civilized ku # 303 ~ Merry Xmas and a ... say what?

Say again • click to embiggenA Merry Xmas and/or Happy Holidays to one and all.

Enjoy your HDTV if Santa brought you one and good luck with "Some Assembly Required" and instructions translated by someone after / during an office party (in China).

Comments

[Mike C]

Thanks for the laugh! The instructions certainly were penned after a party of some kind. Funny - the best slaughter of the English language in assembly instructions yet.

P.S. Looking forward to Chargers-Titans game in an hour....yes, in HD.

[James]

I received an email from a close friend on Christmas morning. To oversimplify things a great deal, we've had quite a few discussions about "nature" over the years and what the word "nature" truly represents in the first place and why it has created such a pull for me and less so for him depending on how it is defined. In his email, having talked about this at length with me over the years, he wrote, "I turn, of course, to C.S. Lewis when it comes to matters of the spirit, and I think you might like what he's got to say." He then included the following from Lewis:

"For some people, perhaps especially for Englishmen and Russians, what we call "the love of nature" is a permanent and serious sentiment. I mean here that love of nature which cannot be adequately classified simply as an instance of our love for beauty. Of course, many natural objects--trees, flowers, and animals--are beautiful. But the nature lovers whom I have in mind are not very much concerned with individual beautiful objects of that sort. The man who is distracts them.... Nor are they looking for "views" or landscapes. Wordsworth, their spokesman, strongly deprecates this. It leads to "a comparison of scene with scene," makes you "pamper" yourself with "meager novelties of color and proportion." While you are busying yourself with this critical and discriminating activity, you lose what really matters--the "moods of time and season," the "spirit" of the place. And, of course, Wordsworth is right.... It is the "moods" or the "spirit" that matter.
Nature lovers want to receive as fully as possible whatever nature, at each particular time and place, is, so to speak, saying. The obvious richness, grace, and harmony of some scenes are no more precious to them than the grimness, bleakness, terror, monotony, or "visionary dreariness" of others. The featureless itself gets from them a willing response. It is one more word uttered by nature. They lay themselves bare to the sheer quality of every countryside, every hour of the day. They want to absorb it into themselves, to be colored through and through by it."

I thought The Landscapist and readers might also be interested in what Lewis had to say. Happy holidays to everyone...