#vagaries

[terracemuse]

floating world.

[mvaljean525]

It is with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare. We call things beautiful, not as such, but because of what they mean.

Because we commonly attribute beauty to whatever does us a favor, We are reduced to puzzled despair whenever actual beauty says no.

Indeed, our calling a thing beautiful almost means it is not. For how can we know it is beautiful until it betrays us?

A sage once said “The trouble with these great philosophers Is their only way of doing honor to an idea is to say the idea is true.”

It is the same with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare. Humiliated, we are no longer willing to call the beautiful beautiful . . .

Madrid is reading his poetry to a roomful of unearthed cultural relics. He compares the white hair on their heads | to the flag that signals surrender.

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It Is with Words as It Is with People

Anthony Madrid  (B.1968)

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Graphic - Pablo Picasso  1881-1973

[redleafhaiku]

The persistence of 

vagaries is what makes life 

hard, yet worth living. 

—Red Leaf Haiku by © John Clark Helzer

[tervacious]

I wonder if anti-gun lefty/lib Americans fully understand that Australia rounded up its citizens and put them in camps if they got Covid or refused to get vaccinated, and I wonder if anti-gun lefty/lib Americans fully grasp the state Canadian citizens are in right now.  Like, it’s funny how people fully and sincerely believe “their” government is a friend and will totally protect them when it comes to something like this but nothing else.  I just wonder why people are that stupid.

I should know the answer, I’ve watched women defend males for literally everything my entire life, it’s the same dynamic, but I feel like centuries of Stockholm Syndrome makes that, while still stupid, at least understandable.  When it comes to a general swathe of Americans, though, I just can’t figure out the rationale.  Government isn’t your friend.  It’s not there for you.  You aren’t in control of it.  Do you not grasp this?  It’s weird af.  The only reason the U.S. government didn’t go completely batshit fascist during the pandemic is because they couldn’t without taking a serious risk in a stretched-thin context.  That’s it, people.  They don’t care about you.  They don’t care about your rights.  They don’t care about your liberty OR your safety, and honestly given the facts on the ground I think maybe liberty is a way better bet anyway.

[puutterings]

the man of broad, clear, imaginative vision, not

  Let us get that proposition straight...       “It was all a question,” this scientist maintained, “of whether Nollie could make good her vagary. If she could, and grew in strength of character thereby, it was, “i>ipso facto, all right; her vagary would be proved an advantage and the world enriched.”       To the higher type of scientist — the man of broad, clear, imaginative vision, not the puttering experimenter incapable of a synthesis — it would have been fairly obvious that our social forms are themselves the pragmatic selection of a thousand centuries, and are rigid because their strict maintenance is believed to work better, by and large, than any trimming to the convenience or growth of individuals. Such is the way with the majority of “advanced” thinkers; they are so advanced that they have left all the lessons of history behind them.

ex Lacy Lockert — in his moralizing rant on/around John Galsworthy’s Saint’s Progress (1919) — “Some of Mr. Galsworthy’s Heroines,” in The North American Review 215:2 (February 1922) : 255-266 (259)

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Lacy Lockert (1888-1974?)... Career: Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, assistant professor of English. 1916-25; retired early in order to study and write... 1912 Mother dies; family home broken up and Lockerts move to Nashville, Lacy suffers nervous breakdown which interrupts his doctoral studies at Princeton; treatment was in Nashville. 1915 Returns to Princeton in January. Nelle Ramsay dies in California in June.

source : finding aid, Lockert, Charles Lacy, Jr. Papers, MSS.0263 (Vanderbilt University)