Find Something Beautiful Today

Happy Valentine's Day!

[Photo by Laura Ockel at Unsplash]

"Bombholed"

A solid hit below the water line.

Conductor at Work

 

Acquittal

Law professor Jonathan Turley wrote this yesterday on the impeachment trial in the Senate.

Weekend Leadership Reading about Jeff Bezos

Wally Bock has the assignments.

[Photo by Super Straho at Unsplash]

What's on Your Wrist?

FutureLawyer compares his wrist gizmo to an expensive but standard wrist watch.

Memoirs

"I did not have to wait for more than a few minutes. Then, to the chagrin and annoyance of the mighty, an attendant appeared and whispered to me to accompany him. I smiled amiably and followed him into the police chief's office, a large airy room with a massive desk set against one wall. The man behind it had a still youthful face, but one on which burgundy and lobster already seemed to have left perceptible traces. He politely extended a soft, well-tended hand, exposing his small protuberant belly. I noted how well dressed he was, and remembered that his friends had mentioned this. He owned several hundred ties, eighty suits by Saraceni, the most expensive tailor in Rome, and countless pairs of shoes made for him by a bespoke bootmaker who was no less expensive and just as well known." 

- A description of a 1936 encounter with Arturo Bocchini, the chief of Mussolini's secret police, from The Interpreter: Memoirs of Doktor Eugen Dollmann

Everyone knows about the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle but those by the lesser-known can be even more interesting. [Eugen Dollmann was both charming and repulsive. A scholar, he went into the SS and translated for Hitler and other Nazis.]

Here are some other unusual memoirs that I recommend:

• Chronicles of Wasted Time and The Green Stick by Malcolm Muggeridge
• Churchill by Lord Moran
• Captured by History by John Toland
• The Past Has Another Pattern by George Ball
• On the Border with Crook by John Bourke
• Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
• The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven

Your recommendations?

First Paragraph

 About ten years ago I gave a set of lectures at Harvard in which I made the observation that all theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography, and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining as honestly as he can the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with all its ups and downs, its mysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truths about human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there. More as a novelist than as a theologian, more concretely than abstractly, I determined to try to describe my own life as evocatively and candidly as I could in the hope that such glimmers of theological truth as I believed I had glimpsed in it would shine through my description more or less on their own. It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that if God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks. Someone we love dies, say. Some unforeseen act of kindness or cruelty touches the heart or makes the blood run cold. We fail a friend, or a friend fails us, and we are appalled at the capacity we all of us have for estranging the very people in our lives we need the most. Or maybe nothing extraordinary happens at all - just one day following another, helter-skelter, in the manner of days. We sleep and dream. We wake. We work. We remember and forget. We have fun and are depressed. And into the thick of it, or out of the thick of it, at moments of even the most humdrum of our days, God speaks. But what do  mean by saying God speaks?

- From The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days by Frederick Buechner

Yuja Wang Break

 

Something to Ponder

 To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb