September 2026
entangled
1 September 2026, around 4.52.
The changing of the seasons is making itself felt. There is some relief, because the air is getting colder and smells of future rain rather than wildfire smoke – and the rain is desperately needed. A sense of uncertainty still keeps watch over passing moments, though – waiting, patient. What is awaited is itself uncertain. So one is tempted to linger, wrapped up in thought, in the pause before the day begins, until it’s time to sweep through to the next thing.
hotchpotch
14 September 2026, around 13.36.
A few notes on current reading:
- Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unsconscious. Assertions sparsely supported by evidence; or, wishful thinking. Allusive, sometimes unconvincing, but an enjoyable romp through the murk of someone’s unconscious, even if it isn’t necessary ‘collective’.
- Richard Butterwick’s Lithuania: A History. Chatty history, with more minute parenthetical digressions than even I care for, and also more references to video games than I expected (for a chapter on medieval/early modern history).
- Christmas Humphreys’s Buddhism. In addition to a name that is always surprising to see, Humphreys has a peculiar tone to his writings that combines sparks of keen insight with a wide-ranging, self-contented blindness.
- Dorothy Sayers’s translation of the Song of Roland. I don’t think the Song of Roland is very good; in this it is much like Beowulf. Roland also appears to have deserved the whupping he got.
- Eileen Chang’s Time Tunnel. Acute images interlarded with tedium. I cannot tell, writing that, if I mean the stories as experienced by the characters or the reader.
- D.C. Lau’s translation of The Analects. I think I still prefer the Daodeching, as what the Master says usually seems to be a bit tiresome and irritable, as though interrupting a secretary, currently on the phone with some remote VIP, with a banal question about the napkins for a small party to bid farewell to the latest batch of unpaid interns. But you know the secretary would be mad if you got the wrong ones, even though it isn’t at all important.
- A short biography of Michelangelo, with some of his poems and letters. The politics of education has not, apparently, changed all that much in spirit.
- Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King. The closest comparison I can think of is Wendy Walker’s The Secret Service, and I mean that as a high compliment, even though the books are not at all alike in their details.
Adversaria (42)
30 September 2026, around 4.29.
‘…the contemporary academy is the scene of an epistemological battle, albeit a battle of snails (one has to look very closely and patiently in order to see it)’ —Donald A. Schön (‘The Theory of Inquiry: Dewey’s Legacy to Education’, p. 120)
‘History since the French Revolution has changed its role. Once it was the guardian of the past: now it has become the midwife of the future’ —John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 21%)
‘The higher consciousness advances in the process of evolution, the more it moves out of succession. To be fully conscious is to escape from time, from expansion, from separateness, from contradictories. Growth, movement, and change dissolve in permanence, stillness, and completeness’ —F.C. Happold (Mysticism, p. 120)
‘Machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings are with human beings. This situation is ironical. More and more concern about communication, less and less to communicate’ —R.D. Laing (The Politics of Experience, p. 34)
‘Contemporary events are not what we fear—it’s the unending reverberations we’ll have to endure that scare us. We dread any incident that confirms our worst fears about ourselves’ —Richard C. Schwartz (Introduction to Internal Family Systems, 26%)
‘…in practice, the reservation was a place of crisis, not civilization, education, or improvement. […] Indian culture was to an extent preserved, but it was placed in a museum, where it could no longer meet the problems of the moment or evolve to meet those of the future’ —Mahmood Mamdani (Neither Settler nor Native, p. 65)
‘Clothe thyself with the garment of nothingness and drink the cup of annihilation. Cover thy breast with a nothingness, and draw over thy head the robe of non-existence. Set they foot in the stirrup of complete renunciation and, looking straight before thee, ride the steed of non-being to the place where nothing is’ —Farid al-din ‘Attar (Conference of the Birds, trans. Margaret Smith, quoted in F.C. Happold (Mysticism, p. 258)
‘To the underprivileged, home is represented, not by a house, but by a practice or set of practices. Everyone has his own. These practices, chosen and not imposed, offer in their repetition, transient as they may be in themselves, more permanence, more shelter than any lodging. Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived. At its most brutal, home is no more than one’s name—whilst to most people one is nameless’ —John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 65%)
‘Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. Love is the path through permissiveness to discipline: and through discipline, only too often, to the betrayal of self’ —R.D. Laing (The Politics of Experience, p. 60)
‘Autocracy is a delicate balancing act, requiring the support of other power centers, which themselves seek power and may have incommensurable agendas’ —Mahmood Mamdani (Neither Settler nor Native, p. 221f.)
‘…for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls ona. ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one placed and always surrounded by the same circumstances. A species of thick clothing slowly grows around the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk’ —Richard Jeffries (The Story of My Heart, quoted in F.C. Happold (Mysticism, p. 385)
‘It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a lifelong aversion’ —John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 79%)