…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet
Author William Manchester recently passed away which has prompted me to re-read some of his books. One favorite is A World Lit Only by Fire : The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance – Portrait of an Age. Manchester is often accused of being a “popular” historian, more focused on narrative than getting his facts straight. To these detractors I say, phooey. Unlike many history books which are the world’s best cure for insomnia, A World Lit Only By Fire is highly readable, entertaining, and enlightening. Manchester paints a grimly realistic picture of what life was like in the middle ages including the stench, the violence, and the pervasive Roman Catholic Church. He shows the seeds and the blossoming of the Renaissance – the combination of technology (printing press), brilliant enlightened minds (such as Erasmus and DaVinci), and Papal funding that brought about a full scale shift in the consciousness of the Western world.
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Spent Memorial Day in The Hamptons, New York City’s version of Martha’s Vineyard. (NYkers may take issue with that comparison, as, since NYC is the center of the world, MV would be Boston’s version of the Hamptons. It’s all amusing to me, a Northern Californian, where in the summer more people go TO the city during the weekend than leave it.) Found myself at a party on Saturday night hosted by the publisher of Gotham, LA Confidential, and other fine, extra large glossy magazines showcasing celebrities and parties. Found myself wandering in and wondering of the spectacle of many tan lithe twenty-somethings with gorgeous clothes and bodies to match. Kept wondering why a video camera was pointed my way until I noticed that I was standing behind James Lipton, the guy from the Actor’s Studio. Other notable attendees included Tina Louise (Ginger from Gilligan’s Island) and Ivana Trump. Finally managed to congregate with other fellow wonderers (what are we doing here?) and was able to relax and enjoy the party. Later a friend emailed along this poem by Emily Dickinson. Seems like they had spectacle parties in her time as well…
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I love stories like this… from the New Scientist, Diet of Worms Can Cure Bowel Disease. Studies have found that regular doses of pig whipworms can drastically relieve the symptoms of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and Chron’s.
Hats off to the brave volunteers for the first studies, who not knowing if this was going to work of not, intentionally submitted their GI tracts to intestinal parasites.
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Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones books are the best antidote I can think of for the grumpies, in my case most recently induced by an unexpected 5 hour layover at SFO. Fortunately most airports these days carry small but decent book stores and even more fortunately in this particular instance the SFO bookstore carried Bridget Jones.
Cervante-esque in their humour, Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, carry us on a delightful romp through the life and loves of Bridget Jones, a thirty something London girl who can’t quite seem to get anything right, but for whom life magically all works out in the end. The first book is loosely themed around Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, with the male love interest, who Bridget at first spurns, is a one Mark Darcy, a deliciously modern day character equivalent of the first Darcy.
When the Bridget Jones Diary first came out I was bemused to read some reviews, by men naturally, who were appalled by Bridget’s shallow self-obsessions with weight, cigarrettes, drinking, and “shagging”. Well my friends, believe it or not, Bridget’s diary does indeed express the way that most of us single women think and feel. Which is exactly why it is so hilarious. Bridget is exposing our innermost insecurities and obsessions for the whole world to read.
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Walter Isaacson’s highly readable Benjamin Franklin: An American Life tells the story of the extraordinary life of our most colorful founding father. One cannot help after reading this book that Ben Franklin would have fit right into today’s urban society. Wonderfully open-minded, witty, curious, practical, and incorrigibly flirtatious, he would have made the most interesting company even today. Reading Isaacson’s book, I was struck not only by Franklin’s accomplishments and his contributions to the success of our revolution and our constitution, but also by his contributions to the set of values that define what is an American.
In Isaacson’s words,
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us… He was, during his eighty-four-year-long life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and clean burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.
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