Art of Reading by Samuel Bak

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Why History?

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  Interesting story - vignette that sounds familiar from about 80 years ago. February 1961 in Montgomery, AL where the seven states who seceded gathered to create the Confederacy one hundred years earlier … the city organized a weeklong celebration. White men dressed up as confederate colonels and women as confederate belles for a parade and fair attended by fifty thousand. There was also a pageant that told the dramatic story of secession and resistance to federal power. The parade passed directly in front of Dexter Avenue Baptist, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King, Jr. The pageant included a detailed reenactment and swearing-in of Jefferson Davis, played by a local attorney.   Judge Walter Jones said white people had gained “a deeper appreciation of the things the Confederacy fought for, and helped them to realize that unrestrained federal power is destroying this nation.” Another newspaper comment was “Today the South is facing many of the same problems it faced in 186...
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Clocks from Hell

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  Last night I finished Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. Its one of his earlier works, published in 61. At the end his main character gives an interesting analogy on extremist like Nazis or the KKK, etc. He describes them as clocks from hell. Not exactly.   Clocks, at least in the past, were built on interlocking gears and it was the teeth lining up that kept the time. He said some people file teeth off. So then the clock tells time perfect for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, then misses, then another 2 hours and 52 minutes and then misses. These people in extreme political movements have access to see the world as all of us do, to know reality as we all do. But they take some of their teeth off with a metal file. They remove the vision of, lets say, little Jewish children being so similar to their own children. So then all their gears turn and they love Wagner and Brahms, perhaps even Prokofiev Peter and the Wolf (1936), but they file off the teeth for Jewish human-likeness.  ...
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The Hearth

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"A stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house a center. Its coldness marked the morning, and the spreading of its warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the different family members tasks that defined their place in the household. The mother built the fire, the children kept the firebox filled, and the father cut the firewood. It provided for the entire family a regular and bodily engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven together of the threat of cold and solace of warmth, the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of carrying, the teaching of skills and the fidelity to daily tasks." (Albert Borgmann: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ) So what is our new center? Warmth is now provided in a completely uniform way requiring no demands on our skill, strength or attention. In fact, the warmth device (central heating system) is c...
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