Saturday, December 29, 2012
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Growing Old, Then Older, then Oldest
Before writing this bog (#4), some business
I'm still trying to refine the physical purity of this blog by having a comment section immediately following the text, as any self-respecting blog should have. But how to do that is elusive, although there are knowledgeable people helping me. Meantime, if you want to leave a comment, click on the title of the blog, and lo! a comment box will appear below the text.
And a somewhat hairier problem. (Hoarier problem? One easily falls into the morass of how something customary suddenly isn't customary.) That is, how to combine the emails of all the blog's recipients so that by pressing a single key, the blog speeds not faster than the speed of light to them.
If any readers have solutions to these for the moment conundrums, please let me know.
Now about aging.
It surprises me how many people are reluctant to give up their age to strangers. As though having been born is shameful, and best left undisclosed. In my view, becoming older signifies some sort of victory over the illnesses that strike without warning, or accident. All the contingencies that threaten growing older. To announce how old you are, it seems to me, is a way of saying that you have beaten the odds. But that's not in the mindset of many, especially women. For heaven's sake, when you're in your 70's you are hardly of sexual interest to any but a very small percentage of men. Why, then, the mystery? Habit, perhaps. Withholding your age was, at one time, among the women I knew growing up, just not done, and it was rude to ask unless, perhaps you were asked by a doctor or someone else whose detailed knowledge of you was useful or necessary.
Now after that homily, are there any dissenters? If so, I THINK I'd like to hear from you.
It may, or will, come as a surprise to some that this blog was expected to emphasize poetry. One of my daughters-in-law, herself a blogger, knowing of my penchant for having words chase each other across a page but not necessarily in any conventional sequence, encouraged me to embark on this late-time activity, thinking perhaps that it might keep the gray cells funcioning. Well, she has learned that I am no man's (or woman's) follower. She has, I hope, come to the knowledge that anything that means words will find its way on this computer.
I haven't forgotten that the blog has to do with aging, so here is a poem about what it means to me to age.
MY TIMES OF LIFE
Daily, earth diminishes, time lessens,
breaths count maybe in the millions,
the numbers that count my life
inevitably begin on their asymptote
to reach the straight line that means
an approaching end, asymptotes not
designed to rise forever when it comes
to life.
The mathematics of living are so
peculiar, nothing I think about
or really know, but all the same
the sands that spill are counting,
sometimes slowly sometimes quickly
but always enumerating time passed
therefore time left.
Euclid and Euler never bothered
with such things, so far as is known,
although they too were subject to
the enumerations of which they might
or might not have been aware.
Everything counts in life.
So there you have it. I have another poem about aging I want to send you, but that will have to wait until next time.
Until then, peace, and be as serene as you can.
I'm still trying to refine the physical purity of this blog by having a comment section immediately following the text, as any self-respecting blog should have. But how to do that is elusive, although there are knowledgeable people helping me. Meantime, if you want to leave a comment, click on the title of the blog, and lo! a comment box will appear below the text.
And a somewhat hairier problem. (Hoarier problem? One easily falls into the morass of how something customary suddenly isn't customary.) That is, how to combine the emails of all the blog's recipients so that by pressing a single key, the blog speeds not faster than the speed of light to them.
If any readers have solutions to these for the moment conundrums, please let me know.
Now about aging.
It surprises me how many people are reluctant to give up their age to strangers. As though having been born is shameful, and best left undisclosed. In my view, becoming older signifies some sort of victory over the illnesses that strike without warning, or accident. All the contingencies that threaten growing older. To announce how old you are, it seems to me, is a way of saying that you have beaten the odds. But that's not in the mindset of many, especially women. For heaven's sake, when you're in your 70's you are hardly of sexual interest to any but a very small percentage of men. Why, then, the mystery? Habit, perhaps. Withholding your age was, at one time, among the women I knew growing up, just not done, and it was rude to ask unless, perhaps you were asked by a doctor or someone else whose detailed knowledge of you was useful or necessary.
Now after that homily, are there any dissenters? If so, I THINK I'd like to hear from you.
It may, or will, come as a surprise to some that this blog was expected to emphasize poetry. One of my daughters-in-law, herself a blogger, knowing of my penchant for having words chase each other across a page but not necessarily in any conventional sequence, encouraged me to embark on this late-time activity, thinking perhaps that it might keep the gray cells funcioning. Well, she has learned that I am no man's (or woman's) follower. She has, I hope, come to the knowledge that anything that means words will find its way on this computer.
I haven't forgotten that the blog has to do with aging, so here is a poem about what it means to me to age.
MY TIMES OF LIFE
Daily, earth diminishes, time lessens,
breaths count maybe in the millions,
the numbers that count my life
inevitably begin on their asymptote
to reach the straight line that means
an approaching end, asymptotes not
designed to rise forever when it comes
to life.
The mathematics of living are so
peculiar, nothing I think about
or really know, but all the same
the sands that spill are counting,
sometimes slowly sometimes quickly
but always enumerating time passed
therefore time left.
Euclid and Euler never bothered
with such things, so far as is known,
although they too were subject to
the enumerations of which they might
or might not have been aware.
Everything counts in life.
So there you have it. I have another poem about aging I want to send you, but that will have to wait until next time.
Until then, peace, and be as serene as you can.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Getting It
First, some old business.
Lat time, I mentioned some books relating to wonder. Two readers added their own suggestions, one William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. How such an obvious selection was missed by me has to be taken as an error occasioned by age. I'm bound to make mistakes, and ask that you indulge me with a possible smirk that such mistakes are age-related. (I have no doubt that I'll make a really stupid mistake now and then, in which case I hope you'll also be forgiving.) Remember, you're not getting any younger!
A second book is an anthology by Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, which I'll comment upon after reading it. A third is from my own library: Wonder, by Robert C. Fuller, in which the author grapples with the evolution from "emotion to spirituality," to quote the subtitle.
In my introduction, I hinted that family-related stories would be few and far between; this is one of those few and far between occasions.
When he was at university, one of my sons was urged by his math professor to get a PhD in the subject. I said I didn't remember him as having a special talent in mathematics. What happened? I asked. "I don't know," he replied, "I just got it." And that decades-old comment has become part of my world-view ever since. (The PhD wasn't appealing; he took an MD instead.)
The concept of "getting it" is applicable universally. Some extremely bright persons acknowledge that poetry eludes them. Others simply don't understand some basic ideas of mathematics or the physical sciences. An unusually brilliant person I know has admitted that he tried unsuccessfully to understand poetry, art, and photography, ultimately conceding that he was an almost wholly "left brain" person.
The idea of "getting it" certainly is applicable to political beliefs, so that some otherwise rational people cannot deeply empathize with the impoverished, the dispossessed, the mentally ill, the physically handicapped. And as for wonder, either you "get it" or you don't, and no amount of argument can convince you otherwise. Which is why I cannot understand the bitterness sometimes shown by theists and atheists at one another, when neither position can be proven indisputably.
What, if anything can be done to help someone to "get it?" I can't answer that question believably; perhaps you can, and if so, let the rest of us know. There is no doubt that being able to "get" something is a function both of nature and nurture, but which of the two is more important may some day be determined.
Interestingly, the only time I have seen the concept of "getting it" in print is in a letter in the current (Oct. 29 & Nov.5, 2012) issue of The New Yorker; a physician berates those who would deny services to the destitute, asserting that those living at the bottom of the financial pyramid "get" their situation better than others.
Until next time.
Lat time, I mentioned some books relating to wonder. Two readers added their own suggestions, one William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. How such an obvious selection was missed by me has to be taken as an error occasioned by age. I'm bound to make mistakes, and ask that you indulge me with a possible smirk that such mistakes are age-related. (I have no doubt that I'll make a really stupid mistake now and then, in which case I hope you'll also be forgiving.) Remember, you're not getting any younger!
A second book is an anthology by Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, which I'll comment upon after reading it. A third is from my own library: Wonder, by Robert C. Fuller, in which the author grapples with the evolution from "emotion to spirituality," to quote the subtitle.
In my introduction, I hinted that family-related stories would be few and far between; this is one of those few and far between occasions.
When he was at university, one of my sons was urged by his math professor to get a PhD in the subject. I said I didn't remember him as having a special talent in mathematics. What happened? I asked. "I don't know," he replied, "I just got it." And that decades-old comment has become part of my world-view ever since. (The PhD wasn't appealing; he took an MD instead.)
The concept of "getting it" is applicable universally. Some extremely bright persons acknowledge that poetry eludes them. Others simply don't understand some basic ideas of mathematics or the physical sciences. An unusually brilliant person I know has admitted that he tried unsuccessfully to understand poetry, art, and photography, ultimately conceding that he was an almost wholly "left brain" person.
The idea of "getting it" certainly is applicable to political beliefs, so that some otherwise rational people cannot deeply empathize with the impoverished, the dispossessed, the mentally ill, the physically handicapped. And as for wonder, either you "get it" or you don't, and no amount of argument can convince you otherwise. Which is why I cannot understand the bitterness sometimes shown by theists and atheists at one another, when neither position can be proven indisputably.
What, if anything can be done to help someone to "get it?" I can't answer that question believably; perhaps you can, and if so, let the rest of us know. There is no doubt that being able to "get" something is a function both of nature and nurture, but which of the two is more important may some day be determined.
Interestingly, the only time I have seen the concept of "getting it" in print is in a letter in the current (Oct. 29 & Nov.5, 2012) issue of The New Yorker; a physician berates those who would deny services to the destitute, asserting that those living at the bottom of the financial pyramid "get" their situation better than others.
Until next time.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Something About Wonder
I want to write about wonder. How to define it so that it makes sense is a serious problem, one I won't attempt to resolve. Instead, I want to suggest that just as in poetry ideas can be hinted at that can't be adequately defined, so the concept of wonder stands as something we know but have trouble putting into logical terms. An early effort to deal with the idea is Rudolf Otto's now classic The Idea of the Holy. The book is an attempt to relate the feeling of awe in a religious, specifically Christian context, but can be usefully read as a secular piece. One of the difficult aspects of discussing such a concept as wonder or awe is that many such efforts are specifically Christian, and it requires that a serious investigator into the idea relinquish previously held beliefs about religion. Indeed, perhaps most attempts to pursue the idea of wonder are to be found in the writings of mystics of all religious denominations, although secular studies also have been published, such as Milton K.Munitz's The Mystery of Existence. Perhaps the most popular work on the subject of awe as it relates to mysticism is Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, still in print after a century. A brief summary of which I am fond is F.C. Happold's Mysticism/ A Study and an Anthology. More recent works are by Frank Collins of genome fame (see the Internet for this). For those interested in pursuing a more scientific view of the concept, I recommend Krista Tippett's Einstein's God, especially the first chapter.The book consists of a series of interviews with eminent investigators from a broad spectrum of scientific fields.
Allow me to end this blog by quoting a poem by Walt Whitman that early on led me, a practicing scientist, to recognize that there are experiences beyond the ordinary that allow us to know the world differently than we otherwise might. It's called, after the first line, When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer.
When I heard the learn's astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Not to everyone's liking, maybe, but there it is. If you have anything to add, and if you're alive and thinking you probably have, perhaps you'll let me know. If you can't otherwise reach me, try clicking on the word Introduction in the first blog, and a comment space will open up.
Until next time.
Allow me to end this blog by quoting a poem by Walt Whitman that early on led me, a practicing scientist, to recognize that there are experiences beyond the ordinary that allow us to know the world differently than we otherwise might. It's called, after the first line, When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer.
When I heard the learn's astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Not to everyone's liking, maybe, but there it is. If you have anything to add, and if you're alive and thinking you probably have, perhaps you'll let me know. If you can't otherwise reach me, try clicking on the word Introduction in the first blog, and a comment space will open up.
Until next time.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Introduction
Let me introduce myself. I'm David Taber, somewhat aged in a serene way, interested primarily in poetry, religion, philosophy, and above all, family, But this blog will rarely if ever concern family doings.
I want this blog to be a way for me to relieve myself of some of the issues that concern me and to learn your opinion of what I've written. Criticism is welcome unless it is vituperative, in which case don't bother to read this blog. The world is a glorious place, full of wonder but also of devilish evil and hurt. My interest is mostly in the wonder, the attitude that leaves you standing in awe looking at something beautiful or contemplating an idea that illustrates the utter magnificence of what it means to think. Art. music, poetry, and anything that makes me stop in wonder at the unusual is what I mean this blog to contain. Quotations from notable artists or intellectuals are always welcome; they could be yours. Pride is OK, if deserved. So let me know what you think. And if it's in a poetic form, all the better.
Until we meet again, at an interval yet to be determined.
adding this line
I want this blog to be a way for me to relieve myself of some of the issues that concern me and to learn your opinion of what I've written. Criticism is welcome unless it is vituperative, in which case don't bother to read this blog. The world is a glorious place, full of wonder but also of devilish evil and hurt. My interest is mostly in the wonder, the attitude that leaves you standing in awe looking at something beautiful or contemplating an idea that illustrates the utter magnificence of what it means to think. Art. music, poetry, and anything that makes me stop in wonder at the unusual is what I mean this blog to contain. Quotations from notable artists or intellectuals are always welcome; they could be yours. Pride is OK, if deserved. So let me know what you think. And if it's in a poetic form, all the better.
Until we meet again, at an interval yet to be determined.
adding this line
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