Snow + Quotes of Note + A Book Recommendation

This is what we woke up to yesterday morning. 3" and still falling. Bah. We got about 4 " altogether.

My back yard.

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I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has.

Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the U.S. (1809-1865)

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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there -- lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)

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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust, novelist (1871-1922)

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I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.

Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

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The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)

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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.


John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)

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Until yesterday, I had 45 "followers" and now I have 44. Who broke up with me? Was it something I said?

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I've just read "The Year of Fog", by Michelle Richmond, and I recommend this page-turner! The book jacket reads....."Here is the truth, this is what I know: I was walking on the beach with Emma. It was cold and very foggy. She let go of my hand. I stopped to photograph a baby seal, then glanced up toward the great Highway. When I looked back, Emma was gone."

This book is a mystery, and it is educational and thought-provoking too. Here are some quotes from the book:

"A painting can last for centuries, even millennia. The Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, and the Mayan cave drawings are proof of this. But a photograph is, by its nature, a transient work of art. The moment a photograph is transferred to paper, the slow process of erasure begins. The purpose of photography is to stop time, but time inevitably erodes........Photographs represent our endless battle against time, our determination to preserve a moment: the sweet baby girl before she become a difficult teenager; the handsome young man before his body is won over by baldness and fat; the honeymoon trip to Hawaii, before the happy couple becomes two strangers, living angrily under the same roof. I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism: it is in our nature to believe that the good things will not last."

There is a lot in the book about memory; how it functions and how it serves us.

"Memory is not unlike a photograph with multiple exposures. One event is layered on top of another, so that it is impossible to distinguish between the details of the two. The older we get, the more multiple-exposure memories we have. Temporal relationships become elastic. As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the lives we have had."

I found it very engaging and I hope you will enjoy it too. Admittedly, it will probably interest women more than men.