Paul Vitols's Blog, page 33

be a bookworm—save the world

So how am I coming along with my liberal education, you ask?

You may recall from an earlier post that I put a high value on liberal education, and have been persuaded by the writings of Mortimer J. Adler and Robert M. Hutchins that only with such an education can one be a truly free citizen, and that only a society made up of such citizens can itself be called free, whatever might happen to be in its constitution.

As the Greater Depression deepens around us, we hear increasing calls for governments to "do something". Is Greece defaulting on its debts? Yes. Do something! Governments themselves encourage this way of thinking by pointing fingers at each other and warning they must do something. Fix this!

In the much smaller and more localized depression of the 1890s in the United States, the Democratic president Grover Cleveland was also subjected to pressure to "do something". He resisted such pressure, being of an outlook that the American economy was not really the government's business.

He was probably the last president to hold such a view. The financial panic of 1907 led the U.S. government to centralize control of banking and the money supply with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. The two world wars occasioned massive interventions in the economy, in which the federal government commandeered resources and factories, creating all the enabling legislation and vastly expanding its bureaucracy in order to manage its new provinces. The Cold War and then 9/11 allowed the government to go on a permanent war footing, with all the appropriation of resources and curtailment of freedoms that entails.

Canada has been less militaristic (although there we are in Afghanistan and Libya, among other places), but our governments have also grown vastly. Income tax, introduced as a temporary measure to defray the costs of World War I, has massively increased, but the government spends much more than even this, financing the remainder with debt. More and more of us are directly dependent on government for employment, contracts, or welfare.

Dependent and docile. We remain passive unless things really start going wrong, and then we yell. But what good is such yelling?

I'm interested by the "Occupy" movement that has people camping out in cities in amorphous protest. The Wall Street location of the original suggests that the issue is essentially economic justice. This is a reasonable and very interesting topic—but how much do the protesters, or those interviewing them, or any of us, know about it? What is economic justice? Is there such a thing? Does it mean something more than "you have lots, I don't, give me some"?

I'm saying that a meaningful discussion of this topic can occur only among those who are liberally educated. Close to 0% of the population is competent to talk about it or think about it. We don't have the education. Yes, we're lawyers and managers and dentists, but training in those fields does not make us competent to discuss ideas meaningfully. Yes, we can see when greedy, powerful opportunists are able to lay their hands on large amounts of easy wealth at others' expense. And I assume that some of them will be scapegoated in due course.

But that's all it will be: scapegoating, demonizing, and emotional outbursts. With no wide comprehension of the ideas involved, it can't really go anywhere else. We won't be anywhere near discussing root causes or engaging in a true controversy: the discussion of legitimately differing points of view. There will be chaos, violence, and misery; what there won't be is comprehension.

Lacking a liberal education myself, I can't even promote it as effectively as I'd like to. I feel that all I can do is try to soldier on with gaining one as best I can on my own.

With the indispensable help of books, of course. The volumes I've got on the go right now that I regard as part of my liberal education are:

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, volume 5 of the Britannica Great Books
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Idea of Love by Robert G. Hazo
A Study of History 3: The Growths of Civilizations by Arnold J. Toynbee

It's quite a pile, but I love it.

My fear is that when revolution comes and the existing world political-economic order is swept aside in the next few years, it will be done once again by the Mussolinis and Hitlers and Maos. It will be a convulsion of the uneducated, actuated by envy and revenge, and not guided, as it should be, by ideas.

Maybe the Marx Brothers said it best:

Zeppo and Chico have gotten into some kind of a jam.

Zeppo: We've got to think!

Chico: Nah, we already tried that.

Maybe I will after all make a try at working these things through. Maybe I'll look at what "economic justice" might be in an upcoming post.

Meanwhile, I'll keep reading.

The Pentagon by Steve Vogel

The Pentagon: A History by Steve Vogel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this book in August 2008 as part of my ongoing effort to learn more about the American "military-industrial complex". It turns out that there are not many books on the Pentagon; this was one of the few devoted to it. Admittedly it appeared to be mainly about the actual building rather than the institution itself, but I hoped that a "bricks and mortar" account might nonetheless provide a useful sidelight on the institution, and, having now read it, I feel it has done so.

Steve Vogel's history of the building is built around three events: its original construction (about 300 pages); the attempted storming of the Pentagon by antiwar protesters in October 1967 (50 pages); and the terrorist strike on 11 September 2001 (80 pages). The remaining 70 pages link up these events with highlights from the intervening years. From a purely structural and, as it were, architectural standpoint, the book is devoted to its bookends of construction and post-9/11 rebuilding, and the rest of the book is a sketch to connect those events, with the drama of the 1967 protest causing this episode to occupy more space than its purely architectural significance would justify.

One thing I was hoping to learn from the book was more about a piece of information I had picked up in James Carroll's excellent House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, that Franklin Roosevelt, when presented with the original proposal for the Pentagon, had ordered its makers to cut it to half its size, and they had instead gone ahead and built it to full size anyway. To me this seemed like a significant indication of how military power was usurping the prerogatives of civilian power in the U.S., and I wanted to know exactly how it had played out.

Mr. Vogel's book delivers those goods in spades. He details every twist and turn in the tortuous story of how the Pentagon was commissioned, designed, and built, including the many-sided tug-of-war over where exactly the building would be put and how big it would be. The issues of power and control in any complex project with many strong-willed participants—and the building of the Pentagon was certainly this—become murky. I was reminded of an image that came to my mind from my experience making a TV series: decision-making is less an orderly chain of command than a pack of dogs pulling on a carcass. In this case the carcass was the world's largest office building and what would become the ganglion of history's largest and most globe-gripping military force. The participants, from the president on down, were indeed strong-willed, as well as powerful, quirky (in some cases mentally ill), and all too human.

Why is the Pentagon a five-sided building? Why was it built in Virginia instead of in D.C.? Why was it such a departure from the neoclassical architecture of the capital up that point? These and many other questions are answered by the book, and some of the answers were, to me, surprising. The symbolically powerful pentagonal shape, for example, arose from an initial hasty sketch of the proposed building, formed so that it could occupy as efficiently as possible the irregularly five-sided property it was originally intended to occupy. When the site was changed, things were moving too fast to make any major changes to the design other than massaging its irregular pentagonal shape into a regular pentagon—and voila, the Pentagon was born.

Many other things too happened by seeming serendipity. While no aspect of the would-be Pentagon was without controversy and even vehement opposition by influential Americans, the wheels for its construction were thickly greased by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The Japanese were thus able to achieve what no American could: to focus the mind of the Sleeping Giant and get Americans behind the Pentagon project.

And what a project. As one who has worked in corporate project management, I really appreciated this aspect of Mr. Vogel's book. He delivers a sense of the feel of a large project: the chaos, the urgency, the fear, the interpersonal politics, and yes, the achievements. Whatever your attitude to the institution of the Pentagon—and mine is quite negative—as a feat of engineering and project management at the biggest scale, the construction of the actual building was amazing, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading about it.

Steve Vogel's writing is clear and fluent; he makes the complex project easily understandable and portrays its people vividly and sympathetically. An ex-serviceman himself and a longtime correspondent for The Washington Post, Mr. Vogel does not indulge in flag-waving or overt patriotism in this potentially highly charged topic. He does convey a strong sense of the heroism of people during the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and the trauma suffered by the families of the slain. And he even records the misgivings some of those survivors had upon listening to George W. Bush use the occasion of the dedication of the memorial to those slain to hint at his intention to invade Iraq.

I'm still looking for a really good book about the Pentagon as an institution, for I believe that the increasing militarism of American society necessarily implies a drain of the country's sovereign power from the White House and the Capitol to the Pentagon—a structure never envisaged by the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, before World War II the standing army of the Unites States was relatively small; afterwards, it ballooned to match its outsized headquarters at Hell's Bottom, Virginia, and has never really looked back. Roosevelt's cherished hope that the Pentagon would become a national archive after the war was probably a nonstarter, and the paranoia of the Cold War provided a perfect accelerant for the political cancer of militarism, against which mere presidents, as Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961, are powerless.

But if there is such an institutional history of the Pentagon out there, or if one comes along, Steve Vogel's book provides an excellent background document. Form and function are always closely linked, and after reading The Pentagon I feel I know it as a physical place—one in which real people have worked and died. Their problems as workers in the world's largest office building have been my problems as an office worker: getting lost in the building, commuting, dealing with the crappy indoor climate, the ego clashes of self-important bosses. They're just trying to do their job. Speaking as a citizen of planet Earth, I feel it's unfortunate what that job now is. But Steve Vogel has told the story of their building very well.

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sketchbook: Thursday 27 October 2011

THU 27 OCT 2011 ca. 1:00 pm LOUTET PARK

We're up here so that Kimmie can finish spraying fixer on the shoes she's prepared for Robin's Halloween costume: Dorothy's red shoes from The Wizard of Oz: a cheap pair of high-heeled pumps that Kimmie has found a way of applying red glitter to. The shoes do sparkle, but the first spraying of fixer yesterday in the common garage rendered the basement floor of our house, including my office, uninhabitable. The pungent, feltpen smell of volatile organics pervaded the air and wafted upstairs. I insisted on an outdoor location for the final coat today. Kimmie, in her lilac-colored sweater, now sits chin in hand on the small set of bleachers by the high chainlink fence. The shoes glitter on the ground nearby.

Our Corolla is the only car in this small parking lot by the fenced-off baseball field, where a sign proclaims "Home of North Vancouver Girls Softball." A few other signs hang on the chainlink: "Reserved: Keep Off"; "Please: No Dogs on Sportsfields"; "No Dogs Allowed"; "Field Closed"; and a green graphic sign depicting a red diagonal slash through the cream-colored silhouette of a dog.

Surrounding the field are trees—cedars and tattered alders—and the blue heap of Mount Fromme beyond. It could be a quiet rural scene, but past the screen of trees where Kimmie now stands is The Cut: a long steep slope of Highway 1, with a heavy continuous noise of traffic like a nearby waterfall, punctuated with the roar of diesels as they gear down, sounding like aircraft taking off.

Close by a stuccoed outbuilding rests on the lawn: it houses the changerooms. Cream-colored and dirty, it looks like a massive cube of cake.

The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval & Adrian Gilbert

The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids by Robert Bauval

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My personal introduction to the Great Pyramid of Giza was in January 1982, when I traveled to Egypt. At that time there were few tourists, so I made my way alone up the Grand Gallery, mysterious, massive, and steep inside the man-made mountain, and for a time stood alone in the King's Chamber at its top. I was surprised to find the chamber so plain—no hieroglyphics, no carvings&. It was like standing in a damp, dim concrete room, like a change-room at a public swimming pool, with the big, plain stone "sarcophagus" looking more like a broken watering trough for livestock. In short, the chamber, like the rest of the innards of the Pyramid, suggested a feeling of functionality, even if it was impossible to guess what that function was.

Fast-forward to March 1994. Browsing through the shelves of Westernesse, a used bookstore here in North Vancouver, I came across, in their "new" section, a copy of the Element Classic Edition of The Great Pyramid Decoded by Peter Lemesurier. Intrigued by the book's high quality, detailed illustrations, and unconventional viewpoint, I bought it ($24.95—expensive at the time). I started reading and quickly became fascinated and excited. It was the first I'd ever heard of the phenomenal physical properties of the Pyramid and its encoding of a number of mathematical and astronomical quantities and proportions, including approximations of pi and phi (the irrational quantity that generates the Golden Section), accurate lengths of the tropical, sidereal, and anomalistic years, and accurate representations of the Earth's polar and equatorial radii—among many other things. I was astonished, electrified. I had no difficulty believing the author's contention that the Great Pyramid was something vastly more and vastly other than the mere tomb of a vainglorious king—one whose body was never found in the monument.

I came to see the Great Pyramid as the single greatest puzzle on Earth, the greatest monument to the question of human origins and destiny. We have forgotten the purpose of the most marvelous and stupendous structure ever built. What does that say about us?

Since the collapse of the Egyptian civilization a shroud of ignorance has fallen over Giza. The Pyramid's brilliant white casing stones have been stripped from its surface, perhaps to build mosques in Cairo, and people have dynamited their way into the Pyramid in their lust for treasure. (What does that say about us?)

In the following years I dug further into the question, reading works by John Anthony West, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, and Graham Hancock. My first encounter with the work of Robert Bauval was in his role as coauthor, with Graham Hancock, of The Message of the Sphinx, which came out in 1996, two years after The Orion Mystery. (The Sphinx is perhaps an even greater mystery than the Great Pyramid.) Since that book already took account of the discoveries documented in The Orion Mystery, I didn't bother to get the latter book. But something (I forget what) flagged my attention back to the earlier book, and I ordered a copy.

I'm glad I did. Bauval, a native of Alexandria and a civil engineer by trade, is the antithesis of a New Age crackpot. Cautious, objective, and humble, he provides a good "outsider's" view of the standard theories about the Pyramids, showing good familiarity with the various people and texts that have presented these. For the New Age may have its crackpots, but orthodox, mainstream Egyptology has no shortage of its own. And in any field where there are such large gaps in the factual knowledge, there is no doubt a greater danger that scholarly consensus will be mistaken for truth. Egyptology needs fresh thinking, new ideas—it needs more Robert Bauvals instead of dismissing them as "pyramidiots," one of the actual terms used by Egyptologists.

The book is a narration of how Bauval developed his own theory of the origin and purpose of the Egyptian pyramids. Quite a bit of it is concerned with the details of his efforts to get more information and his dealings with professional Egyptologists, most of whom were dismissive of his ideas. There were important exceptions, though, such as the warmth and interest he was shown by I. E. S. Edwards, octogenarian former Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum—the more important because he was regarded by many as the foremost authority on the Egyptian pyramids.

Bauval's theory is that the complex of pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty was conceived and built as whole: a gigantic, multigenerational megaproject. They, along with the river Nile and the ancient cities of Heliopolis and Letopolis, mapped a portion of the heavens, and served specific funerary functions, although they were not tombs of individual pharaohs. Rather, they were a system to ensure the flight of the dead pharaoh's soul to the stars, and his rebirth as the next pharaoh.

I won't say more about the specifics so as not to spoil the reading, journey, which does indeed read something like a mystery. The account of Bauval's discovery of the correlation between the Giza pyramids and the belt of Orion is delightful and authentic. Adrian Gilbert, listed as coauthor, is an English publisher with whom Bauval joined forces when they discovered a shared interest in the pyramids. It seems that Gilbert provided organizational, research, and editorial help to a project that was really Bauval's. The book is narrated in Bauval's voice.

I learned a lot of new things in The Orion Mystery, and I say this as someone who has studied the Great Pyramid more than casually over the years. I suppose I would sum things up thus: if you're interested in the mystery of the Great Pyramid of Giza, then this book is required reading for you. And if you're not interested, you should be.

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sketchbook: Wednesday 19 October 2011

WED 19 OCT 2011 ca. 10:30 am GRANVILLE & BROADWAY

The black steel bench is cold; the thrum of traffic is insistent, loud, and close. I'm facing east across Granville Street while Kimmie has her teeth cleaned back on Burrard Street.

It's turned cooler, more nearly overcast: the gaps in the cloud cover are small and shrinking. The sun glows distantly beyond a ragged patch to the southeast: light seeking its way through grottos of cloud.

A pigeon has alighted in front of me, looking almost expectant. Clean and blue-gray, it flaps away again. A squad of travelers streams from the bus that has pulled in, people unconnected with each other except for their choice and time of transport. A minute Chinese woman walks the other way, tapping a pink umbrella, wearing a plaid crushable hat. She boards the #10 bus, which, with a short fart of pneumatics, readies for departure and is gone.

Dumptruck rounds the corner, yellow-green, almost military-brindled; trucks snarl up Granville generally.

The buildings here are low-rise, oldish. Across Granville are the boutiques Bombay and ella. The old brick building on the corner, which I remember as a business school decades ago, is now vacant in its 2 upper floors; the tall vertical rotating sign suspended from the corner of the building to project over the sidewalk is stationary. It reads Kaplan, and below it a For Lease sign is hung on the wall. The ground floor is still occupied: Blenz Coffee and a Chinese jeweler whose name is partly hidden by a blighted little tree out front.

Now the Granville bus has pulled in front of me, interposing its big square windows.

Over the intersection is a crisscrossing tangle of wires, mainly for the electric buses. Little yellow leaves fall occasionally from the maple-trees standing at intervals on the hardpan of the broad sidewalk—silent corpses that sometimes lift like little hands in a stirring of air.

sketchbook: Tuesday 18 October 2011

TUE 18 OCT 2011 ca. 1:00 pm NORTH VANCOUVER DISTRICT LIBRARY

There's a plasticky smell here, exhalation of the naugahide chair. It's soft and cubic, a kind of nondescript taupe color, maybe a tad yellowish. There are four chairs in this alcove by the high windows. And now I'm joined by a retired guy opposite: tall in his white golf-shirt and ball cap, leaning on his right arm as he flips through Maclean's magazine. On the coffee table between us, a low rectangle of yellow-green wood, the color of French Canadian pea soup or of pondwater in sunlight, are strewn a few other publications: People magazine, Metro newspaper, and today's Province, with a full-page face shot of a young man with close-set eyes and the large superimposed headline "Charged," and in smaller type: "with the murder of four women". Each of these journals hangs partly off the edge of the table: a scene of hurry and carelessness.

There is a breathy hum of a large blowing fan, presumably the HVAC system. There are sounds of thumping and ruffling, objects being stacked or sorted or moved, out of sight. Sunlight falls diagonally across the nubby brown-green carpet. Out those high windows is the sunlit plaza, with its parked bicycles and steel chairs and tables belonging to a café. People amble toward the auto-sliding door of the library like wasps returning to a nest. A teenager has sat himself on the pavement by the bike rack, and is now joined by a friend who stands talking to him, hands stuffed deep in his jeans pockets, wool cap pulled down maximally over his head. Now they're joined by a third, hair in a long brush-cut, and they all stand idly talking by the door.

Inside, a sense of cedar and space: high concrete ceilings with great ribbed HVAC ducts running along it; large white cylindrical lamps hang down low, to just a couple of feet above head-height.

Now: sirens loud on Lynn Valley Road; they shoot past and quickly grow quieter. And a Chinese man, slim, middle-aged, troubled-looking, takes hold of The Province and settles into one of the chairs opposite: the one by the window.

sketchbook: Monday 17 October 2011

MON 17 OCT 2011 ca. 1:45 pm SAFEWAY PARKING LOT

The sun is hot and bright, but the air streaming by is cool, scented faintly with sweet baked goods or rubber. The lot is nearly full; cars prowl like great insects looking for their resting places.

"It shocks me when people do that."

Scruffy man talking to a woman he has approached here in the parking lot. He wears old black sweatpants, a baggy olive-silt sweatshirt, and a red ball cap. He is unshaven. And now:

"I got her licence plate and the mark matches up," says the metallic-red-haired woman, returning to the man. Apparently he witnessed a parking-lot collision.

A kind of desert: paved ground, blue expanse of sky, sun nude of any cloud, blank cinderblock walls. People backing cautiously, turning, new takers pulling in to stalls still warm from the previous car.

"How do you spell licence?" says the woman behind me, presumably asking the scruffy-looking man.

A pair of women walk by, one elderly, one middle-aged. Young couple arrive at the jeep parked next to my car—girl in a salmon-colored shirt, and a small wiry young guy in an apple-green shirt and ball cap.

"OK we'll be back," says the girl to the occupant of the jeep, slamming the door.

A plaintive canine whining begins from within.

The rattling trundle of the old shopping carts, rusting and misaligned.

Brambles are massed at the wall of the deserted white-brick building just beyond my car. A separate paved lot next to it is cracked, disintegrating. A little girl with a springy mop of blonde curls runs across it, her black leotards scissoring as she gambols along.

An old man pushes his wheeled walker, holding one bag of groceries. A young bearded man belches loudly as he passes the old man, his leather boots scuffing the pavement confidently.

And I'm in jeans and jean jacket, standing at the right-rear quarter-panel of my car, leaning over the trunk lid, Staedtler ballpoint wriggling over the page. The cool breeze puffs erratically by: air that has come from somewhere cold.

The Idea of Justice by Otto A. Bird

The Idea of Justice by Otto A. Bird

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This short monograph sets out to clarify—not to resolve—the ancient idea of justice and thereby enable the reader to recognize and compare different arguments on and appeals to it.

The Idea of Justice was one of five such monographs created by the Institute for Philosophical Research in the 1960s under the guidance of the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. (The others were The Idea of Freedom, The Idea of Happiness, The Idea of Love, and The Idea of Progress.) They are all Great Ideas, as identified by Adler in his Syntopicon to The Britannica Great Books of the Western World series published in 1952. Through the 1940s Adler and his Britannica team compiled a list of the greatest books in the Western tradition and made an inventory of the idea content of the entire list—in effect, the main ideas discussed by the greatest writers in the Western tradition.

It was no small task. It took Adler years just to develop a method of identifying the ideas discussed in the great books, and several more years, working with a large, dedicated, and—needless to add—highly intelligent team, to establish a list of them. The number of ideas they came up with was 102 (later expanded to 103 with the inclusion of the Great Idea of Equality). These monographs treat five of those 102 ideas. It was Adler's hope that the Institute would go on to treat all of them, but for whatever reason this did not pan out. So what we've got are books on five key and controversial Great Ideas.

The approach taken by the Institute was unique. While Otto A. Bird was the author of The Idea of Justice, this book, like the others, was a collegial effort of the Institute as a whole, in that the ideas and drafts were circulated and discussed repeatedly among the team before the book was published. The intention was to expunge any bias or personal editorial viewpoint on the part of the author. And while it's not possible to achieve this, their method brought them as close to this ideal as can be done.

For The Idea of Justice is not a philosophical work, but rather, as the author stresses, a dialectical one. Its aim is not to establish what justice is or is not. Its aim is to summarize and to clarify the various competing theories of justice that have been advanced in the Western tradition without showing preference to any of them. In order to do this, the author had to survey a vast literature, identify the key assumptions and components of the different theories of justice, group them into families based on shared characteristics, and then find a simple and clear way of comparing and contrasting them with each other. And in all this he succeeded admirably.

The topic itself is sprawling and diverse. Different writers have different views and even different definitions of justice, many of which are implicit rather than explicit. Bird kept studying the material and boiling it down till he found that all writers on justice, no matter how they differed with each other in other ways, agreed on three basic points, or as Bird terms them, the "common notes" of justice:

Justice is a social norm
Justice is approbative
Justice is obligatory

Or, in other words: Justice involves relationships between people; justice is preferable to injustice; and justice imposes a duty on us that we are not morally free to reject.

Examining all the writings from these points of view, Bird discovered six fundamental issues in the question of justice:

Is justice the same as legality?
Is justice a criterion of law?
Is justice based on natural right?
Is justice, in any sense other than that of legality, an objective norm of human action?
Is justice obligatory on its own, apart from legal or social sanctions?
Is justice a distinct virtue?

Based on the answers to these questions, Bird determined that there are three basic theories of justice, which he names the Positive Law theory, the Social Good theory, and the Natural Right theory. For each of these he identified a number of "paradigm authors" whose works are the most typical and complete for the theory in question. Three of these authors are Thomas Hobbes (Positive Law theory), J. S. Mill (Social Good theory), and Thomas Aquinas (Natural Right theory).

He sets out the arguments of each of these theories in turn, and finally discusses the nature of the controversies between them: how they criticize each other and defend themselves.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Bird's work here. For while the issue, and therefore the idea, of justice is important to each of us, what do we really know about it? We often hear—or say—"that's not fair!", but what exactly do we mean? Do we mean something beyond "I'm not getting as much as I want!"?

As Bird observes, even the paradigm authors do not each address all the issues contained in the idea of justice; often their views are implicit and must be deduced from what they say. Or one author's views must be supplemented with those of another author in order to flesh out the full implications of a theory and make it complete and consistent.

No individual writer on justice in history has shown such a complete view of the topic as a whole as you can see in this book. No writer has demonstrated a knowledge of the full range of the issues connected with justice and how they relate with each other. They had not done the dialectical work that Otto A. Bird has done. Now, because he has done it, any reader of The Idea of Justice will come away with a broader and clearer grasp of the idea of justice, its key issues, arguments, and theories, than was possessed by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, or John Stuart Mill.

Think on that.

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sketchbook: Thursday 13 October 2011

THU 13 OCT 2011 ca. 12:30 p.m. AMBLESIDE BEACH

Sitting with Kimmie in the direct sunshine. We're on a little wooden bench on the paved esplanade whose bronze plaque reads:

Robert Fiddes & Family

West Vancouver

Pioneers

Behind me is the thump of a basketball being slowly dribbled. The cries of distant gulls; the barking of a lone dog; the swish of leaves in the breeze blowing onshore; the beeping of a reverse-gear alarm somewhere far away. The beach is almost deserted. No one passes on the gray, foot-churned sand; no one sits on the bleached logs embedded in it; no one is in the active, blue-gray water. A small white sloop leans a short way offshore. Behind it, the straightedge of the horizon is dark against the pale powder-blue sky.

No, the few people here are pedestrians on the esplanade: young woman in gray sweater and jeans, cool unapproachable face; mentally disabled young man in a red ball cap, making a long repeated statement to a little girl walking with him.

And now another gap, quiet but for the sullen thud of the basketball.

sketchbook: Wednesday 12 October 2011

WED 12 OCT 2011 11:50 am MOM'S DRIVEWAY

Have just pulled in for lunch, have a few minutes for a sketch.

A sense of dark-green forest with holes in the roof through which light shines. Mail carrier strides up the mossy walk with a package—and now back. White shirt, blue shorts. Wet leaves all around: wet bracken drooping from the planter at the center of the paved circular drive, wet fir-boughs, massed wet laurel on the far side of the circle. The carport, built in the 1960s, still looks unfinished: woodframe and plywood built over the concrete pad. A gray Saturn parked in the enclosing dimness. On the wall of plywood that covers half the entrance, a white cartoon outline of a great dove, drawn by Harvey, the property's previous owner. Green garbage-bin, couple of old lifejackets, some mismatched clay plant pots stranding on an apron of moss.

It's not exactly quiet: the pocking of a nail-gun somewhere in the distance; the dragged-out moan of vehicles topping the little hill in the road; until a minute ago, the nagging snarl of a generator at a roadbuilding site nearby. Now: a power saw grinds into something. And another car, more stealthy, grunts over the crest. Hammer blows. But also the delicate twitter of a little bird, the harsh coughing of crows, and the metallic peck of waterdrops hitting the roof of my Corolla.

Time to go in.