A Prisoner, a Museum, a Man Getting Old
When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he passed the time by making a map of Egypt.
I wrote about how Le Corbusier’s idea of a Musée à croissance illimitée makes me want to create my own, but in text and images.
You are in your sixties, even fifties, and you are walking by a shop window, or in some area in which a security monitor shows a scan of the line you are in. You sneak a look. You see someone in the space where you should be but you do not recognize the interloper. Then, after an unseemly lag of a second or two you are forced to remake your own acquaintance; it seems you no longer know yourself at first sight. The you behind your eyes believes you look like you did twenty years ago, and it assumes that dated image is the real you, even if recent photos tell a horror story. But photos seldom confirmed your self-image, even when you were young, so you can dismiss the latest batch. In high school you accepted only one or two out of fifty on the contact sheet as satisfactory, though none of your friends or family, when asked, could distinguish the person in the photos you thought reasonably flattering from the many in which you looked like a total doofus. To them they were all indistinguishably you. They were not even putting you on, as you vainly believed, when they thought the best picture was one you felt the most loathsome.
Now, at age sixty-five, you supply yourself with the appearance St. Augustine says you will be accorded at Judgment Day, when you will rise with your thirty-year-old body and looks, which approximates Paul’s making your resurrected body match Christ’s: “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4.13). The resurrection of the dead heels to our vanity.
— William Ian Miller, Losing It. So glad I’m still young.
From the new book by Stephen Ornes, Math Art.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: How is it that I still have committee meetings??
- Music: Back in Ambient World — trying out various ambient-music-generating apps, none of which, so far, are great.
- Reading: Plutarch’s Lives
- Food: I wonder if I could ever get tired of tacos?
- Drink: Now that summer is here in Texas, I’m enjoying the bright citrusy goodness of a traditional Sidecar.