Notes & Quotes

Limitations

Neil — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:39:37 +0000

Living here is a little like marriage. There are limitations and a universe of satisfactions within them. I have developed a loyalty to what is.

Patricia Henley, Sticking Around Lafayette, Indiana

Smithsonian Magazine (link to the rest of the article)

Surfaces

Neil — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:32:32 +0000

You can’t have depths without surfaces. It’s impossible. And sometimes surfaces are all we have to go by.

from Linda Grant, The Thoughtful Dresser (online here)

Never let a day pass

Neil — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:56:32 +0000

Never let a day pass that you will have cause to say, I will do better tomorrow.

Brigham Young

Self-fulfillment

Neil — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:54:35 +0000

The more one develops as a person, the more one wishes to be like the Father, as the Son wished to be like the Father. … We become ourselves through willing, joyful obedience. The gospel has no more use for self-esteem than it has for self-pity or self-regard. … One of the mistakes we make over and over again in life is to go directly for the things we think are important. But if we aim at self-fulfillment, we shall never be fulfilled. If we aim at education, we shall never become educated. If we aim at salvation, we shall never be saved. These things are indirect, supreme results of doing something else, and the something else is service, it is righteousness, it is trying to do the right thing, the thing that needs to be done at each moment.

Arthur Henry King, Arm the Children, p. 265

Comfort of Destruction

Neil — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:25:01 +0000

There is an … important kind of art that cannot give us the comfort of the gospel but can give us another kind of comfort, the comfort of destruction. … You may say that destruction is evil, but I tell you that the destruction of evil is good. The power of art to destroy the evil in contemporary culture is good. … We can speak of … artists who portray the whole gamut of miserable life without the gospel. Most of the art of the twentieth century is … quite ruthless in its way of depicting what humankind is like without God. …

The prophets are always emphasizing the wretchedness of humanity without salvation, and if we read them again we shall realize how important emphasizing that is. People, after all, have to be awakened to their wretchedness, just as they have to be awakened to their salvation. … Outside the gospel, we must expect despair, and therefore, those who give us the greatest despair are those who, if we do not already believe in the gospel, will drive us to it because there is nothing else.

Arthur Henry King, Arm the Children, pp. 159-160

Too Much Apparatus

Neil — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:52:26 +0000

Too much apparatus, like too much bureaucracy, only inhibits the natural flow [of teaching and learning]. Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to provide that; if students are too demoralized, bored or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then that is the educational problem which has to be solved – and solved from inside the experience of the teachers and the students.

Theodore Roszak, as quoted in Neil Postman, The End of Education, p. 26

Vision in Music

Neil — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:25:45 +0000

We all … experience moments when we want to get outside the limitations of ordinary life, when we see dimly a vision of something beyond. …Now it is not enough to feel these things; the artist wants to communicate … these things into … ordered sound, clear and intelligible; and to do this he must make a synthesis between the thing to be expressed and the means of expression. Thus there has arisen the technical side of music. …And first of all the composer has … to devise a series of dots and dashes which well explain … in a very inadequate manner, the pitch, the duration, the intensity, and to a certain extent, the quality of sounds he wishes the performer to produce. The composer starts with a vision and ends with a series of black dots. The performer’s process is exactly the reverse; he starts with the black dots and from these has to work back to the composer’s vision. First he must find out the sounds that these black dots represent and the quicker he can get over this process the sooner he will be able to get on to something more important. Therefore though a good sight reader is not necessarily a good musician, it is very useful for a musician to be a good sight reader. The performer has to learn how best to make these sounds. …then he must learn to view any series of these black dots both as a whole and in detail and to discover the relation of the parts to the whole, and it is under this heading that I would place such things as phrasing, sense of form, and climax – what we generically call musicianship. When he has mastered these he is ready to start and reproduce the composer’s vision. Then, and then only, is he in a position to find out whether there is any vision to reproduce. …Thus we come round full circle: the origin of inspiration and its final fruition should be one and the same thing.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays, 13-15

Collaboration

Neil — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:49:58 +0000

Because those who feel urgency want to achieve the goal as soon as and as effectively as possible, they invite collaboration. They are not afraid of others who may be more competent in some area than they are. In fact, they are attracted to competence wherever they can find it. They want to succeed. So they welcome others’ opinions. Those who feel pressure, contrarily, seek isolation.

Russell Osguthorpe, Choose to Learn, p. 28

Daily Improvement

Neil — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:17:18 +0000

We talk glibly about eternal progression, yet that idea really must be broken down into day by day improvement.

From Bruce C. Hafen, A Disciple’s Life