Oppenheim Arts & Letters

. . . Until You Grade 3,000 Papers

Source: Youtube poster "germanyacko". "The Simpsons - Comments about PhDs and Grad Students. [HQ]." Posted December 26, 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XViCOAu6UC0

A painful little chuckle, that one, but looking back on more than a thousand reviews at Zoetrope.com and more than 700 posts here, each one a small adventure in online expression and journalism, I feel even today the enrichment of the graduate school experience worth the lifestyle costs.

We know because we see, and if we should come to see a great deal, it is because at some point in our lives we had time to look, and that appreciatively, with discipline and patience, and in depth.

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Why Indulge in Art Criticism

At the Mayhem today (www.modelmayhem.com), a participant wrote about why he doesn't care to care to respond to requests to criticize the photographs of other artists. 

I took an opposite tack:

Why I participate in various critique venues:

1. I might learning something in the process of trying to write a considerate, earnest, incisive response to someone else's work;

2. I may harbor some useful observations about method, process, or place in the literature about which the artist may yet be unaware or unfocused;

3. I like the sound of my voice in typing;

4. Good artists listen to criticism critically and may enjoy how informed conversation complements their own peculiar art-making experience.

Step A: Always the development of a technical vocabulary--some thing or many things one may do with a set of tools;

Step B: Always the development of literary or conversational (through the art) sensibility.

With age, in some regions quasi-official imprimatur or an influential myth, the personal "editor"--the old fashioned substantive thing--may become an important figure in the artist's head, and at that point, paid or not, the work involved in thoughtfully engaging with someone else's effort in both its technical and literary facets becomes both ambitious and responsible.

A good critic, imho, should not be far in kind from a curator, editor, publisher, stage manager, or producer in terms of a kind of guardianship of the art (through "gatekeeping") and improvement of its essential discriminating qualities for marketing and showcasing.  Pop culture gives us a cartoon version of the critic as an immensely egotistical and impotent personality--e.g., the theater know-it-all who can't write a play--but between artists and "master teachers" and creative representatives, the figure may be quite different, a Perkins, for example, to Hemingway, Wolf, or Faulkner.

I should have put a smiley icon after the cynical and self-denigrating  "I like the sound of my voice in typing" but may admit that the experience of writing for an immediate audience or single recipient online has been much a part of the charm of participating in life in this way.

The zenith, so far, of my career as a volunteer critic may this line from the Photo Wing at http://www.zoetrope.com:

1

J. S. Oppenheim

4.337

1044

The score of "4.337" represents the aggregate recipient rating for my remarks on a scale from one to five; the figure "1044" tells how many times I've gotten it together to give another photographer one to a few paragraphs of thoughtful and apparently helpful criticism.

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Winter Weather for Illustration

Barn visible from Longmeadow Road, Hagerstown, Maryland, Jan. 2, 2010.

It's 15-degrees F.(ing) cold out there today with a wind chill of -4.  Much better to be in and reading, sipping hot tea, and working with illustration.

I may make it a rule here to print everything presented once or twice at least.

We may surf an awful lot in cyberspace, but we must still live in realspace with real walls that want something like art.

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Tonality - The Park in Winter

Evergreens screen a tennis court at Pangborn Park, Hagerstown, Maryland, Dec. 30, 2009.

I've no wish to starve mucking around this year but feel that both outdoor and indoor (digital suite) adventures in photography may be in order.  Life's always a little more interesting tackling what we don't know how to do than doing what we've done over and over (and over) again.

Would the above look better in blue, sepia, iced, high keyed, patched out as a watercolor?

I could notch it up to its bare lines or outlines or pound it down to abstract blocks.

I'm curious too, however I mash it, to note its looks on a 13x19 sheet of Hahnemuhle rag.

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Rest Goes Hard on the Heart

Perfectly subjective, all that follows --

Activity circulates blood; inactivity leaves the heart to do all the work.  Sleep has become more difficult than wakefulness, but wakefulness and activity have become suddenly treacherous.

My not-so-novel response to my introduction to common Lisinopril: hyperawareness, hypervigilence, and one really good bout with panic underwritten by some kind of sensory experience.  As with automobiles these days and their computers, I suspect the body has to "reset" and "recallibrate" its autonomous alogorithms when its chemistry has been abruptly altered. 

Well, no need to feel alone in that respect:

http://www.medications.com/se/lisinopril/anxiety-attacks

Sow now I'm looking around for "cardiac rehab" guidance: how much effort should be applied to producing a training effect in the heart?  How much would be too much?

I've just learned 30 minutes out in the winter of 2009's first snowstorm, with a last uphill climb through 15 inches of powder back to my building, seems enough exercise for at least half a day. 

Booties on around here, and hot tea in the cup.

Thirty minutes out walking twice a day hasn't done me in, not even with snow up to my shins, but I do wonder if so minimal an effort has done my heart any good.

Last blood pressure reading 30 minutes after five minutes of exercise with ten-pound dumbells: 125/75 79 -- not bad, but what does it mean? 

I've complained here in 19th Century Modern about being made Borg before my time--before anyone's time.

Now I wonder to what extent that sentiment may have been subconciously driven by rising blood pressure and awareness of changes brought about through my comparatively inactive state.

Somewhere back in my history, I had three or more years of stellar cardiovascular fitness sustained by routine 45- and 90-minute jogs and runs; more recently, or since the building fire o' 2006 and the move to the low mountains, I've drifted far into the "mouse potato's" life: life online, blogging, researching, teleconversing with typing endlessly--and offline: photography, much of which today involves the same computing platform. 

Add for refreshment in recent years: a great girlfriend, now ex-girlfriend, and . . . restaurants!

More drink, more food, more rest, little physical activity . . . more death.

I have this week with a pill about the size of the head of a pin entered middle age with undeniable finality, and it seems my first job, the one without which no other is possible, is to stay in it for as long and as well as I may.

Goodbye, my old black volcanic coffee bean.

Hello, decaf.

It's not so bad.

I've just passed a week without the aforementioned morning coffee or the evening's equally medicinal bar drink. 

Of hamburgers and pizzas, much less barbecue, and other salty and sweet delectibles I have but memories.

Of late and away from office and kitchen (and theater), I've been outdoors and moving along a few times.

I've also played my guitar and sung for more than an hour at a time, a first return to practice after months if not years of low-level maintenance of the skill and talent.

So last night, fairly alcohol, caffiene, fat, and salt free, also exercised and one might even say "venillated", I poured about two ounces of wine for Kaddish and noticed I could smell the bouqet of that small amount of Girasole Vineyards' Pinot Noir from several feet away.

Odd, that.

But kind of cool.

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Strawgirl's First Snow

Strawgirl's my "Wilson".

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'Twas Gluttony That Brought Him Low

Fiddling with high blood pressure, with which I suppose one should not fiddle too much, I finally managed to move the steak and potatoes to fish, usually salmon, and chicken and to embark on a recuperative walking program.  So after a tough Friday night, I awoke Saturday morning without my ears ringing, the first time in a long time for that, and alert and breathing easily.

An old friend called and wanted to drive his red Corvette up the mountain, out of central Maryland, out here to the cusp of Western Maryland, always a pretty ride for those down-state slicks, and I said, "Sure."

There's a book to be written about highways and restaurants, and one could do worse than to start with Interstate 81 in West Virginia, speed limit 70-miles-per-hour, and end with a beer, sandwich, and ribs at one of the state's finest barbecue and pool joints, which I'll refrain from mentioning here given the health-orientation of the post overall.

However, let me tell you this: if that Bud, barbecue, and ribs out of the Wild and Wonderful should turn out my last supper, be assured it was a great one.

Best get to it while you're healthy (and young wouldn't hurt either).

I rather knew what I was getting into.

Ears ringing, possibly another symptom or two . . . I'm going to step out in the rain for a short walk.

If it's icy, or ice is on the way, I'll be in sipping water, one of the killers as retention drives the problem; if not, I may see you on the other side of America's medical industry, which has made itself a monster to be avoided at nearly all costs.

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Decoupling Cyborg

Mission: live offline and rebuild realspace.

First attempt: noble.

The catch: Netflix.

My computer and television tell me that yesterday was a sunny day (this one on which I escaped the electronic feeds has been dismal by comparison--relentlessly cold, dark, and rainy).

What happened: The Blu-Ray player has a Wi-Fi dongle, and after figuring out my router was sensitive to UC/lc password entry--and the program on the tv screen offered UC/lc entry, I managed to hook into my Netflix account and request for a first over-the-Internet movie Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

The classic, like its director, has aged.  Pan Am provides flight service to the earth orbiting space station; calls home to earth at the picture-phone booth: about $1.75 for one or two minutes in film time. 

However, as may Kubrick's work and artistic reputation, 2001: A Space Odyssey too will stand always for a certain passage in the history of contemporary culture.  Where Kubrick's crime and life were marked by the unbridled licentiousness of the advent of leftward hedonism and the "helter skelter" of an anarchic and yet essentially fascist cult, this film in particular may stand always for the central revolutions of the age: the co-development of computers, complex organizations, asceptic technology management teams, and a suppression of primitive urges perhaps so effective that it would seem to take a partially sentient, wayward, and murderous computer, the HAL 9000, to reawaken them.

So in my effort to reduce my online footprint and related rounds (involving correspondence and posts) and to spend just a little afternoon prep time readying the theater-in-a-livingroom before getting in some fresh air, I chose the film most likely to characterize my solipsistic predicament perfectly, i.e., one involving, eventually, an astronaut alone on a spaceship run by a computer and on a collision course with a "far out" future culminating in the image of a fetus in a bubble gazing back on the earth.

Can anyone say "Google"?

I'm not in my own personal "starchild" phase (yet), but much of the science fiction depicted in the film, especially in the realm of computer-human interaction and dependence on computer-supported technologies rings true this day: I may not have a space-to-earth "picture phone", but I sure have e-mail and remote personal relationships.

An iPod would take care of the rest.

This morning, I tried reverting to old fashioned reading but perhaps chose too eclectic and literary a work for concentration: Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi.  After so many years of electronic distraction and infotainment, taking a day or a few for a philosophical book . . . fuggedaboudid.  Whatever the character of the experience of reading Hesse at 14, about the same age at which I probably saw Kubrick's film for the first time, reading the author's work a second time in my 50's seemed not what it must have been the first time through. 

I might even say the film was better than the book.

Or, as is the way with Electronic Attention Deficit Disorder (EADD), I have through cyberspace simply a broader and more constant palette of available intellectual occupations and preoccupations, especially as regards social, philosophical, and political scribbling and every manner of art experience and communication.

Still, it's time to lay off the Internet, for the communication-enabling servant has become too much the master.

Reference

IMDB: "2001: A Space Odyssey": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/

New Media Giants: 2001: A Space Odyssey Explained.  http://www.kubrick2001.com/

Rotten Tomatoes.  "2001: A Space Odyssey": http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1000085-2001_a_space_odyssey/

Wikipedia.  "2001: A Space Odyssey": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_(film)

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Film Studies - Ethnic, Cross-Cultural, Plain Fun

Jewish Life Mediated

Call mine "a life in a library".

It has been as much for some time, and what worlds it contains: particles of the contemporary western mind; reminders of how something called "we" got from another thing called "there" to something else called "here"; it has even hosted an introduction and orientation to my own missing or neglected role, i.e., my life as a Jew.

The Jewish People have known horrendous crimes--truly, crimes against humanity--for millenia. 

(403) So the Romans being now become masters of the wars, they both placed their ensigns upon the towers, and made joyful acclamations for the victory they had gained, as having found the end of this war much lighter than its beginning; for when they had gotten upon the last was, without any bloodshed, they could hardly believe what they found to be true; but seeing nobody to oppose them, they stood in doubt what such an unusual solitude could mean. (404) But when they went in numbers into the lanes of the city, with their swords drawn, they slew those whom they overtook, without mercy, and set fire to the houses wither the Jews were fled, and burnt every soul in them, and laid waste a great many of the rest; (405) and when they were come to the houses to plunder them, they found in them entire families of dead men, and the upper rooms full of dead corpses, that is of such as died by the famine; they then stood in a horror at this sight, and went out without touching anything. (406) But although they had this commiseration for such as were destroyed in that manner, yet had they not the same for those that were still alive, but they ran every one through whom they met with, and obstructed the very lanes with their dead bodies, and made the whole city run down with blood, to such a degree indeed that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with these men's blood. [1]

However light the grasp of the horrors attending the massacre and burning of the Jews of ancient Jerusalem, it may be balanced for contemporaries by the universal introduction to and intimate experience with, personally or through media, the Holocaust.

There are books here too, of course, and reading may echo the movies, or vice versa as each passing week and month form their own de facto learning modules, but here I'll keep to "rolling stock" for comment.  I had taken an interest in the Polish roots on my mother's side, herself a Yiddish-speaking immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island when she was four years old.  She had never talked about the "old country" and probably had little to remember from it, but film documentaries have provided a generic answer to curiosity about old roots.  Frontline: Shtetle, by turns a sentimental homecoming for the protagonist and an angry prosecution by the filmmaker, Marian Marzynski, nonetheless treats eyes, ears, and heart to the layout and landscape of the Polish village, its social strata and attitudes, its challenges and failings as regards the presence of the Jews, and, perhaps its small triumphs too: to date, Israel has recognized more than 6,000 Poles as among the "Righteous of Nations", i.e., those who risked their lives saving Jews from the Nazi horror (Wikipedia reports the number of Poles caught and put to death by the Nazis as rising into the tens of thousands). [2]

Frontline: Shtetl and Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust provide a glimpse of Poland's social landscape through the lens of returning survivors.  In fact, given Marzynski's underlying focus on Polish anti-Semitism as a theme connecting the WWII experience with that of a sanitized but still shackled small town politics and the effort in Hiding and Seeking to offer correction to the prejudices of two orthodox Israeli sons of a Holocaust survivor, the two may make for good side-by-side viewing.

For an extra look over Jewish life in Poland before the war: Image Before My Eyes.  The documentary more resembles documentary, perhaps as Ken Burns has reinvented it to bring to life more of the emotional experience of a day and time. 

Other films I've watched recently and related to Jewish life work with or around the Holocaust and the WWII experience, some comedically so.  Everything is Illuminated turned out a riot of a film with a generous tour of the Ukrain and an appropriately interlocked social story for telling.  Films concerned directly with the Holocaust: Europa Europa, Paper Clips, I Have Never Forgotten You, I'm Still Here (readings from Jewish children's diaries of the era), and Forgiving Dr. Mengele. 

Everything is Illuminated

Europa Europa

Frontline: Shtetl

Paper Clips

I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal

Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust

Primo Levi's Journey

I'm Still Here

Image Before My Eyes

The Longest Hatred: A Revealing History of Anti-Semitism

Forgiving Dr. Mengele

The Jews: History of a People (Die Juden: Geschict Eines Volkes)

Around the Islamic Small Wars

In their pursuit of contemporary themes, television's 24 and other shows have produced a terrorism genre, reliable for crafty villains and plenty of menace, but there's quite another side to the bang-bang that makes the news, and that has to do with the comparative obscurity to westerners of the cultures out of which so much violence has come.  There's far more to each, of course, than terrorism.  Even a movie as vilified as anti-Israel as Paradise Now, a story about two suicide bombers, both with misgivings, puts up in the atmosphere of the work arguments contrary to any argument for terror.  That noted, I would make an exception of the 1991 release with Sally Field, Not Without My Daughter, the relationship between America's freedom and potential, especially in its domestic quarters, and the locked-down and stifling atmosphere of a conservative Iranian household being held in stark contrast as Field becomes the wife (with a daughter) kidnapped by her Iranian husband, then enjoying dual citizenship in California, and held incommunicado beneath the family roof in Tehran.  Were that the only kind of movie one might care to see about Iran, one would miss the charms, temporal collissions, and oddities of the state as patched together in Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmin.

A Mighty Heart

Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmin

Death in Gaza

Not Without My Daughter

Beirut: The Last Home Movie

Paradise Now

The Color of Olives

The Kite Runner

Hitchcock

I love Netflix!

I have my all-I-can-watch subscription, and it has sufficient algorithms and organization to at the very least "notice", in a statistical sense, my tracks and feed up a host of associated films I'm sure to enjoy by theme or auteur.  Here I've had my very own Alfred Hitchcock Film Festival--no crowds, free popcorn, drinks from the bar encouraged.

By the way, my lists indicate the order in which movies.  Most strange, given my other interests, I found The Birds a fair template for terrorism and Foreign Correspondent, while a little hokey with age, as relevant a film today as I'm sure it was when released.

Rear Window

Strangers on a Train

Vertigo

North by Northwest

Dial "M" for Murder

Psycho

The Birds

Foreign Correspondent

To Catch a Thief

The Classics and the New Home Theater

My only regret with the documentary and feature films listed here is that I watched most on a 27-inch screen, terrific for its size but small not only by the latest standards in general but with wide-screen format, quite disappointing. 

The cure after several months of research (and a particularly bad episode with Amazon and Samsung customer service): a locally purchased 40-inch HDTV and the addition of a Blu-Ray DVD player (Samung LN40B750 and Samsung BD-P3600).  I could not have done better, and I note that on the basis of not finding fault anywhere in the viewing experience or system controls.  My eyes are around 84 inches from the screen, closer if I'm on the edge of my seat, and for continuous sharps without distractions down into the subliminal technical sort, everything's fine.  The television has a 2ms response rate and refreshes content at 240Hz, plenty for movies and state-of-the-art for watching football.

The first film watched on the big screen: Lady Sings the Blues.  That's a pretty good film for a new in-house viewing experience.  How I wish, however, that I had watched on the new set many more from these latest lists, especially Ken Burns: The Civil War.

This coming year, despite a healthy cue of new at Netflix, I will probably repeat some old favorites, starting with Dr. Zhivago, which I think visually among the greatest films ever painstakingly photographed and stiched together. 

Atonement

Taking Chance

Mercury Rising

Ken Burns: The Civil War

A Man and a Woman

Days of Wine and Roses

Cinema Paradiso

Pretty Woman

Coyote Ugly

Helvetica

Never on a Sunday

Les Miserables

Lady Sings the Blues

French Connection

French Connection II

Cited Reference

1. Frontline.  "From Jesus to Christ: Primary Sources: Josephus Describes the Romans' Sack of Jerusalem: The Wars of the Jews, Book 6, Chapter 8."  PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/maps/primary/josephussack.html

2. Wikipedia.  "Polish Righteous Among the Nations": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Righteous_among_the_Nations

Related

Oppenheim, James S.  "What I Have Been Watching -- Movies."  OA&L, June 11, 2009: http://commart.typepad.com/oppenheim_arts_letters/2009/06/what-i-have-been-watching-movies.html

Oppenheim, James S. "What I / We Have Been Watching Lately.  OA&L, January 25, 2008: http://commart.typepad.com/oppenheim_arts_letters/2008/01/what-i-we-have.html

Oppenheim, James S.  "Black Widows, Black Crows, White Gulls -- Hitchcock's Metaconflict."  OA&L, June 29, 2009: http://commart.typepad.com/oppenheim_arts_letters/2009/06/metaconflict-hitchcocks-birds.html

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Language Play - Nuts, Bolts, and Moves

"No serious researcher denies that Muhammad came to a milieu that was highly influenced by Judeo-Christian ideas. Indeed, the Qur'an presupposes familiarity with Judeo-Christian ideas to the extent that it often does not give the full version of a narrative; there is no need to identify what is supposed to be common knowledge.[3] A typical example is in the verse that was only partially cited by Muslims commenting on news programs in the wake of the 9-11 terror attacks: "Whoever has killed a single human without just cause, it is as if he has killed the entire humankind."[4] In fact, the full verse is: "And for this reason, we ordained for the children of Israel that whoever has killed a single human without just cause, it is as if he has killed the entire humankind." Significantly, the complete verse refers to a divine edict not found in the Torah, but rather in the Mishnah, part of the Jewish oral tradition.[5]"

Mohammad, Khaleel.  "Assessing English Language Translations of the Qur'an."  Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2005, pp. 58-71: http://www.meforum.org/717/assessing-english-translations-of-the-quran

How do they exhort witnesses testifying in capital cases? They brought them in and admonished them: Perhaps you will speak from supposition, and from hearsay, evidence from the mouth of a witness, or "We heard it from the mouth of a trustworthy person"; or, perhaps you do not know that afterwards we will test you by inquiry and examination. Know that capital cases are not as monetary suits: monetary suits - a person may give his property and effect atonement; capital cases - his blood and the blood of his offspring depend on him until the end of the world, for we find concerning Cain who killed his brother, it is written, "the bloods of your brother cry" (Genesis 4:10); it does not say, "your brother's blood" but "bloods" - his blood and the blood of his offspring. Another interpretation of "brother's bloods" - his blood was dashed on the trees and on the stones. Therefore man was created singly, to teach you that whoever destroys a single soul of Israel, Scripture accounts it as if he had destroyed a full world; and whoever saves one soul of Israel, Scripture accounts it as if he had saved a full world. And for the sake of peace among men, that one should not say to his fellow, "My father is greater than yours;" and that heretics should not say, "There are many powers in Heaven." Again, to declare the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, for man stamps out many coins with one die, and they are all alike, but the King, the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, stamped each man with the seal of Adam, and not one of them is like his fellow.  Therefore each and every one is obliged to say, "For my sake the world was created." And lest you say, "What do we need with this trouble?" Has it not already been said, "He being a witness, whether he has seen or known, if he does not utter it..." (Leviticus 5:1). And should you say, "What need is there for us to be responsible for the blood of this one?" Surely it is said, "And when the wicked perish, there is joy" (Proverbs 11:10).
[Moreshet translation]

Mishnah, 4:5 -- http://www.on1foot.org/text/mishna-sanhedrin-45

Elaine: What else did you tell [reaches over to slap Jerry] him. [does it

again] The two of you must have had *quite* a little chat!

Jerry: Oh, it wasn't like that! I didn't even mention you. You know, we

were in the garage. You know how garages are. They're conducive to sex

talk. It's a high-testosterone area.

Elaine: Because of all the pistons and the lube jobs?

Jerry: Well, I'm going down to that garage and telling him to stop doing it.

Elaine: Well, wait---wait a second.

Jerry: What?

Elaine: Isn't that a little...rash?

Jerry: No! He stole my move!

Elaine: Yeah, but...*I* like the move.

Jerry: Yeah, but it's like another comedian stealing my material.

Elaine: Well, he doesn't even do it exactly the same. He--he--he uses a

pinch at the end instead of the *swirl*!

Jerry: Oh, yeah. The pinch. *I've* done the pinch. That's not new.

Seinfeld episode: "The Fusille Jerry."  6:19, April 7, 1995: http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheFusilliJerry.htm

The bold-italics in the second passage are mine.

The unsung borrowing between writers -- or comedians and garage mechanics -- bothers me not in the least: creatives are a cross-pollinating breed and need not put the kibosh on one another for stealing a few lines of useful material -- or instruction -- now and then.

A couple of things about the literary relationship between Judaism's oral traditions as passed along in the Mishnah and Muhammad's fine choice of passage do bother me:

1. I didn't know the referenced and scholarly factoid setting this post in motion, and should I now apply myself solely to growing from such a curious speck of knowledge my own well architected crystal, what I may put together would not amount to much more than a few grains of wet sand.  Such arcane knowledge not only tells its small stories, it recalls also the oceans of time in which such language play may have represented  both a divinely indulged passtime--English has its own extensive library of fables, saws, and tropes, and I'm sure other languages do as well--as well as a technology inspiring competition for the claim of ownership and mastery.

2. Shall one count on one hand or two the number of lay Netizens likely to take inspiration from such notice?  I can count four at the moment, including at least one implied reader.  This becomes a political question where the all-together-now zeitgeist of the age could do with some large observation of the inspired nature of history-changing creative writing and ecclesiastical expression but is not likely to embrace the same en masse: between golf, NASCAR, football, and the universe of online chit-chat, few know time today as it may once have been experienced by most.

Every Sabbath, I shut down the computer as part of the pact, effectively retreating into Judaism's island in time. 

I should wonder at the effect of not reconnecting on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday.

What if?

Modernity needs its scholars, and its scholars need monk's time, unbothered, unfettered, continuous, open.

Each may have in discovery and reflection as great a journey today as any three thousand or more years ago.

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