Without Lifting A Finger

Of course, though Paris is always a thrill, we were aiming for Lisbon & Sintra (another box to tick). And we could only get there (barely made it;)) via Paris.

I guess I put plenty Paris pics on Instagram but nothing here. It's not too late.;)💗

  Plan to turn crucible of industrial revolution into 'international quality' museum gets funding boost. Merthyr Tyrfil * From a letter from Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson: I was in Wales, as well as Scotland, during Autumn time; lived three weeks within wind of St. Germanus’s old “College” (Fourteen Hundred years of age or so) and also not far from Merthyr Tydvil, Cyclops’ Hell, sootiest and horridest avatar of the Industrial Mammon I had ever anywhere seen; ... * The History of Merthyr Tydfil - The Town of Steel. Methyr Tyrfil -- Town of Steel

We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud “electricity,” and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, — for we have no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah me — what could the wild man know o...

Emerson to Carlyle: I read with interest what you say of the political omens in England. I could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. But government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. We have had in different parts of the country mobs and moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have betrayed an almost godless state of society; so that I begin to think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may. There is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that I could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love of life too strong in him.

Carlyle to Emerson: One more juicy bit (for today): What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most monstrous “tissue,” this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from “that roaring Loom of Time,” — miraculous ever as of old!

Might've been injured in the recent storm. He was sitting on the sand (in a curious position) and when I approached him he "hobbled" to the water. In the two pics I got of him "on the water," it looks like he's dragging a leg.🙏💗

 

Carlyle to Emerson: Work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one must, in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then.

Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine. Please let the story, dear God, in its revisions, be made too clear for any false & low interpretation because in it, I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. I don’t know now if it is consistent. Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right—or any wrong. I want it to mean that the good in man sometimes shows through his commercialism but that it is not the fault of the commercialism that it does.  Perhaps the idea would be that good can show through even something that is cheap.

It may be that we each mean different things when we speak of love and happiness, within a couple, as well as within society. Especially now. When I was growing up in middle-class suburban England, our family knew no one who was illegitimate or divorced or homosexual; all was heteronormative, and no one saw a psychiatrist unless they were truly, deeply mad. (There were a few minor exceptions: a couple of schoolmasters we thought dodgy, plus a great-uncle who had remarried after his first wife was confined to an asylum.) Now, towards the end of my life, more children are born out of wedlock in this country than within it; divorce, homosexuality and seeing a shrink are routine, while gender has become more fluid. All this is as welcome as it is belated, and we may occasionally feel sharp pity for those in previous centuries horribly trapped in the prisons of social, religious and sexual expectation. Though it would be impertinent to imagine that they understood love less well. They certa...

But we don’t really imagine, do we, that all this authorial remembering has come from a cup of tea? Proust clearly believes in the powerful unloosing effect on our memory of taste and smell: in the second volume, À l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, he repeats that ‘The best part of our memory lies outside ourselves, in a rainy breath, in the smell of a closed-up room or the smell of the first blaze of a fire.’ But perhaps the Madeleine Incident, however true in life, should be regarded as a fictional device as much as a transcendental key. Perhaps Proust was a novelist in search of a theory to scaffold his work – which would be a very French thing.

 From Departure(s): A Novel Marcel finds that when he tries to remember Combray, only the frustrating norms of memory apply: he sees it as no more than ‘a luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background’. And he sees the same scenes again and again. This, he realises, is because they are prompted by ‘voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect’, and since ‘the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself’, he no longer has any interest in trying to ‘ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.’ But then a wonderful thing happens. One day, many years later, low in spirits, he returns home, and his adored mother, seeing that he is cold, offers him some tea, ‘a thing I did not ordinarily take’. Further, she sends out for a petite madeleine. He dips a morsel of cake into the tea and raises it to his lips in a spoon; as he tastes it, an exquisite pleasure runs through him. It is beyond gustatory; it is...

The cushions he lay on were damp from the rain and they stank. He was very thirsty. He tried not to think. He heard a car pass in the street. He heard a dog bark. He lay with the yellow silk of his enemy’s shirt wrapped about him like a ceremonial sash gone dark with blood and he held his bloodied claw of a hand over the severed wall of his stomach. Holding himself close that he not escape from himself for he felt it over and over, that lightness that he took for his soul and which stood so tentatively at the door of his corporeal self. Like some light-footed animal that stood testing the air at the open door of a cage. He heard the distant toll of bells from the cathedral in the city and he heard his own breath soft and uncertain in the cold and the dark of the child’s playhouse in that alien land where he lay in his blood. Help me, he said. If you think I’m worth it. Amen.

 

It'd been a semi-serious resolution for at least two years. I accomplished the climb yesterday morning. Especially on the way down, I had to talk to my knees.;) Occasionally I'd stop to shoot a bird (often quite the balancing act along the rugged trail). Perhaps the most cooperative model was a Bewick's Wren, which I saw on (and heard) on the return trip. Amazing little guy. I'll post his video separately. The only slight disappointment: the HOLLYWOOD sign (see last pic).;) *