scribbles, notes, dispatches
a few thoughts on this chart
Roman Period, 130-161 C.E.
Encaustic on wood panel with gilt stucco
This portrait of an unknown woman… was meant to be placed over the face of a mummy. (An earlier mummy mask, of Meret-it-es, is in the first gallery.)…
From Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins museum.
The artist painted it using the encaustic technique. Mixing organic colors in hot beeswax, he applied the hot paint to a specially prepared wooden board.
Said earlier mummy mask, roughly 400 years older:
Red abstract markings, discovered in several Spanish caves, are old, and in fact were seemingly made by hominins long before H. sapiens moved into Europe. The red sinuous marking and system of squares and lines near the middle of this photo are purported to have been made by Neanderthals (other images, depicting animals and present adjacent to these markings, were seemingly created more recently by H. sapiens individuals). Image: (c) P. Saura.
HT: Tetrapod Zoology
The hatred of which I have found myself to be the target is exactly the attitude that is embodied in those featureless high-rise blocks in which the working classes were to be imprisoned. It is present too—dare I say it—in those polished aquariums where the superrich blow bubbles against the glass for a year or two like exotic fish, before suing the architect who designed their costly prison. Both templates are deeply hostile to what matters in human life…
Some clear thinking here by Alan Jacobs.
It’s easy enough in the US or Europe to speak of something called “post-Christianity”. But to what extent can a culture re-paganize when it was never fully converted in the first place?
And I don’t just mean just the Majority World. Here’s Camily Paglia in a recent interview with Carl Trueman:
Yes, despite being an atheist, I remain (as I like to put it) Italian pagan Catholic—which has very little to do with Christianity as it first emerged from ancient Palestine. The Northern European Protestant reformers were quite right to condemn how far the Church of Rome had strayed from the Bible. My people of the Italian countryside never really surrendered their paganism. They simply renamed their gods (the Roman Janus became Saint Januarius—San Gennaro) and re-crowned Isis and Magna Mater as the Madonna. My mother’s baptismal church in Ceccano in Southern Lazio, Santa Maria a Fiume (“on the river”), sits on the foundations of a temple to the Empress Agrippina, which in turn replaced a temple to the goddess Minerva.
The world is odder, scarier, richer, more hostile, more permeable than we tend to think. After all, relative to the rest of the world and the rest of history, we’re the WEIRD ones.
I’m sure Lewis is right that it’s a “false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal”. As he says, “a post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce.”
But let’s strain that metaphor. What if she wasn’t ever married? What if she just had a long-term relationship, and instead of divorce it’s a slow, messy, breakup full of false starts, false recoveries, finally more with a whimper than a bang?
So let’s back up a bit.
The goal is to write something everyday. To get the juices flowing, to slow down and look around the place and enjoy it, darn it.
Well here’s what’s not needed: empty words piled high with digital ink, opinions shouted into the void, or a vehicle for my ego to increase its already substantial propensity for self-regard.
What could be useful: a travelogue, a place to collect curious items of note, good things, true things, beautiful things. A means of exercising the mind. Small, tentative steps toward wisdom.
So with that – enough preamble and navel-gazing!
Ben Thompson on the state of technology in 2018: despite the market dominance of the big consumer-facing companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon), the prospects for continued disruption and innovation are dim: there is little venture investment in the pipeline, the current moats are just too large, the incumbency advantage too steep for potential competitors.
On the other hand,
In contrast, consider the enterprise software market: here the Internet has very much lived up to its billing, unleashing a torrent of innovative companies made possible by cloud computing, that are challenging lumbering incumbents up-and-down their product lines. And, to their credit, some of those incumbents, like Microsoft, are responding in kind, dramatically overhauling their core strategies and releasing new products and services that are innovative in their own right.
Quick, what’s the most valuable company in the world?
In summary,
This, then, is the state of technology in 2018: the enterprise market is thriving, and the consumer market is stagnant, dominated by the “innovations” that a few large behemoths deign to develop for consumers (and probably by ripping off a smaller company). Meanwhile a backlash is brewing on both sides of the political spectrum, but with no immediately viable outlet through competition or antitrust action, the politics surrounding technology simply becomes ever more rancid.
Prediction: this political backlash will turn out to be one of the few area of common cause for conservatives and liberals. (Note the reaction to Amazon’s HQ2 selection on both the right and the left). As to there being “no immediately viable outlet through competition or antitrust action”, count me skeptical. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I remember the name Lazarus flashing into my mind, and the incredible thought: This is a power that could raise the dead.
This, from a remarkable essay by Patricia Snow. Snow, mother of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, describes her 1986 conversion, or more accurately her encounter with God. I can’t recall a more vivid, credible, sensory account of the experience of the supernatural.
Another excerpt:
I was also convinced that there must be people like me: thirty-four years old and educated, not uninterested in religion or unversed in theology, and yet absolutely without a clue, in my whole demystified life, that there was a God who did such things in the world. A God not only real but approachable, and not only approachable but forthcoming—coming to meet me, on his own initiative, in a totally gratuitous, unlooked-for way
And one last striking passage:
It amuses me, in retrospect, to think how little I deferred to him at that point. I was like a child—I was a child—in my simplicity and boldness, finally understanding what was available, and asking, with great earnestness. Like Jacob with the angel, I wrestled with God that night and as much as said to him, I will not let you go until you bless me. I will not get up, or leave this room, if I have to lie here all night, until you come to me again and show me that searing love.
Jacob, struggler with God. Children. Persistent widows. The earnest, the simple, the bold.
To such belong the Kingdom of God.
A commonplace blog.
A stationary bicycle for my mind.
A depository of words, curiosities, flotsam, jetsam.
Stay tuned.
Lernings 