A plant of slow growth
This, dear reader, in my opinion, is NOT how books should be organized
If you own a number of books, how do you organize them? I thought it was interesting to read about how 11 different writers organize their personal libraries. Personally I like Francis Bacon's categories of Memory, Reason, and Imagination, though it does sometimes make it difficult to decide where things should go. For a book about historical philosophy, is it memory or reason? What about you, do you have a method of organizing books you use?
I've finished writing up my summary of the next part of The Seven Lamps of Architecture for my "seven lamps project". This chapter is the first lamp: The Lamp of Sacrifice. Delilah gently reminded me that I didn't give enough background about John Ruskin, or the book in general, so I tried to frame that a bit more in this post. For anyone with a software development interest, I'm curious whether and how you see any of this as analogous to software architecture. I haven't yet done the connection part, as I'm leaving it for once all the summaries are complete.
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence—true friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo & withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
The above quote is excerpted from a letter from George Washington to his nephew Bushrod Washington as part of a set of advice as the later goes off to study law in Philadelphia. I think the idea of friendship as a "plant of slow growth" is an interesting one. It brings to my mind the idea of something that both can't be rushed, and also can't be neglected. Gardening is a humbling passtime to me because despite all the effort a gardener may make, the plant may still wither. Of course, sometimes the opposite is true which is that despite the neglect of gardening skill, a plant may flourish. Truly, friendship at least partially overlaps with providence.
Similar to Andrew Kleon, I love it when movies have a "notebook MacGuffin" (to borrow his phrase), and I always find it fascinating what the filmmakers decide to put into the notebook, or how they structure it. Pausing a movie to check out the marginalia of a notebook and admire the doodles and sketches makes me want to have a notebook in the same vein. The Uncharted series of video games did a great job with these notebooks, forcing you to reference their craftsmanship in-game to solve puzzles (albeit not tremendously difficult ones), and I always appreciated games that were so unapologetically difficult as to force me to write down tidbits in in my own notebook in order to solve things (looking at you Riven).
Coming up soon, I'm taking an asynchronous course on Aristotle's Organon through the Lyceum Institute, which constitutes his Topics, Categories, and Posterier Analytics (among a few others like De Anima and Physics). If there are interesting pieces I may end up throwing them into this newsletter or a blog post. During the course though, I'll need something not-quite-so-heavy to read so that I can unwind a little bit, probably in the fiction category. Do you have any recommendations for me?
I've been enjoying the soundtrack to Kids on the Slope which was produced by Yoko Kanno. It's some great energetic jazz and includes a cute jazzy version of My Favorite Things that Aveline likes.