Now we see you…
… now we don’t.
Discarded CCTV kit. Cambridge.
Quote of the Day
”It’s impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.”
- Jerome K. Jerome
He’s right. I can testify to it.
Apologies to Sylvia Beach
When I used this photograph of James Joyce on the day of publication of Ulysses I mistakenly named the woman in the picture as Harriet Weaver, when in fact it was Sylvia Beach who, among other things, published the novel!
It was a really stupid error on my part, and many thanks to the readers who gently pointed it out.
My explanation is the same as the one Samuel Johnson famously gave to the woman who asked him how he could have made the error of wrongly defining ‘pastern’ as ‘the knee of a horse’. “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance”, he replied.
As Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes puts it, when in a hole, stop digging.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Sinéad O’Connor | Raglan Road
A version I’ve just discovered of a favourite song.
Long Read of the Day
Old, Not Other
Fine Aeon essay by Kate Kirkpatrick & Sonia Kurds asking why we neglect and disdain the one vulnerable group we all eventually will join? And arguing that Simone de Beauvoir had an answer.
On Beauvoir’s view, most societies prefer to shut their eyes rather than see ‘abuses, scandals, and tragedies’ – they opt for the ease of accepting what is, instead of the self-scrutiny and struggle that is required to envision and enact what life could be. Speaking of her own society, she claims that it cared no more about orphans, young offenders or the disabled than it did about the old. However, what she finds astonishing about the latter case is that ‘every single member of the community must know that his future is in question; and almost all of them have close personal relationships with some old people’. So what explains this failure to face our future, to see the humanity in all human life?
The answer to the question is what Beauvoir called “bad faith”.
Worth reading just to see how the authors sketch it out.
My commonplace booklet
Cats with jobs Link
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