A wonderful story about a 18 year-old boy, struck with a terminal cancer, who is wise beyond his years.
John Challis.
Teen is running out of innings, but the game still isn't over.
After the walk, John addressed the crowd.
"He spoke from his heart," Mr. Wetzel, the coach, said. "He said, 'I've got two options. I know I'm going to die, so I can either sit at home and feel sorry, or I could spread my message to everybody to live life to the fullest and help those in need.' After hearing that, I don't know if there were many people not crying."
Later in an interview he was asked where he gained his wisdom.
Through cancer.
"They say it takes a special person to realize this kind of stuff," he said. "I don't know if I'm special, but it wasn't hard for me. It's just my mind-set. A situation is what you make of it. Not what it makes of you."
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"I guess I can see why people see me as an inspiration," he said. "But why do people think it's so hard to see things the way I do? All I'm doing is making the best of a situation."
John then raises his voice.
"Why can't people just see the best in things? It gets you so much further in life. It's always negative this and negative that. That's all you see and hear."
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Through his own thoughts and through his deep Catholic beliefs, John believes he has "figured it out." He answers questions with maturity, courage and dignity, traits that have become his trademarks.
There's a fine, new-to-me blog on The Art of Manliness where lessons in manliness are next to practical tips like Nine ways to start a fire without matches.
When all else fails, a coke can and bar of chocolate will do
Some like John McCain need no lessons but can teach some. Of course, he'll never do it and so it rests on others to tell.
Mr. Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, "I told you I would make you a cripple."
The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day's will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at "a goofy angle," as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.
But it didn't heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint. Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day's splint in place.
Years later, Air Force surgeons examined Mr. Day and complimented the treatment he'd gotten from his captors. Mr. Day corrected them. It was Dr. McCain who deserved the credit. Mr. Day went on to fly again.
Fascinating historical tidbits from this essay by Stephen Koch in the New York Times
“Celebrity was wonderful cover,” Noël Coward said near the end of his life. “My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot ... a merry playboy.”
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Perhaps a lifetime of concealing his own private life gave him a knack for the clandestine. In any case, he said, “I wanted to prove my integrity to myself.”
So he played the fool. “I was the perfect silly ass,” he said. “Nobody ... considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things that I’d pass along.”
I love this
When war came, Coward was sent to Paris as a figurehead in a propaganda office, where he made it part of his cover to mock intelligence work as childish games carried out by inept duffers. When someone proposed leafleting the enemy with speeches from Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, he recalled, “I wrote in a memorandum that if the policy of His Majesty’s Government was to bore the Germans to death I didn’t think we had enough time.”
I never knew the Duke and Duchess were so pro-Nazi, a fact over looked in the breathless media coverage of the love story of the king who could not continue as king "without the help and support of the woman I love."
By 1940, the Windsors had graduated from mediocrity into real menace. One factor in the abdication had been that the prime minister had been told, reliably, that the woman inflaming the king’s already fascistic sentiments was a friend of Ribbentrop and the next thing to a Nazi agent. After the abdication, the Windsors were married in the residence of a Nazi collaborator. As the Battle of Britain approached, British intelligence believed — correctly — that Hitler, assisted by Ribbentrop, planned to restore the duke to the throne as a quisling monarch. Worst of all, intelligence suspected that the couple may have been complicit in this treachery.
If you suddenly hear church bells ringing out next Tuesday around 4 pm, they ring to mark the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI to the United States for a six day visit, the schedule for which tire out anyone much less an 81-year-old man.
Catholics around the country are eagerly awaiting the touchdown at Andrews Air Force Base where he will be welcomed by the President and First Lady, the welcoming ceremony on the White House lawn, his meeting with the bishops, vespers at the National Shrine, the Mass in Nationals Park, his meeting with leaders from other faiths, his visit to the Park East Synagogue, his speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations, his meeting with young people with special needs and seminarians at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, his trip to Ground Zero and his celebration of the Mass at Yankee Stadium.
Of course, the Catholic media is pulling out all the stops with EWTN carrying live full coverage of every moment. Peter Steinfels wrote in the New York Times to expect a cliched coverage by the mainstream media as they discover once again that the Pope is indeed Catholic.
Yes, he disagrees with Richard Dawkins that atheism is necessary for salvation. Yes, he believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the son of God and the center of human history. Yes, he thinks that Catholic Christianity is truer than Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or even Protestant Christianity. Astounding. What next?
To its credit the New York Times has set up a blog magisterially entitled A Papal Discussion with noteworthy and informed contributors to assess the Pope's visit. Still I expect a lot of silly discussion about how the Pope has 'changed', has 'grown', is 'cracking down' all while wearing red Prada shoes. But since nothing can approach the splendor of the 2000 year old Catholic Church, there will be much fascination with Catholic liturgy and vestments. What I'm most interested is how they experience and report on a man of such virtue, intellect and moral authority. How will they report on Pope who writes such extraordinary letters such as Deus caritas est God Is Love and Spe Salvi Saved by Hope.
In Something Beautiful Has Begun, Peggy Noonan remembers asking people who had met John Paul II what they thought or said,
they'd be startled and say, "I don't know, I was crying."
John Paul made you burst into tears. Benedict makes you think. It is more pleasurable to weep, but at the moment, perhaps it is more important to think.
I always liked Pope John Paul II, but it was Cardinal Ratizger who riveted me with his homily to the College of Cardinals as they gathered to elect a new Pope when he spoke of the
dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.
The antidote he said was the development of
a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth. We must develop this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith - only faith - that creates unity and is fulfilled in love.
His call to develop a mature adult faith and his powerful intellect and ability to make the vast deposit of the magisterium clear and fresh has made me a fan and deepened my faith.
A lot of other people are getting Pope Fever like Miss Kelly who has snagged a ticket to the Mass in Yankee Stadium. The Anchoress, who to no one's surprise, loves Benedict and other Catholic things finds Benedict
warm, pastoral, approachable, quite paternal, and as easy to glean as a dear old uncle sharing fellowship over a cup of tea.
Sissy, a self-confessed agnostic, is getting A glimpse of the clearing and will be ringing her bells that that for many long years, they have never been heard.
With the theme of the Pope's visit "Christ Our Hope", I expect he will bring us good news and remind us that Christian hope is transformative because it offers assurance that "life will not end in emptiness".
You might have missed this when John Tierney posted it in February, but even if you did see it, it's worth being reminded that keeping all your options open is not the best advice.
Advantages of Closing a Few Doors
We forget that the point of a decision (from the Latin decidere to cut off) is to cut off options so one can go forward.
St. Patrick in his own words. From his confessions.
St. Patrick, born in Britain, captured and made a slave for 6 years until he had a vision and found the courage to escape and eventually return to his family. A few years later, another vision appeared to him
I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading: "The Voice of the Irish". As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of Foclut, which is beside the western sea—and they cried out, as with one voice: "We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.[12]
When the world seems its most discouraging, I search out stories of ordinary people whose lives can inspire me.
Greg Mortenson is such a man. A former US Army medic, he's made it his mission to build girls' schools in an area known as Baltistan, "Little Tibet" in the far north of Pakistan.
Here rural schools are rare, girls' schools even rarer, as the education of girls is condemned by religious extremists as un-Islamic. The Jafarabad school, along with 63 others in equally poor areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, exists thanks to the efforts of a brave foreigner the locals call 'Dr Greg', who has been described as 'a real-life Indiana Jones' and spoken of as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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His key allies include clerics, warlords, military officers, foreign mountaineers and several former members of the Taliban - one of whom is now a teacher at one of his schools in Kashmir - and an army of ordinary villagers desperate for their children to receive an education. 'What I'm good at is putting together a team, finding the right people,' he says. He has no pretentions to any other ability except willpower. 'I'm just an average guy. I had to work really hard in school. Learning never came easy to me, but I've got those Midwestern ethics that force you to persevere.'
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A trauma nurse and former mountain climber, he was climbing Mt Everest when a buddy came down with altitude sickness and Greg stayed with him, probably far too long because he became sick himself. On his way back, he became separated from his group and wandered sick into a tiny village where they nursed him to health. Only when he recovered did he realize how generous they had been and how poor they were. He promised to come back and build a school and he did, with no great plan, winging it all the way.
He's set up more than 60 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In May 2005 riots broke out in Baharak, the gateway to Afghanistan's Wakhan province, after Newsweek magazine erroneously reported that a Koran had been flushed down a lavatory at Guantanamo Bay. Every building with any connection to foreigners was burned by furious mobs, including the offices of the UN. But Mortenson's CAI school was left untouched - protected by village elders who saw it as their own.
His book has now sold over 850,000 copies.
You can read more of this most inspiring story at Free to Learn.
Lest we forget the greatness of George Washington, Richard Brookheiser reminds us in First in Politics wherein we learn how Washington learned how to back out of a bad situation and how to flip an enemy.
And Gleaves Whitney reminds us how often Washington put service above self.
Jason, an autistic boy and the manager of his school's basketball team with responsibilities to hand out water and lead the cheers, was tapped by the team's coach to suit up for the last game and then to play for the last few minutes.
"If I weren't there, I wouldn't have believed it," said the coach.
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Bill Whittle has posted another fabulous essay, Forty Second Boyd and the Big Picture.
Part 1 Pope John and the Supersonic Monastery
John Boyd – Pope John, The High Priest of the Fighter Mafia, the Mad Major, the Ghetto Colonel – Forty Second Boyd not only wrote the revolutionary tactics manuals that gave American pilots the keys to air-to-air victory… and with it the essential and undisputed control of the battlespace. Nor was his achievement limited to the design of the phenomenally successful F-15 and F-16 fighters. Nor was it merely the codifying of physics and thermodynamics to make a science out of an art form. That John Boyd saw all of these things for the first time would have made him a legend. But this was quite the lesser of his two great achievements. For Boyd not only saw how to perfect the sword. He saw too how to perfect the swordsman.
And for that, Forty Second Boyd may turn out to be one of the most important men of the Twenty-First Century. And he has lain at rest in Arlington National Cemetery since 1997.
Part 2 The Big Picture
A New Agility based on the theories of John Boyd and
Swordlessness using nothing but the enemy's sword against him.
General Petraeus – just perhaps – is in the process of winning such a victory in Iraq. By brilliant diplomacy, deep understanding of the culture and the judicious use of gunpowder and money, it appears he has severed most of the Sunni tribes from al Qaeda and used them as “Awakening” peacekeeping militias against their former allies. General Petraeus is not fighting the last war; he is fighting the next one. He did not arrive there and just hope for the best. He observed. He oriented. He decided. And he acted. And then he observed again to see what effect he had. And again. And again.
This is not firepower. This is not attrition. This is, rather, an intelligent, delicate, sophisticated, maneuver-based strategy. A light, but sometimes deadly touch. Fingertip control. Water flowing downhill, into the cracks which our enemy cannot fill.
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If this continues, Gen. Petraeus will have walked into the camp of the enemy and used his own sword against him. That is a profound species of victory.
You can not put a value on the power an idea such as the one that drives Gen. Petraeus’ “Awakening” strategy. A man’s ultimate motivation is to provide for his family. A man, when all is said and done, is powered by nothing more or less then the desire to make his family safe and proud of him.
He was 18 when he knew he wanted to write, but he couldn't finish anything.
So he trained as a librarian, worked in a printing plant and then a bookstore. Not until mid life when a friend said to him, "If you don't really take this seriously, you're going to die before you get a book out.", did he get going.
Per Petterson is Norwegian and not that many Norwegian books are translated into English.
If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world," he says. "The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer."
Still Out Stealing Horses sneaks up on people. "It snuck up on the world."
"Out Stealing Horses: A Novel" (Per Petterson)
It's appeared on several best of the year lists including the Time magazine, the National Book Critics Circle, the New York Times and won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in June.
Northern Light is the review that made me want to read the book.
Per Petterson is a writer who has accepted the hand fate dealt and embraced the lifelong project it implies.
"All I ever think about," he says, "is families."
You know the Christmas song, "Do You Hear What I Hear?"
Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy,
“Do you hear what I hear?
Ringing through the sky, shepherd boy,
Do you hear what I hear?
A song, a song, high above the tree
With a voice as big as the sea.”
What you don't know is that the song was written during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 by Noel Regney as he walked down the streets of New York City where despair hung thick in the air when he came upon two babies in strollers looking at each other and smiling.
Curt Rosengran had Thoughts about life on my 40th birthday
Who do I want to be?" The "meaning" element especially reflects a voice in me that has been getting more and more insistent.
I always say, only half-jokingly, "I want to change the world, I just don't want to do all the work.
He interviewed Marshall Goldsmith (or a future podcast.
In the interview Marshall, who coaches people who are or could be CEO's of multi-billion dollar corporations, said something that stuck in my head. "Ask any CEO who is retired - and I've interviewed many - 'What are you proud of?' None of them ever talked about how big their office was. All they ever talked about was the people they helped."
And that's what I want out of my next 40 years. If I can look back at age 80 and see a legacy of energized, meaningful, thriving lives that made a positive impact on the world around them, I will be a happy, happy man.
Let's join in the applause for Jeanne Assam, the killer blonde, who probably saved 100 lives at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs.
She "did not think for a minute to run away" when a gun entered the church and started shooting.
"I wasn't going to wait for him to do further damage," she said before a crowd of reporters and TV cameras who applauded her.
"I saw him coming through the doors" and took cover, Assam said. "I came out of cover and identified myself and engaged him and took him down."
"God was with me," Assam said. "I didn't think for a minute to run away."
Assam said she believes God gave her the strength to confront Murray, keeping her calm and focused even though he appeared to be twice her size and was more heavily armed.
Larry Bourbannais, a Vietnam veteran who saw combat was one of those shot, saw Assam walk toward the gunman and yelling "Surrender!"
He said it was the bravest thing he's ever seen.
Why didn't someone think of this before? Lights on walkers may cut falls
Forget driving in the dark — sometimes it's dangerous just walking in the dark.
As the population ages, medical teams are responding to more calls from people who have fallen in the night. Many are from older adults who toppled over their walkers while reaching for a light switch on the way to the kitchen or bathroom.
Credit Ron Olshwanger, director of the Creve Coeur Fire Protection District, whose own experience with his own mother ultimately led to his inspiration.
The lights (which are a lot like bicycle lights) cost $34 at Medical West, a medical supply firm that can install them on new or existing walkers.
Olshwanger emphasizes that he and the fire department won't make any profit off the headlights. His inspiration is his mother, Bernice Bormaster, who died five years ago. After breaking her hip, she called her son three times in the middle of the night for help getting back to bed.
"It's a perfect example of what can happen. A lot of these people, their minds are fine, their bodies are just a little weak." Olshwanger said. "These people want to live a normal life, and I think this will help."
HT bookofjoe
Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate, but doesn't teach because he spends most of his time in Hawaii surfing and in the winter snowboarding near Lake Tahoe. He is also a physicist who has spent some time working out the complexities of the intricate, elegant shape pictured above. It's called an E8, a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points.
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
Unlike the Standard Model of everything that can weave together only three of the four fundamental forces of nature, Lisi's E8 theory can accommodate all four. I know very little about physics, but the shape is very beautiful and looks like a mandala. In Oriental Art, a mandala represent the cosmos.
Lisi believes that our universe is this beautiful shape.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
I believe what John Keats wrote long ago, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." So I'm placing my bet on E8 instead of a spaghetti universe of superstrings.
Blind since he was six with only partial sight before that, James Elleyby met his wife at a school for the blind, has two young children both blind but never gave up on trying to regain his sight.
Six corneal transplants had failed when he and a sighted friend googled for doctors and came up with the name of Dr. Claes Dohlman, a doctor at Massachusetts Eye and Ear who developed a technique to use artificial corneas.
Man with restored sight has no time for tears.
James reached out and Dohlman reached back.
Last January, after surgery, Dohlman ripped the patch off and James instinctively covered his face with his hands. Then he blinked and pulled his hands away and realized he could see his fingers. He looked around the room and saw colors, the names of which he hadn't a clue.
He took the bus back to New York and found that Ivory and his little girls were more beautiful than he had imagined.
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He got a job - telemarketing, working with computers. He wants to go to law school. He wants to do everything. He believes he can do anything.
Invited back to Boston for a dinner organized for his doctor, James asked
"I don't have any money," James said. "What do you give a man who gave you your sight?"
A few weeks ago, James stepped outside his home in the Bronx. He looked up into the sky and saw something twinkling. He didn't know what it was and asked a neighbor. The neighbor thought James was kidding.
"It's a star, James," the man said. "It's a star."
As he gazed upon a star for the first time, James decided that the best way to show his gratitude was to rent a car and drive 200 miles to Boston, because he could.
A wonderful story about the twin who desire for life was so great, he survived several attempts on his life while still in the womb.
We're twinseparable! Happy with his brother, the boy who refused to die.
They diagnosed him with leukemia and told him he had nine months to live. John Kanzlus, weakened by his chemotherapy treatments, drew on his lifetime of working with radio waves to devise a machine that targets cancer cells.
The miracle: It works.
Kanzlus got his hands on come nanoparticles from another cancer patient, Nobel Prize winning chemist Richard Smalley.
"John asked, 'Is this what you expected?' For the first time in my life, I realized that a smile starts behind the eyes before it starts at the mouth, for Steve responded, 'This is much more than I expected.' I watched his smile engulf his entire face."
Marianne finally realized: "Could what John's working on be real?" Curley phoned Smalley to tell him the news.
He remembered Smalley's response: "Holy God."
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At 63, Kanzius is still receiving treatment for his cancer, which has recurred. He knows the process he developed may not be ready in time to save his life, but the project was never about him. "I want to see the treatment work," he said. "That would be my thanks."
Civic Ventures, a think tank founded in the late 1990s is "reframing the
debate about aging in America and redefining the second half of life as a source of social and individual renewal"
It's about "helping society achieve the greatest return on experience."
They begun a number of programs including the Experience Corps, a national service program for Americans over 55, the Next Chapter working in local communities to help people in the second half of life connect with peers and find pathways to significant service.
The Purpose Prize provides 5 awards of $100,000 each to people over 60 who are taking on society's biggest challenges.
Here are some of the winners about whom Mark Freedman, founder and President of Civic Ventures said,
"These men and women - some national figures, some local heroes - disprove the notion that innovation is the province of the young and show us the essence of what's possible in an aging society."
Nominations for the 2008 Purpose Prize are open November 15 through March 1.
The foundation also publishes a number of booklets available for download including The Boomers' Guide to Good Work
The maxim "Bad money drives out good money", otherwise known as Gresham's Law, stands for the concept that when spending money, if both good money (higher in silver or gold content) and bad money (lesser in intrinsic value) are exchanged at the same price people will hand over the 'bad' coins rather than the 'good' ones, keeping the 'good' ones for themselves.
The same thing is happening in our mainstream media where the 'bad' is driving out the 'good'. Stories about celebrities - Lindsay, Britney, Angelina - drive out stories about real heroes. When have you ever read about a story of a Congressional Medal of Honor winner?
The consequence is that people have fewer guides about how to lead a meaningful life, one of purpose, one that transcends ego and by so doing finds a place of belonging in society a and a way of making a difference in the world.
Too many of us can't see the upside of growing older, the development of maturity through the unexpected trials of life, and the great satisfaction of a life of meaning. Too many try too long to be young and hip and cool, stuck in a perpetual adolescent mire.
They don't see a way out.
In the early days of the women's movement, there was much talk about the need for new role models so that young women could pattern their thinking and the behavior after older women who had struggled and succeeded in a man's world. The Catholic Church employs the lives of the saints as role models for the faithful to show how different people in different times struggle to achieve good and holy lives.
Joseph Campbell found in the stories of heros across all cultures, the archetypal myth which he called monomyth consisting of several stages. Often called the hero's journey, the fundamental structure includes
Robert Kaplan examines why the media is reluctant to understand Modern Heroes , preferring instead to see them as victims and feeling sorry for them.
Every journalist has a different network of military contacts. Mine come at me with the following theme: We want to be admired for our technical proficiency--for what we do, not for what we suffer. We are not victims. We are privileged.
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An army at war and a nation at the mall do not encounter each other except through the refractive medium of news and entertainment.
That medium is refractive because while the U.S. still has a national military, it no longer has a national media to quite the same extent. The media is increasingly representative of an international society, whose loyalty to a particular territory is more and more diluted. That international society has ideas to defend--ideas of universal justice--but little actual ground. And without ground to defend, it has little need of heroes. Thus, future news cycles will also be dominated by victims.
Barbara Nicolosi, a scriptwriter in Hollywood, has posted notes of her talk on heroes in storytelling and in society. Heroes in Storytelling
She asks what does a kid (and by extension, a society) look like who has heroes.
Idealistic, hopeful, imitative, open, eager to please, reverent, grateful
And what does a kid look like without heroes.
Cynical, haughty, suspicious, jaded, irreverent, entitled, self-absorbed.
To a child, she writes, a hero provides a teaching example of a life worth living.
To an adult, heroes
should engage us in a holy rivalry; to shame us into being more generous and tireless in doing good. Mother Teresa shamed me into facing what a schlep I am. In some ways, because she could pick a maggot ridden poor person out of a gutter, I was able to be kinder to the annoying guy in the next office.
To boomers she says
Try and make the last years of your lives heroic. Just heard the other day from one of my students how her 53 year old father just walked out on the family – two teens at home and an eight year old – and moved in with his 26 year old receptionist. He told his daughter he was bored and feeling unfulfilled. Enough of this nonsense! We don’t want to hear about your need to be having fun anymore! We need you to be brave as you face your elderly years – you will be wrinkled and sickly and forgetful – and your heroism will be to be uncomplaining, and wise and solicitous and serene for the rest of us!
There's much more including this wonderful quote, One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being." May Sarton
Professor Randy Pausch's last lecture struck a chord among millions of people. The Wall St. Journal reports on What It Meant for Readers.
After he spoke, his only plans were to quietly spend whatever time he has left with his wife and three young children. He never imagined the whirlwind that would envelop him. As video clips of his speech spread across the Internet, thousands of people contacted him to say he had made a profound impact on their lives. Many were moved to tears by his words -- and moved to action. Parents everywhere vowed to let their kids do what they'd like on their bedroom walls.
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Dr. Pausch feels overwhelmed and moved that what started in a lecture hall with 400 people has now been experienced by millions. Still, he has retained his sense of humor. "There's a limit to how many times you can read how great you are and what an inspiration you are," he says, "but I'm not there yet."
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Dr. Pausch has asked Carnegie Mellon not to copyright his last lecture, and instead to leave it in the public domain. It will remain his legacy, and his footbridge, to the world.
With a sister whose brain has been damaged by encephalitis leaving her without a short term memory, I was especially interested in this piece by Oliver Sachs in The New Yorker, A Neurologist's Notebook: The Abyss
Clive Wearing, an eminent British musicologist, struck with encephalitis, loses his ability to preserve new memories as well as the loss of his entire past - the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded.
From the start, he has been loved by his wife Deborah and he's retained his musical powers and memory.
Clive’s performance self seems, to those who know him, just as vivid and complete as it was before his illness. This mode of being, this self, is seemingly untouched by his amnesia, even though his autobiographical self, the self that depends on explicit, episodic memories, is virtually lost. The rope that is let down from Heaven for Clive comes not with recalling the past, as for Proust, but with performance—and it holds only as long as the performance lasts. Without performance, the thread is broken, and he is thrown back once again into the abyss
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It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is wholly in the present
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As Deborah recently wrote to me, “Clive’s at-homeness in music and in his love for me are where he transcends amnesia and finds continuum—not the linear fusion of moment after moment, nor based on any framework of autobiographical information, but where Clive, and any of us, are finally, where we are who we are.” ♦
Gregg Easterbrook calls him the Greatest Living American. A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he was just awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. According to the Wall St Journal, he may have saved one billion lives.
Do you know who he is?
A plant breeder, Norman Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains and took his science of the Green Revolution to impoverished farmers in Mexico, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, China, Indonesia and South America. His life has been spent serving the poor.
Every nation his green thumb touched has known dramatic food production increases plus falling fertility rates (as the transition from subsistence to high-tech farm production makes knowledge more important than brawn), higher girls' education rates (as girls and young women become seen as carriers of knowledge rather than water) and rising living standards for average people. Last fall, Borlaug crowned his magnificent career by persuading the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations to begin a major push for high-yield farming in Africa, the one place the Green Revolution has not reached.
Now 93, he writes in the Wall St Journal today about Continuing the Green Revolution with the Gene Revolution or biotechnology. His examples
• Since 1996, the planting of genetically modified crops developed through biotechnology has spread to about 250 million acres from about five million acres around the world, with half of that area in Latin America and Asia. This has increased global farm income by $27 billion annually.
• Ag biotechnology has reduced pesticide applications by nearly 500 million pounds since 1996. In each of the last six years, biotech cotton saved U.S. farmers from using 93 million gallons of water in water-scarce areas, 2.4 million gallons of fuel, and 41,000 person-days to apply the pesticides they formerly used.
• Herbicide-tolerant corn and soybeans have enabled greater adoption of minimum-tillage practices. No-till farming has increased 35% in the U.S. since 1996, saving millions of gallons of fuel, perhaps one billion tons of soil each year from running into waterways, and significantly improving moisture conservation as well.
• Improvements in crop yields and processing through biotechnology can accelerate the availability of biofuels. While the current emphasis is on using corn and soybeans to produce ethanol, the long-term solution will be cellulosic ethanol made from forest industry by-products and products.
It's a disgrace that none of the major TV stations carried anything about Borlaug yesterday which is one reason why this great man is so little known. Easterbrook again
Borlaug's story is ignored because his is a story of righteousness -- shunning wealth and comfort, this magnificent man lived nearly all his life in impoverished nations. If he'd blown something up, lied under oath or been caught offering money for fun, ABC, CBS and NBC would have crowded the Capitol Rotunda today with cameras, hoping to record an embarrassing gaffe. Because instead Borlaug devoted his life to serving the poor, he is considered Not News.
She lived in a small town in Montana, a mother of three and a municipal court judge. Shannen Rossmiller, shaken by the terrorist attacks on 9/11, wanted to learn more about the kind of people who would commit such an act. She read, she surfed and learned Arabic so she could read and post messages on jihadi sites and in time pass herself off as a jihadist sympathizer.
Soon, she was passing information to the FBI, information that stopped several terrorist attacks. A mom from Montana.
My cyber counter-jihad via Maggie's Farm
The best Commencement Address of the year so far - Tony Snow speaking on "Reason, Faith, Vocation" at Catholic University.
Heed the counsel of your elders, including your parents. I guarantee you, they have made some howling mistakes if, like me, they were in college in the ’70s and ’80s. They probably haven’t owned up to them, but they might now, because they want to protect you. You see, they know that you are leaving the nest. And now that you’re leaving the nest, predators soon will begin to circle. Some are going to try to take your money, but the really clever ones are going to tempt you to throw your life away.
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Finally, love. How trite is that? But it’s everything. It separates happiness from misery. It separates the full life from the empty life. To love is to acknowledge that life is not about you. I want you to remember that: It’s not about you. It’s a hard lesson. A lot of people go through life and never learn it. It’s to submit willingly, heart and soul, to things that matter. Love is not melodrama. You don’t purchase it, you don’t manufacture it. You build it.
Every time I buy something gaudy for my wife she says, “Oh that’s nice,” and then it goes away someplace. The love letters she keeps; I don’t know where the jewelry is.
I wrote this post last year for Third Age, and thought why not repost it this year because so few people know about the Great Hunger. The Irish who fled the famine emigrated around the world and were such successful immigrants, so completely integrating into the mainstream culture wherever they landed, they lost touch with their own history.
Some say the potato first arrived in Ireland when they washed up on shore following the shipwreck of the 130 ships of the Spanish Armada in 1588 in a violent storm. It didn’t take long for the potato to become popular as a healthy and reliable source of food and soon the mainstay of the Irish peasantry. Grown underground, it was plentiful even during times of war, surviving when other crops and livestock were destroyed. The population of Ireland soared with more than two thirds living on the land, dependent on a potato harvest that, unlike grain, could not be stored.
When the potato blight appeared in 1845 and spread in 1846, people were left with nothing to eat, with no way to make money to support themselves. By the end of the worst years of the potato famine, 1847-1849, more than one million Irishmen women and children died of starvation in "The Great Hunger." Another 1.5 million emigrated.
About a half million were evicted by their landlords, many sent away in overcrowded "coffin ships" to Canada with little food, almost no water and no doctors. Already weak and sick, often more than half died. It was said that sharks could be seen following the ships because so many bodies were thrown overboard.
Remember now, Ireland was part of Great Britain and in this time of greatest need, the English government washed their hands of the "Irish problem" by dumping the entire cost and responsibility of famine relief upon the Irish property owners. They closed down the public works programs and soup kitchens which were a "temporary solution" for the first crop failure.
With the passage of the Poor Law, anyone seeking relief who owned more than a quarter acre in land had to forfeit their land.
Men could only get relief if they went as destitute paupers to workhouses already overfull with widows, children and the elderly. People were turned away in droves. They wandered the countryside, living in holes and under bridges, eating grass and dying in ditches.
In Donegal Union, ten thousand persons were found living "in a state of degradation and filth which it is difficult to believe the most barbarous nations ever exceeded," according to the Quaker, William Forster. His organization, the Society of Friends, had refused to work in cooperation with the new Poor Law.
Still, it was not enough as the British Government called for maximum pressure to collect taxes and tax collectors seized livestock, furniture, clothes and tools from homeless paupers. As a matter of policy they would not supply food to the starving people who were considered feckless and reckless for depending on the potato. In 1861 in The Last Conquest of Ireland, John Mitchel wrote: "The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight but the English created the famine."
Little wonder that intense hatred grew against the British. Unrest by a group of Irish nationalists known as ‘Young Ireland’ caused the British government to send in troops to quell any sort of popular uprising. Habeas corpus was suspended and the Treason Felony Act was passed that made speaking against the Crown or the Parliament punishable by deportation to Australia for life.
Ireland was forced to pay for its own relief. Landlords tore down houses so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes, evicting tenants in the winter with nowhere to go. Men and women who had never committed any crimes deliberately committed crimes so they could be deported. The horrors of the Great Hunger are unimaginable to us today and deeply shameful to those who survived it.
Michael Shaughnessy, a barrister in Ireland, described children he encountered while traveling on his circuit as "almost naked, hair standing on end, eyes sunken, lips pallid, protruding bones of little joints visible." In another district, there was a report of a woman who had gone insane from hunger and eaten the flesh of her own dead children. In other places, people killed and ate dogs which themselves had been feeding off dead bodies.
So shameful is the memory of the famine that those who survived rarely spoke of it. Those of Irish descent now living in the U.S or Canada or Australia are only beginning to learn about the Great Hunger, through contemporary Irish bands like Black 47, recent books like the National Book Award winner, Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett and the PBS series on the Irish in America.
What’s most often told is the glory of a new life in a new land. The most famous of which is the story of "Nine Famous Irishmen’ reprinted on countless restaurant placemats.
In the Young Irish disorders, in Ireland in 1848 the following nine men were captured, tried, and convicted of treason against Her Majesty, the Queen, and were sentenced to death: John Mitchell, Morris Lyene, Pat Donahue, Thomas McGee, Charles Duffy, Thomas Meagher, Richard O’Gorman, Terrence McManus, Michael Ireland.
Before passing sentence, the judge asked if there was anything that anyone wished to say. Meagher, speaking for all, said, "My lord, this is our first offense but not our last. If you will be easy with us this once, we promise, on our word as gentlemen, to try to do better next time. And next time - sure we won’t be fools to get caught."
Thereupon the indignant judge sentenced them all to be hanged by the neck until dead and drawn and quartered. Passionate protest from all the world forced Queen Victoria to commute the sentence to transportation for life to far wild Australia.
In 1874, word reached the astounded Queen Victoria that the Sir Charles Duffy who had been elected Prime Minister of Australia was the same Charles Duffy who had been transported 25 years before. On the Queen’s demand, the records of the rest of the transported men were revealed and this is what was uncovered:
THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER, Governor of Montana
TERRENCE MCMANUS, Brigadier General, United States Army
PATRICK DONAHUE, Brigadier General, United States Army
RICHARD O’GORMAN, Governor General of Newfoundland
MORRIS LYENE, Attorney General of Australia, in which office
MICHAEL IRELAND succeeded him
THOMAS D’ARCY MCGEE, Member of Parliament, Montreal, Minister of
Agriculture and President of Council Dominion of Canada
JOHN MITCHELL, prominent New York politician. This man was the father of John
Purroy Mitchell, Mayor of New York, at the outbreak of World War I.
This surprised me and I think it will surprise you especially if you are interested in education, aid to the poor or development of the Third World.
Cheap private schools are educating poor children across the developing world despite the handicaps states put upon them and without much encouragement from the international aid establishment.
James Tooley did research in India, parts of China, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria.
In every case, private education is a principal lifeline for the abjectly poor
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On the whole, dime-a-day for-profit schools are doing a better job of teaching the poorest children than the far more expensive state schools. In many localities, private schools operate alongside a free, government-run alternative. Many parents, poor as they may be, have chosen to reject it and to pay perhaps a tenth of their meager incomes to educate their children privately. They would hardly do that unless they expected better results.
The Ten-Cent Solution (link fixed)
You've never heard of James Tooley...The reason you haven’t heard of James Tooley is that his work is something of an embarrassment to the official aid and development industry. He has demonstrated something that many development professionals would rather not know—and would prefer that you not know, either.
Hat tip to Amy Wellborn.
Dr. Jonathan Fine is organizing some of his retired colleagues in a new venture called Bedside Advocates to provide one-on-one support and comfort to people in hospitals, an educated ombudsman as it were.
From retired caregivers, a spoonful of compassion.
The volunteers with Bedside Advocates will not practice medicine. Instead, they aim to provide comfort and compassion while helping fragile and elderly patients navigate the increasingly complex medical system by accompanying them to the doctor's office, the hospital, and the nursing home. They hope to help patients get better care by empowering them to ask questions, follow their medication regimes, and get prompt attention to problems.
And most of all, they plan to be there when no one else is, providing relief for tired caregivers and support for patients without families, according to Dr. Jonathan Fine, who is leading the effort.
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Fine, 75, of Cambridge, envisions a cadre of retired doctors, nurses, physician's assistants, and trained lay people who would provide one-on-one support to thousands of patients, seeking to humanize healthcare while reducing medical errors, complications, and hospitalizations. He has already recruited about 20 doctors and secured some start-up funding from the Legislature, and he plans to launch the program in a pilot phase this spring. The organization expects to find needy patients through practicing doctors, senior centers, and people who call asking for help.
Said one man whom Dr. Fine helped deal with a "litany of specialists".
It's like having your own attorney in the court of medicine. A man like Jonathan, the US needs millions like him."
If it works, it could be a national model. It's how I envision solving the health care crisis of boomers getting older - boomers helping each other.
Amid the horrors of World War I, a corps of artists brought hope to soldiers disfigured in the trenches.
Faces of War
Wounded tommies facetiously called it "The Tin Noses Shop." Located within the 3rd London General Hospital, its proper name was the "Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department"; either way, it represented one of the many acts of desperate improvisation borne of the Great War, which had overwhelmed all conventional strategies for dealing with trauma to body, mind and soul.
Trained as an artist, Francis Derwent Wood was 44 when he enlisted in the war and too old to fight in combat, he became an orderly in a London hospital where he found meaning and purpose in creating masks for those for whom plastic surgery was not enough.
His new metallic masks, lightweight and more permanent than the rubber prosthetics previously issued, were custom designed to bear the prewar portrait of each wearer. Within the surgical and convalescent wards, it was grimly accepted that facial disfigurement was the most traumatic of the multitude of horrific damages the war inflicted. "Always look a man straight in the face," one resolute nun told her nurses. "Remember he's watching your face to see how you're going to react."
In Sidcup, England, the town that was home to Gillies' special facial hospital, some park benches were painted blue; a code that warned townspeople that any man sitting on one would be distressful to view. A more upsetting encounter, however, was often between the disfigured man and his own image. Mirrors were banned in most wards, and men who somehow managed an illicit peek had been known to collapse in shock. "The psychological effect on a man who must go through life, an object of horror to himself as well as to others, is beyond description," wrote Dr. Albee. "...It is a fairly common experience for the maladjusted person to feel like a stranger to his world. It must be unmitigated hell to feel like a stranger to yourself."
Abraham Lincoln is one of my great heroes. Today on his birthday, I pleased to share new things I learned about him this year.
When Albert Kaplan bought this daguerreotype, Portrait of a Young Man in 1977, it reminded him of Lincoln somehow. Years later, he appears to have proved that it is a portrait of a young Lincoln with authentication both scholarly and authoritative available at Lincolnportrait.com
As a young man, Lincoln was not particularly religious. He never joined a church, was never baptized and never made any profession of belief. Yet, something happened to change his mind. In President Lincoln's Secret, Professor Allen Guelzo writes
Lincoln’s election to the presidency, just in time to see the country fall into civil war, presented him with a different set of challenges to his meager stock of religious belief. Lincoln expected a quick and direct restoration of the Union. But in battle after battle, the Union armies were handed humiliating defeats. The president could make no logical sense of this apparent contradiction of progress. After a year-and-a-half of seemingly fruitless bloodshed, he concluded that God had taken a direct hand in events to stymie the war’s progress so long as it was waged for purely political purposes, and to force Lincoln to recognize that the war must be turned in a moral direction that spoke directly to the crime of slavery.
This insight is what eventually drove Lincoln to depart from the policy direction with which he had begun the war, and to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. To the astonishment of his Cabinet, Lincoln explained that his decision to issue the Proclamation was a “vow” he had made “to myself, and...to my Maker.”
At least six million American children have serious mental disorders, according to government surveys, a number that has tripled since the early 1990s writes Zach Lynch in Brain Waves who has many links to articles describing some the difficulties families have in sorting through conflicting advice and diagnoses.
Such a tragedy for both the children and the parents.
I wonder how much is exacerbated by the frenetic pace of the modern world, the pressure to compete and succeed, fragmented families and an increasingly depraved mass culture.
It's hard for anyone to find a foothold, a sure place on which to grow.
The Afghan keyholders who put love of art and country above all else and hid the country's national treasures from the Russians, the Taliban, warlords, drug lords and Islamic fundamentalists, pledged never to tell where they were hidden.
One keyholder was tortured, international art officials say. Another survived by selling potatoes in the Kabul market. Through it all, they kept their secret.
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On Wednesday, the fruits of their silence went on display at the Guimet Museum in Paris. It began exhibiting more than 220 artifacts from the Afghan National Museum, including masterpieces of gold and ivory that have never been seen in public and that a few years ago were believed lost forever.
In fact, the pieces had been delicately wrapped in toilet paper and newspaper and stashed in such places as a bombproof vault in the basement of Afghanistan's presidential palace, where keyholders finally revealed them to Afghan President Hamid Karzai about three years ago.
"It was heroism by silence. It was the Afghan curators and keyholders themselves who preserved these things and . . . made sure no one got into the storerooms," said Fredrik Hiebert, an archaeologist at the National Geographic Society who inventoried the artifacts at the request of the Afghan government. "They were safeguarding these treasures even when people couldn't eat, and when people said they would kill them if they didn't give them up. But they didn't."
MTV Survey of 5400 young people in 14 countries
Young people in developing nations are at least twice as likely to feel happy about their lives than their richer counterparts, a survey says.
Indians are the happiest overall and Japanese the most miserable.
Only 8% in Japan said they were happy, fewer than 30% in the US and Britain while 75% in Argentine and South Africa were happy.
Lets see, In developed countries, young people have little optimism, are concerned about jobs and globalization and feel the pressure to succeed.
In underdeveloped countries, young people are more religious and expected their lives to be better in the future.
Too easy a life, too much stuff, and rich, young people lose a sense of meaning, passion and purpose.
For more than 26 years, Larry Stewart was the Secret Santa who gave away millions of dollars and no one knew who he was.
Now that he has cancer,
he wants to inspire others to do the same. He said he thinks that people should know that he was born poor, was briefly homeless, dropped out of college, has been fired from jobs, and once even considered robbery.
But he said every time he hit a low point in his life, someone gave him money, food and hope, and that's why he has devoted his life to returning the favors.
Returning the kindness of strangers.
I often write drafts of posts and save them to finish later. One such saved and forgotten start was about the Nobel Prize for Economics being awarded to Muhammad Yunus whose micro-lending ventures gave a path out of poverty to millions of the world's poor.
Better than anything I could write are two posts.
From Gates of Vienna: From Rags to a Roof Over Your Head
From 37 days: Help someone buy a cow. Patti met him years ago when she interviewed him for a book.
But this one, this Nobel Peace Prize, I agree with completely. And so, in honor of Mr. Yunus, here is the chapter I wrote some six years ago about his quiet, small revolution. Well done, Mr Yunus, well done:
Long before Harvard began teaching Happiness, soon to become the most popular introductory class there, Columbia was offering a course in the Meaning of Life.
"Creativity and Personal Mastery by Srikumar Rao aims at nothing less than to help each student "discover your unique purpose for existence". The "perennially oversubscribed" course is demanding, requiring extensive reading and time-consuming exercises. Now, he has a book covering much of the same material.
It's the Ivy League version of Rick Warren's A Purpose-Driven Life, a book that has sold an astonishing 20 million copies, People have an huge hunger for meaning and purpose in their lives. I've read Rao's book and I think it's quite good. If you want to get full value, be prepared to do the exercises.
Said Professor Rao who is considered a "life-long resource" for his students.
"At business schools, the vast majority of students don't have a clue what they really want to do."
"They're in business school for a number of reasons -- the most important one is economic security, they want to go out and make a ton of money, they want to be in a prestigious company."
However, many are also wary of the long hours and intensely competitive environment typical of post-MBA employers such as investment banks, he notes.
"My basic thesis is that work hours are getting longer and longer and more grueling. But if you don't get up in the morning with your blood singing at the thought of what you do, if you're not really into your life, then you're wasting your life. And life is short."
This can come as a shock to the traditional MBA student, many of whom have progressed seamlessly -- and successfully -- through school, university and the start of their business career.
"Just the thought that someone comes out and puts it so boldly is like getting hit in the face with a wet fish," Rao says. "They off and think about it, and they say: 'By golly, he's right!'"
Cloudspotting
I was trying with the book to get people to look at something that was so familiar, but to just try and think about it in a slightly different way," says Pretor-Pinney. "And that's a kind of shift that I think can happen. They look up and these clouds have been there the whole time, but they look up and go, 'Wait a minute, they are incredibly beautiful and I never really stopped to think about it.
A 38-year-old Englishman, Gavin Pretor-Phinney, started the Cloud Appreciation Society on a lark that you can join for about $6. After finding no book on clouds despite the fact we all have been watching clouds since childhood, he wrote The Cloudspotter's Guide, a surprise hit in Britain and I imagine soon here.
The Manifesto
WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.
We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.
We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.
We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the
atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of
a person’s countenance.
Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked.
They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save
on psychoanalysis bills.
And so we say to all who'll listen:
Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!
When the Hutu militias came to his front door in Kigali, Rwanda, Damascene held them off so his pregnant wife could escape out the back door with his young three-year old son Derrick.
As Jeanne fled she saw her husband being beaten and she didn't know if he had been killed. All she could do was save the children.
Two weeks later, she was in Brussels and a week after that she gave birth.
Damascene lost all 11 brothers and sisters, his parents and 140 others from his extended family. He thought he lost his wife too.
Damascene fled through Africa to Indonesia, than to East Timor, then to Darwin, Australia where he told immigration officials his passport was forged. They locked him up; he was safe.
He reached Darwin in 2001, was released from Villawood as a temporary resident in 2002 and granted permanent Australian residency last year. He had not given up hope and sought Red Cross help to find his family.
They finally found her in Brussels. He flew to her in February. "Thank God, you're safe," he said. And: "Why didn't you find someone else?"
"Because I never gave up hope. And I could see you in your son's face." He replied: "Thank you. Thank God."
Exhausted are you?
You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?"
"The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest," I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence. "What is it, then?"
"The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness."
It's David Whyte on meeting Brother David. A remarkable essay
You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly to rot on the vine.
Learning to Die is quite a remarkable essay by Brother David Steindl-Rast.
on awareness of death
In the rule of St. Benedict, the momento mori has always been important, because one of what St. Benedict calls “the tools of good works” – meaning the basic approaches to the daily life of the monastery – is to have death at all times before one’s eyes....it is a seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, and a challenge to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment so as to become more fully alive.
on purpose and meaning
With purposes, we must be active and in control. We must, as we say, “take the reins,” “take things in hand,” “keep matters under control,” and utilize circumstances like tools that serve our aims....But matters are different when we deal with meaning. Here it is not a matter of using, but of savoring the world around us. In the idioms we use that relate to meaning, we depict ourselves as more passive than active: “It did something to me”; “it touched me deeply”; “it moved me.”
on life.
Life, if it isn’t a give and take, is not life at all. The taking corresponds to the active phase, to our “purpose” when we do something; while the giving of ourselves to whatever it is that we experience is the gesture by which meaning flows into our lives. It must be stressed that this is not an either/or; life is not a give or take, but a give and take; if we only take or only give, we are not alive. If we only take breath in we suffocate, and if we only breathe out we also suffocate. The heart pumps the blood in and pumps it out; and it is in the rhythm of give and take that we live.
Another wonderful post from the Doctor Is In wherein he ruminates on the endless pursuit of a longer life.
For we who live longer in such an idyllic world may not live better: we may indeed live far worse. Should we somehow master these illnesses which cripple us in our old age, and thereby live beyond our years, will we then encounter new, even more frightening illnesses and disabilities? And what of the spirit? Will a man who lives longer thereby have a longer opportunity to do good, or rather to do evil? Will longevity increase our wisdom, or augment our depravity? Will we, like Dorian Gray, awake to find our ageless beauty but a shell for our monstrous souls?
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Like all, I trust, I hope to live life long, and seek a journey lived in good health and sound mind. But even more–far more indeed–do I desire that those days yet remaining–be they long or short–be rich in purpose, wise in time spent, and graced by love.
Gutzon Borglum was 60 years old when he began to carve Mount Rushmore.
Fourteen years later he died and his son completed the finishing touches on his 'colossal achievement' - four Presidential portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt carved in granite. Another
A lot of people shrink from Mt. Rushmore. They say it's too big, too schmaltzy. It's not politically or environmentally correct.
They don't experience the "little frisson of excitement and uncomplicated patriotism" that Judith Dobryznski did and writes about in A Monumental Achievement (Wall St Journal, subscribers only)
Borglum consented only to do something bigger. He wanted to create a monument to the American philosophy, a celebration of the American spirit. That, he said, could be done only by portraying the nation's greatest presidents, picked by him.
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Granite is a blunt medium, not given to nuance. Yet these portraits do seem to capture the essence of each man.
Less than a year before he died, Borglum talked of the pleasure he experienced at Rushmore. "This is the work I love most, this intimate contact with the four men," he told the New York Tim
