Working Vacation

Christmas is past, and the new year looms large. 2009 will be the year I become single again at 45, possibly for the rest of my life, though a part of me hopes not. This passing year is the least memorable of my life in so many ways, but I remain grateful for such blessings as I have: a lovely daughter, supportive parents, many friends, my hobbies, my faith.

The past week, ostensibly a holiday, was crammed with less-than-restful activities that precluded blogging, hiking, banjo playing, reading, and just about everything else I consider recreational. It was instead a time of formidable ice storms that hampered travel, of playing with Elaine, of making hectic preparations for the last Christmas I will enjoy as a married man for an indefinite interval. My family and I tried our best to be supportive of my wife; she spent both Christmas Eve and Christmas with us, and seemed content. More than once I reflected during those two days on the surreality of the situation: By all accounts, I should be simmering with conflicted emotions about this woman, who not many months past gave me the "let's just be friends" routine after seventeen years of marriage. Yet the waters of my heart, muddied by such emotions not long ago, have cleared miraculously, something I attribute to the Almighty. A process that friends of mine have assured me will take years -- the anger, the resentment, the guilt, the self-doubt, the crushing grief -- all of this and much more were my lot for the space of a few anguished weeks. But now my wife and I have become, truly, "just friends," and I have trouble already remembering how I once felt about her. That, in my view, is the operation of the Atonement in a mighty way, helping me to make the best of a bad situation.

In any event, the week of Christmas was horribly unproductive. My exercising routine suffered and I fell behind in my free-lance writing assignments. Why is it that our culture is so obsessed with productivity? No one will ever accuse me of being a workaholic, but I often feel the phantom need to be productive goading me like a hot needle.

No time for play now, Elaine. I have work to do. Go amuse yourself, and Daddy will come up and play a little later. Elaine is getting a little too used to that refrain, my conscience warns me. Lately, when she's immersed in make believe, I sometimes overhear disquieting snippets from her role playing, like "Sorry, I can't play right now," and "I'll play with you later, sweetie." Out of the mouths of babes.

I was told once, though I've been unable to verify it firsthand, that Brigham Young opined that four hours a day would suffice to do the "sweat of thy brow" work prescribed at the time of the fall, if we lived in a more equitable world. The rest of our time, presumably, would be spent with our families, in edifying recreation, and doing God's work. Whether this is true or not, I take grave exception with a culture that worships work for its own sake. I read of people working literally all the time, but for what purpose they cannot fathom. To save money? No, their debts and spending habits preclude that. To purchase time for leisure? Not really; many people refuse to take extended vacations, because they see something vaguely decadent in, say, a month-long backpacking trip.

In point of fact, work has become something of a false God, insofar as it distracts from life's other priorities. How many members of my own religion have I known who use the job as an excuse to miss church services, to stay away from the house and family, and to refuse church callings when extended!

The problem is that work is equated with remunerative productivity; nothing else qualifies. This blog, for example, is not deemed work, although some of the entries took considerable time and reflection. Neither is developing a musical talent, or learning a language for the fun of it, or reading an excellent book. And the reason these things are categorized as baneful leisure activities is that they do not earn money.

Not that there's anything wrong with earning money. I've never been wealthy, but I've never been a slacker, either. But money or any other material aim as an end in itself is no justification for work; only a goal is. It is not enough to work; we must strive to accomplish things. With money, that means budgeting and saving, not just spending reflexively. With so-called leisure activities, it means doing, as much as possible, things that will be productive and righteous and enlarge our souls. By such a definition, blogging and recreational writing are indeed forms of work; so is playing with a daughter, or decorating a Christmas tree, or learning a new song on the banjo. And from my experience, even work proper -- the things we do to bring home the bacon as we should -- ought to be something commensurate with our God-given talents and abilities. A good friend of mine is an accountant, a job he finds maddening at times, but withal fulfilling, because accounting is something R., with his careful, disciplined mind and temperament, was born to do. I once told him that I could be an accountant, but I'd be a lousy one. It has never made any sense to me to try to do something for which one is not suited, if only to earn more money.

Anyway, the Christmas week has passed and I'm reverting to productive form. I churned out one article and one piece of editing, both of which were paid assignments, and am working on others, in no small measure to ensure that the checks, above and beyond my contract salary as an academic, keep rolling in. I'm saving money, you see, both for a general nest egg and for a Huber banjo, the most beautiful, sweetest-sounding five-stringed instrument ever built, one that will be a dream to play when I finally come up with the several grand required to buy it. My new banjo is to be the capstone on my midlife crisis, a needless indulgence that will be a lot cheaper than the Harleys, Corvettes, and RVs that other men of my age bracket confer on themselves when life goes sour.

I'm rambling now, which is what happens when you blog past midnight. What I'm trying to say is: Most worthwhile things in life are work of one sort or another -- but aimless toil, which seems to be the lot of so many Americans caught in the "rat race," is pointless idolatry that distracts from things of eternal import.
Buenas noches.

Rarae Aves

The world is in deep freeze right now. Supercooled snow on the sidewalks creaks underfoot, and fingers of cold start prying their way through cracks in windowsills and door jambs the moment the furnace stops blowing. It was slightly below zero last night, remarkable weather for this early in the winter.

Last Saturday was the annual Christmas Bird Count, my own personal Saturnalia that not even the Ward Christmas Party, inevitably scheduled on the same day, could induce me to forego. For the uninitiated, Christmas Bird Counts are carried out across the United States and Canada (and in a few other countries as well), some time during the Christmas season and wherever enterprising birdwatchers have created a "count circle," a 15-mile diameter area where, for 24 frantic hours, amateur and professional (mostly the former) birders comb woods, fields, mountains, watercourses, and any other habitats for birds. Both numbers and species are tallied and, although the CBC isn't a competitive sport, there's often an element of competition between different count circles. There are four different counts in our immediate area, and the one I and my parents always participate in is usually second banana (except for last year, when we got the highest species total of any of the local counts -- a glorious first).

Counting birds is not particularly glamorous in my neck of the woods. Since we're far from any ocean or other large body of water, the likelihood of turning up anything really exotic is practically nil. But over the many years that I've been counting in this part of the world, I've had occasional moments that are the stuff of lifelong memories. There was the time I saw the first ever golden eagle for our count, a late migrant that sailed overhead one crisp sunny December morning more than two decades ago. There was the last time I saw an evening grosbeak on the CBC, that obstreperous yellow and black north woods finch, once a common winter visitor in these parts and now nearly extirpated from the north woods. The locals used to call them "mustard birds" but they are, apparently, going the way of the passenger pigeon, and no one knows why. It is many, many years since I last heard their ringing calls, here or anywhere else.

This year we awoke to a fresh glaze of ice from a storm the previous day. Nothing was falling from the overcast sky, and the trees and bushes looked like finely-spun glass. My brother Mark, up from Mississippi to help with the count, play Scrabble with yours truly, and pass the holidays, was out before dawn. Just as I was sitting down to a hasty breakfast of eggs and cereal, my trak phone jingled. It was Mark, who had just walked into the middle of a flock of around twenty roosting turkeys. Two species of owls were calling, he added, the subtext unmistable: Get off your posterior and hit the trails, big brother!

All things considered, it was a very good day. My first nice bird was a yellow-bellied sapsucker (a type of smallish woodpecker) that I called up only five minutes after setting out. Not long thereafter, I managed to summon a wintering hermit thrush from a dense grape thicket in one of the more inaccessible niches of my parents' mountaintop property. Later in the morning I located a male purple finch, which turned out to be the only one found that day.

In spite of the ice, the woods were busy and full of evidence of activity. I found a set of fresh fisher tracks along one puddle-pocked trail (aptly named "Ten Springs Trail"), and also found prints of raccoon and opossum. The woods pullulated with roving flocks of pine siskins, hundreds and hundreds of them, small brownish relatives of the goldfinch that hail from the northern coniferous forests. This year is shaping up to be a good year for so-called "invasions" of northern finches like redpolls and crossbills, and the abundant pine siskins may be harbingers of things to come when the winter deepens.

Down by the Little Juniata River, I scoured a river bottom woods of river willow and sycamore, and hit the jackpot: a great blue heron, a reclusive belted kingfisher, a ruby-crowned kinglet (also the only one seen this year) amid a large flock of more common golden-crowned kinglets, and a cheeky winter wren that popped from his place of concealment to scold from a broken snag.

Mark and I teamed up for the afternoon, and drove to a nice marsh near another section of the river. Here were sparrows in abundance and a small flock of bluebirds. Here also we saw a single kestrel (a tiny falcon) buzz-bombing a much larger Cooper's hawk that had breached its territory.

Together we tallied 46 species for the day, a new high for us in this locale.

After dark we drove to the "compilation dinner," where the other birders who'd been out all day were gathered to report their finds. This is usually the best part of the count, as birders affect friendly rivalry to find out who saw the "best" birds of the day. This year, the best bird was probably a short-eared owl, along with a golden eagle. My purple finch and ruby-crowned kinglet were our party's two unique contributions. All in all, our count tallied 69 species, a new high.

I have never understood why bird watching is not more popular among the LDS people. It is a completely innocuous yet challenging activity, and, probably more than any other outdoor activity, is conducive to appreciation of nature. I did the Christmas Bird Count in Provo a time or two, with wonderful results; my assigned area included a slice of the Wasatch Mountains as well as the marshes around the old Novell headquarters south of town, and the cross-section of birdlife was spectacular. Many of the other birders, including the compiler, were obviously fellow LDS, but I've noticed over the years that the activity is viewed with vague suspicion in some church circles. It smacks of such heresies as environmentalism, unlike more wholesome forms of outdoor recreation like ATV riding and hunting.

Yet it is possible to harbor a love of the outdoors and of the natural world without succumbing either to the extremes of modern environmentalist politics nor to the impulse to ravage and degrade God's creation. I have hunted and ridden ATVs in the desert, and enjoyed both activities, but I mostly enjoy the outdoors without attempting to modify it. I've nothing against progress, only against dogmatism in any form.

In any case, I've been a bird watcher since the age of five or so. Some of my best memories are from far-flung birding expeditions -- finding the rare bearded lammergeier in the French Pyrenees at the impressionable age of fourteen, going eyeball to eyeball with giant (and very tame) Magellanic woodpeckers in the cold rainforest of the southern Chilean Andes, spotting my first great pied hornbill in the leech-infested jungles of southern India, seeing my first king vulture over Pico Bonito in Honduras, counting puffins, murres, and other seabirds off Seward, Alaska, and revelling in rare birds like reddish egrets and magnificent frigatebirds blown ashore after a storm on Galveston Island. I've forgotten the names of most of the roommates, friends, missionary companions, co-parishioners, classmates, and fellow employees I've known over the years, but I remember most of the good birds and where and when I saw them.

Birdwatching allows one to enjoy almost any corner of the world, no matter how dismal it may seem. India's teeming, poverty- and disease-ridden cities, for example, are birders' paradises: one need only lift one's eyes from the depressing human squalor to almost any banyan tree to enjoy a wondrous banquet of urban birdlife, from the ruby-eyed koel to tiny glittering sunbirds. Birds may been seen almost anywhere on the face of the earth except deep underwater, their powers of flight providing a subliminal fillip to our own spirits which, once upon a time, may have enjoyed such freedom of movement.

Once, a very long time ago (at least, it seems so), I went to Argentina as a junior in high school on a one year Rotary exchange program. A large part of my motivation was to see new birds, although I was careful not to tell that to the panel of interviewers screening the applicants. No sooner had I arrived in my new digs in a small town in the middle of the boundless pampas than I began combing the surrounding countryside for birds. At about the same time, I met the LDS missionaries living in the town (Maipu was its name) and before long, was taking them on guided birding tours of the surrouding countryside, where I introduced those two bemused young men to the Chimango Caracara, the Monk Parakeet, the Southern Screamer, the Fork-tailed Flycatcher, and other exotica. They in exchange introduced me to a new religion and the rest is history.

Fire

I spent a few hours with an uncle of mine this evening, while my wife watched over Elaine. My uncle G. went through a fairly messy divorce almost thirty years ago, and was eager to dispense advice. We had dinner at a swank steakhouse and discussed the ramifications of starting over after such an event. Uncle G. had two young children when the unhappy event transpired; there was infidelity and other such unlovely conduct, but in the end, he and his ex have become, if not close friends, at least comfortable acqaintances. Her husband -- the man she should have married in the first place, according to all concerned -- does contracting work at his house now, and the two families are very chummy. All, or almost all, is forgiven, after so many years.

Uncle G. and I are alike in many ways, and, religious differences aside, embarked upon marriage from similar points of departure. He and I were both naifs as to the ways of the world, so to speak; neither of us had ever, shall we say, been intimate with a woman prior to our respective marriages, and neither had dated much.

I was therefore interested at the contrast in some of the lessons we've drawn from our respective marital debacles. For me, the old adage "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" has new significance; but I have absolutely no intention of changing the moral standards of my upbringing and my religion, regardless of what lies ahead. Uncle G., by contrast, concluded that some measure of sexual experience, in conjunction with a years-long courtship, was the best safeguard against a second failed marriage, and, in the years that followed, conducted himself accordingly.

Which is not to say I blame him; unlike me, he is not under strict religious covenants to keep what we LDS term the "law of chastity," and the cultural climate in our country has, since the 1970s, suffocatingly favored so-called "sexual freedom." My young students, the third generation since the original "sexual revolution," now advocate "hooking up" which, I'm told, is a sexual encounter of the most casual and anonymous character imaginable. By twenty-first century standards, even what used to be called "living in sin" is becoming a quaint anachronism for the degree of commitment it used to entail.

People like myself, on the other hand, who adhere rigidly to the values of several generations past, are today to be found only in a few enclaves of conservative religion (although even the members of my church do not always live up to the lofty moral standards we profess). My parents, never religious in any sectarian sense of the word, also believed in and practiced premarital chastity and postmarital fidelity, just because it "seemed like the right way to behave." Theirs is an extinct breed, I fear.

So it was with some chagrin and a poker face that I listened to my good uncle hold forth on the absolute necessity of getting tested for AIDS and the entire suite of formidably-named venereal diseases now in circulation. There is no such thing as a virgin anymore, he explained, and you'll have to protect yourself and your partners. He admitted he was conflicted on the merits of living together before marriage; he had one such relationship, which lasted a year and a half, and eventually broke up, whereas he did not cohabitate with the woman who became his second (and current) wife. He is now by all accounts a healthy, well-adjusted, happily-married, successful man in his early sixties.

And yet... And yet... I thanked him for the advice, which was so clearly heartfelt, but I already knew in my heart what I would do. For me there can be no turning away from the principles of conduct I have always lived by. I could not help thinking as I drove homewards that, in spite of the alluring rationales for the "new morality" (as they called it when it was still fairly new, at least on Main Street USA) and the new so-called sexual freedoms conferred by birth control, abortion on demand, modern medicine, and an utter revolution in attitudes about marriage and sexuality, we as a nation are not as well off as our ancestors who upheld and practiced a set of values requiring more restraint. We have a saying in our religion (courtesy of the Book of Mormon, from a sermon delivered by a prophet of God to a wayward son who had a problem with the ladies): Wickedness never was happiness. That, it seems to me, is the only possible answer to all the champions of sexual permissiveness. It is difficult to understand, particularly when in the throes of temptation that mortality sometimes sends our way. But it is the truth.

Sexuality has rightly been likened to a fire, and not the sort that refines. Freed from moral restraints, it consumes men and women like a savage flame, leaving ruined lives, families, and societies in its wake. That, at least, is what I've observed. As my experiences richly attest, relationships like marriage are fragile enough without introducing the consuming flame of sexual misconduct of whatever variety. And now a sexual conflagration is literally burning the country to the ground.

This metaphor gained force as I crested the hill and saw my hometown spread out before me. There, a few blocks from the highway and very close to my house, a three-storey building was aflame. Fearing for my daughter's safety, I rushed back to the house, but the massive fire was in fact a block and a half away, an old hotel succumbing to some misbegotten spark. I took Elaine and my soon-to-be ex-wife down the street to watch from a reasonably safe distance as the fire worked its destructive and inevitable course. Seven fire companies were represented, and my daughter watched in awe as thick streams from several water cannons and numerous hoses tried in vain to quench the huge flames erupting from the upper storey windows and the roof. Window panes exploded and a cauldron of smoke billowed heavenward as the firemen struggled to save the ground floor and the adjacent buildings. Elaine was frightened at first, then fascinated, then indifferent, her attention distracted by the numerous dogs wandering around that needed a petting.

We watched the immolation of one of our town's most venerable old buildings for more than a half hour before Elaine's eye-rubbing suggested that bedtime was in order. As we made our way homeward, the hoses and water cannons continued to thunder away, and the night sky was lit up by flames forty or fifty feet high gushing from the roof of the doomed structure. There is nothing good about fire untrammeled, I decided. It is a purely destructive force.

So it is with the fire that lurks in the hearts and minds of men: only when it is kept pent up and under strict control can it ever do any good. If allowed to escape its proper bounds, it will burn the edifice of the soul to the ground. This is my belief, and not even a failed marriage is going to alter it.

Symbols

To resume my discussion from an earlier post on what I deem the most fundamental keys of understanding ever uncovered by secular scholarship -- I mean the taxonomy of phenomena propounded by Charles Sanders Peirce -- we ought to consider in more depth a few of the implications of what Peirce was fonding of calling "the Triad" (nothing to do with Chinese mafiosi, incidentally!). The triad of eternal, all-embracing categories, which Peirce termed Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, is everywhere manifest. Comprehending the categories, as I also mentioned earlier, is no ordinary task, because the method of reasoning required to "get at" the Peircian architectonic is quite different from the Cartesian nominalism in which we have all been steeped. They are only learnt by a proliferation of examples, and in fact there will never be an "Aha!" moment when the student knows with apodictic certainty what the Categories mean in their totality.

Yet we should strive to understand them nonetheless. Peirce tried many names for his Categories, but settled on prosaic-sounding ordinals because, in their most general sense, that is what they are. Firstness is anything in the class corresponding to the first phenomenon that we perceive or experience. In one of his first writings on the subject ("On a New List of Categories," 1867), Peirce called it "Quality," because that term comes closest, th0ugh still without being perfectly exact, to embodying what Firstness is. All qualities are Firsts, be they visual, tactile, olfactory, aural, or psychological. We experience everything -- whether a mental picture or concept, or a tangible experience -- first in terms of its qualities as they present themselves to our senses. If personalities could be classified according to the dominant Category they embody, then artists, musicians, and entertainers are preponderantly Firsts. The present time is also a First.

Secondness, which Peirce variously characterized as reaction and resistance, is the second thing to impinge upon our senses. It embodies things material inasmuch as they derive their substance from reaction and resistance to other things. The very act of discerning a First will involve a Second -- a notion obtruding upon our thoughts, a physical object resisting our senses, and the like. Secondness is the domain of the material, the existential, the tangible, the reactive, and the inert. The businessman, the accountant, the banker, the manual laborer, the manager -- these are all Seconds in the world of work and personality. The past time -- absolute, unyielding -- is a cardinal Secondness.

Thirdness is the third and final category that presents itself, and is also the most important. It is the Category involved in mediation (that is, of uniting Firstness and Secondness through the operation of some law or habit of mind). It is the most abstract and consequently the most neglected of the three. To acknowledge Thirdness is, as Peirce repeatedly showed, to acknowledge God, for Thirdness among other things involves final (as opposed to efficient) causation, and God is the ultimate final cause. Logicians, mathematicians, scientists, and jurisprudents tend to be (though are not always) Thirds. The future is a Third.

Now a word on another pair of terms which Peirce (and many other philosophers) deem to be of great importance: nominalism and realism. Philosophers don't always agree on the scope of these two terms, but for Peirce, the distinction between nominalists and realists was pivotal. The nominalist believes only in the reality of things existential -- that is, he confines his mode of inquiry and his worldview -- to the realm of Firstness and Secondness. He denies the reality of abstractions like law and motive. He denies the validity of Thirdness, in other words, and sees the world as opposites in conflict. His reasoning is always either-or.

The realist incorporates Thirdness into his reasoning. He believes in the reality of abstracts -- laws, principles, purposes, and the like.

In the Middle Ages, when the schoolmen were laying the first foundations of the science of logic (distilled mostly from Aristotle), they coalesced into two great camps, the realists, led by one John Duns Scotus, and the nominalists, led by William of Occam (he of "Occam's Razor," a beguiling fallacy if there ever was one). Duns Scotus, who was nicknamed "Doctor subtilis," was quite possibly -- along with Roger Bacon -- the most subtle mind of his age. His works -- even that small portion that have been translated into English from Church Latin -- are noteworthy for their quodlibetical nuances, which Peirce imbibed when few other scholars were interested in things Medieval (medieval history and studies was long a neglected subject in the American academy until Haskins came along).

It was, however, the Occamites who managed to get the upper hand in Medieval universities and purge the ranks of Scotus' epigones. So vivid was the obloquy directed at the realists that Scotus' surname Duns (probably representing the village in Scotland where he came from) became synonymous with with willful ignorance -- the "dunce cap" is a legacy of that debate.

As to the most important application of the Categories, Peirce was one of the two founders (the linguist Saussure was the other) of the modern discipline of semiotics, the study of signs. A sign is anything that represents something (an object or ground) to some mind, producing a mental representation called an interpretant. In Peirce's most famous taxonomy, he resolved signs into three basic types -- icons, indexes, and symbols (in point of fact, there are other ways of classifying signs in Peirce's system; this particular trio evaluates signs in terms of the manner in which they have signifying force).

Each of these three sign types represents its object in terms of one of the three categories. Icons are Firstnesses; their power of representation is bound up in some quality of the thing represented. Thus icons are usually likenesses of some type, such as pictures or onomatopoeic words (words that "sound" like what they represent). Broadly speaking, icons act as signs by virtue of similarity to the thing represented.

Indexes are signs that derive their force from directing the mind's attention to the thing represented, by some kind of physical or mental deixis ("pointing out"). A pointed finger is a good example of an index; so are demonstrative adjectives and pronouns ("this," "those," etc.). Terms that have meaning by virtue of a part referring to a whole (so-called synechdoche), like "all hands on deck" (where "hand" refers to the entire person) are also indexical. Where icons derive their force from similarity, indexes derive theirs from contiguity.

But these two sign classes are in fact what Peirce termed degenerate. Symbols are signs in the fullest sense because they operate in their entirety the way all signs operate in part, namely, by deriving their power to signify solely from some associative habit of mind. For example, the "plus sign" is a pure symbol, as are the overwhelming majority of words in all languages. With all such symbols we find that the relationship between the sign and its object is purely arbitrary; there is nothing inherently more correct about denominating the canine animal "dog," "chien" (French), "perro" (Spanish), "Hund," (German), "sobaka," (Russian), or "nay" (Tamil), for example; all are essentially arbitrary configurations of sound the utterance of which, for their respective speaking communities, will ineluctably summon up the interpretant of a dog. Mental habit is a form of Thirdness, and so the symbol is Thirdness embodied in the sign.

But these divisions are not absolute, as the realist mode of thought has to acknowledge. All words in fact are symbols, and all partake in one degree or another of iconicity and indexicality as well. Consider, for the fact, that in all languages, words denoting the simplest and most commonly-uttered concepts are typically the shortest and phonologically least complex. Pronouns, common verbs like "be" and "go," determiners, and common nouns for the most familiar objects (like "man," "boy," "dog," etc.) are some examples of this. On the other hand, word-symbols denoting more complex things tend to be longer and more phonologically challenging. This is highly iconic, and is found in all languages.

Likewise, even the most obviously indexical word-signs, onomatopoeia, have an element of arbitrary symbolism; or else why does a rooster say "cock-a-doodle-do" in English but "kikiriki" in Spanish? The sound of a blow in English is "Pow!" or "Wham!"; in Spanish it is "Paf!" And so forth.

But why should any of this be of concern to we of the LDS faith? Because a grand consequence of realism and of the semiotic that flows therefrom is that the universe is meaningful, that all things have signification to some mind (or Mind). Where the nominalist sees mere inert, lifeless reaction, the realist perceives purpose and meaning. He sees no contradiction between the laws of physics and of mind because, as Thirdnesses, they are both really the same thing. The realist also sees that mind and matter are the same, that the latter is merely a deadened, habit-bound version of the former; and all of this, which squares perfectly with latter-day revelation, is to be gleaned from the magisterial musings of Peirce.

Herein lies the repudiation of the materialist, the existentialist, the atheist, the socialist -- nominalists all --that the universe, including human society, is not a mere congeries of reactive substances, susceptible to rigid Cartesian determinism and manipulation. It is in fact a grand Symbol and composite of symbols, dynamic, meaningful, purposeful, evolutionary, and perfused with mind or intelligence. It is the embodiment of the three Categories, behaving as all symbols do, working out its own meaning and destiny, progressing (like a train of thought-symbols) to ever higher states of perfection and consistency.

This is, as best I can represent it at this late hour and with limited materials on hand, a distillate of the Peircian categories and a few of their consequences. Perhaps most pleasing to the realist is that there is no conflict between reason and religion; Peirce's nifty little paper, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" is worthwhile in this connection. So is "The Law of Mind," concerning which I may have more to say in a future entry.

It's snowing and sleeting by turns outside, and I must arise early to convey my beloved to preschool. Good night.

Cold

My little one is gone again for a few days, and, as always when she's with her mother, the house seems -- and is -- very empty without her. Also, it's very cold.

This is deliberate. I have always preferred cold weather, and left to my own devices, prefer to keep the furnace turned down or completely off. Right now the temperature is in the low fifties and falling; it will be in the upper forties in my bedroom when I wake up tomorrow.

What is it about the cold and the winter that has always held an almost magical attraction, at least for me? In our family albums, there are photos of me as a small boy in Maine, playing in several feet of snow when the temperature was below minus 30. Two summers ago, in a road trip to Alaska and the Yukon with my brother, I got to swim in the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay, and loved it. The day was cold (about 40 degrees) and very windy, and the pebbly beach was roiled by chalk-colored waves. I plunged into the 34 degree water and swam around for a few minutes, earning a meaningless "polar bear certificate" into the bargain. In the wilds of Alaska and the Canadian far north, I got used to bathing in haste in frigid, glacier-fed streams and sleeping in a tent in near or below-freezing temperatures.

For me, the winter cold is emblematic of the northlands, which I love more than any other region of the globe; and the north means freedom. Long ago, certain of the wayward Israelites fled to unspecified "north countries" in hopes of keeping the statutes of God, which they had never been too successful at doing in the gentler, softer Levantine region.

It was Montesquieu, in that portion of Spirit of the Laws that practically no one bothers to read nowadays, who speculated that soft climates make for soft men. He pointed out that the freest peoples generally live in cold or mountainous areas; whereas the tropical and temperate climes have mostly nurtured autocracy. To the jaundiced modern eye, that might seem like an absurd generalization, but no one who has spent time in the comparatively epicene cultures of the Asian tropics (as I have -- India and Sri Lanka in particular) could altogether disagree.

The people whose laws and culture became Western Civilization (the Germanic tribes, whose descendants people all of the nations of northwest Europe, and whose blood, thanks to the southward irruption of the Lombards and the later Medieval movements of the Normans into Italy and the Balkans, is even heavily mingled with that of the peoples of the northern Mediterranean) were from unspecified northern regions of Asia. They settled in the vast "Hercynian Forest) of northern Europe and eventually became (if the authority of Turner, the Anglo-Saxons' first great historian, is to be accepted) a sort of refuge for expatriate Romans wishing to escape the bondage of living in that decrepit empire. It was they who truly discovered popular government of the sort we know today -- the Icelandic Althing, the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, and quite probably the distinctives of English common law -- trial by jury and the system of writs -- were innovations of the Germanic people at some stage, though the precise origin of such institutions is a matter of dispute.

Even today, most (though not all) of the world's freest countries are northerly -- the United States and Canada, Finland, Switzerland, Holland, Norway, and Denmark come to mind (yes, I know some of the aforementioned are socialistic, but they aren't a patch on the more despotic varieties of socialism preferred in Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Russia is of course the great exception, but there too, things appear to be changing.

As for the freest place on earth, that would have to be Alaska, almost a country in its own right. Those of us who have been there can understand why the "last frontier" attracts a certain breed of men: vast stretches of extremely hostile, unforgiving wilderness, long, cold, dark winters, and a lot of people who prefer, shall we say, to do their own thing. Alaska holds little attraction for those who abhor risk, who expect society to take care of them, and who do not like physical discomfort -- that is to say, most of the human race.

Which brings me back to the cold. As will become apparent as this blog progresses, I love liberty -- some say too much. Liberty requires first and foremost a denial of self -- what the Founding Fathers meant when they spoke of "virtue." Liberty has no place among the effete, the soft, the lazy, self-serving, or the pleasure-loving. It is an active impulse that disdains needless luxuries. It is best appreciated under some degree of self-denial; hence it is that so very few of the wealthy -- those who benefit the most from the bounties of liberty -- actually prefer freedom to the gentle bondage of luxury and privilege. Most of the men who fought the Revolutionary War -- who fought it, I mean, as opposed to watching from the sidelines and hedging their bets (and their business dealings) -- were poor men from "the sticks," men of little means but who knew how to shoot. The sacrifice of Dr. Warren at Bunker Hill stands out for its singularity: a man of privilege and status who insisted on fighting and dying on the front lines, despite being appointed a general.

Likewise is freedom popular here in the hills of western Pennsylvania, where few households are unarmed and government, especially the one down DC way, is viewed with narrow suspicion.

The other day, in the bitter cold and sleet, I went up the mountain to pay my parents a visit. No fewer than seven cars were parked at the bottom of their road, all belonging to hunters who were out in their tree stands waiting for a deer to happen by. This in weather that would send city folks scurrying chipmunk-like from the toasty warmth of offices and delis to the protective coccoons of their cars.

Our people prefer the snow and the cold, not to mention the solitude of the forests. I prefer them too, which is why I'll never live in a large city. I enjoy being alone, and I enjoy the outdoors for its own sake. But more even that that, I enjoy being a free man.

A Grand Key -- The Peircian Categories

My little beauty is fast asleep, leaving me alone with my thoughts for an hour or two. And for the past several days, while other commitments have prevented me from making any entries to this blog, it occurred to me that this blog needs to begin living up to its name (which, I admit, is a term I invented years ago, and which sprang readily to mind when I was groping for a title in the wee hours last week when I started this enterprise on something of a whim). Occasional effusions of self-pity such as the first two entries have featured may be therapeutic, but they are hardly in keeping with what I think I want to achieve.

And what I want to achieve, in the midst of a life-altering crisis (Is there any other kind?) is a sort of melding of the spiritual and the intellectual, such as I have been mulling on for many years, the bare beginnings of an LDS-informed architectonic, perhaps. For it seems to me that in our church we are either apt to regard intellectualism with narrow suspicion, cordoning it off from respectable Gospel-oriented discourse, or to embrace it in all of its secularist extremes, relegating the revealed Gospel to a lowlier status and sneering at that portion of Latter-Day Saint-dom that fails to live up to self-serving intellectual ideals. In this latter category I have always placed those obstreperous and energetic Church dissidents, whose sole purpose seems to be to disrupt the orderliness of the Lord's house. Little wonder that many faithful Saints, upon seeing the mischief such souls stir up on their way out the doors of Zion, push away intellectualism as a needless distraction.

In truth, the Lord encourages the Saints (and every leader of the Church from Joseph Smith on has done the same, both by exhortation and by personal example) to seek education and truth wherever it can be found. There is something inherently romantic and ennobling about the process of education -- which, by the way, is primarily to be had as a result of personal effort, under the guidance of the Spirit, rather than by inculcation under the rod of some trained and too-often nescient professional educator.

Thus the overarching concern of this blog will be to systematize some of my own thoughts, the fruits of roughly three decades of both formal and self-education, and to share with whatever readers should stumble on this site some suggestions on where the "best books" are to be found and what is in them.

Where to begin? Though not a philosopher as such, I take as my point of departure an idea that, while little known, will yet (in my humble opinion) come to be recognized as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single concept ever brought to light by human intellect.

Most people, if asked, Who is the greatest genius that ever lived? would likely give the name of some eminent physicist or mathematician --Einstein or Gauss, Planck or Newton, perhaps. In our technocratic age, it is the great abstractionists of the physical sciences -- the theoretical physicists and the mathematicians who provide their theoretical tools -- who seem to get the highest acclaim. The most important ideas of our age? Undoubtedly (say the worshipful masses) Einstein's theory of relativity (E=MC2 being the easier version, special relativity, but the much less memorable equations of general relativity are far more significant), or perhaps the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or the laws of thermodynamics.

But in the opinion of this humble pilgrim, the achievements of all of these men are dwarfed by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the greatest genius most people have never heard of. Peirce lived mostly in the 19th century, and never held a university professorship, his thinking being so far ahead of his time that even the Harvard savants could not abide him, except in small doses. He grew up in Cambridge, however; his father, Benjamin Peirce, was Harvard's (and America's) first bona fide theoretical physicist, and many of the extraordinarily talented people who lived in the Cambridge area in the first half of the 19th Century -- Emerson, for example -- were acquaintances of the Peirces. Charles read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at the age of twelve, and knew that he wanted to be a philosopher first and foremost. In point of fact, he was many things throughout the course of his scholarly life: a mathematician, psychologist, linguist, historian, economist, astronomer, and geodesics expert among them. But it was in the field of philosophy that Peirce made his greatest contributions, although little of his work was published in his lifetime. In particular, Peirce was interested in the efforts of Kant to produce a taxonomy of phenomena, a fundamental classificatory system of everything that is or exists.

We are all familiar with the process of classification -- all of the descriptive sciences use it, and languages do as well, subconsciously creating classificatory categories for nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech (Latin verb conjugations and noun declensions being but one example). The question that Kant was willing to ask was: Is there a most fundamental classification for all things, both tangible and intangible, in which a self-consistent worldview can be grounded? Kant believed that there was, and came up with a fairly elaborate taxonomy (I forget how many basic categories he posited, but it was a significant number).

Peirce, beginning at a fairly tender age, set about to correct Kant's line of reasoning, and soon hit upon what he came to regard as his greatest insight, that there are in fact but three grand Categories into which all phenomena can be classified. He named them (prosaically but logically enough) Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, and devoted most of the rest of his copious scholarly output to tracing conclusions from this idea in various disciplines, like linguistics and graph theory, with which he was familiar.

The most accessible exposition of Peirce's Categories is to be found in a paper intended as an outline for a book he never wrote, A Guess at the Riddle. Firstness, Peirce explains, is that which first impresses itself on our senses --a mere feeling or quality of feeling. It encompasses things like odors, qualities of appearance, states of emotion, and the like. Firstnesses are such as they are without regard to anything else. Secondness is that which is such as it is with reference to something else. It encompasses the tangible, the reactive, the factual. Secondness embodies opposition, resistance, and effort, among many other things (or, perhaps better put, these things are all examples of Secondness). Thirdness is the domain of those things which stand in relationship between First and Second, that are such as they are by virtue of relating a thing or percept with something else. Thirdness is the domain of law, of motive, of meaning, of purpose, and of final causation. It comprehends both the laws of physics and of the human mind.

Now at first blush, these Categories may seem arbitrary or even pointless. But they are the grand key to understanding the makeup of the universe and the organization of all truth. They cannot be grasped in the same way that one might, for example, master a mathematical algorithm or memorize a verb paradigm. They must be learnt line upon line and not by rote, and be allowed to impress themselves gradually upon the soul until they come to perfuse our entire way of thinking. When I was first introduced to the Categories by John Robertson, my mentor at BYU, I was less than impressed. But over time (years, actually) and many readings and re-readings of Peirce's seminal papers, the Categories oozed through my intellectual pores,so to speak, until I appreciated with almost revelatory force their importance. To begin to comprehend the Categories is to see everything in an entirely new light, and to being to take one's first tentative steps away from the stifling nominalism (about which more in a future post) that is the unquestioned mode of thought of our age.

The Categories are everywhere manifest; they are the reason that the mind is so fond of threes, of which the Godhead is the preeminent example: Father (Thirdness -- final cause), Son (Secondness -- tangible, born in the flesh), and Holy Ghost (Firstness -- quality of feeling par excellence). Peirce saw reality as triadic rather than dyadic, and noted that Thirdness is typically cut out of modern systems of thought. This is tantamount to saying that modern thinkers are fond of excising law, motive, final causation, and the like from theory, and dealing solely in the domain of the First and the Second.

The hour is late and I need to retire, so I'll resume this thread at the next opportunity.

Alone

A friend from Utah telephoned this evening, and I mentioned my new marital status. He is himself a happily-married fiftysomething with a raft of fine offspring (many of them married), but he was sympathetic to my plight. His brother, he told me, was divorced many years ago and has not re-married -- this in a church and culture where long-term single men are regarded (not altogether whimsically) as "menaces to society" (that's from a statement usually ascribed to Brigham Young, though I've never seen the original source). Scott said his brother wants nothing to do with LDS women and has no expectation of ever marrying again. Regarding another mutual acquaintance, also of Utah, who's been through a divorce, Scott informed me that this good brother (who has since remarried) told him that the day he walked out of the courthouse a divorced man, he felt like doing cartwheels. "Scott," he said, "why do you think men get divorced?" When Scott had no answer, he answered his own question: "Because it's worth it."

I certainly bear my own soon-to-be-ex no ill will; in point of fact, I enjoy our association much more now that we're just friends. I frequently point out to friends and family inclined to pass judgment that we never fought during our marriage, and do not intend to start now. So I doubt very much I will share that man's unbridled jubilation when my divorce is final.

But the other observation is much, much more trenchant. Men, at least men with any shred of decency in their makeup, do not take such a drastic and painful step as divorce unless it is really, really worth it. My sex in general lacks the nuanced subtleties of a woman's understanding of the human heart, but we all know, and can anticipate, in our admittedly one-dimensional way, what the choice of divorce means: months, perhaps years of anguish, guilt, perhaps worse. It means sobbing children who cannot or (if older) will not understand. It means new long-term financial obligations and possibly restrictions on where one can live and work. It means painful, sometimes adversarial discussions with in-laws who used to be family. It can mean years of legal conflict, hard feelings, social ostracism, and all the rest. Even those of my sex (and there are many) who find their way to divorce as a result of indecorous behavior like adultery, pornography, or abuse, whose moral compasses are significantly impaired, understand the consequences of divorce.

But in the end, divorce must be (or be perceived to be) worth the cost. For me, it is. Much of my pain was front-loaded, so to speak, expended over the years when my wife and I were married in little more than name. How many nights I lay awake until the gray hour before dawn, hoping against hope, praying that somehow, the Lord would soften my wife's heart, that she would want to re-commit herself to our marriage and to our eternal covenants! How many lonely hours I spent, when she was away on extended visits to family, wishing that she would call or email of her own account, rather than wait to hear from me before sending some terse reply! How many years did I watch with something akin to envy as other men's wives expressed their love and admiration for their husbands publicly? How many times did I sit alone in the Celestial Room of the DC temple, watching other couples luxuriate in the things of eternity together?

In short, by the time I was finally ready to give up on our marriage of 17 years, most of the bonds that constitute such a relationship had already been severed. The physical act of separation (her moving out, which my brother and I accomplished in one forgettable afternoon with the help of our father's dump truck) and its aftermath was still brutally, exquisitely painful, but short. After only a week or two, I could smile at her again; by Thanksgiving, I was happy to have her share in the festivities at my parents' home, since she had nowhere else to go. This evening, when she came over to pick up Elaine, she admired the Christmas tree that my daughter and I put up yesterday and then helped give our daughter a quick but overdue bath before leaving.

And mirabile dictu, tonight was the first time Elaine left my house without tears. As daughters often do, she has shown a strong preference for being with her father, and has made that preference painfully clear every time she has to go with her Mommy. Now, however, she's coming to accept the new order of things, and knows that she'll see Daddy again in a few days.

While Elaine's grief and incomprehension were at their most acute, however, it was awful. The first time her Mommy bore her away, crying and fighting to stay with Daddy, it was all I could do to keep a "game face" until I got the door closed; then, I broke down and wept like a child, great wracking sobs that I hadn't seen the likes of since long before adolescence. One cries a lot during a divorce, by the way; if one is like yours truly, never in public, but often in private, especially during moments of pure reflection, like while commuting to work.

But all of that is past now. I knew it was coming, but could not, of course, fully appreciate how exquisite it would be, that pain of breaking a bond that was meant to endure forever. It was an experience I never intend to repeat.

But it was worth it. As I told a friend recently, I've been alone now for many years, as I've only recently come to appreciate. But it's easier by far to be lonely alone.

Prolegomenon: While My Pretty One Sleeps

My beauty, my gorgeous little daughter, is slumbering more or less peacefully down the hall. She is finally sleeping better weeks after her mother left, although the custody changes are still jarring for her. Her mother -- my soon-to-be ex-wife of 17 years -- lives now only a few blocks away, but for my daughter -- Elaine, I shall call her, though it isn't her real name -- it might as well be a continent. Elaine is not yet four, at that age when cognition is newly-awakened, but reason lies still a few seasons in the future. She knows that Mommy no longer lives with Daddy, but does not understand why. At intervals of a few hours, this terrible knowledge obtrudes on whatever peaceful visions she might be enjoying, and sends her stumbling down the hall half awake in search of Daddy (if he's nowhere nearby), or causes her to sit bolt upright in bed, requiring a father's embrace to settle down again. Sometime during this writing, she will probably come looking for me, a tiny girl whose world has been torn apart by things she cannot comprehend.

Until Elaine comes looking, let me introduce myself. I am forty-four, at an age nowadays still considered youthful but (as someone once pointed out) finally old enough to get some respect. I hold a PhD in linguistics from an Ivy League university, have a beautiful three year old daughter, and have more hobbies than a respectable middle-aged male is supposed to have: I enjoy hiking, birdwatching, beetle collecting, weightlifting, and the five-string banjo. I spend entirely too much time reading (a pursuit with no remunerative rewards, and hence held in low esteem in this pragmatic modern age). I also do a fair amount of free-lance writing, which does earn me a tidy extra income beyond my salary as a Spanish teacher at a small northeastern college. I am a faithful, temple-worthy member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mitt Romney Church). And, oh yes, in less than three months, I'll be divorced.

To those who read this without an insider's perspcctive on LDS culture: a divorced LDS male is a pariah of sorts. When divorces occur between people married in an LDS temple (supposedly for all eternity) it is almost universally assumed to be the man's fault -- he must have found someone else, or perhaps he has a problem with pornography, or maybe there's abuse. Women, we are told, in an interesting cultural volte-face from generations past, are wiser, more spiritual, and altogether superior to their husbands. Of this we LDS men we are frequently reminded, by implication and by overt statement, in our priesthood meetings and church conferences. In married couples, goes one popular refrain, husbands are usually the theologians, but wives are the Christians. Scarcely a General Priesthood meeting goes by without discussion of the evils of pornography, infidelity, abuse, and other kindred evils. Men, it is assumed, are the universal perpetrators, while women are the long-suffering saints.

The truth, at least based on my experience, is that both men and women are capable of good and evil, of sound and of shoddy judgment. I am still having trouble figuring out why our own marriage failed, but I know this: It was not because of pornography, infidelity, abuse, apostasy, or any of the other usual suspects. What I do know is that, soon after my wife and I got married, she withdrew into a shell from which she has never emerged. She has never, in all our years of marriage, expressed her love or appreciation for me publicly (in a testimony meeting, for instance). She has always disliked physical contact intensely, and, starting about ten years ago, began conveying the impression that she could not stand to be around me. A few years after that, she stopped going to the temple with me more than once every couple of years. More or less concommitantly, she developed a strong interest in alternative medicine (EFT in particular), and stopped going to the doctor for treatment of her thyroid problem. Three and a half years ago, shortly after the birth of our daughter, she discontinued intimacy altogether. Her pregnancy, during which she refused medical attention except for the ministrations of a midwife, was nightmarish for both of us. She gained a lot of weight, understandably enough, but continued to gain more and more after Elaine was born. Her health declined, but she refused to do anything about it. I tried everything I could think of -- counseling with church authorities and with a Church professional counselor chief among them -- but nothing made any difference. Being encumbered with male ego, I had a difficult time accepting that my wife simply did not want to be married any longer -- after all, I've always tried to keep in shape by exercising with weights, have always been responsible with money, have been as faithful as a black Lab, and we've never had a fight.

But in the end, after many solo trips to the D.C. temple and long months of careful prayer and reflection, I asked her last summer what she wanted. Her answer: a divorce. I am not a good listener, she said, and many other things besides, all of which I'd heard before and done my best (admittedly, a far less than perfect attempt) to rectify. Do you love me? I asked. No, was her reply, except as a fellow child of God.

That was it, then. I was raised to believe that if you are faithful, kind, reponsible, a peacemaker, and a communicator, you will have a successful marriage. Certainly my parents have built a lasting relationship with that formula. My later conversion to the LDS Church added another dimension: Keep your covenants, especially your temple covenants, and the Lord will consecrate your union forever. I've seen time and again how other temple marriages have foundered on that shoal: the husband develops "worthiness" problems, or an affair or some other such crisis rears its ugly head, and temple vows are set on their ear. Yet none of the foregoing apply here. In the end, I can only wonder: Is it I, Lord?

Such things are a novelty in my (non-LDS) family; there has never been a divorce in any of my direct lineages, as far as anyone knows. Divorce is something visited upon uncles and aunts and a few friends, but it hasn't been a family matter, until now. In my wife's family -- all LDS or former LDS -- things are different. Two of her five siblings have already had a total of three divorces between them, and a third sibling once filed for divorce but ultimately forged a shaky reconciliation that lasts to this day. Still another is in a nightmarish relationship with a spouse who has lots of "issues," as we say.

But however it has happened, I find myself on the cusp of middle age looking to start life all over again, where none but those who know me very well are likely to believe that it wasn't somehow entirely my fault.

But enough of that. Elaine slumbers still, so I'll hazard a few more biographical details. I love languages. I've studied as many as the late Brother Nibley, but my area of expertise lies to the east of his. My languages include Sanskrit, Pali, Avestan, Pali, and Sinhala, but I don't qualify as an LDS scholar because I know little Hebrew and will never be employed at "the Y" or contribute to Sunstone Magazine. Also, FARMS will never be interested in my scholarship, which has involved decipherment and translation of obscure South Asian texts that presumably lie outside the realm of LDS scholarly interest. No spite there: I just decided a long time ago that the Church has more than enough Middle Eastern scholars, Mayanists (my own advisor at BYU, where I did my Master's was one), and Classicists. No, I wanted to be a bona fide Orientalist, to lisp the chaste tongues of South Asia and unravel the pagan mysteries of their unspeakably ancient societies. But my publishing record is scanty, and academic demand for Orientalists is scantier, so I earn my bread teaching Spanish and writing articles on history and current events for a reasonably well-known "conservative" biweekly magazine.

For years, my fascination with, well, just about everything, seemed a tremendous liability, but no longer. It's now my lifeline. I exercise compulsively with weights, and also swim laps at least once a week and slog on the treadmill as well, in pursuit of those oh-so-elusive flat abs. I've never completely overcome my adolescent obsession with fitness and muscle definition, I'm afraid.

And as balm for my sorrows, there is always the woods, the rich Eastern woodlands of my birth and youth, where I've returned to live out my days (or so I hope). I know every birdsong, every mammal, every tree, and a goodly portion of the insects and other lesser creatures our woods harbor. I never miss a chance to be out in the woods, observing, enjoying. Just the other day, on the eve of deer season, I went eyeball to eyeball with a strangely confiding six point buck. A few days before that, I showed Elaine a porcupine in a black locust tree. And this afternoon a swamp sparrow mingled with the usual host of juncos and house finches at my parents' bird feeder. Life is never dull nor God far distant for those with a love of nature and the outdoors in their hearts.

I also have my books, hundreds of them. History has been my addiction of late, primarily Classical, Byzantine, and Medieval. I've read almost every book in the English language on Byzantine History (not a difficult feat, actually, for such a neglected field), and nearly everything of the classical historians, from Herodotus and Thucydides through Ammianus and Procopius. At the moment, I'm reading a history of American banking (I went on an economics binge a decade ago, and like to revisit that area from time to time). I even have a small collection of rare books, including a first American addition of Millot's Elements of History (the Founding Fathers' favorite "universal history") in five volumes, from the printing press of Isaiah Thomas himself. Of all the commandments of the Almighty to the Latter-Day Saints, I love most the injunction to study, learn, and "seek out of the best books." It's even in my Patriarchal Blessing, if memory serves.

Finally, there is my faith. In spite of what has happened, I remain true to my religion, to what we Latter-Day Saints call my "testimony," that ineffable conviction of the truth of the Gospel as propounded by Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. I gained that testimony years ago as a high school exchange student in South America, and have never deviated from it, although there have been times I have wished for a return to what sometimes seems to be the bliss of ignorance. But like that great Hollywood metaphor of the red pill, there can be no turning back from a testimony; once that threshold is crossed, one leaves the embrace of ignorance forever. I cannot un-know what I have learned, nor deny truth that is deeply rooted in my soul.

What is the purpose of this blog? I don't really know. I have been told by my brother, a minor celebrity in one corner of the blogsphere, that blogging is therapeutic, whereas I've always regarded it as little more than self-promotion. Be that as it may, I suppose this will be a flash in the pan, an anonymous reaching outward at a time of crisis, a sharing both of ideas and the matrix of feelings that begot them, a testimony of faith, a hankering after understanding. I suppose that my creativity and enthusiasm for such a project will expire in due course, and have no illusions that any but Almighty God, who hears every prayer of the heart, will ever pay these musings the slightest attention. But nevertheless, to the extent that I can anticipate the direction this enterprise may take, I offer these words to the broken-hearted, to all inquirers after truth, to lovers of liberty, to those who are children at heart, and to anyone who can appreciate the ineffable wonder of the night sky or the minute architecture of an insect's wings. In me you have a kindred spirit.

My little one still sleeps. All is well.