We may credit Bob Dylan with inventing both folk rock and country rock. A major contribution to latter genre was The Byrd's 1968 Sweetheart of the Rodeo, their sixth album. Where there's country, there's Christianity.
Pretty Boy Floyd. The old Woody Guthrie tune.
Reader Josh E. asks for tips on how to get a dissertation done. Here is how I did it.
……………………………………
I had an odd schedule in those days. I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight. I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station. I got off and hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass. Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my apartment mate, Quentin Smith, and was in bed by four again. That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78 every single day holidays included.
That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential. I told one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense." She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation." Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours." True enough. And I still do. I don't get up at midnight any more. I get up at 2 AM. I've become a slacker.
One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night. The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog. A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it difficult to get the door open. But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged. I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.
Addendum. An excerpt from Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday:
So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.
Has Islam played any role in the civilizing of the peoples in the lands where it has held sway? Yes, of course. But when we consider Islamic penology, it is positively barbaric compared to that of the West. Of the five great religions, Islam seems to have had the least civilizing effect.
Here:
Iran’s judicial system remains among the most brutal in the world. Iran executes more people per capita than any other country and carries out more total executions than any nation but China (whose population is over 17 times the size of Iran’s). Tehran continues to target political dissidents and ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities for execution. Capital punishment can be—and often is—carried out against juvenile offenders and for nonviolent crimes.
Here:
In Somalia, a 13-year-old girl was buried up to her neck and stoned to death by 50 men in a stadium with 1000 spectators. After her death it was revealed she had been raped by three men and she was arrested after trying to report the rape to militants who control the city.
Here: A graphic that details how people, including women and children, are stoned to death. Imagine a death by stoning that takes two hours. Physicians (under duress) are on hand to determine when enough stoning has taken place. You wouldn't want to waste good stones on a dead girl.
Gruesome video of amputation. The actual amputation of a hand begins around 1:30. Watch it, especially you leftist reality deniers.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – Islamic fundamentalists want to impose sharia law on the entire world, not just where they live. They believe the law is sacred and just and the best way to preserve order.
In the video, two thieves are condemned, and they each provide a taped confession. Finally, their hands are cut off in a semi-medical environment. During the procedure the men are awake and fully conscious. Each forced amputation takes nearly a minute and there's blood and bone, naturally.
These are not Islamic extremists, but rather this is how Islam is practiced in many parts of the world with the full sanction of the law. This is the face of Islam. Although this punishment has been carried out under a militant force, it also happens in sharia countries with the police as opposed to a local militia carrying out the sentence.
In Islam, the right hand is cut off. This is because in that culture the left is unclean, reserved for sanitary reasons. Without their right hand, these people will be compelled to handle things with their left, including their food. It's a subtle form of permanent psychological punishment that goes beyond the simplicity of amputation.
Just as these people punish their neighbors, imagine how they might treat you, the non-Muslim. You are an atheist in their eyes and worthy of far more gruesome punishment.
Is every Muslim a terrorist? No, but most terrorists are Muslims. Islam is the main source of terrorism in the world today.
Are there Buddhist terrorists? Yes, a few. But their terrorism is accidental to their being Buddhists: it does not flow from Buddhist teaching. Quite the contrary is the case with Islam.
Were cruel and unusual punishments ever inflicted by law in the West? Yes, of course. But to bring this up is anachronistic and irrelevant.
Is every Muslim a barbarian who supports the practices detailed above? No, but Muslim lands are lands where these barbaric practices take place. And the good Muslims have had no effect in reversing them. (Turkey under Ataturk's influence an exception. But did you ever see Midnight Express? I saw it the night before leaving for a year in Turkey!)
Is every leftist an apologist for radical Islam and its barbaric practices? No, but leftism is the main source of support of radical Islam in the West. The "unholy alliance" — to cop a title from a book by David Horowitz — between leftism and Islam is explored in my Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam and What Explains the Left's Toleration of Radical Islam?
Are some Muslim immigrants to the West willing to assimilate and accept the West's values? Yes, but they are in a small minority.
Is there a right to immigrate? No. Immigration is at the discretion of the host country and must benefit the host country.
Is there any net benefit to the West of Muslim immigration? I'll leave this question for the reader to ponder. As you ponder it, bear in mind that immigrants bring their culture with them. (Sicilians brought the mafia.) You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.
There is an analog of contagion in the spread of attitude. Moods are socially transmissible. Which do you carry? Which do you avoid? Voluntary social self-quarantine is something to consider.
Thus spoke the introvert.
Remove every Democrat!
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 177, from the entry of 30 September 1940:
The best defense against a love affair is to tell yourself over and over again till you are dizzy: "this passion is simply stupid; the game is not worth the candle." But a lover always tends to imagine that this time it is the real thing; the beauty of it lies in the persistent conviction that something extraordinary, something incredible, is going to happen to us.
Who among us has not been played for a fool by the illusions of romantic love? Our restless hearts seek from the finite what the finite cannot provide. This is quite the predicament for those for whom the Infinite has withdrawn behind the veils of nonentity or sunk beneath the waters of oblivion.
"Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes."
It is sweet to do nothing, but only if if the inactivity comes like the caesura in a line of poetry or the punctuation in a sentence of prose or the rest in a piece of music. Inactivity extended stultifies.
Old age is the sovereign cure for romantic folly and I sincerely recommend it to the young and foolish. Take care to get there. Philosophers especially should want to live long so as to study life from all temporal angles.
I fanciulli trovano il tutto nel nulla, gli uomini il nulla nel tutto.
The child finds everything in nothing; the man nothing in everything.
A strange vibe supervened the other morning during a leisurely meander over the local hills. It was as if the world's volume had been dialed down. Things had become calmer and quieter. Or so it seemed. "An upside of the shutdown," I said to myself.
The typical American's life is frantic, frenetic, and hyperkinetic. For any really good reason? What's the rush? Quo vadis? Whither goest thou, thoughtless hustler?
Meditation the same morning was long and unusually peaceful. The mind-works ground to a halt. I did not want to rise from the mat. After a 70-minute session I did. I reckon that fine long sitting had something to do with the dial-down vibe.
I will speculate further on the improvement of the social atmosphere and its causes. There is an analog of contagion in the spread of attitude.
I do not hide from myself the fact that some will die of the Chinese disease and that many, many more will have their lives and livelihoods wrecked by the politically-motivated draconian measures of the overzealous.
But why not appreciate whatever good presents itself in any situation?
Reader RP submits the following aphorisms for evaluation:
A very good thing about not having anyone to talk to is not having to talk to anyone.
A very good thing about not having any place to go to is not having to go anyplace.
The evil of loneliness becomes the good thing of solitude when one makes use of all the time on one's hands by thinking and loving God.
Do they meet your standard for aphorisms?
Brevity and economy of expression are marks of a good aphorism. Hackneyed phrases such as "time on one's hands" ought to be avoided. I would rewrite your first and third like this:
The good of not having anyone to talk to is not having to talk to anyone.
and
The alleviation of loneliness is not in society but in solitude with Him Who Is.
or
Amor dei transmutes the evil of loneliness into the good of solitude.
A good aphorism ought to be brief, true, original, satisfying in form, and universal in content. Example:
A man sits as many risks as he runs. (Thoreau)
That is a model aphorism. You say it is not true as it stands? But add some such qualification as 'in many cases' and you remove its literary merit. Besides, anyone intelligent enough to understand it will take the qualification as tacitly present. Even better, perhaps, is
Some men are born posthumously. (Nietzsche)
The proposition this expresses is true without qualification. Here is one from E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (New York: Seaver Books, 1983, translated from the French by Richard Howard):
Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities. (163)
Brilliant. Philosophy, as Plato remarks (Theaetetus St. 155) and Aristotle repeats (Metaphysics 982b10), is about wonder, perplexity. Fruitful philosophical conversation, rare as it is and must be given the woeful state of humanity, is therefore a consolidation and appreciation of problems and aporiai, much more than an attempt to convince one’s interlocutor of something. Another from Cioran:
Nothing makes us modest, not even the sight of a corpse. (87)
Outstanding! But this is bad:
Time, accomplice of exterminators, disposes of morality. Who, today, bears a grudge against Nebuchadnezzar? (178)
This is quite bad, and not become of its literary form, but because the thought is false. If enough time passes, people forget about past injustices. True. But how does it follow that morality is abrogated? Cioran is confusing two distinct propositions. One is that the passage of time disposes of moral memories, memories of acts just and unjust. The other is that the passage of time disposes of morality itself, rightness and wrongness themselves, so that unjust acts eventually become neither just not unjust. The fact that Cioran’s aphorism conflates these two propositions is enough to condemn it, quite apart from the fact that the second proposition is arguably false. A good aphorism cannot merely be clever; it must also express an insight. An insight, of course, is an insight only if it is true. Nor is an aphorism good if it merely betrays a mental quirk of its author. For then it would be of merely psychological or biographical interest.
An aphorism is not a proverb such as
Aus den Augen, aus den Sinn
Out of sight, out of mind.
or
Neue Besen kehren gut
A new broom sweeps clean.
A proverb is a distillation of folk wisdom; an aphorism is the product of an individual.
An aphorism is not a maxim such as
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Maxims are prescriptive; aphorisms descriptive. They are grammatically declarative rather than imperative or optative or cohortative.
Must an aphorism be a standalone? The following makes a good aphorism even though it is part of a wider context:
Life is a business that doesn't cover its costs. (Schopenhauer)
Finally, Karl Kraus on the art of the aphorism:
Beim Wort Genommen, p. 132:
Einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn man es kann, ist oft schwer. Viel leichter ist es, einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn mann es nicht kann.
It is often difficult to write an aphorism, even for those with the ability. It is much easier when one lacks the ability. (tr. BV)
This life's a fling
Why do we care?
Why do we cling?
The play is the thing!
Sense and matter
Mind and meat
Together in Man
Mystery complete!
Not authentic haiku?
Screw you!
Syllabification seventeen.
A philosopher sympathetic to my views asked me this question a year or two ago. I said that I used to, but no longer.
Now why might that be despite an enlarged readership in a time of increasing political anger? One possible explanation is that we are now so 'siloed' into our positions that we read only our own.
Speaking of silos, a Mormon friend of a non-Mormon friend of mine purchased an old ICBM silo in Arizona. Now that's one serious prepper. Moderate in all things, including moderation, I keep my prepping within the bounds of sense. And I read everything. Nihil humanum, et cetera.
Companion post: Word of the Day: Oubliette
