Weekly Review: December 11th to December 17th

I am ambivalent when there are too many good things over the course of a week.

My attention is caught among trying to sift through all these different news articles and bring you some of the best that I can find. I want to share all the interesting things that I found but if my attention is strained trying to find them, your attention is just as strained because of the information with which you are trying to keep up yourself.

I hope that you will enjoy the articles that I have included here.

Do you have suggestions on how I can make the Weekly Review more interesting or more useful? Please comment below. I want you to enjoy the Weekly Review and get something out of it. I don’t want to be another aggregator that you ignore.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Ready for Take-Off!
• School Reforms
• How to Think
• Edgar Allan Poe and the Frogpondians
• On Whose Merit?

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The Great Metaphysicians

Whenever I first think about traveling, I am struck with the horror that I cannot bring my whole library with me. How do I decide which books to bring? When I travel, I am on a strict budget. I could easily spend my entire budget on books. That’s true at home as well as abroad.

So, I try to bring books with me. Enough books to keep me entertained for the entire trip. I always resolve that I am not going to buy a single volume while abroad. This is a resolution that I know I am going to break even as I am making it; however, in making this resolution, I buy fewer books than I otherwise would.

I had begun to explore the poetry of W.B. Yeats before I went to Rome in 2004. Reading Yeats, I felt I found someone of a similar bent of mind, who looked for the mythic elements of life but also saw that the mythic elements are not enough to strip life of its banalities. Perhaps I had not realized that when I was packing for Rome. Whatever my reasons were, I decided not to bring The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats to Rome.

And that may have been a blessing in disguise.

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Every Angel is Terrifying

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?
–Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy” from The Duino Elegies (Stephen Mitchell, trans.)

Saturday evening I felt overwhelmed.

My problems are not major. I have a roof over my head, food to eat, friends to pass time with, and a job. Though, in this economy, who can be sure of their job security? If this recession has done one thing, I hope that is has realigned people’s values to those things that truly matter. But my problems still distract me.

The Devil on my shoulder asks, “What have you got to complain about?” I start belittling myself and try to bury my problems. But some part of me remembers this piece of simple wisdom:

In the bottom of your shoe, even a small pebble is bigger than the whole world.

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Weekly Review: October 16th to October 22nd

Each week, whenever I’m reading The Boston Globe, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal — almost exclusively online these days — I try to take note of interesting articles to share here.

And each week, I find there is both too much and too little to share.

I feel like my ability to filter which stories will be interesting and which won’t be is not getting any better as the weeks progress. I hope, though, that you are enjoying the pieces that I do choose to share.

And, further, I hope that if you find anything interesting that I missed you’ll share it with me in the comments below.

These Things Caught My Eye

• The Sparrow Takes Flight
• Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!
• The Danger of a Single Story
• Is This the Bar to Raise in Public Education?
• Snow on Rilke
• The Speed of Thought: Forming Words
• Et Tu, Brute?

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Dwelling on and Dwelling in the Spirit of Play

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
– Aristotle

A few days ago, one of my friends set her Facebook status to, “But bear in mind that a person’s worth is measured by the worth of what he values.”

This simple act amused me. And moved me to think. I had had cause — not just cause but causes — to think about my values before she had put up that status. I realized that my life has been out of alignment. Specifically, I have not been giving enough attention to one trait I deeply value: playfulness.

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