Ransen's Blog

Anne Tyler is great at describing all sorts of humanity, including (in "A Patchwork Planet"), old men who leave their tools to surviving friends and relatives.  Old men who imagine, before they die, that their precious collection of useful objects will be gratefully received by other people. And then she goes on to say that the tools are usually ignored, then taken to the dump. I don't intend to die any time soon, but I think about that occasionally when I look at my collection of stuff. "He'd like that spanner!" I think. And "He'd like that power drill". And so on. Anne Tyler, even if she has never never met me, has my type down to a tee.

 I was using my soldering iron and unplugged it before I left the room. I stepped outside the door and thought: "Have I really unplugged it?" I stepped back in again and saw at a glance that I had:    And then I wondered when how had the concept of "unconnected" gotten into my brain, and how could I at a glance see that the soldering iron was unconnected. Somewhere in my brain the concept of unconnected was recognized as being active when shapes from my eyes we transmitted and interpreted.

 Sometimes nasty evil behaviour is excused by the fact that the nasty evil person has been brought up in an environment which produced that behaviour. That could be so, I cannot judge.  But there is a corollary of this which is hardly ever mentioned by the excusers. That is that extremely good people are also simply a result of their circumstance and upbringing . If there is no blame, there can be no praise.

More than 300 years ago, Spinoza was excommunicated by the Amsterdam Jewish community.  I wonder if Spinoza (being on the whole a logical clear thinker) was amused by the phrasing: "Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in." I'm a programmer so this has always struck me as odd. Once he is cursed by day and cursed by night you have covered all the possibilities. Any one of the three curses above covers all of Spinoza's life. I suppose religion is theater (and not logic or sense) and so needs theatrical curses (not logical ones).

 June the 20th (or 21st depending on the year) is the first day of Summer. But is also the Summer solstice, or longest day of the year. Here in Northern Italy the maximum daily temperature will continue to rise till the middle of August. I prefer the cold, and dislike muchly the hot and humid Milan Summers. The Summer solstice gives me a little boost. I take comfort from knowing that from the 20th onwards the Sun will be shining less and less each day. And you notice this descent into darkness by the strangeness of the early morning light, which arrives later every morning. The light feels gentler and the air feels cooler, at least in the mornings.   And so we trick ourselves into thinking everything is going to be alright.

I've mentioned before that I like manga .  But my daughter introduced me to an anime which I think will remain with me till I die. There is a particular scene which, well, shocked me with its force. The anime is "The Promised Neverland " and if you see the images from it you imagine it is a such a sweet thing: But by the time I got to the end of the first episode I realised it was much darker... ...but much much darker than I could have imagined.   No spoilers, but you, full adult, watch it and see what I mean. And don't let any small children watch it.   (I watched it on Netflix, and the scene which remains with me is towards the end of the first series.)

As you walk through the park early one morning and hear the twittering of the birds and notice the greenness of the plants... ...it can be depressing to remember that all life is struggling. The tweets of the birds are (sometimes) saying "fuck off, this is my territory", and just because they are high pitched does not mean they are sweet, it just means they are small creatures. And the plants have fought through their evolution to beat competitors for light and water. Not that the songs of the birds are not amazing to listen to, and forms of the plants and animals are not wonderful to look at. But. Still. What counteracts these depressing thoughts? Well the fact that the universe exists and the fact that we are conscious. Those are the two main miracles. (And strange things like prime numbers, integration and differentiation.)