the average 22-year-old man today has an testosterone level roughly equal to that of a 67-year-old man in 2000.
-read the whole thing
The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.
-A.E. Housman
I was reading D&C 1 and felt a General Conference Doggerel coming on.
Lord, I come to you with but 10 sins
Or if you press me, how ’bout just one sin?
A faint little sin, like it hardly had been.
And the Good Lord said, divide it by ten.
Teddy Roosevelt. The older I get the more I admire the man. Though he was a ham and a showman, like a better Donald Trump for a much better age.
Here he is on reading. Some excerpts:
Now and then I am asked as to “what books a statesman should read,” and my answer is, poetry and novels — including short stories under the head of novels.
…
why! there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value.
The same thing is true of Darwin and Huxley and Carlyle and Emerson, and parts of Kant, and of volumes like Sutherland’s “Growth of the Moral Instinct,” or Acton’s Essays and Lounsbury’s studies
Parts of Kant! Ha ha ha ha. Oh, Teddy.
I still read a number of Scott’s novels over and over again, whereas if I finish anything by Miss Austen I have a feeling that duty performed is a rainbow to the soul. But other booklovers who are very close kin to me, and whose taste I know to be better than mine, read Miss Austen all the time — and, moreover, they are very kind, and never pity me in too offensive a manner for not reading her myself.
Our challenges demand that we should be supermen of history, capable of resolving the crisis our age and place and constructing the new understanding. Nothing less will do than be iron men and saints.
We should be men with hearts full from the well-springs of tradition, but also with fierce eyes for the coming forms of life that lie over the horizon. We should have a dual orientation: both an immovable rootedness and the most expansive wanderlust.
-thus Rafael M.
“The weak things of the world shall come forth and break down the mighty and strong ones,” D&C 1:19.
I once thought this prophecy was real inspiring. I now think its a prophecy of bad times coming. Because the weak don’t take on the strong, nor win, unless the strong have made an utter misery of the world and dragged everything including themselves down into destruction.
“The prophecies and promises … shall all be fulfilled,” D&C 1:37.
Inspired by Rozy, I wrote a poem in the style I call General Conference Doggerel, though bluer.
(For you single people, sorry. Your display of the nameless virtue is honorable.)
Here goes.
The crows sure loved to talk and gossip. One day they swarmed a hog over and hover. “It must be because he is silent so much,” a bystander observed. “Oh, no,” said a crow taking a momentary break from the harassment. “Its because when he talks he doesn’t always say what we want.”
I recommend the Planetary Anthology: Neptune. It was better quality and more even quality than I remember recent anthologies being. One story was literally gay, but other than that . . .
The story Sea Change was good. It pulled off the trick of making you think there was a deep, rich world behind the story while only showing you the few glimpses necessary for the story. In particular, the actual world-feature that provides the narrative drive is only briefly mentioned in a couple of scattered sentences. Good story with real moral weight, one I would recommend even if it didn’t have the word ‘sennight.’ One cannot trust pseudonyms these days, but on internal evidence I would think it was written by a woman.
We are on a high mountain, or so it seemed to my little girl who hiked to the top of it with me. “Do you see the trucks on the freeway? From here they look like toys.”
“No!” she says, “they are toys. I am going to pretend they are all toys.”
“OK, knock yourself out.”
“Look at the toy trucks and the toy houses all over and its all toys, they are so cute!”
Silence.
“Dad . . .”
“Yes, sweety?”
“There is a giant and we are his toys.”
to argue that the American future depends on pushing our birthrate back above replacement level . . . remains an eccentric argument to many people: an interesting idea, maybe, but not a particularly urgent one, and certainly not the sort of issue that would make the cut of questions for a presidential debate.
Which is a bit crazy, when you stop to think about it. Whether a society is reproducing itself isn’t an eccentric question; it’s a fundamental one. The birthrate isn’t just an indicator of some nebulous national greatness; it’s entangled with any social or economic challenge that you care to name.
Why the dearth?
(more…)
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid
Peace, but not as the world understands peace. His peace is different. The world sees peace as the absence of violence. They make a desert, and call it peace. The Savior makes the desert blossom like a rose, and calls it peace. His peace is a synonym for victory.
But not victory as the world understands it either.
The victory that is won by God as a newborn babe.
Peace on earth, good will to men.
There is a paradise place where the grass is lush and soft; the dew sparkles; the trees whisper in the wind. There is a farm there. The farmer and his family have a routine. Every morning, for example, he or one of his children go to see the ducks to make sure the fencing for their run is still well, to check for predators, and to collect eggs. The land is beautiful and so is the routine. But to make sure they avoid stagnation of the mind, each time they go to the ducks they recite a poem or a passage. They do this for all their many ordered activities.
It is not necessarily a poem about the activity. It is often just a poem they like. But it is the same one for each activity. They find it more beautiful that way. At the ducks, Dover Beach. Cutting cabbage for sauerkraut, Out Out Brief Candle. There are a thousand or more that they recite.
At nights, they play together doing geometry proofs.
If you go past the influence of the farm and its people, past the woods they log, past the hills where they pursue game, past the event horizon of their lives, you find a wasteland. It is dark and roiling with chaotic forces, with an anarchy of brutal energies.
The farm family doesn’t know it, but that roiling darkness is what underlies their farm also. Only it is guided and tamed and brought into order by their poetry and their passages and the harmony of their lives. It is what makes everything so lush and green. The lush farm is the natural end those forces were meant for.
Here is a story in which you are the hero. Well, the sidekick.
There is a hero and his group and the villain and his group. But you must not imagine that you are in a superhero story. The hero is a suburban dad. You are, well, you. The rest of the hero’s crew are neighborhood people. The villain is a rangy, rawboned young man in a wifebeater who operates out of a collection of trailers out in the sagebrush. His crew are trailer park people. One of his sidekicks is a woman in her 30s who looks like a cafe-waitress: a bit the worse for wear, stringy mouse brown hair, prettyish if not so unkempt, face a bit lined, a little too thin. There are no superpowers. Maybe minor powers, the woman can possibly do a few spells or something. There are devices that work better than they should. You are definitely a sidekick in a pulpish or cinematic story. But no superpowers.
There is a backstory by the way. Act 1, before the story starts, you and the hero tangled with the witchy woman. You of course prevailed. Now, in Act 2, she found this villain and helped him put together a group. (more…)