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July, 2025
July 31 Transformation is a solitary process. It's all up to you. It all comes down to you.
[[How to be of service to someone who's in the midst of metamorphosis: protect the chrysalis but otherwise leave the pupa alone.]]
July 30 Pursue the mystery, even though you won't solve it. Climb the mountain, even though you won't summit it. Live, even though you will die.
Why have I only just now discovered The Electric Typewriter?! It's a nonfiction curation site that features essays from notable American writers. This is epic.
"We search the net to bring you the best nonfiction, articles, essays and journalism"
Here are some of their curated collections:
July 28 Emerson said that to be great is to be misunderstood, but that isn't saying much, because everyone is misunderstood. Sure, in a way everyone is great. Everyone is fast. Everyone contains multitudes. It is a man's natural state you misunderstood so it is greater to understand to be great as to be one who understands those who are misunderstood.
July 25 "Replace by" vs. "Replace with"
In a passive construction, use by, and for an active construction, use with:
- "The ball club replaced their pin-striped jerseys with solid gray ones."
- "The pin-striped jerseys were replaced by solid gray ones."
When the subject is ambiguous/hidden (passive voice), it's more like the new thing is doing the action of replacing, as if it's booty-bumping the other thing out of frame. But when there is a defined subject (active voice), it's more like the two things are being held in hand and swapped.
July 24 We ought to call Kansas City the Bi-State Area.
(Inspired by a OneKC billboard depicting the outlines of Candace and Missouri in the background and the heart. KC symbol overlapping them in the foreground— seen on I-35 S.)
[[Material for "Community of KC" V2]]
An example of how a plural could be confused with a plural possessive from Ingrid Michaelson song "Your And I":
Oh, let's get rich and buy our parents homes in the south of France.
The sentence has two viable meanings, and it depends on whether parents is meant as the indirect object of the verb to buy or as a modifier of the noun home. Are they going to buy homes for their parents, or are they going to buy homes from their parents?
July 24 Billboard seen westbound on I-70:
URANUS Fudge Factory – Richmond, Indiana
Later, I passed by Richmond on the highway. This text is painted bold and big on the water tower:
Richmond, IN – A Great All-American Town
My claim: New York City is only suited to New York natives. It's a harsh environment that requires generations of adaptation before a human can flourish there.
Metaphor/Image as Evidence: Of course, a tree is mighty enough to grow through a slab of concrete. We've all seen warped sidewalks and potholes and cracked curbs. But, of course, if you were to transplant a mature tree to the middle of a square block of concrete, you wouldn't expect it to be able to stand. Maybe it could survive by lying on its side and slowly reaching its roots through any cracks it can find. But it would no doubt be uncomfortable, and it wouldn't be living according to its nature.
The same is true for humans. New York is fundamentally inhospitable. That's why, at any given time, there are at least as many tourists, nomads, refuges, and commuters as there are natives in the city. Everyone but the natives (and a select few highly adaptable humans) are rootless. New York can only ever be a stop-over for those trees, because it doesn't offer enough nutrients or enough space for growth. The non-native trees can't stand (in) the concrete.
[[Material for "Community of KC" V2]]
July 23 Christianity gets humility wrong; it's about reverence, not deference. The Christian humility is meekness, where one puts oneself beneath God and asks, "What should I do?" But the most noble and life-affirming humility means accepting one's place beneath Nature/God/Universe/Spirit and not asking but declaring: "Do as you wish."
[[Modern America is not a nation under God but a nation trying to get over God, which is like trying to get behind your own shadow.]]
Future vision for The Intronaut (?):
- Voyaging inward via Nature.
- Outdoor adventures that lead inward
- Inward voyages, via language, dreams, and the outdoors
July 23 For us there may be no descents, but there are rewards. Sisyphus is cursed to climb, whereas we are blessed to climb. He must summit the same hill repeatedly for eternity; we receive new landscapes with every passing moment and are drawn to ever-higher heights. It is also a gift, a reward, that our climb is indefinite rather than infinite or finite. We know that we won't climb forever yet don't know when we'll go. Ideally, that awareness grounds us in the present, in the action of ascent. "We are overpaid a thousand times for all our toil." Beauty and love abound in these landscapes, and the view only ever gets better.
July 20 Good examples of closed-compound adjectives (hyphenated adjectives):
- "next-door neighbor"
- "finger-lickin' good"
July 17 Beauty is not a luxury. Beauty is not only for the wealthy and the elite. Beauty ought to be democratic: by the people, for the people.
(Inspired by David Perell's essay on Democratic Beauty)
July 15 Critic: taste; Editor: vision
A critic is an artist the same way a Hollywood producer is a filmmaker. Rather than making art, they're deciding which art ought to make it, which art is worthy of an audience's attention. And that is a valuable service. We value critics for their taste, but it's important to note that the career critic is not a practitioner.
The critic has a sibling in traditional book publishing: the acquisitions editor. Those editors are even more like movie producers, deciding which books should get funding, which books should get made. But those editors are removed from the process of actually making the book. An acquisitions editor may review the author's manuscript, once acquired, and say what's working and what's not, but she will not suggest how to close the gap between where the manuscript is and where it ought to be. Like the critic, we value the acquisitions editor for her taste.
Yet there is another kind of editor who is a practitioner. This kind of editor should have good taste—certainly—, but we value him for his vision. Rather than just pointing out the gap, observing a delta, he understands the author's intention and suggests a way (or multiple) ways to get there. The practicing editor offers a vision for how to reach the goal.
An editor is a thoughtful reader who must also understand the author's vision and give feedback toward that end, rather than feedback that would pervert the text according to the editor's taste and whim. So, I don't want you to value me for my taste; value me for my vision.
Many people—many writers, even—conflate these two kinds of editors: the critic and the practitioner. Every writer and every book would benefit from having an editor with a clear vision. There's a reason screenwriters and directors don't invite film critics on set.
[[Why I'd Never Make It as a Critic]]
July 15 How to be of service to someone who's in the midst of metamorphosis: protect the chrysalis but otherwise leave the pupa alone.
(I woke up in the middle of the night—about 1:40 a.m.—and wrote this, which makes it feel more true and certainly more urgent.)
We are a nation divided against itself, and each side is trying to get over God. On the left, God is being smothered by the supremacy of the individual: identity politics seems to assert that it is one's right to get exactly what they want, which leads to a lot of hypocrisy in a party that touts the values of tolerance, compassion, and empathy. On the right, God-as-Nature is being overtaken in the value-hierarchy by the weak and low incentives of expediency and profit, which leads to a lot of hypocrisy in a party that claims to be so principled and grounded. The push to privatize public lands, for instance, shows that they have miss d the point altogether of why we make money in the first place. Are you going to damn a river to power an A.I. server farm? For what? So that we can work less? For what? So that we can have more leisure time and maybe explore in nature? Where are you going to go hiking?
For the sake of illustrating my argument, let's borrow the Catholic's Cardinal Sins, which is a pretty un-American framework (we being of a Protestant bent and all), because it does a good job describing modern America. The average republican-voting person is becoming more gluttonous and greedy; the average democrat-voting person is becoming more prideful and angry; and we are all becoming lazy (sloth).
It is true for anything at any point in time that the thing is both being and becoming. The reason I am more cynical than I have ever been is because we are not being true to our foundational values, and we are becoming a nation in which those values may be erased from the cultural consciousness entirely. If we stray far enough and for long enough, we won't remember the way back home.
We have somehow got to thinking that there is nothing bigger than ourselves (from the liberal perspective, nothing bigger than the individual and from the conservative perspective, nothing bigger than the nation), that there is nothing above us. And the longer we think that way, the further we get from a unifying top-level value in the value-hierarchy. We don't have a shared sense of what is Good or Right or True, because we are neither being nor becoming a nation under God.
July 14 The relationship that corporate employees have with their corporate employers is like a dog's relationship with whoever feeds it. Somehow, corporate employers have made their employees feel like they are not earning a living but being given or granted a living, which has the effect of the employees wanting to remain domesticated (and never have to fend for themselves). The entrepreneur, on the other hand, knows that he will only eat if he hunts and kills.
The "Don't tread on me" snake lost its way and is eating its own tail.
[[America used to live up to "Don't tread on me," but now we live out something more like "I'll tread on you first." It's a fear response and a position of oppressive and chaotic rather than quiet and purposeful power.]]
July 13 We are big-brained, wide-eyed creatures with such a narrow view. When are we going to evolve enough to realize that the universe was not made for the benefit of our species (much less, our nation)?
July 12 Modern America is not a nation under God but a nation trying to get over God, which is like trying to get behind your own shadow.
Our hubris and self-importance is in conflict with our founding values, among them this sort of humility of being in service of something divine.
July 12 Trans-humanism is the opposite of transcendentalism; one requires humility, to claim that there is something beyond what we can access in life, and the other is an error of hubris, thinking that we are above everything including death (and Nature).
July 11 This kid from Kansas is drawn to dramatic changes in elevation, both above and below sea level.
July 10 My Theory: The Preeminence of the Penultimate
The conceptual meat, the real spiritual heart of a message, does not come as the first or final beat or even at the climax. The most important part of something falls in the penultimate place: the second-to-last section of an essay, chapter of a book, stanza of a poem, scene of a film. You'll find it in the bridge of a song; the part that (almost always) comes before the final chorus. The conceptual content you find in these penultimate places can be so profound and memorable and moving that you may come to think the entire rest of the thing was built up around it, to communicate the one idea with the utmost emotion and clarity. And I think you would be right.
If you're really curious about why someone made a piece of art, look in the penultimate place.
July 9 Since the shoulder seasons are short, one might expect those seasons to start and end subtly, yet the shoulder season start and end rather suddenly.
July 7 I went to Iceland to prove to myself that I am free.
America used to live up to "Don't tread on me," but now we live out something more like "I'll tread on you first." It's a fear response and a position of oppressive and chaotic rather than quiet and purposeful power.
July 7 Robert Macfarlane's answer to "What is a River?": "A gathering that seeks the sea."
(From this interview with Politics & Prose)
July 5 To get what you need, detach from what you think you want.
// To get what you need, give up what you think you want.
// Give up (let go of) what you think you want to get what you need.
July 5 From my perspective, the sun is small enough that I can smother it with one hand. One might wonder something like, How is the sun so warm and bright if it is so small? It was not until I learned these two figures that I began to comprehend the awe-some scale of our star: (1) light from the sun takes [eight minutes and twelve seconds] to reach the surface of the Earth, and (2) the speed of light is ~3,0000000000 meters per second. After "unweaving the rainbow" and quantifying the sun's distance from the Earth, one might instead wonder, If the sun is a a full eight light-minutes away, how does it appear so big in the sky? And the only conclusion to draw is that the sun is an unfathomable number of times larger than the size of my hand—that it is larger than I could ever comprehend. The final analysis of nature will not dispel mystery but rather corroborate it by failing to account for the degrees of nature's scale and intricacy.
Audible has a billboard along the off-ramp to the Lincoln Tunnel, and the copy on it is: "Embrace the tunnel." Please tell me why it isn't simply "Enjoy the tunnel" instead? Wouldn't that be many times better?
July 5 Linguistic blunder from Native's 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner: "Affectionately mad with 10 ingredients or less"
July 3 I agree that we are sinful, in so far as what the Latin root means: that "we miss the mark." But I disagree that sin is an issue or something to cleanse. It is a miracle that we can aim at the moral Good at all. That we miss is not so important as whether we improve.
[[Eden Is Hell Too]]
July 3 Overheard in LBI—a conversation between woman on bicycles:
"We were biking on the busiest street in Madison, and I said, 'Ezra, I'll kill you if we die out here.'"
An aphorism, riffing on this cliché that emphasizes the distinction between strong opinions (knowing what you want/like) and passing judgment (thinking you know what other people ought to do)—also related to "self-oughts only."
To each their own, and to me my own opinion.
July 3 When, in English, did we start saying reproduce to mean procreate? I can't imagine that it was before the Industrial Revolution.
(Research these words' etymologies.)
- Reproduce (Etymonline): trans. "to make a copy or representation of"; intrans. use, meaning "procreate," came about in the 1850s
- Procreate (Etymonline): ""beget, generate, engender (children)," 1530s
The origin and literal meaning of reproduce evokes the concept of a copy, something fabricated from a mold, a diluted version of an original thing, whereas procreate describes the same dive act of creation that we attribute to God. A human child is "begotten, not made"—much less a copy of the parent. We have procreative power, which dwarfs and embarrasses the measly and mechanical power of reproduction.
[[Eden Is Hell Too]]
July 1 What a great phrase that is, "right of way"—it means something so specific.
I espouse a non-Christian humility, which is a position beneath Nature, our Creator—beneath only in the same sense that one is beneath one's ancestors (as in a family tree). We are most unholy and inhuman when we fall out of this humility and into the hubris that we can control Nature or that we are more powerful than Her.
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