Lion before Storm

Nick Brandt

NO TWO SNOWFLAKES ARE THE SAME

How could anyone have checked, or is this
something else to accept on faith, like enough
is enough or what's good for big business
is good for the country and each time I love
you is said it's different? How do you tell
Africans, for whom it's usual

to substitute egret feathers in
translations: no two plumes are a match, and why
does that sound that less dubious? Once you begin
asking there's that icy cold, the six-sided-
symmetry -- too much that's unique to trust
induction. Here the rare returns like dust

you can't brush off and yearnings that go on
to become those persistent selves we resume
each morning as if by magic. The power of reason,
like past and future, could be myth, and Hume,
be right: cause is no more than an habitual
association. Like doubt, but less cruel.

MARK HALPERIN

What does this mean?

I'm fascinated with this illustration. I don't know that I like it, or that it represents anything worthy, but it's interesting enough that it has been my wallpaper for at least a week. You'd think I'd have a profound opinion by now. What do you think?

Synergy?

I've always been a little put off by the jerky connotations of the word 'synergy' -- I don't know where I picked up the assumption that it's a tired buzzword -- but look at the OED's definition of 'synergism':

Synergism

1. Theol. The doctrine that the human will co-operates with Divine grace in the work of regeneration.

www.oed.com

I think that's interesting.

Sonnet CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

On what logic can do to faith:
"...the voluntary, continuous, and, so to say, enthusiastic striving for a deliberate dichotomy of the human consciousness shatters the spirit's forces at the root. Intelligence is then transformed into cleverness, emotion into blind passion, beauty into illusion, truth into opinion, learning into a syllogism, reality into a springboard for the imagination, virtue into smugness; while theatricality becomes life's inseparable companion, serving as an external cover for falsehood even as idle fancy provides its internal mask." --Ivan Kireevsky

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
--Bertrand Russell