09-09-09
Today should be a good day because it's the first half of my weekend (Friday is the other) and all the numbers align. I haven't decided how to use the rest of the day. There are domestic and bureaucratic tasks, PhD applications, ideas to record, research to conduct, fun to be had. There is time for all.
Work is good, but recently I got heat exhaustion and have been slow to mend. At least the jungle weather has mellowed into something more temperate. Also, I added Life behind the Walls to my tour repertoire. The first two-thirds of the tour addresses cellblock architecture; the remainder concerns labor, recreation, and inmates' relationships between themselves, the guards, and the wider world. When working with the public, it is easier to love humanity abstractly than particularly. Recognizing this, I'm striving for brotherly love because it's crucial for goodness, and the only reason to withhold it is ignorance, yet giving it can have an anagogic effect.
Last week Nick and I stole into the Divine Lorraine, a beautiful abandoned hotel on North Broad Street. We just had to squeeze through a gate, run through tall weeds, and climb into an open window in the adjacent building (the lower windows in the Divine Lorraine proper being boarded over). A helpful ladder brought us from this window into a basement shared with the Divine Lorraine; some stairs brought us to its grand foyer, then we followed the stairs and ultimately a ladder out onto the roof! You would not believe how beautiful it was! There was Center City below us, and a rainbow-ringed moon above.
Recently I've read War and Peace, Absalom, Absalom!, I, Claudius, Finnegans Wake, Far from the Madding Crowd, Monkey Girl (Humes), and Herzog (Bellow). War and Peace addresses (not very succinctly) the human soul's nuances through trivial and monumental endeavors. Tolstoy also construes history as the joining of inexorable cosmic laws with illusory free will. Not that I agree. Monkey Girl is a sensitive analysis of a trial against teaching Intelligent Design in American public schools.
Tomorrow I'll begin auditing a seminar on Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture at Penn -- no small fortune!
Work is good, but recently I got heat exhaustion and have been slow to mend. At least the jungle weather has mellowed into something more temperate. Also, I added Life behind the Walls to my tour repertoire. The first two-thirds of the tour addresses cellblock architecture; the remainder concerns labor, recreation, and inmates' relationships between themselves, the guards, and the wider world. When working with the public, it is easier to love humanity abstractly than particularly. Recognizing this, I'm striving for brotherly love because it's crucial for goodness, and the only reason to withhold it is ignorance, yet giving it can have an anagogic effect.
Last week Nick and I stole into the Divine Lorraine, a beautiful abandoned hotel on North Broad Street. We just had to squeeze through a gate, run through tall weeds, and climb into an open window in the adjacent building (the lower windows in the Divine Lorraine proper being boarded over). A helpful ladder brought us from this window into a basement shared with the Divine Lorraine; some stairs brought us to its grand foyer, then we followed the stairs and ultimately a ladder out onto the roof! You would not believe how beautiful it was! There was Center City below us, and a rainbow-ringed moon above.
Recently I've read War and Peace, Absalom, Absalom!, I, Claudius, Finnegans Wake, Far from the Madding Crowd, Monkey Girl (Humes), and Herzog (Bellow). War and Peace addresses (not very succinctly) the human soul's nuances through trivial and monumental endeavors. Tolstoy also construes history as the joining of inexorable cosmic laws with illusory free will. Not that I agree. Monkey Girl is a sensitive analysis of a trial against teaching Intelligent Design in American public schools.
Tomorrow I'll begin auditing a seminar on Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture at Penn -- no small fortune!