One Talking Oak Leaf
Saturday Report from Your Friendly Leaf-Lover. Don’t miss little miracles. One oak leaf surviving a week of bad weather is a sign of perseverance. Oakley!
You may think I’ve been stupid posting this leaf all week. Perhaps you’re right, but the holidays this year are bringing pain and heartache to many near and far. The leaf is my rose for winter —still beautiful to me.
Diane: On this Oak Leaf; and then on your note on Professor Timothy Snyder.
You are a gifted artist with a poetic mind to concentrate and meditate upon the perfectly formed maple leaf.
This is a spirituality of the poet.
This is the spirituality of meditation in Buddhism.
It is "foolish" in the sense that Socrates was "foolish," Jesus was "foolish," the Buddha was "foolish," or Emily Dickinson was "foolish."
I am foolish in this way, too.
Second topic.
Today is the Feast of the Bishop, Saint Nicholas.
Yes. THAT Saint Nick.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8578
Your citation to Professor Timothy Snyder was your St. Nicholas Day present to me.
As you know, Professor Snyder, with his wife, were distinguished professors at Yale who started the brain drain from Trumpdom to the world-renowned University of Toronto.
With Ukraine on the front line, Western Europe and President Biden at least made a start in defending the great land. Not least, the West gained by a major expansion of NATO, the breaking of the neutrality of Switzerland, and sustaining aid to Ukraine.
Under Trump, it has been a painful betrayal of one of our dearest friends for the defense of Democracy.
The project with its culture and history of the great peoples of Ukraine is a sacred trust to a magnificent culture.
As one who has read (in German translation, mostly) all of the work of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (in English), and who listens carefully to Shostakovich -- I love Russian culture.
My favorite Concert Pianist was the great Emil Gilels.
That's the Russian version of the great Ukrainian name.
In Ukrainian, it is Hillels. In other words, a name after the House of Hillel (which was in friendly rivalry with the House of Shammai) in the time of the New Testament.
Professor Snyder says this:
"We are told that, under stress, the humanities must be sacrificed -- of what use are literature, philosophy, and history when we have problems to solve right now?"
This is not new.
Read "Demons" by Fyodor M. Dostoevsky (translation of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)!! (I read it in the translation of Swetlana Geier (native speaker of both Russian and German.)
There, Pushkin and other greats (Shakespeare) are denounced by a Socialist clique -- With the upcoming Revolution, the Poets are not even as useful as a hammer or spade. A blacksmith is of more worth.
Demons was written in the 1870s, yet it reads exactly like the Bolsheviks forty years later! "Demons" has revolutionary cells that are conspiratorial.
The leaders are totally for worker and farmer and have no use for art and poetry, it all has to work under a dictatorship of the proletariat for agriculture and industry, with no room for the humanities.
The same obscurantism from the 1870s to now!!
Diane: You are a gift, and you have given me in the article a great gift. By the way, the name of Swetlana Geier (the German translator of all of Dostoevsky's work), "Geier" means VULTURE!! LOL!!!
Thank you so much, dear friend.
Actually I am inspired. My best to Mr Leaf.