Not that he couldn’t have, is there another reason he shouldn’t have besides the reason given (which isn’t really a reason)? I think exaptation is cool. 
A part of an epitaph by Kipling, written after his son died as a teen in war. Some think it may reflect his own grief and remorse.
War seems a horrible way to settle a disagreement.
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Whatever our thoughts on armed struggle, it makes one think.
4 Likes
Reading some of the stories out of Ukraine, this is particularly touching.
3 Likes
Speaking of war and poetry (just writing that much made my eyes damp 
), I’m reminded of Wilfred Owen’s poetry as it appears in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, posted above a ways ↑ after Russia invaded Ukraine.
I learned of it ca. 1966-67 in the middle of the Viet Nam war era, wept, and joined the Navy less than a year later.
(In God’s providence, the technical and engineering training that I received in those six years wound up being my career after I got out – not by my plan. Some of you know about other life-path altering co-instances that occurred while I was in, too.)
2 Likes
Connectivity in contrast to Sensitivity
From “How to do Nothing” by Jenny O’Dell.
I alluded earlier to the problem of speed, but this is also a problem both of listening and of bodies. There is in fact a connection between 1) listening in the Deep Listening, bodily sense, and 2) listening, as in me understanding your perspective. Writing about the circulation of information, Berardi makes a distinction that’s especially helpful here, between what he calls connectivity and sensitivity. Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units—an example would be an article racking up a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by like-minded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue: check the box. In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.
Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous—and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in. Thinking about sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.
So connectivity is a share or, conversely, a trigger; sensitivity is an in-person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both. Obviously, online platforms favor connectivity, not simply by virtue of being online, but also arguably for profit, since the difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time, and time is money. Again, too expensive.
2 Likes
I’m being tested on this one this morning. 
I found this very moving. (King Alfonso of the Congo was an African convert to Roman Catholicism.)
"Each day the traders are kidnapping our people. This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for our masses. It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves. The captives are branded with a red-hot iron. "
-Letter from King Alfonso I of the Kongo to King Joao III of Portugal (1526)
4 Likes
Color me with damp eyes.
2 Likes
From How to do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell:
End of Chapter 1: The Case for Nothing –
Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”) 30 . To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.”
Of course, such a solution isn’t good for business, nor can it be considered particularly innovative. But in the long meantime, as I sit in the deep bowl of the Rose Garden, surrounded by various human and nonhuman bodies, inhabiting a reality interwoven by myriad bodily sensitivities besides my own—indeed, the very boundaries of my own body overcome by the smell of jasmine and just-ripening blackberry—I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable detail of the real.
1 Like
Another bit from Wendell Berry, “The Need to be Whole”
… starting with a quote from a California Native American called “Bill”.
Everything is living, even the rocks, even the bench you are sitting on. . . . Everything is alive. That’s what we Indians believe. White people think everything is dead.
That seems to me, for one thing, to be a fairly complete criticism of the European occupation of America so far—at least in its so far dominant version. As evidence, we treat the soil of our farmlands and working forests, not to mention all land to be “developed,” as if it were dead; we treat living farm animals in confinement as if they are dead; we look upon whatever is unwanted or in our way, from “fetuses” to technologically obsolete workers and farmers to mountains and forests, as if they are dead already or might as well be dead. People true to the present time will conclude as a matter of course that Bill was talking religion or, more likely, superstition. But he was speaking merely of reality as he and his people knew it.
1 Like
Speaking of Wendell Berry:
Enemies
If you are not to become a monster,
you must care what they think.
If you care what they think,
how will you not hate them,
and so become a monster
of the opposite kind? From where then
is love to come—love for your enemy
that is the way of liberty?
From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go
free of you, and you of them;
they are to you as sunlight
on a green branch. You must not
think of them again, except
as monsters like yourself,
pitiable because unforgiving.
3 Likes
“Oh! How heavily the weight of slavery pressed upon me then. I must toil day after day, endure abuse and taunts and scoffs, sleep on the hard ground, live on the coarsest fare, and not only this, but live the slave of a blood-seeking wretch, of whom I must stand henceforth in continued fear and dread. Why had I not died in my young years before God had given me children to love and live for?”
“The goodness of God was manifest, he declared, in my miraculous escape from the swamp. As Daniel came forth unharmed from the den of lions, and Jonah had been preserved in the whale’s belly, even so had I been delivered from evil by the Almighty.”
-Solomon Northrup, author of “12 Years a Slave”
3 Likes
Just saw this in Apple News within the last 30 minutes :
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/15/georgetown-jesuits-enslaved-sold/
2 Likes