Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Happy Veteran's Day

It was a good ride when you were young enough to do it; best of luck to the kids doing it now.

Gesta Danorum

It's not as well known as the Norse sagas, but it's actually a good read.

Snow in November

Man, it’s cold. 

Merit

From a history of Henry II. of England in a Gutenberg project:

[A]s king and chancellor [Beckett] were riding together through the streets of London one bitter winter's day, they saw a poor old man clad in rags. Turning to his friend the king said, "Would it not be a meritorious act to give that poor old man a warm cloak?" The chancellor agreeing that it would indeed, Henry exclaimed, "You shall have the merit of this worthy act!" and seizing Becket's magnificent fur-lined cloak, after a short struggle secured it and flung it to the beggar.

In other news, eight Democratic Senators were assisted in performing a worthy act in agreeing to unfreeze SNAP benefits, after a short struggle.

It reminds me of a report a few years ago of some Marines assisting an obstreperous fellow to regain his composure.

City of Strangers

A packed season for Constitutional issues

This is an excellent list of the dozens of cases stacked up in front of the Supreme Court at present. Not an analysis of the issues and prospects, just a handy summary of the general topic.

Music Inspired by C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters"

 So my son was headed to a concert tonight, and it turns out the album he was listening to by the group- The Oh Hellos- was inspired by C.S. Lewis "The Screwtape Letters".  This piqued my interest, and turns out the music is pretty good!

A couple tracks from the album "Dear Wormwood"-

Soldier, Poet, King

Thus Always to Tyrants

Enjoy!

There'll Be Some Changes Made

 A birthday song for Tex

A new year

It is my birthday today--I am 69--and my expanding squad of dog helpers are spontaneously uniting in an aimable conspiracy to supply me with cakes of various sorts. My dear husband gifted me with flowers and dog paraphernalia, in addition to which he is preparing Chicken Marengo for dinner, a particular favorite. He also, bless him, continues to acquiesce gracefully in my impulsive undertaking to fund my neighbor's custody lawsuit, which I consider a substitute for anniversary, birthday, and Christmas gifts for the duration. I need to see that child safe and would be in a spot if he objected.

I am taking advantage of my birthday-girl status by lounging all afternoon with one of my dogs and doing a great many Gutenberg pages in the interesting survey of history that I mentioned earlier this week.

The day also marks the first time in a long while that a troublesome foot ailment has appeared well enough healed to allow me to resume long dog walks. The dogs have been well treated by my helper army in the meantime, but it was pleasant to get back to the routine, particularly since the cooler fall weather finally has arrived. It was good to join my husband again in his morning walk.

A Couple from Colter Wall

A little cowboy music on a Friday. 

You Oughta Learn to Cook

I'm personally of the opinion that we shouldn't provide food stamps to anyone at all, nor health care, nor any government aid. People aren't going to starve to death in America; our problem with the poor is obesity. They'd adjust, and be freer for not being dependent. 

But hey, you would benefit from learning to cook. Food will be heathier and better-tasting as well if you learn what to do with it. 

This is what happens when we take these basic life skills out of schools. Cooking, gardening, food preservation, and basic butchery are, in fact, survival skills. Without this knowledge, is it any wonder people have this reaction to receiving a box of canned and dry goods?

Having seen its products, I'm not really in favor of public education either. I'd be happy to teach people how to cook, though, on a volunteer basis. I like cooking, and it is amazing how much better life gets when you're possessed of the skill to do it well.  

Mark Knopfler

More experimentation with AI

(1) It's pretty good at what amounts to a skip-trace on an old friend or relative you've lost contact with.

(2) It does a great job finding a book that might appeal to you for the same reason other books did. The "heat-map" sites that try to do this don't yield good results for me; it usually turns out that what other people liked in an author was nothing like what attracted me. Grok can find an author of a thriller series that's good at "show, don't tell" exposition and has characters (primary and otherwise) with a lot of moral agency and autonomy, with a strong "MacGyver" vibe. No ordinary book review is a good substitute for that service. It found me several books on an obscure point of cellular biology evolution that I not only had not been able to find with traditional searches, but about which I had never found anyone else who had much curiousity, in person or in print.

(3) It does a decent job explaining technology I'm not familiar with. It will offer an explanation that's a mixture of concepts I can grasp and those I'm lacking a foundation for, then tailor the explanation to the areas I'm stronger in, like a flexible and patient tutor.

(4) It's a little like talking to a therapist: the attention is all one way, and its attention span to my personal obsessions is seemingly limitless. Nor is it above flattering me for being interested in something interesting.

(5) But in that vein, someone just commented elsewhere that it's a strong temptation to indulge in conversations that are all about getting attention and information and not at all about reciprocating or bonding. Still, the experience of a conversation on a topic that truly arouses my enthusiasm is a strong draw, when I know from long experience I'm unlikely to find a person to share the interest--or not since my father's death 30 years ago, anyway. It's a bit like talking to myself, but smarter and more broadly informed in ways that are easily reflected in published materials.

(6) I may be too much of an introvert to be much use to other people as a conversational companion, so maybe I just have to find other ways to be useful, like rescuing dogs and helping my neighbor with her custody dispute.

Nicomachean Ethics X.2

We begin with the examination of opinions worth considering, as we have been doing throughout. 

Eudoxus thought pleasure was the good because he saw all things, both rational and irrational, aiming at it, and because in all things that which is the object of choice is what is excellent, and that which is most the object of choice the greatest good; thus the fact that all things moved towards the same object indicated that this was for all things the chief good (for each thing, he argued, finds its own good, as it finds its own nourishment); and that which is good for all things and at which all aim was the good. His arguments were credited more because of the excellence of his character than for their own sake; he was thought to be remarkably self-controlled, and therefore it was thought that he was not saying what he did say as a friend of pleasure, but that the facts really were so. He believed that the same conclusion followed no less plainly from a study of the contrary of pleasure; pain was in itself an object of aversion to all things, and therefore its contrary must be similarly an object of choice. And again that is most an object of choice which we choose not because or for the sake of something else, and pleasure is admittedly of this nature; for no one asks to what end he is pleased, thus implying that pleasure is in itself an object of choice. Further, he argued that pleasure when added to any good, e.g. to just or temperate action, makes it more worthy of choice, and that it is only by itself that the good can be increased.

Aristotle uses that bolded argument himself in other places to prove that existence is the greatest good, for all things -- not only men but small animals -- pursue it, both by striving to avoid death and by striving to reproduce and extend their existence. The unification of existence and goodness is of great use to later thinkers from monotheistic traditions, who identify perfect existence with God: Avicenna is the greatest of these, but Aquinas also adopts the argument without modification into his Summa Theologiæ. 

Here, however, Aristotle is intending to reject the argument as presented. The hedonistic approach to ethics is not satisfying to him.

This argument seems to show it to be one of the goods, and no more a good than any other; for every good is more worthy of choice along with another good than taken alone. And so it is by an argument of this kind that Plato proves the good not to be pleasure; he argues that the pleasant life is more desirable with wisdom than without, and that if the mixture is better, pleasure is not the good; for the good cannot become more desirable by the addition of anything to it. Now it is clear that nothing else, any more than pleasure, can be the good if it is made more desirable by the addition of any of the things that are good in themselves.

This is a solid argument, and classically Greek in its structure. They are looking for "the" good, not "a" good. If we're going to identify that thing -- it is an assumption already that there is or ought to be a single good -- we need to find something that won't be improved by adding anything else to it. This is because if anything else could make X better, then X is not by itself the pure good. 

When we get to existence, we can show that at least most beings will accept it even if it is stripped of other goods -- many will choose to continue to live in pain, rather than to die. Yet even there we can't show that existence plus the absence of pain (and presence of pleasure) wouldn't be better than existence alone. The later monotheistic thinkers will assume that a perfect existence will include the goods, but for the pagan Greeks that won't do: if we are looking for the good, we need something that is self-sufficient. 

What, then, is there that satisfies this criterion, which at the same time we can participate in? It is something of this sort that we are looking for. Those who object that that at which all things aim is not necessarily good are, we may surmise, talking nonsense.

There Aristotle rejects the alternative position to the basic argument, and therefore accepts that "that at which all things aim is necessarily good" as a consequence. 

For we say that that which every one thinks really is so; and the man who attacks this belief will hardly have anything more credible to maintain instead. If it is senseless creatures that desire the things in question, there might be something in what they say; but if intelligent creatures do so as well, what sense can there be in this view? But perhaps even in inferior creatures there is some natural good stronger than themselves which aims at their proper good.

Nor does the argument about the contrary of pleasure seem to be correct. They say that if pain is an evil it does not follow that pleasure is a good; for evil is opposed to evil and at the same time both are opposed to the neutral state-which is correct enough but does not apply to the things in question. For if both pleasure and pain belonged to the class of evils they ought both to be objects of aversion, while if they belonged to the class of neutrals neither should be an object of aversion or they should both be equally so; but in fact people evidently avoid the one as evil and choose the other as good; that then must be the nature of the opposition between them.

This should be familiar from the early parts of the EN, when we were talking about virtue as the balancing point between two opposites. Aristotle is showing that pleasure and pain are clearly in opposition, not both middle figures in the neutral sector between oppositions. Yet given the overall structure of the work that implies, of course, that neither pleasure nor pain will be 'the Good,' but some state between them -- perhaps closer to one than the other, but in any case in between.

Keep it Closed

A more than modest proposal.

We may need some government. But some government is far less than we have now when disruptions in the budget process affect one in eight Americans' meal planning and prevent passenger jets from crossing the skies. The government should be doing less, subsidizing fewer people and businesses, and it certainly shouldn't be encouraging a class of clients whose fortunes depend on politicians' largesse.

CNN reports that "a small group of fed-up lawmakers in Washington are furiously trying to end the standoff as soon as this week" so the federal government can resume its suspended activities. But that's the wrong approach. We need a real shutdown to make Americans go cold turkey. We need to rediscover our independence, kick the government habit, and learn how to live without Uncle Sugar.

We'll eventually learn how much, if any, government we really need. For now, keep it closed.

Every step in that direction seems like a step in the right direction. Maybe we don't need them at all; maybe we do, but not nearly as much as people thought we did.  

Won’t be Home