I can definitely say I'm tired today. After spending 5 hours cutting though a combination of snow and ice only to have my car unable to climb a snowy hill, combined with a 2-hour trip on foot to the grocery store, I can appreciate various things that I often overlook in a new way.

1. SUV's. As much as I don't like the cost of gasoline, t'were the hummer-owners who go the last laugh today. I can see why many families consider the big van / SUV a 'must have'. City-dwellers have a different problem, but if you're in the suburbs or beyond, it makes a big difference owning or knowing someone who owns an SUV. Most of the time it's not much of a benefit, but in a snowstorm like this it is invaluable.
2. Snow blowers. Probably not the best use of gasoline. However, 30 inches of snow over any significant area (not to mention a repetition thereof) moves beyond what I think I could handle with a shovel. Walking through town made me thankful they have 'em.
3. Refrigerators and dehydrated/dry goods. Dehydrated stuff isn't as good for you. But then again, toting 50 lbs a few miles in the snow isn't either, probably. I'd choose dry goods over miserable hikes any day. Likewise for the icebox; fresh is nice but there are only so many hours in the day...
4. Rock salt. I don't like what it does to runoff (or snow) - makes it all dirty and nasty - but man it is nice to have when your house faces the north. Iced up walkway? Not anymore. Compressed snow/ice? Breaks it in a couple of hours.
5. Being young. Seriously though, if I were a bit older, this might not have been a possible day. Youth is good for something, it seems.
6. Progressive shoveling. You think, 'Well, I don't have to go anywhere this weekend...' but really, unless you are a hermit, you will need to leave some time before the snow melts. Progressive shoveling (shoveling every few inches) makes the work lighter and frankly, keeps you from maddening idleness. That's a double plus.
7. Internet, email, phones. Being in contact when you can't otherwise be in contact? You win this round, internet and phones.
8. Living on a main road. Sure, getting snow plowed into your car is trouble, but actually getting the road plowed? Can't complain about that.
9. Having a snow-worthy car. Whether it is because my tires are actually not all-weather or because my car is too light, I can't be sure. Regardless, it would be nice if a half-inch of snow did not stop me entirely from moving. Maybe... snow chains for my car? IS that too retro?

I'm sure there are others. Also, I can't help but enjoy the photo opportunities. Now if we could only resume our usual schedules... but that won't happen. We're getting another storm in a few days.

This will probably make you snooze, but I found it curious nonetheless:

The first of Boethius's four subdivisions was similitude, used of the case of the noun ‘animal’ said of both real human beings and pictured human beings. Medieval logicians seem to have been totally unaware of the fact that the Greek word used by Aristotle was genuinely polysemous, meaning both animal and image, and they explained the extended use of ‘animal’ in terms of a likeness between the two referents — a likeness which had nothing to do with the significate of the term ‘animal’, which picks out a certain kind of nature, but which was nonetheless more than metaphorical in that the external shape of the pictured object does correspond to that of the living object. ... [bold mine. -ed]

What it looks like happened is that in Aristotle's time a person and an image of that person may have been thought to be in some strong sense the same. As if things containing one's image were a part of one's body. By the time of the medieval logicians, the original sense - that is to say, not the definition itself but the way in which the definition is meant - was lost. Maybe unable to process the complications of this view, (recall superstitions about paintings and photographs) it was in some way discarded. The notion of similitude in analogy seems to have lost a lot of power inadvertently - perhaps not entirely in this fashion, but being ignorant of no more than their teachers and their interpretations of the often difficult Aristotle and the other Philosophers, it may have taken hold.

To wit, the analogic method became a process of identifying similarities between external shapes - and while the deeper sense of shared identity through form still persisted, it seems like for most Westerners who are not superstitious it became implicit and unconscious.

The superstitious aspect of this idea probably relates to a misunderstanding of soul, how it is the 'anima' of someone can be present in images of them, but yet this would pose no threat to them. It is in the same way that a projector of light can come to no real harm by attacks on its projection.

It was quite a profoundly amazing night. I suppose there are some of us who are charmed by a mere blanket of white powder, but I think there is something beautiful about a night which is as bright as twilight, where the reflections of any lights are dispersed and brighten the landscape rather evenly. I recall that the Eskimos had a large number of words for snow - and the remarkable difference between the snow tonight and the snow a few days ago is the way it gripped things. This snow was extraordinarily sticky - grabbing and holding on the edges of things and again to itself so long as it remained frozen. The result was that trees became bedecked with white and their branches looked like the veins in a complex, gigantic ice-leaf. The snow did not just rest on top of the branches (which is usual even with very powdery snow) but clumped about every appendage - twig and bough alike.

Granted, the fact that we don't often get snow around here makes me actually care - New Englanders don't share my passion - but then again, this is more than likely due to the fact that a 2-3 foot blanket of snow contains so many different types that you don't get an experience of one sort of snow so much as an experience of a lot of snow that needs to be removed.

Snow adds an extra, exquisite (and perhaps guilty) pleasure it did not once have: jokes about global warming.

Sniffing around yesterday I found this: 'Welcome to the Plutocracy':

...they voluntarily threw out restrictions against corporate funding of campaigns, restrictions that date back to 1907 and have been upheld by every court since then...

While it seems worrying, really all it does is allow corporations to burn more cash into the mass media for political campaigns - neither of which concern me greatly. Consider:

Just as traditional media conditioned the audience to be passive consumers — first of commercial messages, then of products — the traditional organization conditioned employees to be obedient executors of bureaucratically disseminated work orders. Both are forms of broadcast: the few dictating the behavior of the many. The broadcast mentality isn't dead by any means. It's just become suicidal.

In contrast, the Internet invites participation. ...

From something I've read far too late.

I think the court may be being partisan. But I think it's futile. The more people use the internet, the more fractious they become; the more mocking of mass-packaged anything. There are still some bastions - people who lack the will or anger (it seems to be a big factor on the internet) to resist marketing. But I think that is slowly changing. And that is the cause of our recession.

An interesting thing to ponder:

It is to be hoped that this book reaffirms the worth of implicit communication; not everything that needs to be said needs to be said outright. Some things, indeed, cannot be directly told: like happiness which ‘writes white’ they vanish when put into words.

I have often thought fun is the same way. "I don't believe in fun," see, that is to say, fun is implicit. It is the white space - much like slack - which must surround all of the speaking, working, doing. The pursuit of fun, entertainment, happiness is a circular pursuit: the dog's tail. Slack works the same way - you cannot 'seek' slack. A slack seeker is called a slacker. You must have some slack, or like an over-stretched rubber band - you break. You cannot avoid it; you must not be without it. Likewise if things are not entertaining, we lose interest. But if our own entertainment is the purpose for which we are doing something - anything - it becomes vanity.

Or so I'm boldly claiming.

About implicit things - we may be transmitting memes we are unaware of - implicit from those who taught us, implicit in us, and implicit in the recipient. Know thyself, indeed!

Socrates once said, 'Know thyself'. This is the goal of metaphysics, to think about the thinker. To do so requires thinking about other things such as, 'What is a thought? What is being? What is man? What is nature? What is God?' To some, the self is nothing more than a conglomeration of parts - to 'know thyself' would amount to no more than mapping each part of their body, what it does, and how it acts. But the self is quite obviously not a matter of a particular combination of parts - as Dr. Frankenstein discovers.

Enter the Bard, who places on the tongue of the image-conscious, worldly-wise Polonius:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!

We could talk about what Polonius is meant by William to mean by this, and we can also talk about what the platitude he utters actually means, given its proper context. However, this same concept rears its head in various other places, also perhaps taking on the quality of a platitude. What can we make of the phrase, 'Believe in yourself'? (Is this to mean we ought to have faith that we exist?)

On the face, it just appears to be a platitude expressing a vanilla sentiment of self-esteem or self-confidence, i.e, 'cheer up, you can do it!' However, I've begun to suspect that this is not the only thing this statement means, In the animated feature, 'The Cat Returns', the heroine is repeatedly told by the Baron, an animate statue of a baron, to 'believe in yourself'. In the context of the film she has little need for self-confidence; she is not really a failure - other than at not getting up in time or having much direction in life - and the end of the story does not find her getting up the confidence to ask out the guy that she has a crush on.

We are told that even ordinary pleasure is in essence, painful, because its coming creates a remembrance of its future cessation. We know it will cease, and this pains us. A terrific example of how this is, is in W.B. Yeats, "He Remembers Forgotten Beauty":

WHEN my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God's eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.

There is both a thought of that which is gone, i.e. of things past, and of things which are going to pass, 'For hours when all must fade like dew.'

This poem is truly 'Indigo'!

In a post some time ago, Aaron Taylor references Humphrey Carter, speaking of the 'Tweed' style among Lewis, Chesterton and co.

This preference for plain masculine clothing was in part perhaps a reaction to the excessive dandyism and implied homosexuality of the ‘aesthetes’, who had first made their mark on Oxford in the age of Wilde and whose successors lingered on in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties, affecting delicate shades of garment and ambiguous nuances of manner. Theirs was a way of life of which Tolkien and the majority of his friends would have none; hence their almost exaggerated preference for tweed jackets, flannel trousers, nondescript ties, solid brown shoes that were built for country walks, dull-coloured raincoats and hats, and short hair. Tolkien’s manner of dress also reflected some of his positive values, his love of everything that was moderate and sensible and unflorid and English. But beyond that his clothes gave no idea of the delicate and complex inner nature of the man who wore them.

I was reminded of this when reading 'Manliness: The Baby and the Bathwater"

Dressing and grooming well. It seems like every time we post an article on dressing or grooming on the site, we get an angry complaint from a reader who wants to know what haircuts or suits have to do with manliness. These men have forgotten something that their grandfathers knew very well.

Whenever a person wants to seriously do anything, he or she has to make a commitment - expressed usually in the form of time - to doing that thing. Usually we do this when we're inspired - led by some kind of spirit anyway - about that activity. No less with this medium or my poetry. I have found the most effective path is to do a little bit very frequently; the innate resistance to making efforts that arises on days one is tired is far reduced, and the habit of doing the thing is more easily established if it is done more frequently.

Every once in awhile we run into the 'roadblock'. Writer's block is a kind of this sort of thing - and a reason why there are so many 'inspirational' things - literature, posters, songs, etc. Manual labor does not require inspiration (despite how we feel when we're teenagers) but labors of the mind often seem to. The first solution to the problem is that one must write - or whatever the art is - on the side. When one decides to take a hiatus to just do art, or write that dissertation, time increases, but in some way inspiration thins out to fill the time available.

Life offers us plenty of bumps (Fickle fortune, they used to say) and it is these that can, in my experience, most derail our diligence. What to do when there is nothing to write, nothing to paint, or nothing to blog about? If you're being paid for a particular type of content you may be out of luck; but as for the personal discipline, you simply find inspiration in your suffering itself. Either way, it is very much a chance to throw a critical eye on the enterprise itself, and think about the form of the activity even more than whether we like what we've made.

Father Stephen Freeman has posted a great essay named "The Secret Place". Among other things which are good about the essay, he writes at the bottom:

I will offer a short exhortation: if you keep a website or a blog, do not make it a place for your secrets or the secrets of others (as is too often done in both cases). There is no virtue in this, but only sin. Bring your secrets to God and stand next to His priest. There you will find love and respect, not judgment. And you will find a balm for your soul. This most public of all places (the internet) hates your secrets and would only use them to destroy you. Learn to be silent and speak to God in your heart. I offer this begging…if you have posted your secrets – remove them! Close the doors, draw the curtain and stand in secret before the Most High God!

An excellent point, and one worth considering especially if you are like me, and do a certain amount of thinking 'out loud' as it were. The first part of the essay talks about a very different approach to secrecy, especially in these days when the notion is so abased. Fame is often made in lost in these times based on 'whistleblowing' or 'scandals.' Even when well-intentioned, these efforts often had serious negative impacts. Sol Stern gives an example here, how youthful idealism combined with a disrespect for privacy led to pride, and eventually, ruin. The world of news would not be the same after. Can we say that any shift towards gossip - airing people's sins publicly - is good?