My friend John King sends me this, which I hereby pass along to you. It isn’t flashy but it is memorable.
Consider supporting Wikipedia
Every so often I drop off a few bucks to support Wikipedia. I got this email thank-you note which they suggested I may want to share with some friends, so here it is.
Dear Frank,
Thank you for donating to the Wikimedia Foundation. You are wonderful!
It’s easy to ignore our fundraising banners, and I’m really glad you didn’t. This is how Wikipedia pays its bills — people like you giving us money, so we can keep the site freely available for everyone around the world.
People tell me they donate to Wikipedia because they find it useful, and they trust it because even though it’s not perfect, they know it’s written for them. Wikipedia isn’t meant to advance somebody’s PR agenda or push a particular ideology, or to persuade you to believe something that’s not true. We aim to tell the truth, and we can do that because of you. The fact that you fund the site keeps us independent and able to deliver what you need and want from Wikipedia. Exactly as it should be.
You should know: your donation isn’t just covering your own costs. The average donor is paying for his or her own use of Wikipedia, plus the costs of hundreds of other people. Your donation keeps Wikipedia available for an ambitious kid in Bangalore who’s teaching herself computer programming. A middle-aged homemaker in Vienna who’s just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. A novelist researching 1850s Britain. A 10-year-old in San Salvador who’s just discovered Carl Sagan.
On behalf of those people, and the half-billion other readers of Wikipedia and its sister sites and projects, I thank you for joining us in our effort to make the sum of all human knowledge available for everyone. Your donation makes the world a better place. Thank you.
Most people don’t know Wikipedia’s run by a non-profit. Please consider sharing this e-mail with a few of your friends to encourage them to donate too. And if you’re interested, you should try adding some new information to Wikipedia. If you see a typo or other small mistake, please fix it, and if you find something missing, please add it. There are resources here that can help you get started. Don’t worry about making a mistake: that’s normal when people first start editing and if it happens, other Wikipedians will be happy to fix it for you.
I appreciate your trust in us, and I promise you we’ll use your money well.
Thanks,
Sue
Sue Gardner
Executive Director,
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable corporation with 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in the United States. Our address is 149 New Montgomery, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA, 94105. U.S. tax-exempt number: 20-0049703
You can follow us on Twitter, identi.ca or Google+, like us on Facebook and read our blog. Here is the Wikimedia Foundation annual report for 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation annual plan for 2012-13 and the Wikimedia Foundation’s five-year strategic plan. You can also now buy Wikipedia merchandise at shop.wikimedia.org.
Star Wars and Hemingway
Mental life takes funny bounces. Because of something else I’d seen on YouTube, I watched the three-part series on Jung. Because that series referenced something in Star Wars as an example of modern myth, I wound up re-watching the Star Wars trilogy video tape that I bought a few years ago. And because I had recently re-read For Whom the Bell Tolls, I found myself making invidious comparisons.
Now, I do realize that Star Wars, no matter how successful and artistically innovative it was, was just a series of commercial films, designed to entertain. I really do realize that. Nonetheless, as I was watching it, I repeatedly found that its assumptions look very different in 2013 than perhaps they did in the 1970s and 1980s. This morning, writing in my journal, comparisons with Hemingway’s work came to mind, and I thought, “all right, you’re annoyed. So turn it into a blog entry or let it go. Or both.”
Both. At least, I hope both. The blog entry is a lot more certain than letting it go.
Of course Star Wars has likeable characters. But look at the attitude it embodies.
- Everybody is in love with machines. Access to high technology is assumed, and of course celebrated. These rebels hiding from the empire have somehow constructed and maintained a fleet! (And, since the empire controls all the real estate, the rebels apparently built their fleet and paid their men without taxing anybody!)
- Warfare is easy and fun, if scary. Your own losses are irreplaceable and are worthy of great grief (of course no major character among your friends will be killed or even irreparably harmed) but killing others has no consequences and doesn’t matter, provided that they are of the enemy.
- Darth Vader, who is contemptuous to his subordinates and abjectly subservient to the emperor (though this is softened by the emperor’s manner toward him), is supposed to be the bad guy, but he is built so as to inspire a sneaking admiration for his power and ruthless efficiency.
I could go on.
By contrast, look at Hemingway’s book (I haven’t seen the movie; God knows what they did with it). The old man, Anselmo, sees that the enemy is a man like himself. He recognizes that it is his duty to kill him, but he knows that it is wrong and thinks that after the war is over, they should do a great penance to atone for so much killing. For that matter, Robert Jordan sees it more or less the same way. He knows that good and evil are shared among all, that it is never all good on one side, all evil on the other. They – and indeed all the guerrilla band – know that warfare is brutal as well as dangerous, unfair as well as chancy. They know that the good guys don’t always win, and that sometimes they don’t even remain good guys.
What a world of difference there is, in level of being, between Hemingway’s book that deals with the real world, and the Star Wars movies that make a cartoon of warfare in order to please and excite teenage boys.
Worrying about the prospect of death
Angel Capellon, in Hemingway and the Hispanic World, has a chapter on “Hemingway’s Tragic Sense of Life,” in which he argues that Hemingway’s attitude toward death — and therefore toward life — was very Spanish, and of course I agree. However, on page 166, he quotes Miguel de Unamuno (in The Tragic Sense of Life) to this effect:
“Why do I want to know whence I came and whither I am going, whence and whither everything around me, and the meaning of it all. Because I do not want to die utterly, and I want to know if I am to die definitely or not. And if I am to die altogether, then nothing makes any sense. There are three solutions: a) I know I am to die utterly, and then my despair is incurable, or b) I know I will not die utterly and then I resign myself, or c) I cannot know either one thing or the other, and then I am resigned to despair or despairing in resignation, a despairing resignation or a resigned despair, and therein the struggle.”
This makes no sense to me at all. I propose d) I know I will die in the sense of being able to interact with the world directly and will not die in that my awareness will remain, although probably different, transformed by my new conditions, and thus there is no need for denial nor resignation.
I see that death does preoccupy people. but this attitude makes no sense to me. It is as if, having been given a gift (one’s life), one is then paralyzed (or perhaps motivated) by the fear or certainty of eventually losing it! What does this do to the joy of the gift? It poisons it. Why not accept that you’ve been given a gift, and live it as it comes, as best you can, and not worry so much about the fact that it’s going to come to an end at some point?
That’s how Hemingway’s heroes act, it seems to me.
Jake Barnes seems to life this way, paying as he goes, hoping to find out the meaning of life but not putting off the living until after he figures it out. Thomas Hudson has lived this way, but losses of various kinds have reduced his world to his work and his drinking and his duty. Richard Cantwell, Harry Morgan, Robert Jordan all have lived not oblivious to death but in counterpoint to death, realizing the value of life from each moment to the next.
I don’t see resignation or despair, just a sort of realism. You live your life and enjoy it as best you can, and wait to see what happens. Where is the need for despair just because it’s going to end at some time? Despair might come if it looked like it wouldn’t end.
And then there’s this confusion about immortality – some of these scholars seem to think that one’s being remembered — celebrity or notoriety or even fame — is immortality. But it isn’t. Immortality has nothing to do with being remembered or forgotten by others. It has to do with not ceasing to exist. And if one disbelieves in the existence of the non-physical, how can he believe in the existence of what they call the “after-life”? Yet we know we are immortal. The confusion comes in society’s assumption that the material world is what is real and the non-material world is speculative or non-existent.
I’ll never understand it. No doubt, this is a deficiency in me, that I can’t see the problem as real. But I don’t understand it.
A pretty smart horse
YouTube and Facebook make it easier to share examples of things from all over the world, and on unintended result is that it becomes ever easier to see wrong assumptions we have held.
We are getting so much evidence that animals reason, use tools, communicate, etc., that it is disproving the old assumption that there is a clear distinction between humans and other animal-based life. As that realization spreads, the way we coexist on earth with these other beings is going to have to be transformed. How will we find it possible to keep primates in zoos, when we realize that when they learn sign language, they show us that they communicate thought, not just meaningless phrases? And anyone who has owned a cat or a dog knows that they are vivid, intelligent personalities. Things are going to change. WE are going to change.
Meanwhile, this video will make you smile. She’s stolid and even plodding, but brother, when she wants to get somewhere, she gets there!
http://www.wimp.com/smarthorse/
And I should believe you?
I keep thinking about all the certainties I read about; all the people who know
- everything that is being plotted;
- the secret levers behind every news story;
- the “real” history that has been hidden from us;
- the true secret intentions of this or that person in the news.
I lose patience. My thoughts go roughly like this.
Michael Ventura: “I want it to be true”
MICHAEL VENTURA
LETTERS AT 3AM –
NOTES ON A LONG, LONG JOURNEY
Austin Chronicle – January 11, 2013
The Dragon is a novel almost five years in the works. It may take another five. I keep a Dragon journal. Here are entries from this year.
May 4. I cling, as a novelist, to what Orson Welles said: “Who needs plot? But who can live without a story?” And I cling to what John [Cassavetes] told me: “In replacing narrative, you need an idea.”