – who had claimed Illich's family home – to free his grandfather. Ultimately, Illich did do well in school, studying philosophy and theology at the elite Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican, later earning a Ph.D. at the University of Salzburg. He travelled to India and soaked up Eastern philosophy during long discussions with the Indian Hindu and Catholic priest Ramon Panikkar in Varanasi (Benares), along the Ganges river. He was later ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in New York City. He became a professor at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and moved to Mexico, where he founded an educational centre that challenged the Church’s embrace of modern development. He resigned from priesthood in the late 1960s because he no longer felt at home with the dogmas of the Catholic Church – "I have enough Jewish blood to be able to get angry with God" – and began his life as a philosopher and author.

Illich greeted us at his home in Bremen….

Panikkar died on August 26, 2010. See this journal on that date ("Home from Home continued"), with its link to math16.com and the reference there to Stevens's "The Owl in the Sarcophagus."

Related material—

A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma (letters to The Guardian  on Stephen Hawking's new book)
and Panikkar's book (published in Paris in 2002 and in Minneapolis, by a Lutheran press, in 2006)
The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery.