"no one gets to sit and just comprehend"

"for the sake of seeing human death"

acchariyā abbhutā dhammā

There is no music attached to this short video. Preferable that way.

Roger Ebert, in a 1999 review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, one of the first movies I saw with my daughter, notes that we also turn from even external wonders: "How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story 'Nightfall,' about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen." - May 17 1999

Kant famously looks to the external laws composing the movement of stars as a metaphor for an equally inviolable interior moral law. But, as Jane Bennett puts it, "His official project disqualifies somatic energies from a morality conceived as a self-motivating 'law within us.'"

It is interesting that we seem so habitually disinclined to conceive of the skillful observation of the interior of this life, our body and its somatic energies, as a means also of experiencing wonder, which is, in part, a way of comprehending law and truth. I guess we think we know what happens inside us by reason of the supposed proximity of our conscious mind to the body that helps compound it. But that is generally not the case.

on a happier day

 

so little is our loss.... then / all this earthly grossness quit / attired with stars / we shall for ever / sit, triumphing / over death and chance and ... time. M[ilton] Why / desire to live another day? It / will be like the last: same / sun, same stars, same father, & / friends, nothing more to see. M[ontaigne]. p 42 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, RWE, ed Ralph H Orth

after the students leave intro to literary genres

near the mazon river in a gale

franke institute for the humanities
university of chicago

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quadrangle club university of chicago

office nap

windy day from office before nap

vimutti

jetzt kommt feuer

Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn concerning the Danube, "Der Ister," begins with an invocation to the autumnal leaves, "Jetzt komme, Feuer!"

Photographed October 16 2010

near Kaskaskia Township, Salt Creek, Illinois

from a Dagger Green Boat

at nearly sunset

[btw  Heidegger's 1941 lecture entitled "Hölderlin's Hymne Der Ister" given at the University of Freiburg (on space and time, locality and journey, being at-home and being thrown-into) and collected in Gesamtausgabe (52), contains this:

“...the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.” (trans Richard Polt)]

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Learning how to use a slide rule so I can teach Clio
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shiny eyed Iris on the study's dissolving chesterfield
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Metcalf next to Visuddhimagga

even more geworfenheit

I guess basically one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?

- Henry Spira to Peter Singer

more geworfenheit

Pali to English

river nadī (f.), gaṅgā (f.), ninnagā (f.), saritā (f.), savantī (f.), āpagā (f.)
river-bank nadīkūla (nt.), nadītīra (nt.)
river-basin gaṅgādhāra (m.)
river-bed nadītala (nt.)
river-god nadīdevatā (f.)
river-head nadīpabhava (m.)
river-month nadīmukha (nt.)
riverain gaṅgāsanna (adj.), gaṅgāyatta (adj.), nadītīravāsī (adj.)

French to English

rivière +‎ -ain "people living along a river"
Adjective: riverain m (f riveraine, m plural riverains, f plural riveraines)
riverside (along a river)
Noun: riverain m (plural riverains)

Latin to English

amnicolist: resident (of a specific neighbourhood, square, etc.)
Anagrams: vernirai (Verb, vernirai: first-person singular simple future of vernir [to varnish])
Latin amnicola (“dwelling by a river”) + English -ist; compare the French amnicole
Pronunciation: ămnĭʹkəlĭst, IPA: /æmˈnɪkəlɪst/, SAMPA: /{m"nIk@lIst/
Noun: amnicolist (plural amnicolists)
(formal, rare) One who dwells by a river.

"a startling argument about the future of science 

and about the real basis of human relationships"

geworfenheit again

The reason for objecting quite generally to an attitude of greater detachment and for commending an embrace of at least some of what lies beyond the sphere of one's will has less to do with a benevolent concern for others than with a view about what, for lack of a better word, might be called psychic health. The desirability of this trait comes partly from its expression of our recognition that we are beings who are thoroughly in the world, in interaction with others whose movements and thoughts we cannot fully control and whom we affect and are affected by accidentally, as well as intentionally, involuntarily, unwittingly, inescapably, as well as voluntarily and deliberately. To form one's attitudes and judgments of oneself and others solely on the basis of their wills and intentions, to draw sharp lines between what one is responsible for and what is up to the rest of the world, to try in this way to extricate oneself and others from the messiness and the irrational contingencies of the world, would be to remove oneself from the ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet.

- Susan Wolf, "The Moral of Moral Luck"

Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers (Oxford UP  2004)

We fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe.

- RWE, "Experience"

geworfenheit

Pāṇaṃ na hane na ca ghātayeyya,
na cānujaññā hanataṃ paresaṃ,
sabbesu bhūtesu nidhāya daṇḍaṃ.
Ye thāvarā ye ca tasā santi loke.

One should not kill a living being,

nor cause it to be killed,

nor should one incite another to kill.

Do not injure any being, either strong or weak, in the world.

Sutta Nipāta 2.396

empathic distress / empathic sociability

Trailer for WildWater, just released by Forge Films, featuring psychologist and legendary expeditionary whitewater paddler Doug Ammons, editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Fred Norquist paddling onto the stone wall of Wall Check Rapid on Yule Creek in Colorado.

I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.... Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.... A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence.

-- fr. "Why I am not a Christian," Bertrand Russell

Sace labhetha nipakaṃ sahāyaṃ
saddhiṃ caraṃ sādhuvihāridhīraṃ,
abhibhuyya sabbāni parissayāni,
careyya tenattamano satīmā.

If for company you find a wise and prudent friend

who leads a good life,

you should, overcoming all impediments,

keep their company joyously and mindfully.

Dhammapada 23.328

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PA mts spent night w three screech owls
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