Two weeks ago my brother-in-law invited me to a concert. Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. The rest of our families were doing other things on a Friday night, so it was just him and me. I asked my wife, who is from New Hampshire, if she knew this place in western Massachusetts I’d been invited to. “Of course,” was the response, so I knew it was well-known in the region, at least among people who think a lot about music. Physically the place was lovely: dozens of acres of lightly-trod grass parking, and the “music shed” a roofed, open-walled, 90-year-old structure with seating for thousands surrounded by more grass for picnic blankets and camp chairs. Similar to the much younger Wolf Trap in Washington DC’s Virginia suburbs. Earlier rains diminished attendance on the grass; we arrived not many minutes before the program began and set up our chairs in a fine spot near center-front.

My brother-in-law looked at the printed program. “There will be ballet dancers.” That turned a wheel in my memory. That’s right: Appalachian Spring was originally composed as a ballet. I had never seen it performed that way, only as an orchestral performance. I enjoy dance immensely, so this would be a special treat. (more…)

The last dream of my recent dreams was long and involved and I will only able to recall a few of the details here. It is the setting that stuck most in my mind. Here’s the setting. We–meaning me and some vague unspecified other people, probably family members, although the only one that I ever specifically interacted with was my mother–are on a high ridge line looking west over the south end of the Utah Valley.  Though the geography is not what you would see if you were actually there; instead its a slope up from the foothills and then the middle third becomes very steep, almost an escarpment although it is climbable mostly not using your hands so not completely vertical, maybe more like a 60° slope or 50° slope.  This very steep slope ends in kind of ridgeline and then the mountain continues beyond that but at a more normal slope, not nearly as steep.    I’ll also note that the the flora and fauna actually don’t seem typical of Utah valley nor the rock.  The rock is a dark brown that I think is probably basalt and there are junipers and cedars.

In this dream there is at the base of the mountains some kind of BYU extension campus or secondary facility–call it BYU-Spanish Fork for convenience–and then up at the ridgeline where we’re at is a semi-independent facility or organization but it’s associated in some way with the BYU satellite campus or satellite institution below us.   It is our parent institution in some way.

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Only prophets can understand prophets.

There is, of course, the obvious reason, the same divine source is able to give understanding much better than your own attempts to understand the divine source as filtered through another person. But the main reason is different. The main reason is that to understand someone we have to be able to put ourselves in their shoes. We have to wrestle with what they wrestled with, grasp what they grasped, be surprised and overjoyed by what they were surprised and overjoyed by.

The gospel is process knowledge, not a formula. Becoming a prophet is more or less something like an initiation and you have to follow the same initiation to receive the same results. Lehi cannot stand at the tree shouting to you how good the fruit is and you feel the savor in your mouth.

Saturday night, I had a horrifying dream.

There was a city, and either because of the heights of the buildings or because of the hills in the city, the church had a site people could visit where you could walk out on these walkways that were high above the ground, maybe 100 to 200 feet. The walkway started altogether in a little reception area and a flat space, and then branched out and meandered a bit. Each walkway had a color and a spiritual theme assigned to it, and you’re supposed to think about that theme as you walk the walkway. It was a bit low rent, frankly. The walkways were just concrete floors and rough, waist-high, whitewashed concrete walls (white except for the color coding). The view directly down wasn’t anything spectacular, just a couple of layers of road, a freeway, and an overpass.

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My brain’s favorite 3:00 a.m. thoughts are the ones that make it hard for me to get back to sleep.

Here’s the doozy it woke me up with in the wee hours this morning.

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One valorous rabbit decided, admirably enough, that it would no longer simply flee wolves.  It would take the fight to them!

The angel of rabbits appeared and approved.

Then the angel asked, “how?”

The rabbit said it would cute ’em to death!

This would not work, the angel said.

The rabbit sulked.  It just had to work!  That was the only weapon the rabbit had!

My wife has been ill lately and I have updated my view that I have no patience for nurse-maiding.  It would be closer to the truth that I have no talent for it.  Perhaps even closer to the truth to say that I lack the confidence for it.

Good nurse maids have a kind of instinct for what to do and how to soothe.  Massage, treat, lullaby, caress, wet cloth on fevered brow?   Or if they don’t have that instinct, they think they do, so they keep on nurse maiding and something they do helps.  I don’t have that instinct or that confidence, and so I have a hard time keeping it up.  Is this doing any good?  It doesn’t make any obvious difference.

“Just ask them,” you say, and you can do this but the best nurse-maiding occurs in advance of what the person himself  knows what he needs.

My wife has the talent.  She nurse-maids like a savant.  When doing back rubs she unerringly homes in on knots I didn’t know I had and switches from pressure to strokes when it will do the most good.  She once told me that she finds it extremely rewarding because I give off these little purrs and rumbles and grunts throughout.  I said I did it because otherwise how would she know it was helping?  She looked at me as if I was from Mars.  She knew.

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The great cloud of unknowing around male and female doesn’t prevent us from seeing their virtuous and vicious syntheses all around us.

The virtuous union of manliness and womanliness is marriage and family.

The vicious union of gross manliness and gross womanliness takes many forms, but if you think about it and look around, you will no doubt find some objects for your contemplation.

Manly

Womanly

The Book of Job has a surprising resemblance to a philosophical dialogue and that is probably deliberate.  Although, unlike a traditional philosophical dialogue, Job has bursts of pain and feeling and sometimes contradicts himself in a very human way.

The dialoguing is not the only resemblance to an ancient philosophical text.

the classical understanding, philosophy isn’t a topic about which you can acquire information, like molecular biology, it’s a fundamental way of life. To become a philosopher is to become a different sort of person through what Plato terms a “turning around of the soul.”

The ancients wrote esoterically because esoteric writing is the closest that writing can come to conversation, and the ancients believed that philosophy could only be taught through conversation. Does that shock you? If so, it’s because you come from a culture where philosophy is taken to be propositional knowledge, a set of facts or a list of arguments or a body of knowledge that can be learned. But the ancients considered philosophy to be a kind of process knowledge, like knowing how to dance, or how to ride a bike, or how to do B2B SaaS sales. Imagine trying to learn to play piano by reading a manual but never actually playing any music, that’s how the ancients would think about contemporary academic philosophy. For them, the only way to learn philosophy was to do philosophy with somebody who was already wise — sparring with them verbally, wrestling with them mentally, encountering problems together, solving them together. No text could possibly replace that, but to the extent that any text could, it would have to be a multilayered one. Their works are hard to read because they are fundamentally not designed to directly impart knowledge (!!!), they’re designed to make you, the reader, go through a particular set of mental transitions and moves that imitate the actions of somebody doing philosophy. They’re like the written version of a kung fu movie featuring a multi-tiered pagoda with antagonists of increasing skill on each floor.4 They aren’t training manuals, they are training.

–thus the Psmiths

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If our society’s understanding of the virtues and vices of manhood are bad, womanhood is worse.

Our society is deeply feminized so, as one would expect, there is no clear understanding or term for vicious womanhood.

But surprisingly, there is also no clear understanding or term for virtuous womanhood either.  Men are bad and woman are good but any attempt to clarify or categorize the actual ways that women are good (there are many) is met with shrieks.

My understanding and our understanding (society’s, the saints’, America’s) of male and female virtue and vice has even more gaps in it than normal.

The normal pattern for gaps in knowledge is to have a strong idea of a virtue and its opposing vice, while having almost no concept at all of the opposing virtue and the distorting vice.  This is natural.  It happens all the time.  A good example is the discussion that started all of this off, the Nameless Virtue.  Here we have a virtue that our society loves and cherishes: authenticity.  And a vice that our society hates so much that its used as a pejorative for everything to the point where it has almost no meaning: hypocrisy.  But the idea that there could be a virtue in the same territory as hypocrisy and that there can be gross or cancerous authenticity is a concept that we struggle to express.  It took me a long essay to get there.

But manliness and womanliness are special cases in that almost everything about it is completely obscure: good, bad, and indifferent.

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There once was a little aquatic turtle who lived by a small lake in the woods.  The turtle happily swam in the waters eating minnows and basked on a rock.

But one day it got an ambition.  The little turtle decided to change the world.

Since its world consisted of the small body of water and the mysterious forest around it, the turtle’s world-changing scheme was to dam up the outlet for the lake, thus making the beneficent and friendly (for aquatic turtles) lake, and shrinking the domain of the  hostile and unknown (for aquatic turtles) forest.

So the little turtle swam over to where the water left the little lake through a tumble of rocks and set about trying to add more rocks to it.

Almost instantly the turtle was swept away.

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You listen to a nice Sacrament talk from your daughter on the worth of souls  and in praise of beauty.  You also crave pickles and that deeply-charred fat on a good rich steak.  By Priesthood hour, this craving has mysteriusly transmuted to wanting to hear President Hinckley’s voice again.

So when you get home, you put in your earbuds, push play, and stroll through the trees.  And in some mysterious transmutation, as you hear him speak it is all those long gone Aprils and Octobers again.  Though this particular talk is one you probably never even heard, in the nature of things you certainly never would have heard, as you hear his voice roll on it as if the years have never happened, you are back in 1989, you are back in 1995, you are back in 2005 or 2007,  the harsh summer light of 2026 has given way to the dappled April springs and October falls of all those many years ago, and you are once again a  very young man callow and naive poking his head cautiously into the great unknown future, you are once again a missionary, a student, a young father with his littles clambering on him; and for a few minutes you are forever young and it is 1989 with all its goodness and weakness and naivete, and will be forever.

Here is the talk:

There once was a short little candle getting even shorter as she burned.

“But my flame loves me!” she cried, and no doubt she was right.