July 2020

A List: Alfred North Whitehead--Modes of Thought..........................................98/174

B List: Between books right now

C List: Laurens Van der Post--Jung and the Story of Our Time...……………221/276

I didn't know anything about Alfred North Whitehead before taking this up--I thought he was some kind of literary critic--but it turns out he was a prominent mathematician who turned to philosophy later in life. Modes of Thought is a collection of lectures he gave, 6 at Wellesley College and 2 at the University of Chicago, in 1937 and 1938, when he was a professor at Harvard after having come over from his native England. He was a leading proponent of something called process philosophy. He certainly writes like a serious philosopher, and not of the rambunctious Nietzsche or Schopenhauer type, but very dry, concerned with the pure nature of thought and perception (the sentence where I left off was "The peculiarities of the individuals are reflected in the peculiarities of the common process which is their interconnection." Yeah). I am a little out of practice as far as reading this kind of book, so my concentration drifts in and out, but I have picked up that he is not believer in the Platonic concept that truth consists in static, unchanging, ideal forms, but that the meaning of things is to be found in their transitions and the way in which they become themselves. He is pretty persuasive about this. This is also reminiscent of William James's philosophy, I think, which also has the benefit of being more entertaining to read.

Coming to the end of the Van der Post book. As I noted in last month's check-in, he is not the greatest writer. This book is all right when Van der Post is relating anecdotes about Jung and his occasional interactions with other great intellects of his day (he seems to have worked mostly on his own though), less so when he is explaining the great man's ideas and breakthroughs. Neither of these books really fits in with the current zeitgeist; in fact Jung wrote something to the effect that modern Europeans--whether this applied to Americans or not I cannot tell, probably not--would ultimately have to rediscover their lost spiritual understanding through engagement with their own culture, that adopting say, Eastern wisdom, wise as it was (and Jung was apparently a serious student of it) would not answer. Something of this sort I suspect to be true among the confused and somewhat intellectually beleaguered white people of the present day, of whose number I certainly make one.     

My pictures for this month are not terribly exciting, since I haven't really been anywhere, and I don't think to take a lot of pictures anyway. Most of these are the result of my children getting hold of the phone, though they come up with some interesting snaps. Maybe by next month I will have at least made it to the beach, though I am told there are a lot of rules involved with doing this that threaten to dampen even that fun.  

Rattlesnake (?) on the patio in Vermont. I had been told that these kinds of snakes lived in the area. 

Afternoon cards. If I am going to put in pictures of the children, I ought to get all of them in.

Later in the evening the game moves indoors.

A very large moth on the front porch back in N.H.

The morning after we caught him slithering around, the snake left his skin out for us.

Cherry from the backyard tree.

My son who is supposed to be going to college next month. I still have a sneaking feeling it isn't going to come off.

Squirrel that my ever virtuous wife found as a hairless, starving infant abandoned to die by his own kind that she rescued and nurtured to almost full squirrel strength, though he is still too young to let go.

Our Fourth of July pictures were a little too cute to post on social media in this contentious environment, but I will bury one here to mark the occasion.