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Alan Chadwick and the Arcadian Garden: A Memoir and a Tribute by Paul A. Lee Platonic Academy Press 1997 for Charlene over a caffe latte to be read as an online accompaniment to THERE IS A GARDEN IN THE MIND, Alan Chadwick and the Origins of the Organic Movement in California, by Paul A. Lee PAUL A. LEE Act One Scenes 1–5 Cast of characters Paul’s Letter to the Athenians An excursus on faith in the mode of negative or apophatic theology, faith without content, leaving it to the Spirit to blow where it listeth. Grace and peace to you.
For it is in him that all the fullness of God’s nature lives embodied Colossians 2.9 l. A woman called this morning and said, Oh, Dr. Lee, I would love to hear you tonight, but there’s a demonstration at the Town Clock against Bush’s talk last night, so could you postpone your talk? I’ve been waking up every morning at about 3 or 4 a.m. and lying in bed and rehearsing this– for the last three weeks! The first week it was kind of fun. I got a big kick out of listening to myself. Second week, ehhh. The third week I thought: will this hour never come? I told her no we were going on as scheduled. I’m very pleased to be here and to welcome you to the Dinner Theater Of the Mind, the first in a series of humanities talks at The Attic that we call One Night University. I got the term from a fellow on the East Coast, who started the Saturday University. It’s a sequence of classes that he books and it’s a huge success, as an adult education program. He’s going to franchise it. So I’ve got the dibs on One Night University. Continue reading Homer and the Foundation of the Western Humanities I told you I was worried last time about sticking my neck out but it was such a success, and I’m so grateful for all of your turning again tonight. I’d like to thank Nigel Sanders-Self for doing the PowerPoint display for me. And my granddaughter, Phoebe Zajac, who did the slides for me. And Wolfgang Rosenberg and Alene Smith for doing the promotion and Eric Thiermann for filming both evenings. We’ll make a DVD or a CD from them. So they’ll be available. And thanks to all the rest of you that have made these two evenings a success. I did the math, and I figured if I did this every night, I could make a quarter of a million dollars in a year. But I was worried about running out of things to say, but then I thought, No, I can repeat some of them. Continue reading Socrates and the Rise of Rational Self-consciousness in Ancient Greece
Audubon drew a pair of them, drew them from dead birds he shot himself, and showed a pair sharing food. He lived in the heyday of the pigeon, in the great dreamtime, when they blackened the skies of eastern North America. He wrote of their speed, their beauty, and especially of their incredible abundance: |
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The last passenger pigeon the world will ever know died September 1, 1914. At the time, the event was little regarded. The onrushing war held greater sway on people’s imaginations. But as the years pass, it becomes ever more clear that this death of a bird in a cage, a bird stolen from nature and given the prosaic name of Martha, that this death, in Donne’s words, diminished all of us. For the passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird in North America, was no more, a victim of human greed and our capacity for mindless destruction.