* See also "Hole in the Wall" in this journal.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Monday, January 26, 2009
Monday January 26, 2009
Episode One
For the Hole in the Wall Gang:
Shopkeeper: Good morning, sir. And what can I do for you then?
Prisoner: I’d like a map of this area.
Shopkeeper: Map? Colour or black and white?
Prisoner: Just a map.
Shopkeeper: Map…
He pauses to remember where he keeps such a thing.
Shopkeeper: Ah. Black and white…
He produces a map from a cupboard.
Shopkeeper: There we are, sir. I think you’ll find that shows everything.
The map is labelled “map of your village.” The Prisoner opens it; it shows the village bordered by “the mountains”: there are no external geographical names.
Prisoner: I… I meant a larger map.
Shopkeeper: Only in colour, sir. Much more expensive.
Prisoner: That’s fine.
The shopkeeper fetches him a colour map as inadequate as the last. It folds out as a larger sheet of paper, but still mentions only “the mountains,” “the sea,” and “the beach,” together with the title “your village.”
Prisoner: Er, that’s not what I meant. I meant a… a larger area.
Shopkeeper: No, we only have local maps, sir. There’s no demand for any others. You’re new here, aren’t you?
— Comment at
The Word magazine,
January 16, 2009
|
“In the pictures of the old masters, Max Picard wrote in The World of Silence, people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall… “ — Annie Dillard in |
“Shopkeeper:
Only in colour, sir.
Much more expensive.
Prisoner:
That’s fine.”
Comments Off on Monday January 26, 2009
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Tuesday September 30, 2008
| Hole in the Wall
Loren Eiseley, I never found — “The Invisible Horseman” This quotation is the result of On Michaelmas 2008 (yesterday): The mailman brought next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. On the last page was an essay by Steven Millhauser, “The Ambition of the Short Story.” It said that… “The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there– right there, in the palm of its hand– lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved.” Part II: A search for the “grain of sand” phrase in this journal yielded a quotation from actor Will Smith: “Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: ‘It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I’m teaching my kids.'” The quotation’s source is The Independent of July 9, 2004. Part III: The date of The Independent‘s story turns out to contain, in this journal, a meditation on white-trash food and Reba McEntire. (Recall her classic lyric — John Keats, “Fancy“ A passage closely related to Keats’s poem: “Fullness… Multitude.” These are the missing last words of Inman in Cold Mountain, added here on the Feast of St. Luke, 2004. For the meaning of these words, click on Luke. |
Comments Off on Tuesday September 30, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Saturday September 27, 2008
| Lotteries Sept. 26, 2008 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
| Mid-day (No belief) |
No belief, no revelation 084 |
Revelation without belief 006 |
| Evening (Belief) |
Belief without revelation 340 |
Belief and revelation 006 |
Comments Off on Saturday September 27, 2008
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Sunday May 20, 2007
Plato and Shakespeare:
Solid and Central
Solid and Central
"I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX
From Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star (11/11/99):
|
"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor…. I have dwelt at length on the inconvenience of putting up with it. It is time to think about taking steps." "The Consul could feel his glance at Hugh becoming a cold look of hatred. Keeping his eyes fixed gimlet-like upon him he saw him as he had appeared that morning, smiling, the razor edge keen in sunlight. But now he was advancing as if to decapitate him." |
"O God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell
and count myself
a king of infinite space,
were it not that
I have bad dreams."
— Hamlet
From today's newspaper:
Notes:
For an illustration of
the phrase "solid and central,"
see the previous entry.
For further context, see the
five Log24 entries ending
on September 6, 2006.
For background on the word
"hollow," see the etymology of
"hole in the wall" as well as
"The God-Shaped Hole" and
"Is Nothing Sacred?"
For further ado, see
Macbeth, V.v
("signifying nothing")
and The New Yorker,
issue dated tomorrow.
Comments Off on Sunday May 20, 2007
Friday, July 9, 2004
Friday July 9, 2004
Scoop
This afternoon I came across, in a briefcase I seldom use, two books I had not looked at since I bought them last month:
- The Footprints of God, a recently published paperback by Greg Iles, a writer who graduated from Trinity High School, Natchez, Mississippi, in 1979, and from the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1983.
- Sanctuary, by the better-known Mississippi writer William Faulkner.
At the time I purchased the books, indeed until I looked up Iles on the Web today, I was not aware of the Mississippi connection. Their physical connection, lying together today in my briefcase, is, of course, purely coincidental. My view of coincidence is close to that of Arthur Koestler, who wrote The Challenge of Chance and The Roots of Coincidence, and to that of Loren Eiseley, who wrote of a dice game and of "the Other Player" in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours.
A Log24 entry yesterday referred to a comedic novel on the role of chance in physics, Cosmic Banditos. Today's New York Times quotes an entertainer who referred to President Bush yesterday, at a political fund-raiser, as a bandito. Another coincidence… this one related directly to the philosophy of coincidences expounded jokingly in Cosmic Banditos.
I draw no conclusions from such coincidences, but they do inspire me to look a little deeper into life's details — where, some say, God is. Free association on these details, together with a passage in Sanctuary, inspired the following collage:
Related Texts
Faulkner on a trinity of women
in Sanctuary (Ch. 25):
"Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin. 'This'll put some heart into us,' she said. 'We're setting here like three old sick cats.' They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips. Then they began to talk. They were all talking at once,* again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation."
"In Defense of the Brand":
"In Defense of the Brand":
"When I was helping Frito corn chips expand its core user group in the mid-'90s, we didn't ask Frito-Lay to just wave the Fritos banner. The brand was elevated to a place where it could address its core users in a way that was relevant to their lifestyle. We took the profile of the audience and created a campaign starring Reba McEntire. It captured the brand's essence, and set Frito eaters amidst good music, good people, and good fun."
Song lyric, Reba McEntire:
"I might have been born
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name."
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name."
Loren Eiseley,
Notes of an Alchemist:
I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.
— "The Invisible Horseman"
* A significant phrase. See