What circumspection!What delicacy of conscience!

‘The Effort’ by Billy Collins

I found this on my parents’ shelf. Rowland and Workman were ranch owners in the San Gabriel Valley, where I grew up. In fact, I attended John A. Rowland High School. I assumed Rowland was just some rich guy who bought a lot of property at a good time. Actually, he and Workman were deeply involved in the early history of New Mexico and California. Surprisingly interesting and well-written.

Fascinating. Based on the idea that we make judgements without thinking about them, and there are ways of taking advantage of our unconscious and ways to hone and maximize the process. Lots to consider. Highly recommended.

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from WA:

Roethke was passionate about teaching. He called teaching “one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world.” And he once wrote in his journal: “The teaching of poetry requires fanaticism.”

a favorite poem: Read the rest of this entry »

NYT:

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

from The Book Bench:

There’s Thoreau, who devoted an entire treatise (“Walking”) to the moral superiority of amblers, stating, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art,” which anyway “comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.” Thoreau himself spent at least four hours a day walking through the woods, and he did not understand those who toiled indoors, though, he writes, “they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.” (Thank you, Thoreau!)

Then there’s Rousseau, a Herculean walker, who traipsed as a young man across the Alps from Geneva to Turin and back, and then to Paris and back; who said that he couldn’t think unless walking; and who suggests, in “Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” his final work, that only he who wanders alone can become “self-sufficient like God.” (Not that Rousseau didn’t whinge on other occasions about the lack of a walking companion.)

from the NYT.

Beautiful.

Economist:

ANECDOTAL evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link.