Getting to the super-personal plan
The Weekly Review: Vol VIII Issue 6
Hello fine folks!
Happy April 1st. I hope the first quarter of the year was enjoyable for you! It's been a busy quarter for me, especially the end, so a slightly shorter issue this time around.
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Getting to the super-personal plane
The thing I love most about the the writing of C.S. Lewis is his ability to take big abstract concepts and make them understandable. He does this quite well in most everything I've read of his. So when our 14 year old son starting having doubts and questions about the idea of a holy trinity, I turned to Mere Christianity.
It has been some years since I first read it, so I noted with interest what caught my attention when I was skimming over several section. In The Three-Personal God (the chapter where he addresses the concept of a triune deity), Lewis uses the illustration of lines and cubes and dimensions that helped me when I read the book for this first time.
The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings-just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal — something more than a person.
But this is what came off the page for me this time around.
And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal — something more than a person.
This comes back to the main point Lewis is making earlier in the chapter:
The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God.
What a great statement. Just as I cannot fully comprehend the concept of one God on three persons, I also cannot quite grasp how he dwells in me, and I in him, and we all get to share in his inheritance as children of God.
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Items of note
I haven't followed Craig's work as closely over the past half a year. But I enjoyed this recent essay on … ahem … looking closely at things. It's typical Craig Mod, well written words about something that isn't necessarily of interest to you.
By dint of pandemic stasis, I suspect we’ve all gotten better at closer looking. Perhaps you’ve noticed the subtle slant of the floor of the room in which you’ve been stuck for months on end, or the daily rhythms of that one old dude on your neighborhood block that you’ve now walked around a million times. Maybe you noticed how exhausted you are by video calls, but in noticing that you recognized that it’s really the audio delays and wonky noise cancellation that makes video so stressful.2 Perhaps you noticed how different countries handled the pandemic (how could you not), and from that you recognized the flaws and strengths of the varied responses, and in that the cracks in social systems that we hitherto took for granted.
He discusses artwork, cellular growth, and a few other seemingly unrelated topics. A fun read, overall.
How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
In a similar vein (kind of), I finally got around to finishing this lengthy guide by Andy Matuschak. It's primarily focused on how to write good prompts in order to help your future self learn as easily as possible using a spaced repetition routine.
However, when going through the article, I couldn't help notice the connection with Craig's article. Andy shares the importance of asking the right questions in your prompts:
[…] it’s hard to write good prompts on your first exposure to new ideas. You’re still developing a sense of which details are important and which are not—both objectively, and to you personally. You likely don’t know which elements will be particularly challenging to remember (and hence worth extra reinforcement). You may not understand the ideas well enough to write prompts which access their “essence”, or which capture subtle implications. And you may need to live with new ideas for a while before you can write prompts which connect them vibrantly with whatever really matters to you.
The exercise of writing questions for your future self necessitates that close looking that Craig talks about in his post.
Speaking of those two posts, I actually listened to them both on a recent run. I don't use Matter often, but when I do, it's nice option that have. That guide from Andy shows as a 54 min read in Instapaper, so the chances of me getting through that on my phone rhymes with grim and nun.
Anyway, the app has been maturing nicely, including an all-new use of voices. I still find myself getting lost in the flow of an article at times — it's hard to tell the weight of text. I find myself wondering as I run, “Was that a new section? A footnote?” You miss all the hierarchy in an app like this, but overall, I'm glad to use it every so often.
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Quote of the week
And perhaps the greatest danger posed to literature is not any newfangled technology or whiz-bang rearrangement of our synapses, but plain old human greed in its latest, greatest iteration: an online retailer incorporated in the same year The Gutenberg Elegies was published. In the last twenty-five years, Amazon has gorged on late capitalism’s values of ease and cheapness, threatening to monopolize not only the book world, but the world-world. In the face of such an insidious, omnivorous menace—not merely the tech giant, but the culture that created and sustains it—I find it difficult to disentangle my own fear about the future of books from my fear about the futures of small-town economies, of American democracy, of the earth and its rising seas.
Mairead Small Staid, Reading in the age of constant distraction
A quote I came across in Day One's On this day feature. It's from an article I read in 2019, but the sentiment seems even more needed today.
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Currently
Reading: Eye of the World, Robert Jordan. My recent foray into the Wheel of Time entry on Wikipedia got me to pick up the first book in the series once again. I'm not sure I'm fully committed to reading the entire set of 14 books, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how fresh and solid and enjoyable this book is despite my having read it at least 10 times in my life.
Watching: With the rise in so many streaming services, my wife's propensity for finding new docuseries is alive and well. Her most recent is The Boonies, which follows a collection of unique individuals who live off-grid across various locations in the US. It's not my usual sort of thing, but I've found myself caught up at times during a few laundry folding sessions.
Listening: I've enjoyed going back to the Stranger Things soundtracks lately. The nostalgia vibes that the show nailed so well are strong when I put these on.
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Until next time 👋