· Quotes of the week
- The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author)
- There is no coming to consciousness without pain. Carl Jung
- Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are to some extent a gift. Good Character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece...by thought, choice, courage, and determination. John Luther
- An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information you get. William Feather
· Meditation of the week
Forgiveness is all-powerful. Forgiveness heals all ills.
--Catherine Ponder
Getting mad at someone, a friend perhaps, is normal. Everybody gets mad sometimes. But when we stay mad for very long, it ruins all the fun we'd planned on having throughout the day. Staying mad multiplies. Sometimes it seems we are mad at the dog, our mom, another friend, even the TV.
Forgiving the people we're mad at works like magic. We don't even have to forgive them out loud. We can forgive them in our own minds. The result is the same. Pretty soon the whole day looks bright again. When we're mad, we are the ones who suffer most.
Who can I forgive today, and make my day a better one?
--Catherine Ponder
Getting mad at someone, a friend perhaps, is normal. Everybody gets mad sometimes. But when we stay mad for very long, it ruins all the fun we'd planned on having throughout the day. Staying mad multiplies. Sometimes it seems we are mad at the dog, our mom, another friend, even the TV.
Forgiving the people we're mad at works like magic. We don't even have to forgive them out loud. We can forgive them in our own minds. The result is the same. Pretty soon the whole day looks bright again. When we're mad, we are the ones who suffer most.
Who can I forgive today, and make my day a better one?
· Poem of the Week
Voyage
I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on
in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.
—And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."
Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage—
And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,
I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.
And the sides of the ship were green as money,
and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.
Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.
At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it—
The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on
in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.
—And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."
Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage—
And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,
I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.
And the sides of the ship were green as money,
and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.
Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.
At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it—
The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.
· Video of the week
Bertrand Russell- To our descendants
· Websites of the week
And finally, the culmination of millennia of scientific endeavor
It was on December 19th in 1843 that Charles Dickens (books by this author) published A Christmas Carol. A year earlier, he had read a disturbing news story about child labor in England, and so he had visited Cornwall to see for himself the horrible conditions of child workers in the mines there. Then he visited free schools for poor children. By the time he was through, he was so angry that he decided to write and publish a book exposing the terrible situation of children in poverty, and publish it at his own expense. That was A Christmas Carol in Prose, now called just A Christmas Carol.
A Christmas Carol follows the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge, a mean old miser. At the beginning of the book, his view toward Christmas is: "Every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart." And after hearing that some poor people would rather die than go to prisons or workhouses, all he can say is: "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." But by the end, he has taken on the role of a second father for the poor, crippled son of a man who works for him. And he exclaims: "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody!"
In 1840s England, Christmas was enjoying a comeback. It had once been a huge, ceremonial event, but in the 17th century the Puritans declared it illegal. Since the actual date of Christ's birth is not named in the Bible, the Puritans were suspicious of Christmas, thinking it was too pagan. A significantly toned-down version started to be celebrated again in the 18th century. But it was only in the years before Dickens published A Christmas Carol that the holiday was really taking off, partly because in 1840 Queen Victoria married a German prince, Albert, and having a German influence in the royal family helped re-popularize traditions like Christmas trees.
A Christmas Carol showed Christmas as a time for family, for simple pleasures, for gathering around the table — what we call "the Christmas spirit." It was also a time for parties, for dancing and drinking and playing games, which was dangerously close to Pagan rituals in the eyes of some. But Dickens' vision of Christmas caught the imagination of readers in England and America, and it helped create the Christmas ideal that is all around us today.
