‘In Praise of Limestone’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

[…] In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide.
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.—W. H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”

In his 66 years, W.H. Auden lived in many locations in Europe and America: he was born and raised in York, educated at Oxford, and lived long-term in Berlin, New York City, Michigan, Italy, Austria. In 1948, he started spending his summers on the island of Ischia, in the Tyrrhenian Sea. (Seen above.) That island’s landscape, covered as it is with rocky volcanic outcroppings, so different from any he had known, came to represent difference itself in his mind.
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Today in History: August 5

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The first traffic light was installed in London in December 1868 outside Parliament. It used wooden arms to indicate stop and go during the day and gas lights (red and green) for nighttime use. It was manually operated, and it only lasted a month as the rig exploded in January 1869 and killed the police officer who was operating it that day.

A police officer in Salt Lake City, Utah, is credited with inventing the electric traffic light in 1912, but no traffic control system—no electric traffic control system—was installed until August 5, 1914, one hundred and two years ago today, at the busy intersection of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.
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Craving Order

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is said that Albert Einstein once asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what are we to think of an empty desk?” While not famous for his quips—although E=mc2 is the soul of wit in its brevity—this neatly captures the perspective of a person who kept his desk almost confrontationally cluttered.

The human mind is an organizer, the greatest one we happen to know, the one that all of our tools and machines are built in an attempt to replicate its principles and imagined actions. Nature itself does not organize. Every organizing structure we come up with is an imposition on nature and is thus radically random, at least as far as nature is concerned: No method of organizing is more “correct” than any other.
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