The transparent eye
Welcome to my first email newsletter (tentatively titled 'commonplace thoughts'.) I have a vague sense of a format as well as some tidbits pulled together that I've found interesting that I hope you also may also find interesting. Bear with me as I experiment with the amount of links, text, commentary, images, and other bits and bobs that can go into one of these.
To start with though, it might be useful to describe the reason why I wanted to do this.
Why a newsletter?
There's a lot of technology to chose from for sharing information today. Each avenue, however, guides both its producer and consumer into a different posture. Social media thrives on quick, short opinions, assertions, and rebuttals, trafficking in impression and towards a sense of exhibition. Blogs, newsletters, and emails (hopefully) guide a little more toward consideration.
Someone recently commented that the point of studying and learning was one not only of an increase in self-knowledge, but also a point towards sharing or creating more knowledge and wisdom. While I cannot claim any earth-shattering insight or esoteric knowledge, this newsletter at least gives me a place to think out loud and share things that either spur others to consider, find interesting or useful, or that help begin a conversation.
I welcome your feedback anytime. I probably won't have this long preamble in the future.
And with that, here are some of the things that caught my attention recently.
Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, & uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanished. I become a Transparent Eyeball - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Recently I discovered The Public Domain Review — a website dedicated to exploring works that have fallen into the public domain long ago. Reviews of older works can be interesting because they have the ability to discuss the cultural significance or larger impact of a work in a way contemporary reviews cannot. The image above is from a gentleman named Christopher Pearse Cranch, who illustrated some of Emerson's phrases from his book Nature. I find the images a charming way to ground poetic language to a visual representation.
Other interesting public domain finds include An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons written in 1768 about the maladies of people who overindulge in books, or a roughly 65 page poem about teeth and their diseases from the 1830s, which begins by invoking the imagery of Greek and Roman gods. Our modern dentists must not have enough free time if they aren't creating works like this.
Comment has a great essay on the 10 rules for passivists (not "pacifists"). For number nine in particular, Delilah and I were recently talking about rootedness, and how it allows both thinking and planning on a longer-term. Ultimately I think in order to have a sense of rootedness you also need a true community, which cannot be achieved by technological means alone. In fact, most technological solutions to the problem of community can actually make the problem worse.
Having just celebrated Easter, I found this link for the Netherland Bach Society doing a performance of the Easter Oratorio — it makes me wish our performance halls in America were smaller and more intimate.
Recently Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou passed away. I'd never heard of her until this article. Her solo piano work reminds me a little bit of Chopin, and has a good sense of the elegiac (an apt word I shamelessly appropriate from the New Yorker article) without sounding like American blues music.
How do you like listening to music, are you a corner, club, cathedral, or cocoon person?
Food for thought
Should you say 'please' and 'thank you' to voice assistants like Siri or Google Assistant? What about so-called 'AGI' (Artificial Generalized Intelligence) chat bots like ChatGPT? Is it bad if people do? Why or why not?
(I intend on doing a bit of research about this question in the coming weeks.)