One of my friends is reliably cheerful. We should all have friends like him. His emails and telephone calls are never annoyingly cloying, in the sense that they knock me out of whatever self-centered snit I’m nursing. Without ever saying so, he reminds me that I have it pretty good, certainly better than most of the human race. He’s not obnoxious about his gregarious nature and never tries to impose it. That’s part of his charm. His good nature is contagious and has been for more than fifty years, since I first met him. I thought of him while again reading Montaigne’s “On Some Verses of Virgil”: “My judgment keeps me indeed from kicking and grumbling against the discomforts that nature orders me to suffer, but not from feeling them. I, who have no other aim but to live and be merry, would run from one end of the world to the other to seek out one good year of pleasant and cheerful tranquillity. A somber, dull tranquillity is easy enough to find for me, but it puts me to sleep and stupefies me; I am not content with it. If there are any persons, any good company, in country or city, in France or elsewhere, residing or traveling, who like my humors and whose humors I like, they have only to whistle in their palm and I will go furnish them with essays in flesh and bone.” That describes my friend more than me. I think of it as an aspiration, a sort of moral, emotional ideal. For him, it’s a gift. I need perpetual reminding. My favorite among all of Theodore Dalrymple’s thousands of essays and columns remains “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” published in the December 13, 2003, edition of The Spectator: “I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).”

Weaving past and present together The post Jeanne F. Jalandoni appeared first on The American Scholar.

How we went from an architecture of collapse to a simulation for survival

In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization. Edward Lear (May 12, 1812–January 29, 1888), barely out of his teens, had been working on his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots for two years. Moved by the young man’s talent and passion, one of William Turner’s patrons — a wealthy woman with a deep feeling for nature and art — had procured for him an introduction to the newly opened London Zoo,… read article

In comparison to the late D.G. Myers, I’m a quietist, waiting for something to happen rather than stepping on the accelerator myself. He supplied me with more ideas and inspirations than I was ever able to offer him. A longtime reader reminds me of “The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time,” a project David started and together we  organized almost sixteen years ago. That’s sufficiently remote in time to make it feel like a pottery shard dug up from a kitchen midden. David and I and eleven other writers/bloggers responded to a list of nine questions or prompts we had formulated, plus a summing up written by David. The resulting symposium is at once familiar and eerily alien. In 2009, I see I was already thinking of book blogging retrospectively, as a done deal. Here is one of the questions I formulated and my response:  “Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?”:   “There are no golden ages, only golden moments. I once worked with a newspaper editor who said something like this: ‘You pay your dollar and read the paper. If you find one story that amuses you or teaches you something new, you got your money’s worth.’ To read a blog costs nothing. Peruse the blog roll at Anecdotal Evidence. If you can’t find something there that moves or enlightens you, or drives you pleasingly irate, go check your pulse.”   Glib but true. Here is the late Terry Teachout’s reply to the same question:   “Er, who are all those ‘famous’ book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.”   Go to David’s blog, A Commonplace Blog, and scroll down to the bottom of the left column to read the entire symposium.