Max Holiday Card 2020

Max 03/21/2006 - 12/20/2019

I love you forever and ever. I will miss you each second for the rest of my life.
You are part of me and I will see you in my dreams.

Quote of the Day

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Quote of the Day

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

- Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind

Quote of the Day

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

Quote of the Day

Read books you hate. Nothing pushes you more strongly in the direction of your own voice as knowing precisely what you are not.

- Meg Elison

Quote of the Day

When we think about the adaptive fit of a species to its environment, we think about size, speed, coloration, feeding habits, and so on, but we don’t think about thinking. Sure, we talk about brain size as though it were just another morphological variable like height, but we don’t think about thinking in Darwinian terms. Things get weird when you go there.

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What if the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything can only be contemplated by dodos? What if the Ultimate Truths are dodo thoughts?

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.

- Arthur C. Clarke

Wisdom Of The Week

Larkin’s poetry, in particular, encourages us to take a more capacious view of the matter. This isn’t because his poetry is didactic in some straightforwardly moralistic way; indeed nothing could be more alien to Larkin than the vulgar notion that poetry is meant to make you a nicer person. Rather his poems, if we let them, awaken us to a certain sensibility that is not exhausted by an appreciation of their expressive originality and sublimity. In short, there’s an undeniable sense in which Larkin’s poems have the effect of making us a little deeper, perhaps even wiser too.

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My own take is from the perspective of someone who wishes to know if it’s possible to derive any insights of general human significance from Larkin’s poetry. But first a very brief word about my un-Larkinesque-sounding “insights of general human significance”.

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So what might these insights be? They are, I suggest, the lessons that can be wrought from the kind of uncompromisingly undeluded but humane poetic sensibility of Larkin. The qualities that we might associate with what we might call Larkin’s realism would include a sense of scepticism, honesty, humour, ambivalence and even courage. If we were to use Larkin’s more favoured and evocative compound adjectives we might describe it as undogmatic, undeceived, unbelieving, unconsoling, un-Orphic and undaunted. As for the actual perspective on or view of life itself, Larkin’s poem Ignorance gives us part of the answer:

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure,

Of what is true or right or real,

But forced to qualify or so I feel,

Or Well, it does seem so,

Someone must know.

With his typically light but unfailingly assured touch, Larkin conveys the inescapable subjectivity of modern life. No longer can we claim that any of our views about things of importance are grounded upon objective and unchanging foundations. The loss of the old, pre-modern reassuring certainties means that we have no choice but to rest our convictions on nothing more than our own personal and contingently-formed outlook. And yet part of us still can’t help yearning for the possibility that somewhere “someone must know” what’s really “true or right or real”. The disappearance of truth, or rather the acknowledgment of its absence, shouldn’t entail a strenuously ironic embrace of the arbitrary and meaningless.

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Never to lose sight of the preciousness of non-human life and what it can tell us about ourselves:

The little lives of earth and form,

Of finding food, and keeping warm,

Are not like ours, and yet

A kinship lingers nonetheless;

We hanker for the homeliness

Of den, and hole, and set.

   “The Little Lives of Earth and Form”

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But why should we think this is good for us? Well, one of the main benefits of reading Larkin is that it helps change our conception of what good means or at least might mean. He achieves this by broadening or, better still, deepening our understanding of the good. After reading Larkin, it becomes peculiarly difficult to retain our preconceived, unsceptical notion that the good is necessarily optimistic or inspirational, let alone pious or cosily moralistic. Rather it becomes far more natural and necessary to see the world as a largely cold and comfortless place where only the most exiguous and ephemeral forms of meaning and pleasure are derivable.

The eminent critic Christopher Ricks was definitely on to something when he compared Larkin’s unsanguine view of the world with that of Dr Johnson:

“Human life”, Johnson said, “is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” Life is not something that can be made better other than palliatively (not that this is nothing), and life cannot be bested. Or worsted. Except by death. “Experience makes literature look insignificant beside life, as indeed life does beside death,” Larkin wrote.

There is much to learn from Ricks’s observation. His remark that life can be treated only palliatively strikes just the right chord with Larkin’s equivocal view of the world. Larkin is realistic and honest enough to declare the relative paltriness of poetry compared with the solidity of life, and then the relative paltriness of life compared with the certainty and finality of death. But we shouldn’t forget the inclusion of the not insignificant caveat “look” in the above quote from Larkin: literature is not rendered worthless by life or death. On the contrary, it’s one of the few palliatives that genuinely helps.

- Is Larkin good for you? by Johnny Lyons

Petz created Pet-Commerce

Quote of the Day

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

- Seneca

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Hentry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.

- Anthony de Mello

Quote of the Day

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

- Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Quote of the Day

I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Quote of the Day

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Wisdom Of The Week

I have been reading Anya Plutynski's book Explaining Cancer; it is one of the richest and well-researched books on the current state of cancer research and to understand, why it is so difficult to find a cure. Her background in philosophy brings more rigor to the book. It is not an easy read but you will learn so much from it.

One of the central aims of this book is to argue that understanding cancer requires both the decomposition of parts and processes involved in cancer at the cell and molecular levels ("drilling down") and "scaling up" to the macro level, or examining cancer's historical origins and remote causes, complex organizations, and dynamics.

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How does all this bear on cancer and on explaining and understanding cancer? Steve Frank once said (personal communication) that for a cancer scientist with interests in metabolic features of cancer, everything of interest in cancer can be explained in metabolism, whereas for a cancer scientist interested in stem cells, everything of interest in cancer can be explained by stem cells. Frank was making a joke, but it is a telling one; each scientist investigating one of the several ways of decomposing the casual factors of relevance to cancer is likely to see such factors as centrally important to many, if not all, aspects of cancer initiation and progression. But of course, no one scientist is going to give us the whole picture. This could be predicted for descriptively and interactionally complex systems. This interactive complexity of organisms has massive implications both for our study of living things and for our study of how they break down.

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Cancer is a vivid instance of a descriptively and interactively complex causal process. Thinking about cancer as an instance of an interactively complex system can help us think more carefully about how to do science, as well as the nature of the biological world and ourselves as part of that world. 

Quote of the Day

I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand at the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, I

Quote of the Day

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Quote of the Day

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought to himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, II, trans. G. D. H. Cole

Quote of the Day

To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.

- John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

Quote of the Day

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure -- if they are, indeed, so well off -- to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau