Meditations #29

 Injustice is a sin. Nature has constituted rational beings for their own mutual benefit, each to help his fellows according to their worth, and in no wise to do them hurt; and to contravene her will is plainly to win against this eldest of all the deities. Untruthfulness, too, is a sin, and against the same goddess. For Nature is the nature of existence itself; and existence connotes the kinship of all created beings.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Nine

As we're dragging towards the end of Year Two of COVID, and considering the implications of Year Three and Year Four, I'm drawn back to this passage from the Meditations. As usual MA is correct when he pointed out that "existence connotes the kinship of all created beings." The great trick of capitalism is to make us forget this fact, and to instead celebrate the individualistic accumulation of as much as inhumanly possible, and to decry compassion for our fellow human beings as weakness. I'd hate to think how many COVID-related statistics I've posted on Twitter or Facebook which then cried out for the same tagline: "But my freedom . . ." In the end individual freedom doesn't mean much when it endangers the collective good. Aren't we told this on every visit to our houses of worship (well, not the Evangelical mega-churches), and yet we forget it as we pass out the door.

Backroads

 Lately I've spent a lot of time roaming around the backroads of central Vermont, and I think I've done more exploring than when I actually lived in central Vermont. As a result I've snapped a couple decent pictures that vaguely and clumsily captured the stark beauty of VT in the winter (not Iceland in winter beautiful, but still pretty).

Meditations #28

 Press on steadily, keep to the straight road in your thinking and doing, and your days will flow on smoothly. The soul of man, like the souls of all rational creatures, has two things in common with the soul of God: it can never ben thwarted from without, and its good consists in righteousness of character and action, and in confining every wish thereto.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Five

During the year on this blog that I devoted to reflections on faith I noted, way too many times, the fact that in the Quran the essential concepts of faith and righteous deeds are linked over fifty times. For example, Surah 103: "By the declining day humanity is a state of failure, with the exception of those who believe, perform righteous deeds, and enjoin each other to truth and patience." This has always been one of my favorite surahs because, while we can't understand the divine, we can, to be the best of our abilities, focus our attentions on those four concepts. Cycling back to faith and righteous deeds, I would propose that they are naturally linked; essentially, I would argue that we most clearly practice faith when we're devoting our time to the small kindnesses that we should direct towards all living beings. I'm making this point because it is so remarkably similar to what Marcus Aurelius is saying in the Meditations. Of course, I suppose all religions and philosophies say something similar, or at least they should.

Back in the Day

 My sister Lisa, obviously bored because she's laid up recovering from knee surgery, has been sending me pictures all day.  Here's one of them taken in my grandparents' (Jum and Maude, my dad's parents) house in Rising Sun. Lisa and I had actually lived in that little house on Mulberry Street before we moved up the river to Lawrenceburg.

Now, when this was taken, exactly, is another question. It must be before Brenda, G3, and I moved to Atlanta, so maybe around 1990? MY son would have still been a wee one.

Meditations #27

 All of us are creatures of a day; the remember and the remembered alike.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Four

I think it's time for another Proust reread. The other day in my sophomore classes, which are focuses this semester on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah (because, why not), and we were discussing the importance and nature of history, which led me to reflecting upon the nature of all memory. So, of course, it got me thinking about Proust. Reading Remembrance of Things Past is one of those intellectual and spiritual exercises which must be carried out every so often to get us in shape and to keep us focusing on the nature of all things.

Montpeculiar

 A couple months back I was walking around downtown Montpelier, aka Montpeculiar, our capital city here in Vermont. It's totally different than all the other state capitals around the country, most notably because of its size. Only 8000 hearty souls live in Monepelier, which is, by far, the smallest state capital in the nation (I think the next smallest is something like 250,000). Granted, we have a crazy small state population - right around 600,000 - but even considering that the population is ridiculously small. I remember driving my father through through the city one time and he opined, "Well, that was sort of pathetic." True, I guess, but also sort of charming.

It was Christmas time so the tree was up before the Capital Building.

Meditations #26

 Childish squabbles, childish games, 'petty breaths supporting corpses' - why, the ghosts in Homer have more evident reality!

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Nine

This almost feels more like a Marcus Aurelius rant than a studied reflection on the nature of all things. That said, it's still spot on. I was talking to my sister yesterday and she referenced the constant internecine struggles that have torn my family apart since the passing of my mother; the last time we were ever in the same shared space was at her funeral, and I suspect the next, and last, will be at my father's. Oddly, the only person who gets along with all of them is me, the one who has traditionally been the most distant (and doubtless there's a lesson to be learned there, in both directions). I also refuse to be drawn into the nonsense, stopping each and every one of them as they begin to launch into a complaint or an investigation into the failings of the others. Part of this relates to what MA is getting at here: why do we focus so much time on the absolute transient foolishness of life, the "ghosts in Homer"? Maybe because it distracts us from the deeper, more unknowable facts - or maybe we're just easily amused - or we're simply not that nice of a species. 

Mahmoud and Cinse

 Here's a picture I snapped last fall of my friends Mahmoud and Cinse. He's a Champlain graduate, and, as I've pointed out on several references I've written, is one of those students who will someday define me as compared to vise-verse (that is, instead of someone saying, "Oh, you studied under Dr. Scudder" to him, they will say "Wait, you taught Mahmoud Jabari?" to me). He was passing through Vermont so we were able to get together for dinner with our mutual friend Cinse.

Someday when Mahmoud is president of an independent Palestine I'm hoping for some cushy sinecure job fitting my old age.