Chillin' at the GV!

On Saturday, we drove up to Santa Monica to go to the Getty Villa. It was my second time visiting. Even if we had seen nothing in the museum, it still would be have been an awesome day because we got to make these wreaths with myrtle and flowers. Check out the awesome headgear:


The Getty Villa is like taking a trip to Europe , and all you have to do is drive up the 405. I have seen more valuable and historically significant art in Europe, but going to the Villa is so great because it's like experiencing Roman life for yourself. Standing in the middle of a beautiful peristyle with musicians playing Egyptian instruments, I could totally imagine I was really living in the Roman Empire.
Greek vases rock! Check out my man Theseus killing the Minotaur (the half-man, half-bull) in the middle of the Labyrinth.

Saturday was so wonderful, combining two of my favorite things, museums and great friends.

Honestly, this score is a lot lower than it should be. 1o points should be added just for being in band in high school.

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.