Log24

Kenneth Bacon, an advocate for refugees, died yesterday at 64 on the Feast of the Assumption.

In his honor, we may perhaps be justified in temporarily ignoring the wise saying "never assume."

From a defense of the dogma of the Assumption:

"On another level, the Assumption epitomizes the reconciliation of the material and spiritual world, as the human Mary enters 'body and soul to heavenly glory.' Carl Jung, the transpersonal psychologist, concluded that the doctrine of the Assumption reflected an acceptance of the physical world."

For other such reconciliations, see

• The New Yorker on Milton meeting Galileo: "Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe."
• This journal on Milton's world system: the four qualities "hot, cold, moist, and dry" and the four elements "Sea, Shore, Air, and Fire."

  But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
  Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
  Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
  His dark materials to create more Worlds….

• This journal's "For Galois on Bastille Day" reconciles, if only in a literary way, physical and non-physical worlds. The work of Evariste Galois allows us to depict an analogue of Milton's (and Philip Pullman's) physical world of dark materials within the purely mathematical world of finite groups. (For a less literary connection between physical and mathematical worlds, see this journal on Bastille Eve.)