Secrets

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable--which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live...

Above is a passage from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The narrator is a 77-year-old, dying minister who is writing a book to young son, and this is some of what he wants his son to hear when the son is an adult.

Don't You Be Making a List

It has occured to me that when I start getting judgemental about people, I'm kind of like Santa, making a list. How silly of me to butt in. Let Santa make the lists!

This Might Be True

Disappointment, embarrassment, and all the places where we cannot feel good are a sort of death. We've just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it together and feel that we're on top of things. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.

From Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön.

I Don't Believe in Astrology Either

My horoscope for this week according to freewill astrology:
At Salon.com's forum "Table Talk," participants were urged to come up with a six-word sentence that captured the essence of their lives. One person wrote, "Broke. Payday. Broke. Payday. Broke. Payday." Another said, "Oh, no, not again. Again. Again." But the testimony I really wanted to call your attention to is this: "I never learned how to swashbuckle." Why is this pertinent for you? Because I believe that if you have a similar regret -- that you've never mastered the art of swashbuckling -- you will have an excellent chance to fix that problem in the coming months. In fact, I'm tempted to name 2009 as the Year of the Swashbuckle for you Libras. If I could give you a symbolic holiday gift to get you started, it might be a superhero's costume created by a top fashion designer. Happy Holy Daze!

Six Word Speech

The guys at the NY Times Freakonomics blog asked this question: "If Barack Obama’s inaugural address could be just six words long, how would it read?" The winning answer was “Our worst critics prefer to stay.”

Right versus Wrong and Right versus Right

The world, unfortunately, faces plenty of right-versus-wrong questions. From cheating on taxes to lying under oath, from running red lights to inflating the expense account, from buying under-twelve movie tickets for your fourteen-year-old to overstating the damage done to your car for insurance purposes—the world abounds with instances that, however commonplace, are widely understood to be wrong. But right-versus-wrong choices are very different from right-versus-right ones. The latter reach inward to our most profound and central values, setting one against the other in ways that will never be resolved simply by pretending that one is “wrong”. Right-versus-wrong choices, by contrast, offer no such depth: The closer you get to them, the more they begin to smell. Two shorthand terms capture the differences: If we can call right-versus-right choices “ethical dilemmas”, we can reserve the phrase “moral temptations” for the right-versus-wrong ones…[Right versus right dilemmas] are genuine dilemmas precisely because each side is firmly rooted in one of our basic, core values. Four such dilemmas are so common to our experience that they stand as models, patterns, or paradigms. They are:
• Truth versus loyalty
• Individual versus community
• Short-term versus long-term
• Justice versus mercy

The above passage is from How Good People Make Tough Choices by Rushworth Kidder.

Plastic--Yuk!

Last week a friend sent me a PowerPoint about the evils of plastic. I tried to attach it here, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. However, today I stumbled across this blog with the ridiculous name of "Fake Plastic Fish." It's by a woman trying to get rid of plastic in her life and studying the problem. Probably everything the PowerPoint said is at her site too. I haven't had time to read much of it, but it's intriguing.

Slow Cars

The three paragraphs below are from an editorial by Elizabeth Kolbert in the December 8, 2008 issue of The New Yorker. Be sure to read through to the punch line in paragraph three.

The Secretary of Transportation’s report to Congress begins on a dark note. “Over the past year, the domestic auto industry has experienced sharply reduced sales and profitability, large indefinite layoffs, and increased market penetration by imports,” it states. “The shift in consumer preferences towards smaller, more fuel-efficient passenger cars and light trucks . . . appears to be permanent, and the industry will spend massive amounts of money to retool to produce the motor vehicles that the public now wants.” The revenue to pay for this retooling, though, will have to come from sales of just the sort of cars that the public is no longer buying—a situation, the report observes, bound to produce “financial strain.”

“To improve the overall future prospects for the domestic motor vehicle manufacturers, a quality and price competitive motor vehicle must be produced,” the report warns. “If this is not accomplished, the long term outlook for the industry is bleak.”

The Secretary’s report was delivered to Congress in 1980, a year after what may soon become known as the first Chrysler bailout. Depending on how you look at things, the report was either wrong—three years later, Chrysler returned to profitability—or prescient....