What Counts is the Set of Your Sails, 
Not the Gales

Among art's most important purposes, it should exult, it should inspire, and should aim for the exalted and the beautiful.  Among the poets taken most seriously by the Twentieth century's literati, there was less of this exultation than in the century before them--a sad and disheartening fact.

Here is Ella Wheeler Wilcox, an ebullient cheerleader from that earlier century, who offers some guidance for unfolding your life, a voice that confidently sang out long before the debilitating fog of postmodern nihilism rolled in from the sea of bad philosophy.

                      Winds of Fate

                      Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One ship drives east and another drives west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sails
and not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.

Like the winds of the seas are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through the life:
Tis the set of a soul
That decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

E   P   N

2018.1021

"Dawn Patrol," a silly little poem with commentary

"Dawn Patrol"

Eric Paul Nolte

A little poem below, a tiny burst of sweet silliness I wrote, along with some commentary on why I came to write it.

Terri is campaigning, slowly but slyly, to get a dog. I resist because dogs are so much work. But I do love dogs anyway! I especially remember how much I loved Star, starting when the girls were little. Star was a big old black standard poodle. Well, actually he was more gray than black, and he was half a size smaller than a standard poodle, but what a winning smile and eager mien! We all adored him.

Now, I just stumbled across a lovely article in The Science Dog, by Linda P. Case, called "I Yawn for Your Love," which describes studies done on the nature of canine yawning. She opens her article by describing how her dog, a Brittany named Vinny, begins every day by yawning hugely in her face.

On her Facebook page, Cynthia Gillis posted Ms. Case's article and there challenged our mutual friend, John Joseph Enright, to write some verse, which John subsequently did with his usual, inimitable wit.

A line or two came to my mind, so I too tried my hand at writing a little, um, doggerel (as it were) on the subject, and amused myself for a few minutes with this silliness.

Here it is:

                             Dawn Patrol

Rising just above the distant mountain ridge,

The sun's slender crescent swells at dawn

While Vinny, Linda's Brittany, creeps and peeks

Above his sleeping master's sheets. Then with a gaping yawn

Of dog breath wafting up her nose--oh, how she freaks! 

And then he crawls across her legs as if upon a bridge

And pulls abeam her face to softly nuzzle Linda's cheeks! 

                                          E P N

2018.1017

Guidance for Reinventing Oneself

Guidance for Reinventing Oneself

Eric Paul Nolte

A young friend, Felix Mueller, just posted on Facebook an engaging little meditation on how he and his wife, Kate, made their way to America from Germany not long ago. He feels that he is now facing some difficult choices in life. 

I too am facing some tough choices, but where Felix is a young man, I am down at the other end of the road.

I am feeling compelled to reinvent myself in the wake of my retirement, which was mandated by an Act of Congress. 

I wrote Felix:

Your path has been very impressive so far! I have been delighted to follow the story of your and Kate's unfolding.

I greatly identify with the matters you are now wrestling with.

However, I think it may miss the point to say, as you do, that this kind of struggle may just be a part of being young. It's not youth, per se, of course, because it greatly depends on the individual!

There are people young and old who remain deaf to the very idea that they have much of a choice in steering their lives on any personal course across the sea of life.

Others of any age can know that life is essentially a matter of making choices.

I believe that most of us acquire our values and, more broadly, our sense of life by an uncritical process of breathing-in whatever ideas happened to be in the air when we dropped off the branches of the tree into which life delivered us.

Nothing so passive for you or others like us who made our way to Ayn Rand's challenging ideas!

Now I find myself at the other end of life, teetering on the brink of Old Geezerhood, with my career as an airline pilot ended by an Act of Congress--that bossy, meddlesome gang that always thinks it knows better than we how to run our lives-- that got me frog-marched out to pasture just because I turned 65 years old.

In short, I am having to reinvent myself in the same way that so many feel compelled to do right after college.

For me, I never had to struggle to find things I loved. Rather, my problem has always been how to limit my pursuits to a path that is practicable.

I loved airplanes, music, writing, philosophy, history, literature, science, economics--all things that were artistically and soulfully expressive, or that offered explanatory power for why people do the weird and wonderful things they do!

I remain fascinated by physics and especially by those philosophical aspects of the field that made such a confusing account of things.1

So, my advice, for what it's worth, as I formulate it for myself:

I want to create for myself a life of joy, meaning, purpose.

I need to identify and unfold the gifts I am lucky enough to have.

Which gifts? Most of us have more gifts than a single life can allow us to develop very fully. So which ones should I pursue?

I should strive to identify something that lies at the intersection of:

1. Something I love, something I feel I can learn to do unusually well (if not uniquely well) in the world;

2. A pursuit that stands perhaps the best chance of letting me feel that I have shown up in the world in a way that can make a difference like only I can make.

3. At the end of the day, I need to feel that I have loved doing what I do and that I have nurtured a circle of loving friends and family.

All these are the very stuff of life.

A final point: think about how Alex Epstein as a philosopher is taking the wonderful project he created, the Center for Industrial Progress, into what may become a fount of goodness, sanity, and truly world-shaking gravity! Alex has created for himself and his like-minded associates a place of meaning, purpose, and joy that attracts customers to pay him enough money for him to thrive and flourish!

Felix, I will follow your and Kate's continued unfolding with interest!

Viel Glück!

E P N

________________________________________________________

1. There were epistemological rabbit holes that snagged Einstein [like the analytic-synthetic dichotomy], and then there was the Kantian skepticism that seduced Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, et al, who brought their already committed and contradictory assumptions about the essential Unreality of Reality to bear on their formulation of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the nature of light--i.e. that light is not just a puzzling matter that needs to be further investigated because it displays characteristics of both particles and waves, but rather to say that light is a "wavicle." Right, it’s a wavicle. Now we know! Hallelujah! No need to look into this matter any further! Which is like saying that now we understand something because, "God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it. QED."

2018.1013

word count, c. 810