A sponge peddler, a huge sack slung over his shoulder, peered anxiously at the rain.

From Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst. A wonderful word sketch of a time (Greece, October 1940) and a place (downtown Salonika).

Entering the vast street market on Aristotle Square, Zannis furled his umbrella and worked his way through the narrow aisles. Rain pattered down on the tin roofing above the stalls, fishmongers shouted to the crowd, and, as Zannis passed by, the merchants smiled or nodded or avoided his eyes, depending on where they thought they stood with the Salonika police that evening. A skeletal old woman from the countryside, black dress, black head scarf, offered him a dried fig. He smiled politely and declined, but she thrust it toward him, the mock ferocity of her expression meaning that he had no choice. He tore the stem off, flicked it into the gutter, then ate the fig, which was fat and sweet, raised his eyebrows in appreciation, said, "It's very good, thank you," and went on his way. At the far end of the market, a sponge peddler, a huge sack slung over his shoulder, peered anxiously at the rain. Marooned, he could only wait, for if his sponges got wet he'd have to carry the weight for the rest of the night.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken

Joseph Banks was one of the stars in the Age of Enlightenment firmament. From Wikipedia:

Banks made his name on the 1766 natural history expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador. He took part in Captain James Cook's first great voyage (1768–1771), visiting Brazil, Tahiti, and, after 6 months in New Zealand, Australia, returning to immediate fame. He held the position of President of the Royal Society for over 41 years. He advised King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and by sending botanists around the world to collect plants, he made Kew the world's leading botanical gardens.

Banks advocated British settlement in New South Wales and colonisation of Australia, as well as the establishment of Botany Bay as a place for the reception of convicts, and advised the British government on all Australian matters. He is credited with introducing the eucalyptus, acacia, and the genus named after him, Banksia, to the Western world. Approximately 80 species of plants bear his name. He was the leading founder of the African Association and a member of the Society of Dilettanti which helped to establish the Royal Academy.

He shows up as a shadowy background figure in the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey–Maturin series (which is well worth reading for history, science, and maritime adventure; the first in the series is Master and Commander) and there are several good biorgraphies.

I came across a public domain version of his The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks [Journal from 25 August 1768-12 July 1771]. Some of the daily entries capture the quotidian nature of life aboard a sailing ship married to the opening of the world mind through science and exploration.

Linn. is Linnaeus the Swedish botanist/biologist/zoologist who

laid the foundations for the modern biological naming scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology.

In their first week of sail:

1768 August 28.

Little wind today; in some sea water, which was taken on board to season a cask, observed a very minute sea Insect, which Dr Solander describd by the name of Podura marina. In the Evening very calm; with the small casting net took several specimens of Medusa Pelagica, whose different motions in swimming amus'd us very much: among the appendages to this animal we found also a new species of oniscus. We took also another animal, quite different from any we had Ever seen; it was of an angular figure, about 3 inches long and one thick, with a hollow passing quite through it. On one end was a Brown spot, which might be the stomach of the animal.

Four of these, the whole number that we took, adherd together when taken by their sides; so that at first we imagind them to be one animal, but upon being put into a glass of water they very soon separated and swam briskly about the water.

1768 August 29.

Wind foul: Morning employd in finishing the Drawings of the animals taken yesterday till the ship got so much motion that Mr Parkinson could not set to his Pencil; in the Evening wind still Fresher so much as to make the night very uncomfortable.

1768 August 30.

Wind still Foul, ship in violent motion, but towards Evening much more quiet: Now for the first time my Sea sickness left me, and I was sufficiently well to write.

1768 August 31.

Wind Freshend again this morn; observ'd about the Ship several of the Birds calld by the seamen Mother Careys chickens, Procellaria Pelagica Linn. which were thought by them to be a sure presage of a storm, as indeed it provd, for before night it blew so hard as to bring us under our Courses, and make me very sea sick again.

I love the reconciliation between formal knowledge and vernacular knowledge reflected in that last entry. There was much that was popularly known (such as Mother Carey's Chickens as heralds of bad weather, and the existence of the Gulf Stream, known by sea captains but not by scientists till Franklin) that was still not legible to formal science. People like Banks began that process of not just discovery but of capturing what was already known beyond the halls of academe.

Mother Cary's Chickens were at that time indeed classified as Procellaria pelagica though later reclassified as Hydrobates pelagicus. It is popularly known as the European Storm Petrel.

As they move into September, there are some entries that show just how much was yet to be discovered. New creatures were simply a skein net away.

1768 September 1. Coast of Spain

Still Blew, Mother Careys chickens had not yet left us, but towards night wind slackened so that we were again tolerably easy; by our reckoning we must make some part of the coast of Spain before Morning.

1768 September 2.

This Morn about 7 saw the coast of Gallicia between Cape Ortegal and Finisterre; weather tolerably fine, so that we could use the casting net, which brought up two kinds of Animals, different from any before taken; they came up in Clusters, both sorts indifferen[t]ly in each Cluster, tho much fewer of the Horned ones than of the others. They seem to [be] two species of one genus, but are not at all reducible to any genus hitherto describd.

1768 September 3.

Blew fresh this morn. We were employd all day in describing the animals taken yesterday; found them to be of a new genus and of the same with that taken on the 28 of August Calld the genus Dagysa from the likeness of one Species to a Gem. Towards Even wind fair Settled tolerably fine.

Calls to mind the sentiment evoked by John Keats (a contemporary of Banks)

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
by John Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Journalism and cultural illiteracy

From 4 Problems With Media Confusion Over Ted Cruz’s Quoting Of Scripture by Mollie Hemingway.

In some ways Hemingway is making a mountain out of a molehill. Yet I think she is also quite correct.

Hemingway is referencing a statement by Kathleen Parker, a journalist.

One observation. I don’t know… this seems to have slipped through the cracks a little bit but Ted Cruz said something that I found rather astonishing. He said, you know, “It’s time for the body of Christ to rise up and support me.” I don’t know anyone who takes their religion seriously who would think that Jesus should rise from the grave and resurrect himself to serve Ted Cruz. I know so many people who were offended by that comment. And you know if you want to talk about grandiosity and messianic self-imagery I think he makes Ted Cruz makes Donald Trump look rather sort of like a gentle little lamb.

Hemingway goes on to tear apart Parker's seeming ignorance of even the most basic precepts of Christianity. Ignorance that is so basic that Parker misunderstands completely what Cruz was saying, to the point of mischaracterizing it.

Hemingway does a nice fisking as far as it goes.

But I think Hemingway is pointing to a symptom of a larger issue. Most of the main stream media are college educated, have always worked in services, live in major cities, and are generally secular/agnostic. They are, on all these vectors, fundamentally different from the rest of America where the great majority of people live in the suburbs and country, where they may be very smart but haven't completed college, where many have worked in the physical side of the economy and not just the white collar section, and where most not only regularly attend church but take their religious beliefs seriously.

I tend to think many of the prejudices and biases of the mainstream media are essentially a class issue and I am pretty confident that is most of the issue. Hemingway points out that there is an epistemological issue as well. If you are a secular agnostic, you may have a simple issue of cultural illiteracy that blinds you to understanding the majority of your fellow Americans.

Hemingway may have found a particularly egregious example of this journalistic cultural illiteracy but I don't think it is an uncommon failing.

There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words

I have enjoyed the inspirational life-story of Eric Hoffer and the products of his mind such as The True Believer. From the Wikipedia entry I noted that (emphasis added):

Hoffer's papers, including 131 of the notebooks he carried in his pockets, were acquired in 2000 by the Hoover Institution Archives. The papers fill 75 feet (23 m) of shelf space. Because Hoffer cultivated an aphoristic style, the unpublished notebooks (dated from 1949 to 1977) contain very significant work. Available for scholarly study since at least 2003, little of their contents has yet been published. A selection of fifty aphorisms, focusing on the development of unrealized human talents through the creative process, appeared in the July 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine.[19]

Chasing down the links, I arrived at Sparks: Eric Hoffer and the art of the notebook by Tom Bethell from July 1, 2005.

Here are the Hoffer aphorisms or observations from that article. Just about all of them call for some meditation or exposition but better that I simply record them here. Left to be meditated on later, they will disappear to the back of the mental cupboard of things to be gotten to.

THINKING AS CARICATURE

To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. "To illustrate a principle," says Bagehot, "you must exaggerate much and you must omit much." As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought: it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind--they are interesting and they stimulate. 1950

EXCITING THOUGHTS

There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing--as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect. 1950

HANGING IN THERE

What merit there is in my thinking is derived from two peculiarities: (1) My inability to be familiar with anything. I simply can't take things for granted. (2) My endless patience. I assume that the only way to find an answer is to hang on long enough and keep groping.1951

POLEMICS GIVE WARMTH

Perhaps people throw themselves into heated polemics to give content to their lives, to warm their hearts. What Luther said of hatred is true of all quarreling. There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting. 1950

WHAT OTHERS THINK

It is not good for our efforts at self-realization to know the opinions other people have of us. It is difficult or perhaps impossible to be ourselves if we are known. 1951

THE INCOMPLETE INDIVIDUAL

It is fearfully simple: The incomplete individual cannot stand on his own, cannot make sense by himself. He is a part and not a self-sufficient whole. He can make sense, have a purpose, and seem useful when he becomes a part of a functioning whole. 1951

BROODING

I am more and more convinced that taking life over seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of an Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights. 1952

THE DESIRE FOR PRAISE

This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservation of what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinion of others.The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter. 1952

LITTLE TO SAY

If writing gives us satisfaction, we are likely to end up writing for definite periods each day even when we have little to say. The hanging on to an empty form is almost natural since it is the form only that we can control and stage. There is, of course, also the unconscious assumption that once you stage the form, the content will come to nest in it of itself. All ritual is perhaps based on this assumption: you stage the gesture and words that go with fervor and faith and you assume that the latter will somehow materialize.1952

PLENTY OF TIME

The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time--not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me. 1952

GROANS OF CREATION

The sense of worth derived from creative work depends upon "recognition" by others,which is never automatic. As a result, the path of self-realization, even when it is the only open one, is taken with reluctance. Men of talent have to be goaded to engage in creative work. The groans and laments of even the most gifted and prolific echo through the ages. 1953

THOUGHT AS TREASON

To think for oneself is not only, as Gide said, counterrevolutionary but also apostasy and,at certain times, treason. 1953

UPHILL THINKING

To think of one's self the first thing in the morning and last thing before falling asleep constitutes a most dejecting routine. There is a feeling of lowness about it all. Our preoccupation with thought and with problems, of whatever nature, is a climb up a steep incline. When we slip and hit bottom we are left with the sole preoccupation with the self.1953

THINKING AND WAITING

Thinking with me is like looking for a person whose address I don't know. I stand on a street corner all day long waiting for him to pass by. Certainly there are more efficient ways of locating a person whose address you don't know. But if you have a whole lifetime to wait and enjoy watching things go by, then waiting on street corners is as good a method as any. If you don't find the person you are looking for, you might meet someone else. 1953

A YEAR'S BOOKKEEPING

What was it in books, persons, observation, or experiences, etc., that stirred the mind? You give the date, describe the object, happening, or situation ... What a rich year it could be if every day precipitated even a mere crumb's worth of keeping. 1953

THINKING IN ISOLATION

By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation.To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food. 1954

THERE ARE BUT A FEW YEARS

The most important point is--and remains--not to take oneself seriously. There is no past, and, certainly, no future. There are but a few years--ten at the most. You pass your days as best you can, doing as little harm as possible. Let the desires be few and treat expectations as weeds. You read, scribble as the spirit moves you, hear some new music, see every week the few people you are attached to. Again: guard yourself, above all, against self-dramatization, a feeling of importance, and the sprouting of expectations.1954

KNOW THYSELF

It is precisely because we can never really know ourselves, but only guess, that we are so vehement about the good and the evil ascribed to us by others. In maintaining ourselves against all comers, we are maintaining something that is unknown, uncertain, and never wholly provable. We need a chorus of consent, and we are engaged in an unceasing proselytizing campaign in our own behalf. 1954

COOKING THE FACTS

How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables. 1954

SIMPLICITY

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern. 1954

WORDINESS

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words. 1954

EXAGGERATE!

It is the Frenchman's readiness to exaggerate that is at the root of his intellectual lucidity and also of his capacity for acknowledging merit. The English were not afraid to exaggerate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they were then not far behind the French in the lucidity of their thinking.... There is hardly a single instance of cultural vigor marked by moderation in expression. 1955

TIME TO THINK

It has been my experience that there is no substitute for time where thinking is concerned.Why is it so? The answer seems to be that in many cases to think means to be able to allow the mind to stray from the task at hand. The mind must be able to be "elsewhere."This needs time. 1955

UNUSED TALENTS

Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream. 1955

FACT AND OPINION

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion. 1955

CREATIVE OBSTACLES

The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul,is somehow the offspring of resistance--of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom. 1956

TYRANNY FOR ART'S SAKE

One is not quite certain that creativeness in the arts, literature, and science functions best in an environment of absolute freedom. Chances are that a relatively mild tyranny stimulates creativeness. 1956

A MATTER OF MOMENTS

Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble. 1956

THE ACADEMY

Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies. 1956

IN THE DARK

It is apparently vital that we should be in the dark about ourselves--not to be clear about our intentions, fears, and hopes. There is a stubborn effort in us to set up a compact screen between consciousness and the self. 1956

SCHADENFREUDE

The man of words feels better when the man of action comes to grief. There is not the least doubt that depressions have been good for the intellectual's soul. 1957

UNDERESTIMATING

To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating. 1957

WRITING AS MAGIC

Many people do not expect anything they read to make sense. They do not demand lucidity and relevance. There is a twofold reason for this attitude: First, the viewing of writing as a strange art and mysterious procedure. Such a view equates reading with listening to music. Second, the viewing of writing as something beyond our own powers--a sort of magic. Such a view predicates incomprehension, and is not disappointed by obscurity or lack of sense. 1957

LIES THAT PREVIEW TRUTH

Why is it so hard to tell the truth? Because more often than not the truth is meager and stale. By lying we, as it were, reform the world--arrange things as we would like them to be. And often indeed the lie is a preview of a new truth. 1957

OBSCURITY OF THE SELF

The only key in deciphering others is our self; and considering how obscure this self is and how dim our awareness of it, the use of it as a key in deciphering others is like using hieroglyphs to decipher hieroglyphs. 1957

WRITING AND HINTING

Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints. 1957

STALENESS

How quickly does anything we understand become stale. Perhaps this is a malady of a certain season of life. 1958

GROPING FOR IDEAS

I have never felt that I had a thought too profound for others to understand. On the contrary, it always seemed to me axiomatic that what was clear to me should be clear and easy to everyone else. This despite the fact that it often took me years to grope my way to an idea.... I can spend days and even months on a single sentence. I do not know how to skip. To think and write with me is like putting brick on brick. 1959

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

How rare it is to come across a piece of writing that is unambiguous, unqualified, and also unblurred by understatements or subtleties, and yet at the same time urbane and tolerant.It is a vice of the scientific method when applied to human affairs that it fosters hemming and hawing and a scrupulousness that easily degenerates into obscurity and meaninglessness. 1960

WALKING AND MARCHING

Flaubert and Nietzsche have emphasized the importance of standing up and walking in the process of thinking. The peripatetics were perhaps motivated by the same awareness. Yet purposeful walking--what we call marching--is an enemy of thought and is used as a powerful instrument for the suppression of independent thought and the inculcation of unquestioned obedience. 1960

INNOVATION

Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the
fact that others have already discovered these things--have even discovered them over and over again--and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways. 1960

PERSISTENCE PAYS

What counts most is holding on. The growth of a train of thought is not a direct forward flow. There is a succession of spurts separated by intervals of stagnation, frustration, and discouragement. If you hold on, there is bound to come a certain clarification. The unessential components drop off and a coherent, lucid whole begins to take shape. 1961

ORIGINALITY

Originality is not something continuous but something intermittent--a flash of the briefest duration. One must have the time and be watchful (be attuned) to catch the flash and fix it. One must know how to catch and preserve these scant flakes of gold sluiced out of the sand and rocks of everyday life. Originality does not come nugget-size. 1961

KEY SENTENCES

A good sentence is a key. It unlocks the mind of the reader. 1962

ELABORATION

As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words--two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas--a series of ideas stuck together. 1962

FAITH AND VEHEMENCE

I have never known the hunger for immortality. Nor have I ever savored fervent faith. I have not had even a single festering grievance.... I have yet known vehemence. When I expound ideas and opinions, I do so with a passion. 1964

POSITIVE THINKING

Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing. 1967

A FEW GOOD SENTENCES

Disraeli felt that "nothing could compensate his obscure youth, not even a glorious old age." Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences--nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon. 1977

PHILOSOPHY

I could never figure out--or probably did not take the trouble to figure out--what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble living out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive.1977

RETROSPECTIVE

In all my life I never competed for fortune, for a woman, or for fame. I learned to write in total isolation. My first work was also my best, and the first thing published. I neverbelonged to a circle or clique. I did not know I was writing a book until it was written.When my first book was published there was no one near me, an acquaintance let alone a friend, to congratulate me. I have never savored triumph, never won a race. 1981

Train travel from children's books to spy books

When the kids were growing up, they all enjoyed the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. The original ones by Reverend W. Awdry. One item, much commented on, was the distinctively interactive nature of riding on trains. Thomas and his pals were always coming off the rails, coming up short against a rock fall, stopping at a collapsed tunnel, failing to climb a steep grade, etc. And always, the long suffering passengers had to get out, dig, push, and otherwise help the trains get through.

Brought to mind by a passage in a book I just finished. Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst. A great find. I love coming across an established author with a good backlog of books. From the blurb:

Greece, 1940. In the port city of Salonika, with its wharves and brothels, dark alleys and Turkish mansions, a tense political drama is being played out. As Adolf Hitler plans to invade the Balkans, spies begin to circle—and Costa Zannis, a senior police official, must deal with them all. He is soon in the game, working to secure an escape route for fugitives from Nazi Berlin that is protected by German lawyers, Balkan detectives, and Hungarian gangsters—and hunted by the Gestapo. Meanwhile, as war threatens, the erotic life of the city grows passionate. For Zannis, that means a British expatriate who owns the local ballet academy, a woman from the dark side of Salonika society, and the wife of a shipping magnate. With extraordinary historical detail and a superb cast of characters, Spies of the Balkans is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to fight back against the world’s evil.

Furst is apparently well noted for his historical accuracy.

I enjoyed the book a great deal. Salonika in particular is a city with a fascinating history and anything that teaches me more about it is appreciated. Furst does a great job of highlighting small details and rendering and in general creating an atmosphere of Casablanca of the Balkans.

Another favorite author, Lawrence Durrell, wrote a number of books about pre- and post-war Greece and Yugoslavia. Some of the humorous ones were collected together in Antrobus Complete which also included some stories of the perils of train travel in the Balkans.

The passage in Spies of the Balkans which connected both Thomas the Tank Engine and Lawrence Durrell was this one:

As instructed, Zannis left as soon as he could - the first train out at midday. But they made slow progress; stopped for a herd of sheep crossing the track, stopped because of overheating after a climb up a long grade, slowed to a crawl in a sudden snowstorm, stopped for no apparent treason at a town on the river Morava, somewhere north of Nis, the name of the station not to be found on the timetable. It was the fault of the engineer, someone said; who had halted the train for a visit with his girlfriend. Late at night, Zannis arrived in Nis, where the train that was to take him south was long gone.

And the right story tells us who we are

From the Poet Laureate of California, Dana Gioia.

I am fascinated by the idea of how language and stories shape us and in often unknown ways. From a family of raconteurs, I have grown up with shape shifting stories. The details of a story might vary from telling to telling, depending on the audience, the mood of the storyteller, the circumstances, but the core truth of the story remains the same. It is a marvellous play on what we consider truth - the constituent elements or the meaning taken from the story.

I tell my children stories relayed to me by my grandmother of her mother's childhood. The details of the stories might not stand up to a rigorous research of the records but the story has a life of its own - the way it is retold ensures its continuity. The story "takes on a life of its own" in more than a metaphorical way.

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet
by Dana Gioia

The tales we tell are either false or true,
But neither purpose is the point. We weave
The fabric of our own existence out of words,
And the right story tells us who we are.
Perhaps it is the words that summon us.
The tale is often wiser than the teller.
There is no naked truth but what we wear.

So let me bring this story to our bed.
The world, I say, depends upon a spell
Spoken each night by lovers unaware
Of their own sorcery. In innocence
Or agony the same words must be said,
Or the raging moon will darken in the sky.
The night grow still. The winds of dawn expire.

And if I’m wrong, it cannot be by much.
We know our own existence came from touch,
The new soul summoned into life by lust.
And love’s shy tongue awakens in such fire—
Flesh against flesh and midnight whispering—
As if the only purpose of desire
Were to express its infinite unfolding.

And so, my love, we are two lunatics,
Secretaries to the wordless moon,
Lying awake, together or apart,
Transcribing every touch or aching absence
Into our endless, intimate palaver,
Body to body, naked to the night,
Appareled only in our utterance.

Nonroutine is the key

A good while ago I posted about research showing how at-risk routine work was compared to non-routine work. Specifically, routine manual work was the most exposed to disintermediation or technological replacement. This was followed by routine cognitive work (think administrators). People performing jobs that were non-routine, either cognitive or labor both were stable or growing. This research was from some time in the early aughts.

I came across some new research that brings the data up to date but with the same results. From Jobs Involving Routine Tasks Aren't Growing by Maximiliano Dvorkin.

Given this, it is important to classify occupations according to how routine their tasks are. It is also important to classify occupations by whether they use mostly cognitive skills or mostly manual skills (brain vs brawn). The following figure shows the evolution of U.S. employment across four types of occupations:

* Nonroutine cognitive occupations, which include management and professional occupations
* Nonroutine manual occupations, which include service occupations related to assisting or caring for others
* Routine cognitive, which include sales and office occupations
* Routine manual, which include construction, transportation, production and repair occupations2

Click to enlarge.

The picture is clear: Employment in nonroutine occupations—both cognitive and manual—has been increasing steadily for several decades. Employment in routine occupations, however, has been mostly stagnant.

Tell truth and shame the devil

William Shakespeare, Henry The Fourth, Part I Act 3, scene 1, 52–58

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Glendower: Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command
The devil

Hotspur: And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil—
By telling the truth. Tell truth and shame the devil.

I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings; they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.

From Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, attempting to answer Aristotle's question "How should we live?"

Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy. They do their duty, these shopkeeping souls, but they clip the coin a trifle, like the Jews; they think that even if the Lord keeps ever so careful a set of books, they may still cheat Him a little. Out upon them! This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings; they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.

Ephermera

Doing some beginning of year cleaning of my desk and general work area. Lots of notes to myself, many cryptic, some indecipherable. Some are thoughts meant for later consideration that never got considered. One such is:

Values Based Argument - Logic

Evidence Based Argument - Scientific Method

Emotions Based Argument - Rhetoric

That's an interesting framework to play with. But not today. More clearing and cleaning to be done.