An Ancient Student's Lament

Cuneiform, cuneiform
How'd that get to be the norm?
You Akkadians, Sumerians and Elamites, 
That's no way to write!

I say it's just a batch
Of silly chickenscratch!
Incising marks in clay is bad --
Have you never heard of a legal pad?

The Israelites across the sand
Put things down in a handsome hand.
But I can't help it, I'm just averse
To reading and writing in reverse!

I'll take a ship with sails unfurled
To Western lands, a whole new world!
Yes, I can only dream of it:
To finally write in Palmer script!

Here's To You

We went only to find an inexpensive bookcase for the basement, to give the homeless books in stacks and bags a more dignified place to be.  And we did find one, just the right size, and on half-price sale.  Then things aligned even better when there was a break in the awful weather to load it up and drive all of an entire block home.  This estate sale was right behind us!

I don't recall another estate sale previously in our neighborhood despite the fact that people are often moving in and out, more than half the time due to age.  Even without exterior maintenance to worry about, keeping up with a home and your other needs gets to be too much at some point.  We hear some have passed away after a stay in a retirement home; others we wonder about.  But in this case, we had never even seen the lady who lived there behind us or knew who she was -- for twenty years.  And in that block of four townhomes, we have never seen two of the others either.  It is somewhat eerie.

We asked the sale managers about whose bookcase we were hauling away, and they told us she was widowed in 2000, her husband was a pretty prominent local attorney, and she had children and grandchildren who apparently did not want much of the possessions of a long lifetime.  I surmised they had lived in a bigger home at one time and entertained regularly, based on the large amount of quality glassware and several complete sets of fine china.  You can't take much with you to the retirement home, but it must have been stressful to leave most everything behind.

It was sad to see the late husband's personalized Penn State mug, dated 1954, among the ceramic items. You would think one of the family would have taken it, at least, as a remembrance.  After seeing that, I paused, looked around further, and saw a set of four coupe glasses with green stems, in new condition.  I don't know what the sale managers do with everything that wouldn't sell, but I knew what would be done with them.  They were going to come home with us, to remember the elegant life of people we'd never met and never would.  Lives should not disappear and be forgotten so quickly.
           

Take It To The Limit?

"...the worst are full of passionate intensity"

--T. S. Eliot

Coincidental to this weekend's gun-nut riot in Virginia, I've been reading about, and the writings and sermons of, the 17th-century Puritans.  While trying to parse their reasoning so colorfully expressed with great unreasoning abandon, they still seem to me to be truly frightening.  And as we can today see, they may have exchanged their tall hats and wide white collars for baseball caps and t-shirts scrawled with crazy stuff, they're still with us.

Those Puritans were rightly outraged by their contemporary kings (James I & II, Charles I, and Louis XIV) claiming divine right to do whatever they wished to anyone.  But their furious reaction was about as useful to mankind as the Nazis' later face-off with the Reds.  For all the self-righteous noise and bloodshed, extremism is the wrecking ball of history.  But like an eternal pendulum, it swings from one extreme to another over the centuries, spending only a brief time in the calm middle.  

And extremist doctrines, which inspire such fanatical crowds and movements, are usually based on pretty much nothing.  Think of Ayn Rand's system of "Objectivism," which is nothing at all but a mirror image of the "collectivist," or communist, dogma it opposes.  Each far end of that pendulum's swing is just so, a false opposition, a big con, just a mirror image.  This is the foolishness of believing in ALL OR NOTHING.  So why is such a dangerous approach so attractive to so many?

I recently read a twelve-page summary of a paper presented at an academic conference.  It tried to explain people's responses to public stimuli in media and their behaviors.  But it was all statistics and groupings; I came away wondering why personality types were not considered.  Nature or nurture predominate in some people, but for most it's a mixture,  And we've found how much brain chemistry controls that nature.  So you inherit that and usually will believe and act like your family, group and community.  Even in cases where outwardly it looks like you do not.  That explains Reagan Democrats, for one example: a basically conservative nature from rural roots despite the urban work setting and union card.

So one thing is pretty constant in human nature, and that is: people go too far.  Some would say that's the spirit that leads people to explore and discover, but think about the bodies and trash on Mt. Everest and the destruction of the New World's population and forests.  Not that we all should stay home in our huts and do nothing, but don't do 85 in a pickup truck on an icy road, either.