On birds, Low Country sun, and waiting for the sublime

They fly with grace and a lovely sinuous curve of the neck. Then they land like drunken doofuses. As they slow near the ground, they are barely in control of their own bodies, like a cyclist losing the stability of momentum.

An addendum to what the gods do not confer

By this point Gene Kelly could have settled for doing what his adoring public expected — dancing like Gene Kelly for the remaining years of his career. But he didn’t.

On being a gentleman well unread

Why have I read On the Road, twice, but not Jane Eyre or Don Quixote? Why The Thirty-Nine Steps and Three Men in a Boat but not David Copperfield or Pride and Prejudice? I’ve no idea.

What does not cometh from the gods

Dr Essai has observed time and again how the finest artists are the ones whose idea of fun is spending hour after hour, day after day doing the same thing over and over and over and over.

Could you speak a bit more slowly?

Cicero recognized the problem and charged Tiro with inventing a form of Latin shorthand. Tiro created a system of letters and symbols that was topped by Seneca to 5,000 symbols. Yes, 5,000.

On not saying what it all means

Dr Essai does not read entrails post-election. But he was heartened by a few things in the 2022 mid-term US election.

In regard to feeding the right wolf.

Anger comes armored with a silent lie: Cultivate me, wield me, and you may gain something large and lasting beyond the ordinary. Cynical opportunists know this and turn it against us. Why else would every moral runt grasping for power promise to fight for us?

Marooned on the way to school.

If you are bewitched by color, every glance out the window, every walk down the street, rewards.

On the modern state of intellection, part two.

What dooms us to generation after generation of sad goofiness is not a lack of intelligence but a fundamental Faustian bargain: witless obedience in exchange for the emotional reassurance that comes with group identity. We'd rather belong than think.

On the modern state of intellection, part one.

In accounting for such abundant dumbness, some of it banal, much of if dangerous, one is tempted to shrug and explain it all by writing off people as simply stupid. But they are not stupid.