June 2011
39, by Henry Lawson
I only woke this morning
To find the world is fair—
I’m going on for forty,
With scarcely one grey hair;
I’m going on for forty,
Where man’s strong life begins,
With scarce a sign of crows’ feet,
In spite of all my sins.
Then here’s the living Forties!
The Forties! The Forties!
Then here’s the living Forties!
We’re good for ten years more.
The teens were black and bitter,
A smothered boyhood’s grave—
A farm-drudge in the drought-time,
A weary workshop slave.
But twenty years have laid them,
And all the world is fair—
We’ll find time in the Forties,
To have some boyhood there.
Then here’s the wide, free Forties—
The Forties! The Forties!
Then here’s the wide, free Forties!
We’re good for ten years more!
The twenties they were noble,
The bravest years, I think;
’Twas man to man in trouble,
In working and in drink;
’Twas man to man in fighting,
For money or for praise.
And we’ll find in the Forties
Some more Bohemian days.
Then here’s the wiser Forties!
The Forties! The Forties!
Then here’s the wiser Forties!
We’re good for ten years more.
The thirties were the fate years;
I fought behind the scenes.
The thirties were more cruel
And blacker than the teens;
I held them not but bore them—
They were no years of mine;
But they are going from me,
For I am thirty-nine.
So here’s the stronger Forties!
The Forties! The Forties!
And here’s the good old Forties!
We’re good for ten years more.
currently spinning
“
…sprezzatura, the “certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry,” which is supposed to be the surest mark of a true gentleman, the essence of the courtier’s social capital. Underlying sprezzatura is the idea that the value of an action is in how it is received rather than in any essential quality of the action itself. Deeds themselves become arbitrary, which in The Book of the Courtier leads to the ludicrous equivalence of disparate practices: for instance, how one appears on the battlefield and how one appears at a masked ball are judged by the same criteria, which have nothing to do with why one fights or why one dances. They are merely occasions for sprezzatura. How the courtier appears when in love, too, is evaluated according to criteria that abrogates the emotions presumably involved. Castiglione’s description of the ideal courtier in love renders the actual feelings of love superfluous.
Those actual feelings are precisely those awkward sorts of emotions that the doctrine of sprezzatura intends to suppress. Because feelings are arbitrary within the sprezzatura system, whether one genuinely loves is irrelevant, as insignificant as the reasons one goes to the masked ball. One simply goes because one’s presence is required. One loves because a gentleman wouldn’t be complete without it. In the ideal universe of perfect sprezzatura, men and women apparently interact with one another without requiring any understanding of why.
But supplanting love with sprezzatura, making a virtue of a courtier’s vigilant reflexivity, seems to spite the otherwise governing definition of love as beyond personal will and control. Implicit in that ideal of love as an uncontrollable force rather than a choice is a yearning for a social experience beyond strategy. Such a love could serve as an ontological anchor, providing a basis by which they could know who they “really” were in the midst of all the calculated self-presentation…
That kind of love doubles down on reflexivity and self-consciousness rather than absolving it. In contemporary times, we may have devised a similarly solipsistic solution to our conundrums of love and insecurity: smart phones and social media, which let us live in constant communication with our networks on our terms while preserving our own kind of sprezzatura, the noncommittal openness, flexibility and responsiveness to rapidly changing circumstances, which also happen to be qualities highly desired by employers.
Shared experience is no longer local phenomenon but something that happens in virtual communities, where identity is a perpetual work in progress, a striving to reach a home that is not a particular place but a state of mind, a realization of some ideal community that nurtures an ideal self. But it may be an unrealizable fiction.
” —“Love in the Age of Self-Consciousness” (The New Inquiry)
“Recent work on mental imaging in cognitive psychology has shown that the part of the brain at work when one thinks of a handmade object (a chisel, a dollhouse, a house) is not the same as when one thinks about a nonhandmade object (a stone, a shell). It also turns out that the part of the brain engaged in thinking about handmade objects is the region engaged in thinking about motion.”
—From Elaine Scarry’s thought-stirring Dreaming by the Book, which demonstrates, in a lyrical and straightforward way, the most effective ways in which writers make images on readers’ brains with words.
These lines caught my eye when I read the book a few years ago. I wonder if it applies to all non-naturally occurring things, as in: does the word ‘screen’ light up the same part of the brain as ‘chisel’? It’s somehow so appealing — in a way I’m not sure I can articulate yet — that the brain has a special place for registering the stuff that occurs in nature.
It’s also surprising and neat, and makes sense now that I think about it, that the paths in the brain that get traveled when tools are mentioned are the same ones that get activated when thinking about motion. When I think of a hammer, I think of it being swung. When I think of a screwdriver, I think of it being twisted. Tools speak to action, movement, human agency.
(via carpentrix)
“Francis Bacon had this notion about how to find objective truth. Today, we call it the scientific method. Bacon dubbed it, “progressive stages of certainty”, which I think absolutely nails the point. He figured that each idea has to be solid before you can move forward, and each idea has to fit in place when it’s all said and done. Anything that doesn’t work gets tossed out the window, no matter how much you liked the thought and no matter how much you want to stomp your feet about it. That sounds as much about design as any scientific reasoning.”
—Jason Permenter (via viafrank)
“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”
—Marshall McLuhan (via austinkleon)
“Sometimes you have to pry open your chest with a rib spreader, and reach inside yourself, and tear out your heart, and throw it on your blog with a wet slap!”
—Susannah Breslin
