The Subtle Landscape

OK kids, you’ve got to check out this book: 30 Lessons for Living - Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans, a distillation of 300 interviews undertaken by a professor at Cornell University with elderly Americans deemed, by outside consensus, to have lived a good life.

Last weekend while discussing politics in general and the (then) upcoming Iowa caucuses in particular, a friend offered that President Obama is a Muslim. I didn’t know which response should come first: who cares or no he’s not.

Clearly and obviously, I'm among the more dazed and confused. Can’t stay on topic. Short attention span. Where some, most it seems, see the path before them plain as day – even if it be one requisite of adroit maneuver – I usually can’t see my own fingers if arms at full extension.

Yesterday I was reading an article* about Carlos Jimenez, a young (52 which is younger than I am anyway) architect in Houston and remembered visiting him in his office about a decade ago.

Looking back through my notes, I remembered he introduced me to the concept of generosity in architecture – its power to enhance the quality of one’s living.

I obviously like words. I have the Old English Dictionary on my hard drive and enjoy just cruising through it from time to time. My son used to call me Mr. Big Words, but truth be told I'm almost always dead last in a Scrabble challenge. Guess I’m just good at looking stuff up.

I probably should come clean though and fess that my favorite words are monosyllabic, terse, and widely understood. Even among non-English speakers. I remember a drunken Swedish stevedore reeling them off on a North Sea wharf long ago even before I heard George Carlin do so.

Interestingly, in his new book Who’s In Charge,'* cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga wrote: “…we are people, not brains” by which he means that, uh, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. That though an emergent property of the bit of grey matter up top, a meeting of minds cannot be understood as can, say, the Indianapolis 500 by the mechanics of an internal combustion engine.

That’s Sauger looking over Great Sand Dune National Park during a road trip with his soul mate a few summers ago. He’d already turned 12 by then, which is old for a big dog – just check out his grey muzzle. He loved his home, but wouldn’t be separated from her if it was within his power not to be and he thus enthusiastically accompanied her on this artist-in-residency.

Though it is not exactly the story he tells, in his new book 'The Bear History of a Fallen King,' French cultural historian Michel Pastoureau shows how the coming of consciousness gave its bearers power which descendants have yet even now to effectively tame.

In prehistoric times, bears were feared, perhaps deified as a result, and thus immortalized on cave walls. Common in Europe, they were more than a match for dim-witted pre-humans. Once the light went on, however, so was the hunt and the rest, well, is history.

The three pictures you see below were all painted by Iowa native son Marvin Cone. All come up for auction this week. All are interesting – all the more in juxtaposition.

The first, just below, is titled “Sunlight and Shadows – Luxembourg Gardens Paris 1929." Though it is expected to draw the least interest and least dinero, I quite like it for a number of reasons. First, it is indeed pleasant to look at. Though not exactly exuberant, it conveys a fine sense of the joy concomitant with a stroll through a park in the height of fall foliage.

Well, news from CERN has it that there are particles moving faster than the speed of light. Sounds like a big deal given E=MC2 and all of that. However, reading through the blogs, it seems that Einstein’s theory already allowed for neutrinos of the “Tachyonic” sort to exist always at faster than light.