PARAPROSDOKIAN -ISMS

"Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak."

"The last thing I want to do is hurt you...but it's still on the list..."

"If I agree with you, then we'd both be wrong!"

"Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting one in a fruit salad."

(I wonder how many other fruits we would leave out, eh?)

"The early bird might get the worm; but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese."

"The evening news is where they begin with,'Good Evening," and then proceed to tell you why it isn't."

(See my Abend Post Post)

"You don't need a parachute to go skydiving; you only need a parachute to skydive twice."

"Dolphins are so smart that within a few weeks of captivity, they can train people to stand on the very edge of the pool and throw them fish."

"Always borrow money from a pessimist; he won't expect it back."

And one more Auden-as-critic ism:

"Since he exists historically, not on some timeless Olympus, every critic is, consciously or un consciously, engaged in some polemic. It is wrong to ask about any critic worth reading, "Are his judgments true or false?" but rather one must always ask: "What overemphasized half-truth are they intending to counterbalance?"

This might make aging a little easier........or not: "We exist...to be replaced."

"what we have here is an attempt to communicates"

Captions from TNY

"I saw the most fascinating picture of a celebrity getting a cup of coffee today."

"Tonite I'll be performing a monologue about where I like to shop, my hair color, and something my mother did to upset me."

"It's not a word I can put into feelings."

Woman, upset, speaking to husband, "It's like you haven't heard a single thing I've thought!!"

Two upscale moms in the park, with children: "We believe in the concept of public of public education."

Middle-aged woman in class, to guru: "You say life is about suffering, but isn't it also about complaining?" (wull, if one really must edit TNY, I'd say it's compulsory! See previous post about TNY's founder who said the difference b/w TNY and the Luce's empire was, " I believe in malice."

"An anniversary present? For me? Well, thank me very much!"

Moo latte.......

AUDEN-A-CITY

Mayhap I should explain that I am in The Den of Auden, which some would say is a Den of Iniquity, but nonetheless, when in Auden City, do the dew as the scholars would do. (We currently have 100% humidity hereabouts, Mobility City-wise.)

And, contrary to Alice Cooper, school is never out for School-ers an' Schule-rs.

"Always learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth."?

"Trofimov the eternal student"?--- never graduating or getting a "real job." ? Let the reader decide; and beware!!!

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& let it also be known that this missive is my second on a laptop and my first with a wireless maus. A little difficult with a hypersensitive keyboard but no bane for the reader with a limited time frame! Thanks Mark for the lone and borry of yer keybored, apologetics to Walter Kelly, esq. inter alia and et all. (I kent beleeve I et the hole thing!!!)

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& science interlewd: No black wholes from Geneva Accelerant; just a bit 'o antimatter; and no God Par Tickle neither--so far as Ive herd. So the earth is still safe from science so fur, Hiroshima and the Holocaust notwithstanding. Complete annihilation continues to elude us.......

Mar ladder.........kresch!!! (The sound of one Menorah, falling)

W. H. Auden's contribution to "The New Canterbury Pilgrims"

"As he reaches adolescence, every boy and girl today begins to notice two phenomenon: official religion and religiosity. Official religion is not the same as conventional religion. A conventional Christian is someone who does not distinguish between his faith and culture;he believes in the Nicene Creed as unquestionably and in the same way as he believes that no gentleman wears a celluloid collar."

"An official Christian, on the other hand, is someone who, for various reasons, like setting an example for the young or doing business in his community, attends the rites and recites the formulas while knowing perfectly well that he, personally, does not believe in them. In the boarding schools I attended, chapel was compulsory for the masters as well as the boys, and one very soon realized that many of the former were definitely not Christians but that attending chapel was a condition of their employment. One could not call them hypocrites because this was a open secret which they made no serious effort to conceal"

moore latter

AS GOOD AS YOU--COMPARED TO WHAT?

I probably should let you know that my unwriting has been unintentional but our internet connection is down about 90% of the time, hence not out, but unpredictable in regards to usability.

I am writing this in the office, where I should not be just now, already being on vacaciones. So I am going to try a reverse of previous trends, and do more entries on my way to Mobile, Jacksonville, and back. It seems Mark left the larger of his two laptops so we are borrowing it on this trip. My time seems to be becoming increasingly compressed and I do yearn for more freedom. Even as "retirement" recedes further and further into the future. If I were in France;and if France were franc-ly solvent, I'd have a lot of "free" time--but now, tanks to Sarkovsky, maybe not until next year. Hypothetically. So where's the nanny state when ya need her, huh?

"Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Not you anymore." -Dilbert, the humorous approach of Catbert to the delightful evil of downsizing.

I also need a union, apparently. Guess what? This fall I get a report card (or maybe a re-tort card) based on my popularity with my patients. Here's a question: do public school teachers now get graded by their students? According to CSL in "The Abolition of Man", we should be there already. Dennis, is this allowed in silence by the teachers' unions?

Of course there have always been suggestion/complaint boxes which are generally unused because there is no visible response to them. Risible responses perhaps but not visible to the naked eye. But is there truly any advantage from going to populism from paternalism?

I guess it was my rather vain hope that those who practice practical science would not have to evolve into practitioners of "popular science." Apparently the thin veneer of "objective science" has worn out its brief welcome. The public in general still worships the oracles of science, seeing as they see little other option thanks to militant ideological scientism; but uneasy is the head that wears the crown. If one is a pretender to the throne of God, people will expect you and me to be God.

This is a large part of why America and the West have become so unhinged and unstable. A little god pops up, demonstrates he is no god at all, and there are thousands more hungry for his throne and hence for their own destruction in turn.

Just gimme 5 minutes of fame, that's all I want. ((No, no, gimme shelter, "that's what I want" --from "Money", an early cover song by the Beatles, immediately contradicted by "Money Can't Buy Me Love." (Honesty quickly displaced by a half truth which is far more popular and self-congratulatory)


Actually I have bent over backwards to stay out of the public eye. My desire is to do my work quietly in my office, and let people vote with their feet. I find advertising a complete waste and have never spent a dime of my own money on it. Honestly, I do not appeal or cater to the movers and shakers of Mendota; I find a sizable portion of them pretty rude and insatiable and actually less open to reason than the poor, who are far less likely to sue, as was pointed out forcefully in the Book of James.

Nothing new here, then. I will let you know what "grade" I get--at this point nothing is hidden anyway except for God Himself--so my level of risk/overexposure is low; and having so few regular readers is a regular advantage. At my age esp.

May I again suggest Mark Schuler's Facebook photo gallery for an intimate look at the Schulers, for what that's worth. Much of it is quite funny (esp my comments of course!) Or maybe ya just had ta be there.........

Write if ya get work--or keep yer job--and just remind 'em what "men without chests" (CSL) would say: "I'M AS GOOD AS YOU, MATE!!!"

overheard at the mall:

"Every man is brutish in his knowledge."

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo DaVinci, Thomas Jefferson (and Edison and Selleck) and Albert Einstein."

(And Napoleon was nasty, brutish, and short,too)

"The pen of the scribes is in vain." (well, that's that then.........

Last night Flo and I had a chance to watch a movie about the Nickel Mines tragedy. In the first place, I must disclaim any ability to explain any of the events of that day; I only have my suspicions based on a very necessarily narrow ability to comprehend what is clearly beyond my experience and my ability to reason.

If the reader wants more information or is not familiar with this schoolhouse massacre of Amish girls, I would encourage a re-visit at least to the facts of the case and the facts re: the Amish response.

Columbine may have set the precedent; but I am reminded of an even earlier event which was the overt act of the son of a psychiatrist on a group of praying (on their own, and student-led,lest anyone be contemplating a late call to a lawyer) high school students in, I believe, Paducah KY. John and I were "on the road again" returning from Florida with the great gift of my parents' Camry. (thanks again, M + D, we really used that car to the max.) I was actually planning to stop in Pensacola because of a well-known revival at Brownsville, but this was not at all what I needed. My Mom was very concerned about my stopping there because of the recent murder of an abortionist in that area, by a "pastor" no less, not too long before. Probably that influenced my decision to go straight home.

But that was not to be either, and possibly my folks would have been even more appalled by our actual visit. On our way we heard about this strange attack on radio news, and it was my intention to stop somewhere overnight and go to church in the morning, as was our habit anyway when travelling as a larger group. Some would say this was a coincidence, but I am convinced to this day that the Holy Spirit had His say, and that John and I were privileged to see up close the response of a small church to a great tragedy. But I did stop and stayed Saturday night at a hotel in the vicinity. Curiosity? That may have been the initial draw--God can use our weirdest and most natural feelings which are in fact pre-designed/fabricated , for those who can accept the "hard sayings" of nature. But then...

We were allowed to go in--but the media was not; even though there were certainly plenty of them in the parking lot. I can't even begin to summarize or do justice to what went on in that closed service, nor even to my feelings about it, then or now. As I read this morning in Jeremiah 8 this AM, the pens of the scribes are useless and false in times like these.

My recollection however is that the response was almost identical to that of the Amish towards the perpetrator and his family...

We had a chance to personally talk to Ben Strong, the pastor's son who was the leader of the prayer group, and who actually not only knew but had previously tried, with some success, to befriend the shooter. (the shooter in Nickel Mines was a milkman known well by the Amish and attempts had been made to befriend him by the Amish prior to the massacre.) Ben was the person in the prayer group who did not run but actually came directly up to the boy with the gun and disarmed him not by force but by just the right sort of persuasion--and not only saved other students but probably prevented a suicide as well.

Ben later became a pastor; no surprise there; but as it turned out, John and I had a lot in common with him musically, and he plays a dynamite sax! And we talked more about the joys of music than about his actions or the event just a few days prior. He had said it all in his brief message, which I recall only in substance, not in any details.

.....................................................

It is hard to write the right sort of commentary about this, but I consider these to be modern day parables in action that do, in fact, invite a personal response. Is genuine forgiveness of our trespassers-against-us emotionally or rationally possible? Probably unaided reason or flesh or family values would have to say, no; as the Amish father also said, at least in the movie, we have every right not to forgive. This of course, is largely what we have seen very clearly in our latest election cycles; hence I can say with confidence that such ensamples are not the province of religion qua politics either-- in fact it is so far beyond our capabilities that we have no power even of imagination to go beyond our daily fleshly and--dare I say-- "spiritual" lives to broach the essence of them.

But to see it played out in person and to see ordinary weak people guided "into all Truth" not by abstract principles but by God's Sovereign Spirit going beyond even His own Law that He set up--it is that which causes me to gasp--and to cry out like Jeremiah and Moses and Nicodemus, "How can such things be!!!???

Rainy Day Women #151

And now for something.......else......(a gain)

Speaking of less fragmentary verse, here's a lil' pome that made the rounds at NIU circaz 1968. To wit and ahem:

"I was feelin'

so bad

I ast my family doctor jus' what I had.

I said, Doctor (doctor)

Mr. M.D. (doctor)

can you tell me (doctor)

what's ailin' me? (doctor)

And he said:

'Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah....yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah...

Indeed

all you really need is

Good lovin'!!! etc.

--The Jung Rascals, as told to Ed Sullivan