From the above Rock obituary —

"One friend, whom he had met early in his time
at Cambridge, was Syd Barrett of the band Pink Floyd."

See as well "Crazy Diamond" in this  journal.

"… identity alone may shine forth" — Octavio Paz

Well … Perhaps not quite  alone.

Continued from remarks of Marissa Mayer at Davos last year —

Related material — This evening's NY lottery…

… and Log24 post number 1424 —

See noon yesterday …

… and the date of Donald Hornig’s death:

(Continued)

"High summer holds the earth." 

— James Agee, quoted in a post by University Diaries
linked to here on Thursday.

See also For Taylor and Country Strong.

* A phrase from the quoted Agee poem

For the authors of the new book All Things Shining —

See the discussions of "concrete universals" in James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology  and in Donald Phillip Verene's Vico and Joyce —

The index to All Things Shining  contains no entries for Hillman (or his mentor Jung), Verene, Joyce, Vico, or the word "universal."

It does, however, contain four references to an example  of a universal —

whiteness, 161, 169-173, 175, 178

See also "whiteness" in this  journal.

David Brooks's column in today's New York Times  suggests a search for the origin of the phrase used as the title of a book Brooks is reviewing— All Things Shining , by philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.

The phrase occurred, notably, in Terrence Malick's 1998 film "The Thin Red Line." I have not yet found an earlier usage.

(A search within  the book for "title" yielded no relevant results, and such searches for "Malick" and for "Thin Red Line" yielded no  results.)

For some background, see an August 20 weblog post by Kelly, Shining in Homer.

For some other background, see an August 20 post in this  weblog.

Update: The phrase occurs in Stephen Mitchell's 1989 translation from the Odes of Solomon—

And you have made all things new;
you have showed me all things shining.

"Right through hell there is a path…" — Under the Volcano

Some Context:

From Dogma Part II: Amores Perros —

"It is night on the fourth of the curving terraces, high above the sea.
The stars are full out, known and unknown. Dante is halfway up the mountain….
It is half through the poem; half the whole is seen and said: hell, where grace
is not known but as a punishment; purgatory where grace and punishment are
two manners of one fact."

— Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, Faber and Faber, 1943

See also Shining Forth.

Linked to in a Log24 post of Jan. 21, 2008 —

"The Shining" dance scene from the 2018 film "Ready Player One" —

From a Log24 post earlier today —

From a Log24 post of Thursday, July 12, 2018 —

"Reverend, Reverend,
Is this some conspiracy?"

— Pantera

Click George for a meditation on Albee.

"It is not easy to set aside firmly seated preconceptions
in order to look at old material with fresh eyes —
hardest of all to face facts which, if true, are 
so obvious and simple that they should patently have been 
recognized long before."

— Vincent Scully, preface to the 1969 edition of
The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture

See also, in this journal, Slave Boy.

Update of 10:30 PM ET —

This post was suggested by the following eulogy:

"All work and no play . . . ." — The Shining

"As many philosophers have noted, in the German language,
the word Schein  bears three distinct meanings:

(i) shining, radiance, luminosity

(ii) manifesting, phenomenal appearing, showing itself, coming to light

(iii) illusion, deception, semblance, 'mere' appearance

In the Greek language of Plato's thought, the first two meanings were
bound together by their etymology. But Plato's metaphysics, drawing
a line of irreconcilable separation between the reality of a higher realm
of pure Ideas and the illusoriness of a lower realm consisting of sensuous
appearances, exhibits a logic that he saw connecting inextricably all three
of these seemingly unconnected meanings."

— Levin, David Michael. The Philosopher's Gaze:
Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment . 
Part III, Section 10: "Where the Beauty of Truth Lies."
Berkeley:  University of California Press,  1999.

From a 2002 note, "The Shining of May 29" —

Related material:  The remarks in this journal on April 1, 2013.

Part I

From this journal in September 2012 —

Part II

See "The Shining (Norwegian Version)" from December 2011.

"Sports may be the place in contemporary life
where Americans find sacred community most easily."

— All Things Shining , the conclusion

Or Bolivia —

Backstories — Natural Hustlers.

"Condescension and a certain amount of hostility
used to mark the critical reaction…."

— Emma Brockes on Stephen King in
    The Guardian , 21 Sept. 2013

For the mark itself, see Black Swan Venus,
Vonnegut Asterisk, and Branding Iron.

The title, that of a novel by Arthur Koestler,
has appeared before in this journal.

The title was quoted in a Log24 note of
May 29, 2002 (G.K. Chesterton's birthday).

The link in Saturday evening's post to a Chesterton
essay suggested a further search that yielded
the following quotation—

Then silence sank. And slowly
      Arose the sea-land lord
Like some vast beast for mystery,
He filled the room and porch and sky,
And from a cobwebbed nail on high
      Unhooked his heavy sword.

— G. K. Chesterton,
   The Ballad of the White Horse

This, together with some Log24 remarks 
from 2004, suggests two images—

Above: A 1955 cover design by Robert Flynn.

The arrow theme also appears in a figure from
John Sealander's Road to Nowhere in the 2004
remarks:

The remarks quoting the Sealander image, from 
March 5, 2004, were on mathematics and narrative.

Related material from a year later:

See an announcement, saved from March 16, 2005,
of a conference on mathematics and narrative that
was held in July 2005. Some context: Koestler's novel.

By chance, the latest* remarks in philosopher Colin McGinn's
weblog were posted (yesterday) at 10:04 AM.

Checking, in my usual mad way, for synchronicity, I find
the following from this  weblog on the date  10/04 (2012)—

• The Shining (politics and philosophy)
• Big Bird (Kerouac on jazz)
• Kids Grow Up (children's books and philosophy)

Note too the time of this morning's previous post here
(on McGinn)— 9:09 AM.  Another synchronistic check
yields Log24 posts from 9/09 (2012):

• Decomposition Sermon (mathematics and poetry)
• Grid Compass (philosophy and death)

Related to this last post:

Detail from a stock image suggested by the web page of
a sociologist (Harvard '64) at the University of Washington in Seattle—

Note, on the map of  Wyoming, Devil's Gate.

There are, of course, many such gates.

* Correction (of about 11:20 AM Aug. 3):
  Later  remarks by McGinn were  posted at 10:06 AM today.  
  They included the phrase "The devil is in the details."
  Yet another check for synchronicity leads to
  10/06 (2012) in this  journal with its post related to McGinn's
  weblog remarks yesterday on philosophy and art.
  That 10/06 Log24  post is somewhat in the spirit of other
  remarks by McGinn discussed in a 2009 Harvard Crimson  review.

An earlier (noon) version of this post showed a photo of a
heartbreakingly beautiful young woman I encountered on
the Web today by chance. Perhaps it is best if she remains
anonymous here.

A detail taken today from her Facebook page:

Location of a nightclub in Bucharest

Related material: Shining Forth by myself and Malcolm Lowry,
and Lucifer  by Mihai Eminescu.

See also this journal "about 3 weeks ago."

Related material:

Hexagram 29: Water

Hexagram 29 and the life of
Robert Palmer Dilworth, who
died on this date in 1993.

"And so the sentence ceases to be a sentence—
a verbal construct of a certain length, velocity and
rhythm with, at bottom, an unambiguous literal
meaning. It becomes a sign instead that telepathic
communication is about to commence."

— Verlyn Klinkenborg, "The Trouble With Intentions,"
     in The New York Times  last night at 9:30 PM ET

Other signs of the Times  (click to enlarge)—

Signs suggested by Klinkenborg's remarks—

Click the above image for further details.

From Sean D. Kelly, chairman of Harvard's philosophy department, on Oct. 13, 2011—

"What I’m looking for at the moment is a good reference from Plato to make it clear how he understands the term. I remember that in the Thaeatetus there is discussion of knowledge as true belief with logos, and a natural account here might count logos as something like rational justification or explanation. And perhaps Glaukon’s request in the Republic for an explanation or account (logos) of the claim that Justice is a good in itself is a clue. But there must be other places where the term appears in Plato. Does anyone have them?"

See instances of logos  under "Pl." (Plato) and "Id." (Idem ) in Liddell and Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon —

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=lo/gos .

(See also Liddell and Scott's "General List of Abbreviations"—

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Asection%3D5 .)

"… if you will, a cha-cha on the floor of the Grand Hotel Abyss."

— Harvard student's essay on Jack Nicholson in the ballroom of "The Shining"

"At the still point, there the dance is."

— Four Quartets

Related material on the transition from "Do" to "Be" on Friday, October 21st—

• A Log24 post
  
• An obituary
  

(This post's title was appropriated from a novel by Brian Morton.)

Yesterday's evening New York Lottery— 229 and 9294.

Alex Ross in the online New Yorker  quotes a bad essay he wrote in college titled…

“The Grand Hotel Abyss: History and Violence in ‘The Shining,’”

which purports to analyze the famous scene in which Jack Nicholson
types the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”:

Nicholson has become a chomping-machine of language,
recycling stock phrases, appropriating whatever
drifts into his path. His words are nothing but echoes….

The lottery's 229 may be interpreted as "2/29." See a post from that date in 2008
involving echoes and the abyss.

The lottery's 9294 may be interpreted as "9/2/94." A search for that date yields
an article from Pacific Stars and Stripes—

That article is echoed  by a later Doonesbury caricature
of a professor discussing echoes  in black rhetoric. That
caricature is from the 2/29 post—

"Put me on to Edenville." — James Joyce, quoted in today's noon post.

The New Yorker 's Book Bench quotes a college essay on "The Shining"—

"In the Gold Room, the fatally disconnected under-zone of play,
he finds a fin-de-siècle soirée in progress; after a drink of
Jack Daniels, he dances about for a bit—if you will,
a cha-cha on the floor of the Grand Hotel Abyss."

If you will! You probably won’t.

Then again…

The New Yorker 's online Book Bench has an entertaining
approach to Jack's "All work and no play…" in "The Shining."
For some background, see this morning's previous Log24
post, The Thing Itself.

That post gives some background for the
Midnight in the Garden post of September 6th.

Also on September 6th… See Jill.

(Continued from Tuesday's "A Story")

Tuesday's story, a collection of four random posts, was
suggested by Tuesday's NY lottery numbers.

That story leads, by association, to Frame Tale in
a post of 2:02 AM on Sunday, May 23, 2010. For related
material, see Death Story, a post of 9:40 PM that same Sunday.

Wednesday's numbers—

—suggest a counter-story…

Escape to Pine Mountain

A website on films about Latter-Day Saints (i.e., Mormons) asks

Was "Escape to Witch Mountain"
based on Zenna Henderson's "People" stories?

The lottery numbers above suggest the names of three women—
none, as far as I know, with any Mormon background—
who might rightly be called, without capital letters,
"latter-day saints"…

1. Madeleine L'Engle (see 529 as the date 5/29),
2. June Christy (a singer first recorded on 5/4/45), and
3. Mary Rockwell Hook, architect of Pine Mountain
   Settlement School, who died on 9/8/78.

These three lives, taken together, may serve as
an antidote to the Death Story mentioned above.

"We tell ourselves stories…" — Joan Didion
"Therefore choose life." —God

A Meditation on the NY Lottery of May 29

Yesterday's NY Lottery— Midday 981, Evening 275.

As noted in yesterday  morning's linked-to post,
The Shining of May 29…

"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy ,
Random House, 1973, page 118

One interpretation of the mystic numbers revealed by the Lottery yesterday—

981 as the final page* of David Foster Wallace's famed novel Infinite Jest …

275 as a page in Wallace's non-fiction book about infinity Everything and More …

  Gregory Chaitin points out that this is nonsense …

As noted elsewhere in this journal, I have a different concept of "math's absolute
Prince of Darkness"— and, indeed, of a "quest for Omega." (See posts of May 2010.)

Yesterday's numbers indicate a different struggle between darkness and light—

Light —

Darkness —

* From infinitesummer.org/archives/168 — "A note about editions:
As it turns out, all (physical) editions of Infinite  Jest  have 981 pages:
the one from 1996, the one from 2004, the paperback, the hardcover, etc.
A big thank you to the men and women in the publishing industry who
were kind and/or lazy enough to keep things consistent."

"You think you've seen the sun but you ain't seen it shine."

— "The Best Is Yet to Come," lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, music by Cy Coleman

Related material— The Shining of May 29.

Austin Considine on a Tennessee tourist trap—

"It would be easy for a city slicker to assume this place misses its own punch lines."

It probably doesn't, but a certain academic  tourist trap does .

A trio of Harvard hicks—

1. The chairman of the Harvard philosophy department, Sean D. Kelly—

"Football can literally bring meaning to life."

(See also Garry Wills on Kelly, Rite of Spring, and Heisman Trophy.)

2. A professor of English at Harvard, Marjorie Garber, in a deconstructive meditation—

Garber notes that the word "literature" has two meanings– the English department's meaning, and that of other departments' references to "the literature."

"Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other."

— The Use and Abuse of Literature , published by Pantheon on March 29, 2011

3. The president of Harvard, Drew Faust—

A comment recently made to Faust—

“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged…."

Her response—

"Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her 'scold in chief.'"

—  University Diaries  today. See the excellent commentary there.

"Get there fast. Get there first."

— Motto in New York Times  ad (obituaries section).

"Right through hell  there is a path." –Under the Volcano , quoted here on the day a religious historian died.

"Hang a shining star upon the highest bough."

— Hugh Martin. Martin died on March 11th, 2011.

"The shaping of a work of art means, paradoxically, preserving some space for ambiguity."

— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in The Wall Street Journal , December 11th, 2010

From January 16th—

Here are links to the source posts: December 3, 2010 and December 4, 2010.

Background— see Natural Hustler in this journal.

    This is from All Things Shining— "Conclusion: Lives Worth Living in a Secular Age"

Where Entertainment Is God  continues...

New York Lottery today— Midday 710, Evening 563.

This suggeests a scientific note from the date 7/10  (2009) and the page number 563 from Dec. 29—

Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , October 2002, p. 563:

“To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns.  Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications.  Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things.  These explorations led to… [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story ).”

– David W. Henderson, Cornell University

For a different perspective on Toy Story , see the Dec. 29 post.

Other entertainments — The novel Infinite Jest  and two versions of "Heeere's Johnny !" —

            From Stanley Kubrick and from today's New York Times :

See also All Things Shining  and the lottery theology of Jorge Luis Borges.

The Development of Logic  —

A Universal Etymological English Dictionary —

Joan Didion —

The above readings are related* to All Things Shining , a work of pop philosophy published today.

For a review of the new book, click on the image below.

* Didion's remarks on James Jones are related to the title  of the new book.
  Jones wrote a novel, The Thin Red Line , on which a film is based that
  contains the phrase "all things shining." The phrase is not in the novel.
  The authors of All Things Shining  credit neither novel nor film.

"Whence God is to be understood as a sort of mirror in which all things succeeding one another in the whole course of time have images shining back, a mirror indeed directly beholding itself and all the images existing in it."

— Peter de Rivo, quoted in Wild Materialism , p. 102 (below)

"The stakes were high…. …the status, indeed, the ownership, of logic, a term common to the Faculties of Theology and Art, was in dispute…."

— Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic , by Jacques Lezra, Fordham University Press, 2010, chapter on "The Logic of Sovereignty," page 102

See also Borges on the Aleph.

Saturday night's game… Harvard vs. Brown at Providence—

Harvard 14, Brown 29.

Related philosophy about divine providence—

See also, from 2002, a note on "light inclosed in the dark" versus the late Harvard philosopher Barbara Johnson.

For some context on Harvard and "the Magic of Numbers" see Summer Reading from 2007.

A film director's obituary in today's New York Times—

"Mr. Donner broke through as a director in 1963 with a low-budget black-and-white film of Harold Pinter’s play 'The Caretaker,' with Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence and Robert Shaw. Since he couldn’t find traditional backing for the film, a group of well-wishers that included Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Peter Sellers and Noël Coward financed it."

   A lower-budget version:

All work and no play 

makes Jack a dull boy.

See also "Patrick Blackburn, meet Gideon Summerfield" in Building a Mystery.

"Heidegger suggests that we experience the saying of language as a shining forth:

'It lets what is coming to presence shine forth, lets what is withdrawing into absence vanish.  The saying is by no means the supplemental linguistic expression of what shines forth; rather, all shining and fading depend on the saying that shows.' (pp. 413-414).

But what is the basis and origin of this possibility of saying?  The happening of saying in the clearing, its allowing things to shine forth, can also be called an 'owning.' Owning is the event of a thing’s coming into its own, of its showing itself as itself. Heidegger also calls it 'propriating,' 'en-owning,' or Ereignis:

'Propriation gathers the rift-design of the saying and unfolds it in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure of a manifold showing. (p. 415)'"

— "Heidegger: On the Way to Language," by Paul Livingston

Page references are apparently to Heidegger's Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993.

See also Shining Forth.

"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
 how deep the darkness is around us."
  — Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
      Random House, 1973, page 118

Continued from Christmas 2009 and from last Sunday—

The serious reflection is composed
Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace."

– Wallace Stevens

William Lubtchansky, a cinematographer, was born on October 26, 1937, and died on May 4, 2010.

Yesterday's post included an illustration from this journal on the date of his death.

Here is a Log24 entry from last year on the date of his birth—

Clicking on the Shift Lock key leads to the following page—

—The Philosopher's Gaze,
by David Michael Levin,
University of California Press, 1999

Related images—

Detail from May 4 image:

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC:

(http://www.scrapbookpages.com/USHMM/Exterior.html)

See also Lubtchansky's Duelle and
Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday, 2003.