commonplace book
In the following excerpts, I've often highlighted bits that speak most forcefully to me. But those bits (probably) aren't called out in the original text.
Taking architecture seriously leads us to the proper treatment of tiny details, to an understanding of the unfolding whole, and to an understanding—mystical in part—of the entity that underpins that wholeness. The path of architecture thus leads inexorably towards a renewed understanding of God
A gift that cannot move loses its giftedness.
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It was believed that each man had his idios daemon, his personal spirit which could be cultivated and developed.…
… in Rome it was the custom on one’s birthday to offer a sacrifice to one’s own genius. A man didn’t just receive gifts on his birthday, he would also give something to his guiding spirit. Respected in this way, the genius made one “genial” – sexually potent, artistically creative, and spiritually fertile.…
The genius or daemon comes to us at birth. It carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we choose whether or not to accept, which means we choose whether or not to labor in its service. For, again, [though we have need of it,] the genius [also] has need of us. … the spirit that brings us our gifts finds its eventual freedom only through our sacrifice, and those who do not reciprocate the gifts of their genius will leave it in bondage when they die.…
An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his daemon.
* * * * *
We do not deal in commodities when we wish to initiate or preserve ties of affection…
Situations calling for gifts are exactly those in which we find inappropriate the detachment of analytic deliberation…
… when a decision involves something that clearly cannot be priced, we refrain from submitting our actions to the calculus of cost-benefit analysis …
* * * * *
The Yakut refused to believe … that somewhere in the world people could die of hunger, when it was so easy to go and share a neighbor’s meal …
* * * * *
The great materialists, like these automobile executives, are those who have extended the commodity form of value into the human body, while the great spiritual figures, like the Buddha, are those who have used their own bodies to extend the worth of gifts just as far.
By never trusting, cynics never lose. They also never win. Refusing to trust anyone is like playing poker by folding every hand before it begins. …
The cynical voice … claims that we already know everything about people. But humanity is far more beautiful and complex than a cynic imagines, the future far more mysterious than they know.
Prayer is not a secret code whereby persons can get God to do their biddings. … Yes, Jesus says “Ask, and you will receive.” But he also says not to worry because our heavenly Father already knows what we need before we ask.
So there are two things to say. First, God wants us to ask him for whatever we need or want. He wants us to open up ourselves to him, quite regardless of whether our wants are what they ought to be. I might feel my heart is in a rather bad place and I’d rather not tell God what I’m desiring at the moment. This will not do. Prayer is opening up to God whatever it is that is within us.
But God will not give us bad things, even if we ask for them. Why then does he want us nonetheless to ask? Because (this is the second thing to say) prayer is not an exchange of information. It is, instead, a movement into intimacy with God. And closeness with God is the point. It is also, I suppose, the deepest desire of our hearts, restless, as Augustine said, until they rest in God himself. All our words or actions in prayer, from the thoughts of our hearts to the gathered sharing in the gifts of God at the Holy Table, aim not at getting something from God but at being with God, coming to know his heart.
Victor Lee Austin
July 17, 2023 💬
The truth is, men are more inclined to avoid the death of the flesh, which they cannot avoid, than the death of the spirit; that is, they shrink more from the punishment than from what deserves the punishment. Few, after all, care—or care very much—about not sinning; but they make a great fuss about not dying, though it is in fact unobtainable.
Saint Augustine, De Trinitate IV.15💬
A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.
There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God. […]
Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification.
Simone Wiel 💬Good judgement comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.
Will Rogers 💬There is no formula for success – you just begin and then you continue.
Cameron Esposito 💬We can only try to be our best selves and do the best we can. Else why get up?
Vivienne Westwood 💬It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
Genuine liberalism ... takes for granted that people living in a free and open society of any meaningful size or complexity will have profound, wrenching disagreements about fundamental issues, and that the job of the state and of civic institutions (including the schools) is not to scrub religions, political platforms, and creeds of anything potentially offensive but rather to create a political space in which community life can be lived peaceably....
Mature people understand that living with fundamental disagreements is part of being a good citizen: a good Christian citizen, a good Jewish citizen, a good Muslim citizen, a good atheist citizen, etc. But without that political liberalism, what you end up with is either constant bitter conflict or some kind of (ruthlessly) enforced theological and social liberalism, one that tries to deal with the disagreement by eliminating it rather than by respectfully conceding its legitimacy.
While we have enjoyed decades worth of reinforcement of the formal structures of political liberalism—thanks in no small part to the conservative legal movement’s successful advocacy of religious freedom, freedom of speech, and a robust interpretation of the constitutional bulwark of our civil rights—we have lost some of the civic and cultural buttresses of that liberalism that are necessary virtues of citizenship.
As for their parts in the drama, nothing could now alter the fact that they [the disciples] had been stupid, cowardly, faithless, and in many ways singularly unhelpful; but they did not allow any morbid and egotistical remorse to inhibit their joyful activities in the future.
Now, indeed, they could go out and “do something” about the problem of sin and suffering. They had seen the strong hands of God twist the crown of thorns into a crown of glory, and in hands as strong as that they knew themselves safe. They had misunderstood practically everything Christ had ever said to them, but no matter: the thing made sense at last, and the meaning was far beyond anything they had dreamed.
We look at our perishability without illusion: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But it is a preparation for glory that as Paul says, “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Cor. 15:49).
Through embracing our limitations, we can release the death grip with which we clutch youth and earthly glory and reach out toward the promise of glory that comes through the cross.
I'm always racing through poetry as though it were prose, worried about getting the literal sense right, like a tourist sprinting past priceless architecture to catch a bus.
Philip Christman, in an interview with Alan Jacobs 💬
N.B. – I often find myself doing the same thing. And I love poetry.
Works of art equip us for action. And the range of actions for which they equip us is very nearly as broad as the range of human action itself. The purposes of art are the purposes of life.
Ray Oldenberg
The Great Good Place 💬
* * * * *
Parker J. Palmer believes that the soul is shy and that asking another person to immediately share something very vulnerable can scare them off. Connecting while engaged in third things is a gentler way to communicate.
Many people have fond memories of special conversations that transpired while they were doing the dishes with a parent or going fishing with a friend. This third thing they do together makes it easy and comfortable for them to converse more deeply, often without even making eye contact.
Alan Jacobs
Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition, 15 Jan 2024 💬
-- attributed to Carl Jung 💬
Joshua Rothman
“Becoming You” - The New Yorker, 03 Oct 2022 💬
David French
“Welcome to Our New ‘Bespoke Realities'” - New York Times, 30 Nov 2024 💬
Andrew Christiansen, paraphrasing Carl Braaten
Covenant blog 💬
Two by David Brooks
Over the Trump years, we’ve learned how easy it is to anesthetize one’s moral circuits... You start by lying about yourself, and pretty soon you’re lying to yourself. 14 Sept 2023
[Biden] has his faults ... but I’ve always thought: Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon. Give me a leader whose moral compass generally sends him in the right direction. 6 Oct 2023 💬
SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
- People who dig a lot learn how to dig less.
- I believe it was Willa Cather who said -- and I quote approximately -- that elsewhere the land has the sky for a ceiling, but here in New Mexico the sky has the land for its floor.
- Václav Havel has written, "Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out."
- Grateful for the quiet flow of vespers that had nudged me into acknowledging my weary state, I'd become more willing to do what my body asked of me: let the day suffice, with all its joys and failings, its little triumphs and defeats.
- One of the things I like most about monastic people is the respect they show for the holy hours of sunrise and sunset.
John Newton 💬
he called them, and they said, ‘Here we are!’
They shone with gladness for him who made them.
Stephanie Zacharek
“We Still Don’t Know How to Judge Great Art by Bad Men” 💬
Mark Edmundson
“Truth Takes a Vacation,” Harpers, January 2023 💬