PCAPPC

It's the 50th anniversary of one of the great coming-of-age songs: "Sitting on the dock of the Bay watching my time slip away." But for me, it was Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits, and the line, "No one speaks English and everything's broken, and my Stacy's are soaking wet." If I was a few years older I might have separated myself from my feelings like Bob Dylan when he asked, "How does it feel to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?" There was also Cat Stevens: "I keep on wondering if sleep too long, will I always wake up the same, or so? And if I make it to the waterside, will I even find me a boat, or so?" There was Catcher in the Rye before popular music got serious. And there was Danny Boy before literature acknowledged that generations were coming of age in America, and we were all doing it alone. For most of us, there was no apprenticeship, no ceremony, no mentors. There was onl...

I wrote a nice sentence this morning. The rest of the essay wasn't blog-worthy, but I think the sentence stands alone: "We, this nexus of conceit, conceive and create the universe with every breath, every egocentric blink."

The books in Wuthering Heights (Joseph's and those in the Linton's library) represent the civilized world, and civilization is defined by the perverse piety of Joseph, and the meek, feckless morality of the Lintons. Joseph, in his stubborn dissatisfaction with the world, is the distillation of the Earnshaws' morality, the family that took in an orphan (Heathcliff) that the civilized world (represented by the Lintons) had abandoned. Nelly, the housekeeper (not a nursemaid) who would oversee the last days of both families, was aligned with neither of them. She both loved and despised everyone equally. Her meddling was the meddling of an author with her characters, and her aim was to celebrate their willfulness, encourage and to chastise it, and, finally, to to see it stilled in the calm of surrender and the finality of death. Lockwood immersed himself in her story, and even fancied himself its hero. In the end, he slipped away through the back door rather than risk being dis...

There will be long term effects. His tear ducts will stop working. The lens of his left eye will develop cataracts. The hair on the top of his head will turn gray. And the cancer (which my dog, Clarence, has been diagnosed with) will likely return. This is the age of bear skins and stone knives, and medicine is a branch of the military. We preserve and protect life with shields and weapons because we observe nature as a battleground and evolution as an arms race. We see what our metaphors enable us to see, and what we see is fear. Fear made the turtle's shell and the snake's venom. Fear made fins and wings, teeth and claws, and fear made rage as well as the reactions to it: flight, submissiveness, and group identity. When we look at nature, we see ourselves, because that is how we see. We know the world only as well as we know ourselves, and today we know ourselves as selfish genes in a war which will be won by the most fit. Some of us are asking what the victors of this ...

Leaders are whomever we follow, deliberately or unconsciously, but never slavishly. Those we follow into war are less leaders than they are representatives of an idea their followers believe in. They are objects of our infatuation and are therefore whatever our fantasy, ideology, or worldview requires them to be. The ideology is akin to the video game, and we are all its players. The real leader is the programmer, the architect of the worldview into which we each have assumed a role. The visible leader is as much a puppet as the rest of us. In a reality we know to be artificial, the difference between the leader of the dream and the dream leader is obvious. But when the dream is the assumed reality, the distinction becomes less clear. The point at which a worldview becomes "true", is the point at which its leader becomes its prophet, and their dream becomes an inevitability. I would, therefore, prefer not to call Arthur C Clarke a prophet, but I think he wanted to be recog...