More snippets of goodness

More snippets of goodness from Thomas Howard's Chance or the Dance?

• He calls poetry "the noblest utterance", and says that "Image making is what delights us about certain people's conversation." He says that poetry carves shapes using words. "...it is in poetry that we try to speak the language that is suggested to us by our imagination as the real language of things." He says that poetry comes through the midwifery of the poet. Poetry halts us and tells us to to look at the prosaic more closely. Through it, the clutter of daily experience becomes epiphany.
  

• On application of the imagination as part of reason: "And when we do exercise it, it is in order to bring about a heightened awareness of the experience in question. To do so is to reach across a gulf that cannot be spanned ... by the analytic faculty in us."

• He talks about the new myth, in which imagination is cast off as foolishness, and points out that in this myth, connections are stripped away, reducing things down to what they think is "truth". But this is a confusion of truth with mere facts.

• Related to this idea was one I found profound. That when you strip things of their context, of their interconnectedness and meaning, paring away to nothing but a set of facts, the thing is lessened. It is no longer itself when it is -only- and merely itself.

• "...if we scrutinize the way we do things, we shall find that we have festooned everything with formality and that nearly every act is loaded down with gestures that bespeak much more than can be discerned in the functional demands of the situation itself."

• The new myth says "Politics and commerce and urban planning and medicine and housekeeping--here is where the real stuff is."

WARNING: Political post--proceed at your own risk

One of my son's homework assignments for the weekend was to come up with a controversial solution to an important social issue of the day. The assignment sprung out of recent reading of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.

I was surprised to learn that High School students are still reading this piece, and I don't understand why it is discussed as being shocking in this day and age. We are content to allow thousands of babies to be chopped into pieces and incinerated each day here in the US. In parts of Eastern Europe, young women are paid to get pregnant and abort at a certain, optimal number of weeks, when the fetus reaches the perfect stage for use in facial beauty products and treatments. In other parts of Europe it is legal to kill imperfect infants after they are born.

So if all of this is perfectly OK, why should the thought of eating them be so bad? Wouldn't it be less of a waste if all these millions of blobs of flesh were consumed?

I'm shocked that A Modest Proposal remains in the junior-year corpus in this day and age.

Shouldn't we keep English classes out of our bedrooms? Err, kitchens?

Isn't this sort of thing an infringement on a woman's right to menu plan?

Choices, choices

I don't tend to write about politics here, but this election seems to top them all.

We have two choices as usual:

Option A: Save the whales and kill the babies
or
Option B: Save the babies and kill the whales

Is it truly not possible to be a US politician and be both pro-whale AND pro-baby???