22-Care

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Emotion

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.

As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.

Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs & peaks.

If you watch carefully, you will see this undulation in every department of his life – his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up & down.

As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness & poverty.

Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.

THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S.LEWIS

20-Tick

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Daylight

Daylight Savings

Change the clock twice a year, or else some places will need to adjust their operating hours.

Crank an Hour

Going back to permanent Standard Hours has been tried before, and failed after two years.

What is the issue about the light & night that we keep forgetting?

19-Here

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Thought

Think of the flow of thoughts in your mind as a social media feed. Throughout your life, you have “subscribed” to different things without noticing. Now their posts keep showing up in your feed, and you don’t know from where. Some are true & interesting, but many are unhelpful or simply untrue.

Practical Meditation by Giovanni Dienstmann

18-File

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Bibliotheca

Reading Books by Roz Chast

Things form in my brain. They get bigger & bigger until I must write them down to free up some space in my head.

It’s the same way a chicken lays an egg. When people eat that egg, the chicken is probably thinking, Really? You like that? It just came out of my butt.

Mike Reiss in Springfield Confidential

15-Such

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Influence

A thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs.

Mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue & senility.

Most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books — no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930.

Tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.

And, most fatally & abysmally, men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.

It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis