We went on to discover that this “clew” was a northern English and Scottish fragment of Old English cliewen which meant "sphere, ball, skein, ball of thread or yarn.” Going back even further, it appears as if this word might even go back to a common root meaning a mass of clay which also produced our modern words “glue” and “gluten.” In other words, a big ol’ ball of something. Dough? Bread? Suddenly we’re in the dark forest of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, that ill-fated “clew.”
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Before the Bullfight
It’s incredible to imagine a painter covering the entire surface of this canvas with their thought and attention. And it’s incredible to see photos of this painter, Joaquin Sorolla, working on location, in the open air, with brushes that look like javelins, on canvases that resemble billboards. I don’t know how much of Before the Bullfight was painted outside, but the painting has both the fresh spontaneity of a plein air work, and the considered compositional architecture of a well-planned studio piece. Sorolla is somehow able to have it both ways.
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“Petty Frustrating Crap” and the End of Inconvenience
All sacred relationships are formed in the crucible of inconvenience. Family. Marriage. Lifelong friendship. Religious community. None of it is convenient. Shoot, not even book clubs or bowling leagues are convenient. It’s no coincidence that our culture is coming to view them as increasingly unnecessary. A truly radical transformation in what we mean by “society” and how we experience others is already underway.
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“Eyes on the Construction Site”
⎺Original Poetry from John Grey
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Undone, Redone, Repeat: Reflections on Motherhood
I didn’t know how unprepared for motherhood I was. The nine months spent waiting for my first baby were so magical that it never occurred to me that the business of raising children would be so uprooting.
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Nick Cave on Sorrow, Laughter, and Life
These days, I am neither distrustful nor suspicious of the world, even though my heart breaks for it, and I am not despairing, depressed or embittered. Indeed, I see heartbreak as the most proportional response to the state of the world - to say I love you is to say my heart breaks for you, and this sentiment resonates within all things, bringing a clarity to both the world before us and the world beyond the veil. Sorrow becomes a way of life, part laughter, part tears, with very little space between.
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Auden on Emperor Hadrian and Modern Man
The Emperor Hadrian was individually what we now are collectively, Lord of the World; what we are collectively, each of us can in fantasy see himself as individually.
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Eliot on Engineering and Life
I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.
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David Hicks on the Desire to Know the Truth
Only men and women who want to know the truth more than to be proven right will accept dialectical challenges and not regard reason with suspicion and fear.
