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This is really sweet: From 52 to 48. (Obama got 52% of the popular vote—actually I think it’s up to 53% now.) We love y’all, too. A 48-hour thought on the election: last night my wife and I were both late heading for home and decided (via mobile phone—how times have changed) to meet and…
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I started to add this to the comments on the previous post, in which Dave refers to “glum” conservatives, then amends that to “pessimistic,” but I thought it deserved the visibility of its own post. It’s true that we conservatives have a somewhat pessimistic view of things in general and of human beings in particular;…
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Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy. Either way the outlook is not so good. —Walker Percy, from Love in the Ruins I’m exaggerating; I don’t really expect a catastrophe in the sense of a sudden and enormous destructive event. But I think we’re heading in a…
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Sehnsucht This is a follow-up to last week’s discussion of C. S. Lewis’s concept of “joy:” “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Someone mentioned that there is a German word, sehnsucht, for this longing, and I have been looking around a bit on the web for more information about…
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Many years ago, roughly 1970, I had an LP that included this and several more of Delius’s more familiar orchestral works. Although I thought the music somewhat bland and shapeless, I came to like it, but more as a sort of tranquilizer than as music properly speaking; it was very peaceful and for twenty minutes…
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Janet has stumbled across this old post, I Miss the Future, which led to this one, Blade Runner vs. 2001. A conversation has begun, and since those posts are not visible on the main page here I thought I'd just provide this anchor for the discussion. Janet says: When I was in my late teens…
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My wife’s handiwork. Pre-TypePad http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js
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On this day I like to browse a bit in Charles Williams’s wonderful novel by that name. Here is an account of a baptism. The speaker is a young woman who was intended from her conception to play a role in a very evil scheme. But she was secretly baptized by her nurse, a crucial…
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In the argument between cat lovers and dog lovers, I’m more or less neutral. I like both. But about the specific question of which is smarter, I think dogs clearly have it. Cat lovers can only fall back on the argument that the reason cats don’t appear to be all that bright is that they’re…
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I’ve been reading (finally) Whittaker Chambers’s famous autobiography, Witness, and finding that it’s as good as people say. I’ll probably talk about it more when I’ve finished it, but I had to post this passage. Chambers is discussing the fact that there was no religion in his home, but that he nevertheless felt that it…
Light On Dark Water 