The wonder and mystery of it all.......

 

description and enlargeable photo here

awash..............................

 We live in a world awash with information and we’re not enamoured with imprecision, less still a clear and certain plan to live out the best of our days (whatever the consequences) and, in the process, we’ve annihilated mystery only to be replaced with (Ye Gads) Artificial Intelligence; or another way to say that is we’d rather let something else do our thinking!

-Julian Summerhayes

Pause.........................

 Detachment is the cost of our wondrous, liberating mobility, the price we pay for living untethered.  Connection to place is replaced by inhabitation of space, bringing to near-culmination what Rosalind Williams describes as "humanity's decision to unbind itself from the soil."  The tempo of travel blurs the landscape, and our vehicles increasingly enfold us in a bubble of remove. "The sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures, and smells of the city and countryside are reduced to a two-dimensional view through the car windscreen, something prefigured by the railway journeys of the nineteenth century," notes John Urry, echoing Nietzche.  The portable soundscape of the Walkman-turned-iPod puts much of life at arm's length, creating a "fragile world of certainty within a contingent world," writes Michael Bull in Sounding Out the City.  We are distancing ourselves from knowledge of our own bodily selves and our earth, as Bill McKibben observes.  We live in an era when "vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach," he writes.  "An unenlightenment."  Pause is increasingly absent in a temporal sense, too.  A culture of constant movement, in part fueled by a love of instant gratification, cannot bear the mystery and unpredictability inherent in the idea of pause.  "For the sake of speed, in the interest of not wasting time, we sacrifice the sensuous richness of the not-yet," writes Noelle Oxenhandler in her essay "The Lost While."  We live in a culture of "becoming" but never arriving.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Oops.................

 Failing to learn from others’ mistakes is one of life’s greatest mysteries. Despite having nearly unlimited access to examples of others making all kinds of mistakes, people repeatedly fail to learn from past generations.

-Ted Lamade, from here

Whence comes Santa Claus............

The shrouds of time are pretty good at hiding things. This fun post seeks reasonable explanations:

The traditional culture of those early Finns, known as the Sámi, was shamanistic. They believed that the Amanita muscaria that brought the reindeer its sustenance also brought wisdom to humans. At the time of the celebration of the Winter Solstice, the Sámi’s shamans would consume the drug and then visit prominent Sámi households to pass along the insights that they achieved through their hallucinogenic trips. In honor of the mushroom, they would dress in its likeness, in a red and white costume. The Sámi lived in yurts, which, at that time of the year, were often snowed in. So, the shamans would often pop in through the hole in the roof that served as the yurt’s chimney, bearing the gifts of their psychedelically inspired wisdom.

Fifty years ago...............

At the movies....Sleuth with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier

 

The mystery.................................

 Knowledge destroys wonder, destroys the capacity to feel awe. It makes you capable of explaining away everything. It takes away all poetry from life. It takes away all meaning from life. The knowledgeable person is never surprised by anything because he can explain everything. But no explanation is true for they don’t explain anything at all. The mystery remains. The mystery is infinite.

The knowledgeable person becomes so burdened by his knowledge that he loses the mirror-like quality of reflecting the beauty, the benediction, the dance, the ecstasy of existence. Knowledge is not going to help as far as life is concerned. The knowledgeable person is almost a dead person; he lives in his grave.

-Osho

On true art.............

 

Claude Monet    oil on canvass   Haystacks     1890

The deepest mystery of all, I think, is the one to which biblical faith points, which is the idea that we are made not only of matter that comes from the earth and stars, but we are made in the image of God.  Whatever that means.  I don't know what it means altogether, but I think it means that we bear his mark upon us.  Deep within us.  The face of Christ is within us, his thumbprint is upon us.  The world adds all sorts of things to that holy self that God made, but it still is there, and though we lose track of it in a million ways, I think it remains, if we are lucky at all, as a source of goodness, of flashes of insight, good dreams, good prayers that somehow pray themselves, of healing.

     I think that this is the place from which all true art comes, and by true art I mean art that doesn't just entertain—perfectly alright to do that—but true art that nourishes the spirit, that illuminates the mind, that deepens understanding, that deepens our humanity.  I think that what true art, and true religion, does at its best is to put each one of us in touch with that holy part of ourselves, with that source from which art and love comes, and from which all good, wise things come, so that we—by virtue of this painting, this poem, this ballet, this piece of music, this Scripture—become finally, truly, human at last.

-Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary

surprise and mystery....................

 So much beauty has grown from what at times seemed like impossibly stony ground.

-Trish Harrison Warren via David Kanigan

We love our elaborate stories.....................

 A warehouse of experimental evidence now attests to our cognitive shortcomings: our willingness to jump the inferential gun, to be too quick to draw strong conclusions from ambiguous evidence, and to be too slow to change our minds as disconfirming observations trickle in. A balanced apportionment of blame should acknowledge that learning is hard because even seasoned professionals are ill-equipped to cope with the complexity, ambiguity, and dissonance inherent in assessing causation in history. Life throws up a lot of puzzling events that thoughtful observers feel impelled to explain because the policy stakes are so high. However, just because we want an explanation does not mean that one is within reach. To achieve explanatory closure in history, observers must fill in the missing counterfactual comparison scenarios with elaborate stories grounded in their deepest assumptions about how the world works.

-Philip Tetlock

the mystery.......................

I have observed the power of the watermelon seed.  It has the power to draw from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight.
When you can tell me how it takes this material from the ground and out of its colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight —when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.

-attributed to William Jennings Bryan

About the mind.........................

      Just as it is the nature of fire to burn, it is the nature of the mind to think and wander all the time.  The mind is comprised  of thoughts and doubts.  It constantly casts up dreams and fantasies, creating its own world and then destroying it.  It builds thought castles in the sky and then gets entangled in its own creation.  In this way, it creates its own suffering and undergoes the consequences.  Some modern psychologists believe that the mind can be satisfied if you let it run free, if you let it have whatever it wants.  But this is not the case.  The mind can never be satisfied in this way;  it will always create a mountain of desires.

-Swami Muktananda,  Mystery of the Mind

Opening paragraphs..........................

'You know I don't like to meddle in things,' Conte Falier told Brunetti.  'But since, in this case, he's so close to me, I feel I don't have a choice, not really.'  Brunetti, seated opposite his father-in-law in one of the over-ripe armchairs that filled Palazzo Falier, had been listening to the older man for some time, aware of how difficult il Conte was finding it to begin telling the story he obviously wanted Brunetti to hear.

-Donna Leon, Unto Us a Son Is Given:  A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

(If you haven't started reading Leon's Brunetti stories, well, start now.  Much enjoyment awaits you.)

Opening paragraphs..................

I'm dying, Spenser," the man said.
     I nodded, not knowing what else to say.  An early-summer rain beaded down my office window, dark gray skies hovering over Berkeley and Boylston as afternoon commuters jockeyed for position out of the city.  Their taillights cast a red glow on slick streets.  Somewhere a prowl car hit a siren, heading off to another crime.  The man sitting before me smiled and nodded, his hands withered and liver-spotted.  His name was Locke.
     "How long have we known each other?"  Locke asked.
     "A long time."

-Ace Atkins, channeling Robert B. Parker in the Spenser novel, Old Black Magic

It has always been a mystery to me......

"Maybe the biggest risk for most people is assuming they know exactly what happens next."

-Ben Carlson, as culled from here

Highly recommended...............

As murder mysteries go, this is a really good one.   The protagonist is police commissario Guido Brunetti, but the city of Venice itself may be the hero.  This is the first of a series.   Her second effort has moved to the head of the queue. 

Opening paragraphs.................

The third gong, announcing that the Opera was about to continue, sounded discreetly through the lobbies and bars of Teatro La Fenice.  In response, the audience stabbed out cigarettes, finished drinks and conversations, and started to filter back into the theater.  The hall, brightly lit between acts, hummed with the talk of those returning to their seats.  Here a jewel flashed, there a mink cape was adjusted over a naked shoulder or an infinitesimal speck of dust was flicked from a satin lapel.  The upper galleries filled up first, followed by the orchestra seats and then the three rows of boxes.

-Donna Leon,  Death At La Fenice

Thank God............................

There are mysteries in this universe.  Glorious mysteries.  Ponder that.

Opening paragraphs.......................

When the first man woke up that morning, he wasn't thinking about killing anyone.  He woke up with a head full of blues, a brain that was too big for his skull, and a bladder about to burst.  He lay with his eyes closed, breathing across a tongue that tasted like burnt chicken feathers.  The blues rolled in through the bedroom door.
     Coming down hard.

-John Sandford,  Easy Prey

Wonder.........................................

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.


-Albert Einstein, as culled from here


thanks Rob