Back in them hollers

With the clay courts at the Farm closed yet again because of cold, and with another rain coming on today, extending the Ireland-like boggishness of the Piedmont yet further, I had no choice but to go for a long run again yesterday. Using a recently thought up trick, I started off by going to the bottom of Tadley and going straight up the thing, both because I know the steepness of the hill is intrinsically good for me and every way, but also because it warms me up more or less right at the door to offset the cold of the day, as opposed to needing to run for a mile and change before the body builds enough calorie-burn momentum to do the trick.

I ended up over on Burlage Circle and decided to drop down onto the OWASA easement along Bolin Creek. Aside from the paved trail that runs from the Community Center to Airport and from there on to wherever it terminates now, Umstead or wherever (don't really care for paved trails), there is a beautiful little trail system that runs back there below the Caswell/Cumberland neighborhood across from Phillips back into the hollows behind Mt Bolus. I have never fully plumbed the depths of these trails or, frankly, figured them out.

So I went there, and I followed a trail up a ravine that dropped me up at the top of Mount Bolus, near Cedar. I wasn't sure which direction to go, so I went right, and within a hundred yards there was a trail going off the other side of the road. I could see in the woods that there were lawn chairs looking out over the view, and when I got out to where they were I could see that they were looking out over the shopping center where Flyleaf Books is towards Franklin Street and UNC. An entirely new view! I had never looked at downtown from that perspective.

By the time I had taken a trail down that dumped me out on Bolinwood, I was pretty pooped and I realized I needed to find the most efficient way home, so I took the paved Bolin Creek trail to Franklin and cut across the WCHL field on the Booker Creek trail to get home. Probably 7-8 miles all told.

Anybody not from Chapel Hill is by now bored shitless from all that detail, my apologies, this was for locals and the future me. But the main point is how exciting it is to keep finding new things in my home town. It's really quite awesome, and another of the gifts of the lockdown, for those of us fortunate enough to have the material stability and inclination to search out and appreciate them.

The new strain

It must be owned that I am not too excited to learn about the new strain of COVID from South Africa and it's recent arrival on our shores, not surprisingly in South Carolina, our lesser cousin that has the audacity to refer to itself as Carolina. Yeah right. The low efficacy of the J&J vaccine against this variant does not bode well for reopening and getting back to what we used to think of as Normal.

So, we are back to looking forward to spring and warm weather, which will let us go outside more and hang out with people in the great outdoors. Perhaps we are moving into a period of history when we have a IRL social part of the year and a virtual social part of the year, when we mostly see people on Zoom, using the phone, etc. Certainly we can be happy that we live in the South, where this part of the year lasts longer.

There's a section of the Journal on how COVID will change retirement that's been lingering around my bathroom since November, and I finally picked it up and started reading. One phenomenon it referenced is how many people have gotten healthier during COVID times -- partially to mitigate some the heightened mortality risk associated with underlying conditions like obesity. So doctors are now starting to think in terms of a "biological age" construct, where if you take good care of yourself a healthy 54-year old, say, may be "biologically" equivalent to a median 40-year old.

I started to wonder if there might be a mental health equivalent. Of course, the irony here is that many older people are managing the stress of lockdown better than younger people. So it might be a question of younger- to middle-aged folks learning to be "wise beyond their years." Perhaps with the aid of such tools as blogs.  

Placing the accents correctly

Being in the markets, being in the US media market, it's been hard not to have been drawn into the silliness around Gamestop and other options trading/short squeeze stories in recent days. So I was happy to be diverted with more important stories reading the paper today, including the one about AstraZeneca's virus production issues and another about large numbers of volunteers being needed to staff vaccine sites in the USA. A couple of points here.

1. In the AstraZeneca story, UK PM Boris Jackass Johnson is quoted as saying the he's happy the UK has its doses and Europe can sort out it's own issues. Way to lead, buddy.
2. On the other hand, to be successful going forward economically, Europe is going to have to loosen up its own model of seeking collective good and allow a little more creative destruction. Europe has protected "jobs" by not having firms lay people off and having governments support payrolls. This kind of thing, combined with poor legal and general cultures around bankruptcy (deep stigma) combine to stop cycles of creative destruction in Europe. Companies don't go under, they just limp by. Old models are not superceded by new ones. People don't learn to think creatively and start new businesses, which is why few new things come out of Europe. There are definitely pluses to how they live, but they're gonna need to loosen up a little or they really will be owned by money fleeing China, etc.
3. It would be great if, instead of energetically writing Executive Orders to try to overturn everything Trump did (though I understand the instinct), Biden could address the nation and ask people to volunteer where needed. He needs to leverage rather than squander his call for unity. By doing the right things, he could literally bring people together

On a side note re Gamestop, yesterday Graham and I were discussing a friend of his who had bought options and made a 700% return. Graham had encouraged him to sell, but he wasn't ready to let go. I told Graham that he was right on and that first and foremost, his friend was squandering his attention on the wrong thing, and said that instead of trying to make a quick buck, it was much more important to try to improve consistently and sleep well. I think I like that formulation. Upon reflection I would add "maintain enthusiasm."

Just the three of us

With Natalie making her way up back up the East Coast to New Haven, our home quickly got back into operational mode with just three of us. Graham moved his primary workstation back across the hall into Natalie's room, which we will now refer to as "Leon's Room" because our shy tabby pretty much lives in there. Thankfully, he also become much more willing to receive love from everyone else once Natalie -- a more or less constant source of affection for him -- disappears.

It is different without her. The quality of our meals will go downhill with her culinary bustling gone. But gone also is the underlying tension between Mary's deeply ingrained weight-consciousness and Natalie's gentle but insistent body-positive rebellion against it,* aided and abetted by my exercise-enabled dietary extended adolescence.

Graham, for his part, returns to his period of being the only child, which he gets later in life, whereas Natalie got it when we were younger and more energetic but perhaps less wise.

Mostly, Mary and I are reminded that before too long he will be gone too so we have to focus on being kind to one another.

*As youthful rebellions go this is not a very destructive one

Getting ready for change

With Natalie leaving tomorrow I decided to work from home today. When I went downstairs for lunch, there was a bit of testiness between Mary and Natalie about something Natalie was cooking. I think we're all on edge a little.

It is both sad and happy for her to leave. It's not natural for a 20-year old to spend this much time at home, first 5-6 months in the spring, now 2 months through the holidays. We've gotten through it fine, she has occupied herself well, we found something funny to watch on TV as a family at night (Bob's Burgers, if I hadn't mentioned it), but it just ain't right.

She's planning to be away in the summer if she can find something good for herself, maybe something outdoorsy out West -- and I'll help her find it as best I can. And we'll go visit her if she lets us.

But who knows, she may never live under the same roof with us for this long again. Certainly I hope she doesn't have to under lockdown conditions.

Be we will miss her.

To the office

Must prep and head out to the office shortly, despite Natalie's leaving for the north on Wednesday, though I'll try to hustle home early to help finish our last puzzle of the Christmas season and make a fire with the wood I hauled up on the porch yesterday in advance of the rain coming in tomorrow.

I had a good hour in the backyard yesterday, flipping the long-neglected compost pile, moving wood, getting Natalie's bike out of the basement so she can throw it in the back of the Subaru and take it to Connecticut. I also hustled down to the dam and pulled weeds off of it and treated the small number of plants on it with a de minimis amount of Roundup, to which Mary objects but which our inspecting engineer has told me I must use to kill the actual plants and their root systems burrowing into the dam, rather than just superficially remove the visible part. It is worth a little spousal evil eye for a dam classed by NC's Department of Environmental Quality as "High Hazard," meaning a breach would likely lead to death downstream.

Later I tried to walk to Walgreens while talking to Leslie on the phone, only to discover halfway there that I had forgotten a mask. Sigh. So I went home and drove.

Out with it

With Natalie headed back up North to school on Wednesday, I decided it was time to get the Christmas Tree out to the street today so that we'd have a few days to process one sad event before we had to digest another. For this specific tree, there's no reason to be sad. It had a particularly good run, having been brought into the home on December 11. Which makes it a 6-week tree, maybe the longest-serving tenure of any tree in our household.

And of course, it began life as a miracle tree, scooped from the dregs of trees available under the peculiar market conditions of the Year of Lockdown, which we hope we must never repeat. We have enjoyed it immensely, as have, of course, the cats, who have sipped from the sweet sweet waters of its base for a goodly while.

OK, enough stalling. Time to go face the music and get her out to the street.

Deplatforming and the speed of discourse

The deplatforming of Trump et al from Twitter, Facebook, and even Parler from the major cloud hosting services is not a civil liberties issue, it's an issue of the deceleration of discourse, not unlike what Michael Lewis wrote about in Flash Boys, which told the story of Brad Katsuyama and IEX, which had as its stated purpose slowing down the high-frequency trading that was making stock markets challenging places for individual investors to get good trading execution, thereby stacking the deck against us.

Everyone is still free to speak. People engaging in speech advocating violence just can't use some specific microphones and megaphones. It is, in short, a collar not on production but on distribution. It is in essence a scaling up of the same situation the KKK used to be in here in Chapel Hill. Time was, the KKK would march in Chapel Hill and we would respect their first amendment rights and ignore them. Respectable platforms wouldn't touch them. We need to get back to that modus operandi.

Honestly, it's not just the Right that needs its discourse slowed down, it's all of us. Pursued to the extreme and implemented broadly, we should just heed Jaron Lanier's well-considered exhortation to delete our social media accounts. I have been abiding by that in spirit of late, though I haven't gone the whole way. I am treating social media much like we treat red meat here in our household. I haven't foresworn it entirely, but I've really cut back, and it's working out just fine.

Work

I am definitely planning for 2021 to be a banner year for the Grouse, more posts, more interactive features, cash prizes, perhaps some 3D stuff. By all means keep your eyes posted here.

However, the exigencies of work are all too often imposing themselves on my writerly idyll. More money, more clients, new team members helping out, moving to new platforms... It all adds up.

So I beg your patience on those days on which I am unable to post.

It's worth mentioning that I recently plowed through For the Sake of Elena, the fifth in Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series of mysteries -- all of which I have read during lockdown. Obviously, I like them. I like the fact that she has a set of characters -- no fewer than five of them, in fact, with some add ons (their parents and siblings) -- that develop over the course of the series, which adds a nifty dimension. Sometimes she goes a little long on the character development, but that can be tolerated. As was the case with the lengthy serialized novels of the 19th century (think Dickens, Tolstoi, Trollope, Balzac), right now we are a captive audience and can tolerate a few extra pages as we kill time hiding out from the latest plague.

Talking to the family

Every night we end up at the dinner table and ask some version of "how was your day?" or "what did you do/work on/read today?" It is not the most scintillating, but it's hard to break away from.

It occurred to me this morning that -- though Natalie is in the Education Studies program at Yale, not a true major (hers is American Studies). I've never really talked through with her the question of "why education?" I'm 90% sure it is rooted in "social justice" concerns, but that doesn't answer the question of why she thinks education is the best place to move the needle there. I should try to discuss it with her. Not that I doubt it, I'd just be interested to hear her thinking. I think she also likes the idea of acting on a small, local personal scale. Which I get.

Of course, it could be difficult to have the conversation with her without sounding like I am questioning her judgment. I'll work on it. 

Then there's also Graham. I could learn to talk to him better. And Mary.

Monday Monday, no wait, it's Tuesday!

One of the things you have to love about January is all the holidays, which yield a cluster of 4-day weeks. I'm totally in Monday mindset, yet the week is already 20% done, as it were.

It was a fine weekend, despite a neighbor of mine freaking out about something the neighborhood Board is considering doing and raising hell about it, very late in the game, and very disruptively, I might add. It was a pain in the ass, but I didn't let it mess with my game.

Speaking of which, yesterday went well on the courts. Z took me 6-4 in the first set (though I had been down 1-4 and came back to even before he closed it out). In the second set I was down 2-4, then I came back to win it in a tiebreaker. To his credit, I'm pretty sure Z fought off a set point when I was up 5-4. But I kept it together and didn't get flustered, so it was about mental toughness, as it always is.

Ran into Garland Thomas as well as Woody Burns at Harris Teeter.

Then Graham had some boys over for a fire and smores in the back yard, while I made a fire in the living room for the third night running. 

Scaling the heights

Today the Berridge-Troy clan took on the mighty Uwharrie Mountains, the oldest mountain range in North America. So old, in fact, that they're not really that mountainous. And yet, it was still pretty awesome. We went to Morrow Mountain State Park and hiked up Falls Mountain, which was not too rugged but really quite beautiful this time of year, especially because there was a fair amount of water running in the streams.

Graham drove the whole way there and did a good job handling the harassment of not one but three backseat drivers. Mary and Natalie don't have as much experience as I do restraining themselves from overcorrecting him as he drives. He wasn't really delighted with the whole thing, but handled it well, considering.

After driving 2 hours there I really wasn't that excited about driving 10 minutes past the turnoff to the park to reach the town of Albemarle to get some lunch. Fortunately, with her keen eye for such things, Natalie espied a taco truck not far past the turnoff, so we scored some tacos and fortified ourselves.

At the park headquarters, there was a "Lodge" which appeared to be a very old school and rustic event space. It would be a lovely place for a wedding, if it wasn't so fricking far away from everything.

It's worth noting that there was an incredible amount of quartz in the ground as you went up the mountain. I'm sure there's a geological story to it, but I'm no geologist.

All told, it was a good outing day. Not too much infighting in the car.

Bob's Burgers

Television has been a great balm for the family throughout the period of lockdown. We have watched many things, but first and foremost Community, which really hit the spot. Right now we are settled on Bob's Burgers, an animated thing that we get via Natalie's account on Hulu. We laugh fairly frequently.

It's a shame that I can't talk the family into watching more movies, as there are so many good ones that we haven't watched. But trying to get everyone to agree on something is just brutal. Once Natalie heads back up to college we can go back to re-screening some of the classics with Graham. For now, I'm just going with the flow.

The Process

In addition to tennis with Z, much of my pandemic social life has been with my office mates David and Adam, whom I might term Adam the Younger. The latter is a younger fellow and, like many of the well-educated folx in their 30s, a bit of a foody (though also a hell of an athlete, so he eats what he wants to). As such, he has high standards for coffee, which we enjoy each afternoon around 2. While our household has a preference for ground coffee, being of the slacker late Boomer/Gen X vintage, Adam  the Younger of course likes his beans whole, so he can grind them himself.

So when I brought in coffee for our shared enjoyment yesterday, I brought beans rather than ground. "I like the process of grinding them," he explained. "At home I even use a hand grinder."

Ah yes, The Process. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a discussion I had recently with David (my other office mate) about Judaism, Christianity, and their respective theories of salvation (this-worldly Judaism vs. other-worldly Christianity), and I have been reflecting on this discussion as I come to the end of this book by Abraham Joshua Heschel and he talks about piety and holiness in Judaism, which he very much grounds in the performance of everyday actions, in a calm but not harshly judgmental striving towards adherence. The Process.

On with it.

The judgment of the court

Yesterday's results from the court reflected the following: 6-0, 4-6, 1-6. In fact, it was in many ways more lopsided even than that: I was up 4-2 in the second set, meaning I had won 10 games to Z's 2, then he came back and finished up the match 10-1, including an 8-0 stretch. W, you may well ask, TF.

A lot of it was good old mean reversion. I am by no means that much better than Adam. In fact, if you go back and tot up the aggregate of the by now hundreds of sets and games we have played just during the pandemic, objectively you'd have to say he's better than I am, or that at least that he wins on average. I would certainly hope that if you were going to say that he is better than me, that you'd do it outside of my range of hearing or, at the very least, not on my blog.

Fact is, the second half of the match I didn't feel like I played that much worse than the first half. I'd be very interested in hearing what a good tennis player or coach observing us would say.

But one thing that is very clear was that internally, in my mind, I was having trouble processing dominating him and winning that soundly. If I had beaten him 6-0, 6-2, for one thing he would for sure have insisted on a third set, and rightly so, and there's no way I could have kept it up. I barely got through to 6-0 without flubbing it. I am not mentally trained to dominate. I definitely like having parity with friends.

It takes me back to the last time I was playing an awful lot with a good friend: 2008-9 when David and I were playing several times a week in Princeton, even as he was the broker selling our house. Mostly we were even but some nights one or the other of us would have a hot hand. David definitely got frustrated when I was crushing him, and he showed it and acted out. I can tell Z also gets down on himself a little but, as the numbers show, he is a very disciplined competitor and knows how to manage and channel his emotions, so I really needn't worry.

The wrong question

Oceans of ink have been spilled on the topic of the markets having come unhinged from reality, bubbles in tech stocks, Tesla, and Bitcoin and the crazy behavior of retail investors under COVID, especially via Robinhood and options trading. None of it is entirely nonsense, but it also marks a change in market regime, much as the retail FX trading of legions of Ms. Watanabes changed foreign exchange markets in earlier days. Google it. There will be a lot of pain when mean reversion sets in, but when the dust settles on that the world will look different from how it was before, in traditional Hegelian fashion.

But overall so much of this, and so much of our behavior as financial actors, focuses on the wrong question. So much of what people are asking is "how can I allocate the next marginal dollar so that it grows in my account?" when they should be thinking "how can we allocate our next marginal dollars so that more people will be happy and healthy in the future?"

I am of course dramatically oversimplifying things. I have the impression that people are giving more. I gave more this year than I ever have before, about 10% of household income between charitable giving and political campaigns, with slightly more to the former. In aggregate US charitable giving has historically hovered around 2% of GDP, not counting hours volunteered, and the money-giving is logically clustered amongst those who have more (more hours may be given by those who have less money, I've never seen good reporting). People have also been really focused in many places on supporting local businesses, especially restaurants, to preserve them, so that's a kind of giving.

But the national, high-level conversation has not been focused there, not by a long shot, and that's a shame. If the President could have led a conversation around service and giving while leaving governors and public health officials to lead the dialog on the pandemic, COVID could have been a wonderful moment for civic engagement. In many ways, it still has been, but still an opportunity has been squandered.

Almost as an aside, and because this is my blog I can do this, it's worth noting that the breadth and scale of equity financing in the US -- the stock market -- has worked well for us under COVID. By contrast, the shallow equity markets and largely bank-based financing system of Europe have hindered its ability to shift capital to places where it can be useful. For example, as Zoom has taken over the world, it's been able to easily get money to expand operations, and the whole platform has gotten more stable. I could go on but I've been typing long enough for one day

Glen Heights

Thinking about the passing of Jurg Steiner a month or so back, my mind turned naturally back to Glen Heights in the seventies. It seems to me that the single most important decision in my life was made by my parents back in '71 when they bought a house and moved us there. Most of my best friends on the planet all come from there (and I am going to kick one of their asses on the tennis court tomorrow), and I also have their parents and siblings and even their offspring who still seem like extended members of my family. Not only that, most of them still live relatively nearby, which is pretty amazing.

Actually, this came to mind not because I was thinking about Jurg, but because I was texting with my mom about going for a walk with my mom and Natalie a little later in the woods at Carolina North, which -- as I have written before -- were just known as "the woods" when we were growing up, and occupied a mythical status in my psyche when I was young. Now they are overrun by everyone, his brother, and their mountain bikes. On the one hand it makes them a place of much less mystery and allure. On the other, it protects them from all being turned into subdivisions, so I'll take the good with the bad.

Enough

Had a shitty night of sleep last night, between all that has been going on in the world, here and there, big and small. I won't belabor it, but I will say that the rats fleeing the sinking ship of Trumpism with high-minded rhetoric about how terrible the scenes in the Capitol were is pretty funny. What happened in DC on Tuesday was by no means a new development. It was entirely consistent with a regime that has been happy to do whatever the fuck it wants to for four years. Use flash grenades to dispel a crowd of protesters for a photo op at a church where you're not even welcome? No problem. Separate small children from their parents at the border and lose track of the parents? You bet. Attempt to strong arm a foreign head of state to help your political campaign, and then have the support of your congressional caucus for so doing? Sure. Appoint to lifetime judgeships ideologues who have barely ever spent time in court? Makes sense to me. Use unmarked troops a la Donbass to do crowd control and protect the Lincoln Memorial? Great plan.

It's all just absurd, and it is rather late in the game for members of the Republican Senate caucus to be miraculously growing backbones. Ben Sasse is particularly disappointing. He wrote an intelligent op-ed in the Journal this week. He's a smart, thoughtful guy. But he voted with Trump all the time. He can't blame his spinelessness on Mark Zuckerberg. None of us can. 

The Morning After

During the nonsense of the Electoral College certification process in DC yesterday, I was doing my test to tune things out and focus on work. In fact, I had an excellent conversation with a former colleague who shared with me some stories about excellent strides he has made in his life and also explained the rationale behind a technological phenomenon I had recently heard about.

Then I turned back to a news site and saw what was going on at the US Capitol.

This little irruption of reality TV didn't really give me worries about the stability of US Government. If anything, the day's big news from Georgia already signaled the extent to which the Trump fever was breaking, but the siege of the Capitol drove a stake through its heart. Trump's future as a force in US politics gets fainter by the hour.

But I can't help but worry a little about the potential for valuable information to pass into the hands of Russia and its allies as its retained (and it's not unlikely there were some) and unwitting agents coarsed through the Capitol with their smartphones.

But we must take the good with the bad. I will be happy to see Merrick Garland sit in the AG's seat.

Routines

Each day begins with a mild sense of dread. So much to do, so little light to do it by, so much uncertainty, so much monotony. Then I'm up, my routine begins, and I just push forward through the steps. I think I have listed them out for you before, so I won't bore you with a re-enumeration.

Sometime at dinner a couple of years ago over the holidays -- we were at Provence with mom and Leslie's family -- the subject of routine came up. Leslie asked and was fascinated by the extent to which my life is run by routine, and I was also a little astonished to see how regular I was in so many things. Under coronavirus it has gotten even more extreme, down to the new habit of changing the cats' food bowls not just when it seems like they are dirty, but Monday and Thursday mornings, to be exact. In fact, as I write that, the only way I can be relatively certain that I didn't change them today is that it's Tuesday. Otherwise, my sense memory of doing it is close enough that it could have been today.

In any case, between the routine tasks of morning reading, populating my task list and writing this much I am well into the work day and have a first meeting of the day at 10, so I'd better hustle off. More later.

On with it

Getting in gear for the week over here, not without effort. I really haven't had enough vacation over the last couple of years, plus this whole coronavirus thing, plus as I run around my neighborhood I see all too many Christmas trees out by the street, and I know what that means for ours all too soon. We may have to sacrifice it. I won't even start on Trump and the circus in Congress coming up this week.

Still, it's hard not to be cheered by a few things. The days are getting a little longer, and while Spring is decidedly not "just around the corner," it's not all that far beyond the corner right beyond that one, at least here in the South. If all goes well, I should be out on the tennis court this afternoon after a hiatus since (gasp!) last Tuesday, which is about as long as I've gone in months. This after an abysmal week of heavy rain which has made our little nook of the world look like a sad amalgam of Louisiana and Ireland/

I also made some progress this weekend knocking down tasks (Natalie's financial aid forms) and stacks of printed matter. I pawed through a couple of year-end and 2021 outlook periodicals and got them safely into the recycling bins. One good article I read was about the importance of picking up new skills as one ages to maintain brain plasticity, and it cited the example of a 70-year old physicist who took up juggling. Now that's a fine idea.

Long and slow

Went for a long slow run today, up to the top of Piney Mountain and then down through North Forest Hills Park, past the zen basketball court in the woods which I had discovered early in lockdown, to which I had taken Graham some weeks later. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived. There was an older Asian man sitting on a bench, taking in the quiet. He looked at us and gave us a big thumbs up and said something like "you guys are super" or somesuch. It was hilarious.

After coming home, I plowed through the slim Japanese detective novel that Santa had picked off of my Amazon list, Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders, written in 1973, set in 1937, translated in 2019. It was very old school, Agatha Christie-like.

Now it is my turn to make dinner, building off of a stock from the remnants of the New Year's dinner we got from Lantern which contained real live (well, actually, dead) pig tails. They are very fatty. I'm sure they had to put something funky like that in there because otherwise there's no way they could charge $90 for hoppin john and collards.

Thankfully, I have both niangao (traditionally a New Year's food) and kimchi handy, so I can use those in dinner.

this, that and The Other

The other day at the office my suitemate David and I got to talking, as we often do. Somehow conversation drifted to Max Weber and his distinction between the this-worldly soteriology (theory of salvation) of Jews and the other-worldly version of Christianity. Weber, he told me, basically had it was all wrong, that his worldview was overimbued with Protestantism, and that at some low level it had laid the ground for Nazism -- to dramatically oversimplify, because of the implication that Judaism wasn't in some sense a true religion like Christianity. I had never thought of it that way, I still don't agree entirely, but I totally hear where he's coming from and can see how it would get spun that way in the wrong hands.

He was reminded of some debate that had been spurred by in the course of a reading he and a friend have been doing of the book of Isaiah, wherein there is debate about how Moses received the laws. Did he go up to heaven? Did God come down to earth? Each solution is problematic, theologically. It occurred to me -- and I interjected -- that the whole concept of the Trinity (Father -- Son -- Holy Ghost) was cooked up to resolved this problem, and later I recalled that for the most part the ecumenical councils that were held in Nicaea, Ephesus, etc. from the 4th thru the 8th century pretty much revolved around heresies around this issue, esp. Arianism. Which is not to say that I think the Christians nailed it, they were just thinking through the same issue in their own way.

Then this morning I was reading something in a section of the Journal that had been languishing on the dining room table about the restoration of some 14th century church doors in Florence. The article discussed where the doors fit in to the early Renaissance evolution of the depiction of humans and reality, during which the high degree of abstraction and flatness of styles inherited from Byzantium gave way to greater realism and individuality. It occurred to me that this evolution, the rise of the concept of hereness and individuality, to some extent forms an extension and is of a piece with the debate about the Divine and the Terrestrial, God and Man. And, to go a step further, the One and the Many, and we must give props to Nietzsche for driving home the point that the pre-Socratics really did frame out most of the basic questions.

Nor should I be surprised with any of this thinking, because in a sense it forms an extension of decades of thinking about culture -- admittedly mostly western culture -- to which I've been privy since discovering my parents' old copy of Kenneth Clark's Civilization to reading Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel in college and grad school. Plus tons of other stuff.

It is all decidedly in the realm of Dead White Men. And yet there is a lot of good and important thinking that was done and thought through and which forms the basis of much that is good and valuable in today's thinking and scholarship. Yet I'm sure all of these guys have been more or less shredded in recent decades for their role in positing and subtending structural racism/sexism/etc. I'm not even going to bother looking.

People forget how much of human history has been a struggle to survive. When you are struggling to survive, the question of what is mine vs yours, who is in vs. who is out, has a different resonance. Life expectancy in the US was half of what it is today in 1880. The story of civilization is multithreaded, but in large part it is the story of optimizing the distinction between mine and yours, allocating scarce resources sensibly and thereby raising more and more people up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. As a group humanity has made a lot of progress on many fronts since World War II due to a lot of things, including the Green Revolution, Deng Xiaopeng and Narasimha Rao/Manmohan Singh and the opening of China and India, Gandhi/King et al., Bretton Woods, the internet, multilateral agreement to the primacy of diplomacy over war, etc. Coronavirus has thrown sand into the works and kicked a bunch of people a step or two back down Maslow's pyramid. We need to get organized to bring them back up, but we need to recognize how complicated the task is and not just be yelling at each other.