The Organic City

"The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition the mind."

-Lewis Mumford


1717 Map of Madrid

Kindred souls turn up in the most unexpected places

"I feel a reassuring oneness with other people when I find that even my most intimate, anguished, socially inadmissible emotions and desires are known to others.... Kindred souls—indeed, my selves otherwise costumed—turn up in books in the most unexpected places. Discovering them is one of the great rewards of a liberal education. If I quote liberally, it is not to show off book learning, which at my stage of life can only invite ridicule, but rather to bathe in this kinship of strangers."

Yi-Fu Tuan Chinese-American human geographer

The Concert of Life

 "In the concert of life, no one gets a program."
-Dutch proverb

The Statesman

“This, then, is the aim of the statesman: to weave together the characters of the gentle and the brave... And having perfected the most glorious and best of all textures... he holds them together by this fabric... and rules and watches over them.”

-Plato from Statesman

Tocqueville on the essential role of voluntary associations in American life

"Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association... I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it...

Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another. I have shown that these influences are almost null in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially created, and this can only be accomplished by associations."

-Tocqueville, Democracy in America

See my article in Law and Liberty, "The Mother Science of Democracy"

Thompkins H Matteson's 1862 painting, Hop Picking.

Learning and the future

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
-Eric Hoffer

“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
-Malcolm X

Ideologies

 "Every ideology based upon a false anthropology ceases. Because it's based upon a lie."
-Patrick Deneen

"Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence."
-Jordan Peterson

Love itself

 "Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being 'in love', which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."

-Louis de Bernières from Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Extreme individualism

"All good ideas become false when you take them to their extreme, and we've taken individualism to the extreme."
-David Brooks

@49:25
The Trinity Forum - Evening conversation with David Brooks and Patrick Deneen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFHUvquu7RA 

Success leaves clues

 "Success leaves clues"
-Tony Robbins

Ithaka

Note: A fellow teacher who also went to St. John's Graduate Institute and had also taught in China sent me this poem when I got back from China

Ithaka

by C.P. Cavafy

Translated by Edmund Keeley

 

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.


Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.


Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

 
Shenzhen, China