83. "Your years are a single today"

"Perfect you are, beyond all change, and today does not reach its end in you, yet it does end in you, since all days are in you, nor could they have a course of transit not defined by you.  But your years never run out, your years are a single today; and our days, no matter how many--not only our own but those of all before us--run their course through it, with their own being and identity, while you alone are identical with yourself, so every tomorrow to come, every yesterday gone, is made in your today."

Augustine, Confessions, 1.II (Garry Wills, trans.)

82. On the Importance of Imagination

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.”

    -Percy Bysshe Shelley

This is one reason to read great literature, or so I tell my students.  Literature isn’t going to make us better people necessarily, but exercising our imaginations by entering empathetically into the lives of characters, feeling their pains and pleasures, can be a good “Christian” practice.  It prepares us to do the same thing in real life.  But reading a lot of imaginative literature doesn’t guarantee that we will do what Shelley recommends when it matters most (in real life) or that we will respond with the appropriate and loving actions even if we do manage to use our imaginations empathetically.

Still, I suspect that–like the person who regularly practices anything–the person who regularly exercises the imagination in this way has a better chance of becoming more actively compassionate than the person who doesn’t bother with the practice.

81. Facebook

Spent fifteen minutes scrolling through Facebook feed, reading status updates and comments--something I almost never do.

What a colossal waste of time.

80. The tyranny of tyranny

"But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at."

-George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"

79. Belabor Day

Being the day when we celebrate wordiness, redundancy, and general wastefulness in an effort to purge it from our souls and go back to living simple, economical, and celebratory lives.  This would be the only day of the year Fox News and MSNBC would be allowed on the air, for instance.

78. Killing trees

And then someone went completely mad and decided to cut down all the trees that gave wonderful shade to the parking lot of the Bittersweet Library branch.  Tragic.