Professor Blakely made another great video cut of Charles Taylor explaining secularism and the immanent frame. If you’re interested in that, it’s useful to catch Blakely’s note in the comments, too. youtu.be/iA38ShLjjnc?...

An excellent companion to the EI piece. youtu.be/xwBtbAna9pc?...

“The great German author's masterpiece, The Magic Mountain, published a century ago, allows the reader to see upheavals not as signs of sickness, but as the first steps towards recovery.” engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the...

Mail. Finally got a hard copy of this great book.

More today and they were horrible. The biggest so far.

Back to the wake up at 5:30 grind tomorrow… pray for me…

Phenomenology Friday Do you know anyone who just can’t ever be serious and goes even further by being lewd all time?

earthquake… I’m so tired of this…

Goon: “a man hired to terrorize or eliminate opponents” (Merriam-Webster) That’s essentially what they are.

Seriously, what’s with the face masks? They look like Wagner mercenaries. And they’ve been wearing them since this all started, even in the summer. It’s not like they need to hide their identities.

To all: Have you read this? Do you recommend?

newly added to my fin de siècle literature

I just ordered a big grocery delivery for my elderly parents who are on the other side of the country and are about to get snowed in by a huge blizzard. Tech can be good.

Mail. I have very anxiously been awaiting this. I’m fascinated by the behavioral phenomenon of trying to “escape from the world”, to avoid a certain kind of life, the impulse to introvert oneself. It is more this and less the people here I am interested in. Stagg is keen on this and great writer.

Mail. I just heard about this book recently and thought it would be fun to put in dialogue with Rosa’s Social Acceleration.

Of course Goethe had something to say about this.

I just released a revised and expanded edition of my book, and it’s still a very reasonable price for paperback or kindle. History of form theories, from Aristotle to Goethe to Merleau-Ponty and quite a few others who came in-between.

Many times have I walked this street.

Mail. This will be the first book by Harmut Rosa that I read and I am eagerly looking forward to it.

Whenever I catch up with old friends who are struggling socially and with their personal behavior, I think of how much good it would have done us all if we had grown up having learned from parents or school about Aristotle’s distinctions of friendship and virtue, continence, incontinence, and evil.

On the mutual exchange between Barfield’s theory of poetic language and Tolkien’s mythopoetics. youtu.be/aXU7h44ujeU?...

I’m generally not a full blown tech doomer, but more and more I find myself ready for the Butlerian Jihad. I’m more against the people behind the nameless, faceless, anonymous, probably mostly automated business entities.

The Tennessee River system begins on the worn magnificent crest of the southern Appalachians, among the earth’s oldest mountains, and the Tennessee River shapes its valley into the form of a boomerang, bowing it to its sweep through seven states. — James Agee

Was talking with a friend about reading Rosa’s book here and I think I want to read this other book with. See the second book description below.

Young Hermann Hesse and his family.

You need to be visiting places of scholars and poets maxxing.

Phenomenology Friday McGilchrist on Husserl.

Phenomenology Friday “Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.” The Ministry for the Future. Kim Stanley Robinson.

If you need a conversation on the philosophy of mind between two wholesome gentlemen, I got you. youtu.be/vooDJQ3fdug?...

Movie quote but accurate to the book’s spirit. Galadriel: “Why the Halfling?” Gandalf: “Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I've found. I've found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay.”

yes. attention and care. resonance and response. not control.

I just really need more exposure to the very cold. It is the kairos for kryos.

Got another book to read from this evening. I am primarily interested in Barfield’s ideas and how Tolkien and Lewis received them. Not sure if this book is going to achieve that, but we’ll see.

Relevant to the last post, I think romanticism comes to age via the existential; more precisely bridging from romanticism to phenomenology and hermeneutics. A pathway like this can be seen from the romantics, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, to Husserl et al, culminating with the likes of Taylor.

On experience, Vernon accounts for an evolution in consciousness from the Homeric age to now. Drawing from Blake, Steiner, and Barfield; the latter’s idea that the premodern soul became the soul that centered experience which the Romantics understood. open.spotify.com/episode/4Y0p...

I’ve primarily been living off of homemade chex mix, orange tea, and things with peppermint in them.

I have to say, Nolan’s Odyssey looks awesome. youtu.be/Mzw2ttJD2qQ?...

We had 4.0 last night during the swarm. I treat everything like a foreshock now since the first big swarm we got this past month or so. I’m just done. Earthquakes are absolutely terror inducing and not to be disregarded. Here’s a geophysicist guy is talking about it. youtu.be/IfM7MkmGLIo?...

I like the themes of Norse myth better than Greek myth, not that I dislike the latter. Maybe it’s because I grew up on Tolkien, etc. But yeah, this edition is very enjoyable. It’s like reading Euripides or Wilson’s Homer. But that’s apparently less the translator and more due to its original style.

"No Gimli, I would not take the road through San Francisco unless I had no other choice."

I have some thoughts on Ephesians 5:18 and pilgrimage. Will come back to this soon, but leaving it here as a reminder to myself. open.spotify.com/track/3xZMPZ...

I’m still Norway and winter maxxing, so needed another appropriate read for that.

I need a better philosophical anthropological concept for the personality characteristic of “power hunger”, “control obsession “, other than the misunderstood Nietzschean will-to-power. Anybody got anything good for this?

Reminds me of how Strauss warned: “Let us beware of the danger of pursuing a Socratic goal with the means, and the temper, of Thrasymachus.”

Sheldrake: “So we have in [modern] science itself, it’s part of the standard explanatory basis of science, fields, which are attractive, they work towards attractors; the gravitational field is literally attractive; it’s pulling. […] And other fields. They’re not just static.[1/2]

There’s nothing more wholesome to do right now than watch Sheldrake and DBH talk about anything. youtu.be/t-GaMlbRcKw?...

You gotta be a bookseller at least once in your life. Just do it as a volunteer for a brief time if you have to. Another occupation you should experience is ranch hand. Just do it one summer. Horse ranches always need people; pay is under the table! You might have to self-learn horsemanship skills.

Earthquakes all night and ongoing now, little tremors over and over. could be a foreshock swarm.

We all know this kind of chess player… I will have to pick up this book. This is an unusual topic for Chris Hedges compared to the things he usually covers; but it’s fascinating that someone looked into and wrote about this. youtu.be/QIStD15SNM8?...