If Thou Could'st Empty All Thyself of Self-by Sir Thomas Browne

My last post reminded me of this poem, one of my favorites.

If thou could'st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, "This is not dead,"
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou are all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes He says, "This is enow
Unto itself - 'twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me."

Paradox

Whoever saves his life will lose it, whoever loses his life will save it.
Perfect freedom lies in complete surrender.
The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
I can only be wholly myself when I have lost all sense of self.
We are strongest when we have embraced our weakness.
Etc. (There lots of others.)

The Bible and the Christian faith contains so many examples of paradox, things which always give me food for thought and ideas to which I always seem to return. God seems to deal in these paradoxes. I think that although the pardoxes can be understood partially on an intellectual plane, they can never be understood completely because they reflect a deeper reality of the spiritual world, a reality in which we cannot participate while we are still tied to the physical one. I am sure that learned theologians have written more intelligently and interestingly about this, but I still thought I would share.

(BTW, I think the plural of paradox should be paradoxa, not paradoxes.)

Hockey and partial nudity

The real story is that USC has a hockey team.

Try using these in casual conversation!

Some great new words from the book I was reading. If you really care, look the definitions up yourself. Some of them are not very nice!

neurasthenic
onanist
etiolated
pyorrhea
agitprop
scrofulous

Intellectuals

Having nothing better to do yesterday, I picked up a book my dad had left lying on the coffee table. The book is titled Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. It is a series of character sketches and mini-biographies of men such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Percy Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemmingway, etc.

I expected to be bored witless and instead was fascinated.

These men have been labeled the greatest thinkers, writers and philosophers in past three centuries. Their works are read aross the world in schools and universities. These intellectuals, who are revered for their contributions to mankind, share an amazingly similar pattern of egocentricity, selfishness, self-deception, dishonesty, adultery, alcoholism, infidelity, greed, debt, hate, lying, and violence. Faithfulness in marriage, friendship, and money was not only beyond them, they truly did not recognize the need for it or even care. They used the people, especially the women, around them as objects. They claimed to love Mankind, but showed little or no love to the individual men around them. They and their ideas were the center of the universe.

Does this somehow devalue their great works, Hemmingway's A Farewell to Arms, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Shelley's poetry, Rousseau's philosophy, etc.? My answer is a resounding, YES! Men who lived their personal lives with such dishonor and outright wickedness do not deserve recognition no matter how genius their works. The complete disjunction between their ideas/ideals and their actions calls into question the value of everything they ever said or wrote. Their ideas, words, and philosophies came out of the same diseased minds that tainted everything and everyone around them.

Lost and Hume

Lost was fantastic! I am always amazed by the depth of the show. The episode last night centered around the character of Desmond Hume, who not so coincidentally shares the last name of David Hume, an 18th century Scottish naturalist philosopher. Hume the philosopher is probably best known for posing the problem of induction. Induction is a process of reasoning by which we predict future expectations based on past experiences, (i.e. the sun will rise in the east tomorrow). The problem lies in the fact that the only way we can justify such reasoning is by basing our argument on the success of induction in the past, which is circular reasoning.

Hume the character seems to have been caught in some "time warp" and ends up with the ability to predict the future based on what he has seen in the past. A coincidence? My past experience tells me such a coincidence is not very likely, but I have no justification to say so.

Wonderful World of Technology

I had been trying to add pictures to my blog using Safari, which is my default browser. The picture would not upload. I just tried again using Mozilla, and it worked fine. I am sure there is some deep programming code reason that I did not grasp, but qui curat? It works now.