Log24

Wren Day

“St. Stephen’s Day [Dec. 26] is a national holiday in Ireland, but the celebrations have little connection to the Saint.”

This day in Ireland is instead devoted to a barbaric ritual, “the hunting of the wren.”

Let us therefore recall a more civilized figure– St. Christopher Wren— whose feast day is Feb. 25.

From Log24 on that date in 2005:

… Only by the form,
    the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as
    a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin,
    while the note lasts,
Not that only, but
    the co-existence,
Or say that the end
    precedes the beginning,
And the end
    and the beginning
    were always there
Before the beginning
    and after the end.
And all is always now.

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Heaven– Where Is It?
  How Do We Get There?”

To air on ABC
Tuesday, Dec. 20
(John Spencer’s birthday)

Fred Stein, 1945

“And we may see
the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline.”

A Wintry Friday Afternoon

Three years ago today in the New York Times:

“The book was Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, and I was 12 or 13 when I carried it home from the library one wintry Friday afternoon.

I cannot even remember the novel that accompanied it. But I remember that I was curled up on our beat-up old couch, the one with the huge embarrassing rip where my older sister would position me to sit demurely, my dress fanned out over the damage, when her dates arrived. I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)

The Forms are abstract but real, I read, graspable only through the eyes of the mind, pure reason. And it seemed to me, that dark winter afternoon as I read, that I was grasping them; that I, a yiddishe maidel of questionable worth, was seeing with the eyes of my mind exactly what that ancient Greek philosopher had seen; that just like him I was out beyond the phantasmagoria, suspended in formal perfection; that I was out beyond myself, had almost lost all touch with who I even was, and it was . . . bliss.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

  Related material:
  Davenport’s Express.

  Update of 6:14 PM EST:

    Whistle Stop

  

For the late John Spencer,
actor on NBC’s “West Wing”

    From “West Wing”—

— “When was the last time
    you went to a meeting?”
— “AA?…. What meeting
     could I possibly go to?”
— “Mine.”

The Cinematic
Imagination,
or
“Frida” meets
“Under the Volcano”

A scene from “Frida”
and a scene from the
Day of the Dead festival,
Cuernavaca, 10/30/04

Related material:

For the Man in Black
(Log 24, 9/13/03)
and
For a Man in Black
(Log 24, 11/17/05).