So I declare and testify in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds
Ephesians 4:17
A good message for Christians like me. God isn’t a principle or a puzzle to be solved. There’s no idea or system of ideas that will transform the ineffable into a tidy, graspable answer to all problems.
Unrelated to current events: the origins of the various aphorisms about the relative speed of truth and lies. I really like the earliest formulation they found, by Jonathan Swift: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it….”
I had a garmin fitness watch that I wore for about two years. It got flakier and flakier over the last few months and finally went into some kind of unrecoverable update loop recently. I've tried everything I could find to fix it, but it's just dead.
I liked it a lot but I'm really tired of disposable tech and it's hard to imagine buying another.
"Comfort is to the bourgeois world what heroism was to the Renaissance and sanctity to medieval Christianity -- the ultimate value, the ultimate motive for all action."
-- Emmanuel Mounier, excerpted in Robert Ellsberg, All Saints
"my father often stopped to breathe in, for he had told me time and time again that trouble will not stop in a man whose lungs are filled with fresh air. He always said that God sent the water to wash our bodies and air to wash our minds."
-- Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
I'm giving bluesky a shot because discoverability seems to be better over there, especially for special interest topics like Gene Wolfe.
Purely an experiment, and will still be around here for now.
@arkmashton.bsky.social
"A man’s life is indeed short, ending in death. If it were long, his days would be of small value. If there were no death, of none. Let him fill each day with honor and joy. Let him not condemn himself or another, for he does not know the laws of his existence or theirs. If he sleeps in death, let him sleep. If while sleeping he should meet a god, he must let the god decide how well or ill he lived.
"The god he meets must rule upon a man’s life, never the man himself."
Cutting back on coffee to help with reflux.
Day 1: wow this is really a lot better, and I don’t miss the extra caffeine at all!
Day 2: well, since it’s going so well no reason I shouldn’t have three extra cups