Tuesday, Without Rubies

 Another beating at work today, had trampolines. We had a trampoline as kids. I liked that trampoline, but now I hate the things!

I just finished two posts for the blog. They are now scheduled through December 16. I could finish this one notebook, but I think I will run down to McClures for supplies. Then I will shower off the Ben-Gay, and attend to writing several letters in longhand.

Before work, I read Nebraska mountain lion’s long walk comes to an end in Indiana. I was left wondering if one could reach Illinois, why not Indiana?

After work, I read the following: Mona Charen's The GOP Can’t Whatabout the Pelosi Attack (It is scary that I find myself now agreeing with Charen! But decency is decency.); George, Eric and me: Pattie Boyd on her favourite images – in pictures (Okay, I can see why she could inspire George Harrison's Something and Eric Clapton's Layla.); Introduction: Hope Itself (see below); and Feast Upon These 7 Sumptuous SF and Fantasy Books This November (I only knew N.K. Jemsin, but she is so damned good.); and MITS navigates rocky road through pandemic, driver shortage.

From Introduction: Hope Itself:

Infinite hope, hope against hope, is nothing less than what the great Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard understood as authentic hope. By contrast with worldly hopes that focus on transitory goods such as success and happiness, authentic hope is nothing less than the will to live in faithful relation to the ideal of eternal and unchanging Good. To live without such hope, the Sage of Copenhagen held, is not only to live in despair but to abandon the task of becoming a self, a true individual.

The great danger of our time is the loss of such hope. In his new book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, cultural critic Adam Kirsch observes that humanists are at an impasse: They must either reject continued progress (and the freedom and moral autonomy bound up with it) or acknowledge, on rational grounds, the merit of transhumanist and posthumanist arguments that a world without human beings is superior to one in which humans exist. The latter view, he suggests, might even be considered the humanistic equivalent of those held by various religious traditions that have “always seen the end of days as both wonderful and dreadful.” If the end of humanity is the consummation of humanism, Kirsch concludes, “there may be no choice but to accept the paradoxical promise that Franz Kafka made a century ago: ‘There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.’”

The comfort of that promise might be far too cold for most of us. Yet there is a growing and almost palpable sense that the human species, in this age dubbed the Anthropocene, is exercising its dominance of the world toward catastrophic ends. And it is not only the possibility of environmental catastrophe or endless global health crises that challenges a hopeful outlook. Declining faith in once-revered institutions, including democracy itself, growing social isolation and loneliness, rising numbers of “deaths of despair,” the resumption of dangerous conflicts among the world’s great powers—any or all of these are enough to provoke cynicism or despair about our individual and collective futures.

Great as these challenges and crises may be, however, we might ask whether they are truly the cause of our growing sense of hopelessness or, in fact, are the result of it. The essays in this issue advance the latter proposition: that our multiple crises stem in large part from the absence, or at least the precariousness, of those ideas or ideals, those ultimate meanings, on which true hope must depend.

I have been listening to The Sonic Bloom this evening, but I am going to leave you with this:

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