Breathing and Blogging and Linking...

I am busy with end of school year related work. Still, one needs to breathe, and part of my breathing is writing and part of my writing is blogging.

A dear friend recommended that I watch The Last Detective. He said that the character reminds him of me. I read up a bit on the show and wasn't sure how backhanded this compliment was. Then I found this quote, and now it's all good: "Frankly," one captured criminal tells him, "it's a pleasure to be arrested by you."

Speaking of quotes, I really liked this question, posed by David Baird in A Thousand Paths To Happiness, "Why is it we so hate being taught when we're so happy to learn?"

In the same book, the author raises this paradox, which I've wondered about, "Is there a humble person who isn't proud of the fact?" I've asked myself, "If someone considers someone else arrogant, is there some arrogance in that judgement? Similarly, "Is it iffy to think you are humble?"

While we're on books and quotes here's a quote by a man who was moved by a book many years ago and went out to find the author and made a movie about it called Stone Reader, "Like all secret hopes...when they vanish, you realize you'd done too little to make them happen" - Mark Moskowitz. (It's a remarkable movie.)

That film opens with these words of Ernest Hemingway (in an extended version that doesn't seem to be on line), "All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."

While I was looking up that saying, this line caught my eye, "All things truly wicked start from an innocence." - Ernest Hemingway. There is something very original, insightful, and striking about those words.

On the topic of character, there's a story I've quoted several times, and it seems to always garner 6 comments. It's passed on as a Cherokee story, or simply as a Native American tradition. I cited it here, in a post that I wrote right after a friend mentioned the idea of my facilitating a presentation on middot and teaching. A nice comment exchange with Neil Harris followed.

I just went onto Neil Harris' blog and found that he links to this amazing short video presentation of Rabbi Avigdor Miller talking about the miracle called an apple. (I don't think that Rabbi Miller would have approved being put on Youtube, and he probably wouldn't have backed the smoothly produced and marketed video. This is not to say that I'm not pleased to have watched it. I am.)

I also cited that Cherokee story during my question period of blogging. And I posted it straight up in this one called, Two Wolves. I've also mentioned (not sure if it's in one of these posts or others that reference the story) that President Richard Joel and I tend to use some of the same stories, and this is one of them (another one is The Kite Story, which I write about here, and tell here.

A very recent post included thoughts on the mishnah's statement regarding kinah, ta'avah, and kavod. A reader asked where the mishnah was and I referenced it in the footnote, along with a bit of commentary (which I would have phrased differently had I written it myself). That reminded me of the following, different take on that statement:

The Gemorah in Sanhedrin (102a) tells of a moment when Yerabam ben Nebat was grabbed by the robe by G-d and told - "Do you turn back in teshuvah, and I, you, and the son of Yishai (i.e. King David) will stroll together in the Garden of Eden?" Yirabam asks - "Who will go first?" And G-d says, "The son of Yishai." And to this Yerabam says, "No thanks."

Irving Bunim applies this tale to the mishnah which states that "Jealousy, desire, and honor remove a person from the world." He cites Avot DeRabi Natan which specifies that the world these traits takes a person from is The World To Come. Bunim puts it this way in his Ethics From Sinai Vol II - page 194: "If the twisted, morally vitiated inner self cannot live in this world but will be removed, no more will it be able to live in the Hereafter, where it will arrive quite intact and unaltered." (You can read more about this here).

Recently at a Se'udat Hoda'ah the Cherokee story came up and someone mentioned that it inspired a song called Two Wolves. I like the idea that it was made into a song, but I didn't enjoy the actual song as much as I'd hoped I would (available at Youtube). Does it remind anyone else of this song?

Speaking of animals, on June 22nd someone googled the words "whittling a horse" and then went to the third response, which was this haiku post. I like that one, and the responses.

Someone in the film Stone Reader referenced the first italicized words in the quote below. It's interesting that Frost himself rails against this, in this late in life interview (Paris Review, Summer 1960) quote by Robert Frost:

"So many talk, I wonder how falsely, about what it costs them, what agony it is to write. I’ve often been quoted: 'No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.' But another distinction I made is: however sad, no grievance, grief without grievance. How could I, how could anyone have a good time with what cost me too much agony, how could they? What do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing it? The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why don’t critics talk about those things—what a feat it was to turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this? Why don’t they talk about that? Scoring. You’ve got to score. They say not, but you’ve got to score, in all the realms—theology, politics, astronomy, history, and the country life around you."

The second half of Stone Reader is introduced with this quote on the screen, "The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting" -Milan Kundera. Wow. I think about that a lot. Memory is about how we react to an experience. People tell me that I have a good memory, but it feels more to me like I experience things strongly - that's what I'd call it.

I've been writing this post in stitches over a couple of days. Along with this I've been finishing up marking, dealing with late work from students, and watching Stone Reader. The movie came out in 2002 and I watched it online via Netflix, which I started recently. The movie is about reading and thinking and searching and longing and and and. I liked it. After the movie came out the book at its center was republished after 30 years of being out of print. I checked it out on Amazon and a funny (not ha-ha) thing happened. There are 4 books listed that people who bought The Stones of Summer went on to also buy. One of the books (and I don't know the connection) is one which I'd never heard of until it was just recommended to me (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.)