While I work with Brandon McGinley on our month’s reading, here’s one good graf from Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe’s “Oranges Are Orange, Salmon Are Salmon” in The Paris Review.
“Let it be said before resuming the prophet’s mournful tale that, for those whom the Lord is treating as He treated Osee, the day will dawn when the old initial folly will be seen as the herald of countless graces, nay more, as the very means itself of introducing the soul to its real vocation. If blunder it was to have married Gomer years ago it was a blunder provided for, a blunder precipitated and sacramentalized by God, a blunder without which the life of the soul would never have been complete, a blunder calculated to refine, to humble, and to waken trust.” from Dom Hubert Van Zeller’s “The Outspoken Ones: Twelve Prophets of Isreal and Juda”
I am currently rereading George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” while concurrently reading for the first time Brené Brown’s “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.”
From “Middlemarch,” Chapter XXIX:
“He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity.”
I submit that if Brené Brown were to assess Mr Casaubon, she would hone in on Eliot’s phrase “fears most of all that it should be known” and diagnose Mr Casaubon with a crushing inability to be vulnerable.
Also, I share with the previous poster (Vikki W) a sense that I cannot bring myself to call a paragraph a “graf.” Pray defend this practice, Leah!
And also, is there a way I can italicize book titles in a Substack comment?
Ambivalence is interesting and sometimes the natural world is boring. Sometimes you can be striding up a mountain trail, surrounded by clouds, and be thinking only of your malfunctioning washing machine. When the natural world offers only blankness, and doesn’t feel writable-about, it’s useful to start wondering why. Tugging on that thread can unpick a whole load of hidden assumptions about our relationship to natural environments; what we ask of them, what we want from them, and why.
The ability to admit we're not "feelin it" and maybe even laugh at ourselves... is good!
If Flannery O'Connor put this juxtaposition --> "you can be striding up a mountain trail, surrounded by clouds, and be thinking only of your malfunctioning washing machine" ...in a story, I would be laughing my head off. It would totally be a juxtaposition of the sublime and the banal. It would be a discussion of being blind and not valuing things according to their true worth.
Yet, that very blindness finds every one of us ALL the TIME.
"In fact, for years after divestiture the Unix community was preoccupied with the first phase of the Unix wars — an internal dispute, the rivalry between System V Unix and BSD Unix. ...one of the small companies put out a poster showing an X-wing-like space fighter marked “BSD” speeding away from a huge AT&T ‘death star’ logo left broken and in flames. Thus we fiddled while Rome burned."
(Excerpt^ from prev. paragraph for context.)
"But something else happened in the year of the AT&T divestiture that would have more long-term importance for Unix. A programmer/linguist named Larry Wall quietly invented the patch(1) utility. The patch program, a simple tool that applies changebars generated by diff(1) to a base file, meant that Unix developers could cooperate by passing around patch sets — incremental changes to code — rather than entire code files. This was important not only because patches are less bulky than full files, but because patches would often apply cleanly even if much of the base file had changed since the patch-sender fetched his copy. With this tool, streams of development on a common source-code base could diverge, run in parallel, and re-converge. The patch program did more than any other single tool to enable collaborative development over the Internet — a method that would revitalize Unix after 1990."
“Let it be said before resuming the prophet’s mournful tale that, for those whom the Lord is treating as He treated Osee, the day will dawn when the old initial folly will be seen as the herald of countless graces, nay more, as the very means itself of introducing the soul to its real vocation. If blunder it was to have married Gomer years ago it was a blunder provided for, a blunder precipitated and sacramentalized by God, a blunder without which the life of the soul would never have been complete, a blunder calculated to refine, to humble, and to waken trust.” from Dom Hubert Van Zeller’s “The Outspoken Ones: Twelve Prophets of Isreal and Juda”
Hosea. That was one of my favorite stories of the Bible as a new Christian / in my pre-Christian days.
Still is, I think.
(There's some advantages to encountering the scriptures for the first time when nearly-an-adult!)
I am currently rereading George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” while concurrently reading for the first time Brené Brown’s “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.”
From “Middlemarch,” Chapter XXIX:
“He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity.”
I submit that if Brené Brown were to assess Mr Casaubon, she would hone in on Eliot’s phrase “fears most of all that it should be known” and diagnose Mr Casaubon with a crushing inability to be vulnerable.
Also, I share with the previous poster (Vikki W) a sense that I cannot bring myself to call a paragraph a “graf.” Pray defend this practice, Leah!
And also, is there a way I can italicize book titles in a Substack comment?
I *love* the idea of simulating "what this person would say" RE a fictional character!! (I've run some of these simulations too.)
Heard good things about that Brené Brown book!
My guilty pleasure is reading leadership books, actually, so I hope to read it sometime!
(forgot to respond to this comment earlier, haha!)
The main leadership book that's influenced me told me all the things that that were not "natural" for me to "see."
The helpfulness of vulnerability is one of the more natural things for me to "see," so I think "Daring Greatly" will readily "click."
I should benefit from both!
(I know there's Eve Tushnet quote related to that type of situation!)
* Also, simulating "what some RL person would say if placed in an anachronistic situation." But I never seem to get anywhere with those.
As a coda to this graf, I thought this was interesting from Helen MacDonald on rules for nature writing: https://lithub.com/helen-macdonald-the-things-i-tell-myself-when-im-writing-about-nature/
Be honest when you don’t feel it.
Ambivalence is interesting and sometimes the natural world is boring. Sometimes you can be striding up a mountain trail, surrounded by clouds, and be thinking only of your malfunctioning washing machine. When the natural world offers only blankness, and doesn’t feel writable-about, it’s useful to start wondering why. Tugging on that thread can unpick a whole load of hidden assumptions about our relationship to natural environments; what we ask of them, what we want from them, and why.
The ability to admit we're not "feelin it" and maybe even laugh at ourselves... is good!
If Flannery O'Connor put this juxtaposition --> "you can be striding up a mountain trail, surrounded by clouds, and be thinking only of your malfunctioning washing machine" ...in a story, I would be laughing my head off. It would totally be a juxtaposition of the sublime and the banal. It would be a discussion of being blind and not valuing things according to their true worth.
Yet, that very blindness finds every one of us ALL the TIME.
My (unrelated) 'graph* from recent reading:
"In fact, for years after divestiture the Unix community was preoccupied with the first phase of the Unix wars — an internal dispute, the rivalry between System V Unix and BSD Unix. ...one of the small companies put out a poster showing an X-wing-like space fighter marked “BSD” speeding away from a huge AT&T ‘death star’ logo left broken and in flames. Thus we fiddled while Rome burned."
(Excerpt^ from prev. paragraph for context.)
"But something else happened in the year of the AT&T divestiture that would have more long-term importance for Unix. A programmer/linguist named Larry Wall quietly invented the patch(1) utility. The patch program, a simple tool that applies changebars generated by diff(1) to a base file, meant that Unix developers could cooperate by passing around patch sets — incremental changes to code — rather than entire code files. This was important not only because patches are less bulky than full files, but because patches would often apply cleanly even if much of the base file had changed since the patch-sender fetched his copy. With this tool, streams of development on a common source-code base could diverge, run in parallel, and re-converge. The patch program did more than any other single tool to enable collaborative development over the Internet — a method that would revitalize Unix after 1990."
* I just can't call it a "graf" - can't do it!
-"The Art of Unix Programming," by Eric S. Raymond
(forgot to cite!)
Also, italicization attempts:
underscores: _italicized?_
Like HTML tags: <i>italicized?"</i>
Like HTML except with square braces: [i]italicized?"[/i]
Thank you for trying!
Of course! (New attempted "solution" below!)
Anyway, there's a rule that if you're the person who wants to use different fonts yourself and you test it out, you look 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘺.
But if you test it for someone ELSE, you look helpful and only 𝒂 𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒍𝒆 𝒔𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒚!
Alright, so here's what I think may "work":
Search "how to make italics using unicode" on DuckDuckGo.
I used the program on a site called "lingojam."
Why "work" is scare-quoted:
It will 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 on everyone's display!
Some people will just get a row of garbled junk in place of words, like this (currently unassigned) Unicode character:
(So thar's the risk!)
Oooh, very fun!