June 2020

I'm late this month. There's a lot going on. It's the end of the school year, and my oldest is graduating from high school on Friday. At the ceremony all of the families will be sitting in the parking lot in their cars and the students will be called out one by one to go up and receive their diplomas. While I always found these ceremonies anti-climactic as a young person, as a parent this is all a disappointing way to end the fifteen years of school and the rest of childhood that we have just gone through, especially as it is the first kid.

I'm pretty much out of the way of the riots so far, which is good for me, because I don't find them exciting or think they are likely to result in bringing about the re-ordering of the world that everybody claims they want. I am not opposed to a less oppressive police presence or fewer people in jail, but as I have said before, there are huge conflicts between what different segments of the population consider to be acceptable behavior, and how much of the unacceptable behavior the less tumultuous people can endure however noble their intentions are, which is why, in spite of 90% of the educated portion of the population and all of the major corporations and universities supposedly being in ferocious agreement with the reforms being demanded, I believe that these problems will inevitably recur. But nobody wants to hear my opinions on these matters.

A List: Chretien de Troyes--The Knight of the Cart.................................….59/96

B List: In between books

C List: Laurens Van Der Post--Jung and the Story of Our Time...………..53/276

More Arthurian romance that I am not that into. I guess the repetition is helping me learn the stories.

Laurens van der Post (1906-1996), a Boer native of South Africa, was evidently a pretty well known and well-connected guy in his time, being a writer, television host, soldier, conservationist, advisor to the British government, friend of C.J. Jung, Prince Charles (he is Prince William's godfather), a Zulu chief with a very long name that I am too lazy to spell out, and too many other notable friends and titles to miss. His book, which is a memoir about his friendship and encounters with Jung, is pretty interesting to me so far. Van der Post, who appears by his biography to have been an extreme man of the world, in his book expresses what is to someone in our age an odd conviction in the significance of dreams, and of trying to attain a non-material understanding of the phenomena about us in the world in general, particularly though their mythological or "primitive" interpretations. Jung has thus far only appeared in one episode, in which he does appear to have been an unusually tireless, imaginative and questioning thinker of the sort that drove the narrative of European intellectual history for so many centuries. When Jung was in Africa on one occasion he apparently was so taken by the primitive energies of a tribal dance that he joined in with the dancers, but then, becoming persuaded that there was a demonic influence at work in it, he began to crack his whip in the air all around him and roar at the other dancers to desist and go away, which they eventually did. I'm not sure how much patience the modern academic crowd would have for these types of behaviors, interesting and brilliant as he was. 

I am trying to get a post up on my other blog, which has been idle for a while. I'm having difficulty finding the time to do it, and it is hard to avoid going off on a tangent about current events as well.

This month's pictures are from various places around New Hampshire I have been to lately, some are at White Lake in the White Mountain region, some are at the Sculptured Rocks near Bristol, and some are in Enfield.