My parents-in-law sold their house and the family gathered to clear out their things. Years ago I stored boxes of old New Yorker magazines in the attic.

I contemplated tossing them out only to open one and find this poem by W.S. Merwin. They’ll survive another decade.

Cycling up Banbury road today, I saw a woman on her jog leap up to touch the cherry blossoms dangling overhead. Springtime is the cherry blossoms. It is also the leaping woman.

Iain McGilchrist: “You can’t weigh suffering.” Observation: and yet how desperately we try (Cf. the fundamental premises of the likes of Effective Altruism)

Iain McGilchrist: “In trying to study English we had disembodied works of art, poems; we’d turned them into abstracts, paraphrased them and lost all the meaning. The way in which we did this destroyed them of their uniqueness, destroyed them of their embodied nature and destroyed them of their necessarily implicit character. We made them all explicit, abstract, general—and thus went in exactly the opposite way to the way the work of art was inviting us to go.”

Andrew Welburn in: Owen Barfield, Romanticism Come of Age by Simon Blaxland-de Lange: “We are dimly aware … that our own stage [of consciousness] depends on, and ultimately only makes sense if we connect it with that original, though unrecaptureable wholeness of meaning. The very words and ideas we us still hint at its existence.”

Niels Bohr: “No, no . . . you are not thinking; you are just being logical.”

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” - Simon Weil