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In ancient Rome, March was the first month of the year (that's why October, November, and December were the 8th, 9th, and 10th months). Thus from a certain perspective March 1st is New Year's Day - a time of longer days, returning light, fresh growth, new life, and renewed commitments.
February 2026 was a difficult month for me, having endured the loss of my dear Elisa and then our dog Red, too. Our little family went from four to two in three weeks - now it's just me and our dog Chance. Yet I am blessed with loving family, dear friends, caring neighbors, a strong community, a lovely house, a serene location, abundant nature, beautiful art, financial independence, good health, numerous interests to explore, and long-term projects to complete before my days are done. Life is movement and activity and aspiration, and the finest way for me to honor the dead is to keep living and growing according to the best I have within me.
Over lunch soon after Elisa's passing, my friend Dave Jilk mentioned an essay by science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, who says that if you want to publish books then you need to write four hours a day. Yesterday I was reading a book about jazz composer and teacher Lennie Tristano, who similarly told his students they needed to practice four hours a day. Given that I have aspirations in both writing and music, it sounds like I might need to dedicate eight hours a day to realizing my goals!
Actually, over the last two weeks I have been writing about two hours a day, and as a result I've drafted the first two chapters of my book about Aristotle's conception of human fulfillment. At this rate I might finish the draft of all six chapters in March or April. And after learning of Tristano's recommendation, I've set a goal of practicing music two hours a day, too. Perhaps I'll work my way up to four hours a day each, but two is a good place to start.
In addition, I've realized that I need to take better care of myself physically, so I'm working to improve my health and fitness through diet and exercise.
However, lest you get the wrong impression, I'll say that my renewed commitments are not only about me, me, me. I'm easing the burdens of some of my family members in various ways, and I'm about to start tutoring immigrants in English as a Second Language through my local library, which I did before I became a more or less full-time caregiver to Elisa. Further commitments might emerge as I deliberate about how to give back at this stage in my life.
As Elisa liked to say, all you can do is all you can do. I'm doing the best I can.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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It's been a long two weeks since my dear Elisa passed away. It goes without saying that losing your partner in life is a harrowing experience. Yet in the midst of the darkness there are rays of light and sources of solace. Here are a few that have soothed me in my time of grief:
These sources of solace don't fill the hole in my heart, but they do help to ease the pain somewhat.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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My dear Elisa's passing last week has brought an entire epoch of my life to an abrupt end. This rupture has re-opened my eyes to the inescapable fact that my sands too are running. Given that I'll turn sixty about six months from now, I've realized that the next epoch is the final third of my life.
What can I make of this?
The question has two senses. The first sense is reflective: What is the significance of reaching this point in my life? How can I account for where I am? What account can I give of myself? What are the implications for my identity, my relationships, the roles I play in my family, friendships, and community?
The second sense is active: What should I do now? How shall I fill my days? What changes should I make in how I live? What long-term projects must I complete while I have the energy to do so? What meaning can I create in this final third of my life?
Although it might take time to find the answers, this is the urgent soulcraft in which I am engaged as I grieve for my dear Elisa.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Her sands have run; her thread has reached its end.
The woman whom I singled out to stride
With me through time, together at my side,
Is wife no more, nor life, nor soul, nor friend.
I joyed with her in every hour through years
Of wedded bliss; there was no cause to part.
Now I can’t fill the void within my heart;
My soul must seek a way through all its tears.
She was my earth, my moon, my star, my sun;
I’ve lost my ground, my tide, my guide, my light;
The future seems no day but only night.
Her thread has reached its end; her sands have run.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
Related to my post "Aristotle on Freedom" last year, here is a timely quote from Book V of Aristotle's Politics on the free person's innate resistance to tyranny, founded in that illustrious but elusive character trait known as greatness of soul:
[A] valued person in both [tyrannies and democracies] is the flatterer: in popular governments this is the demagogue, since a demagogue is a flatterer of the populace, and with tyrants it is those who hang around them in a self-abasing manner, which is how flattery works. And it is for this reason that tyranny is friendly to corrupt people, since tyrants enjoy being flattered, and this is something no one who thinks like a free person would do. Decent people are friends; in other words, they do not flatter. And corrupt people are useful for corrupt employments - a nail hammered at a nail, as the proverb has it. And it is characteristic of a tyrant to take no pleasure in anyone dignified or free [ἐλευθέρος]. For the tyrant considers himself to be the only person of that sort, and anyone who matches him in dignity and carries himself like a free person robs tyranny of what is exceptional and masterful about it....
These things and their like are the characteristic of tyranny and are safeguards of its rule, and there is no sort of vileness they leave out. One may say that they are all encompassed within three forms, for tyranny aims at three things. One is for its subjects to think small, since a small-souled person [μικρόψυχος] would not plot against anyone. A second is for them to distrust one another completely, since a tyranny cannot be overthrown until some people have trust among themselves. And this is the reason tyrants make war on decent people as detrimental to their rule - not just because such people do not think they deserve to be ruled like slaves by a master, but also because they are trusted, among themselves and by others, and do not inform on their own kind or anyone else. And the third aim is a lack of power for action, since no one attempts impossible things, and hence no one overthrows a tyranny if the power to do so is not there. So the ultimate terms into which the intentions of tyrants are reducible are just these three, since one may trace every tyrannical measure back to these three underlying purposes: making the people not trust each other, making them have no power, and making them think small. (1313b29-1314a29, translated by Joe Sachs)
Or, as Thomas Jefferson once put it: "I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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About 110 years ago (in America we can conveniently date it from the 1913 Armory Show), the shock troops of aesthetic Modernism blew it all up. Disgusted with third-rate late Romantics, this self-proclaimed avant-garde decreed the destruction of meter in poetry, tonality in music, depiction in painting and sculpture, and in all the arts what they derided as the banality of beauty. Instead of seeking regeneration through artistic movements within the broad framework of what had been built up and bequeathed to them over thousands of years, they decided (for reasons I don't fully understand) that we needed to destroy everything first in order to create anew.
At this point we can declare that we've run the experiment and it was not a success. Four or five generations on, the "artworld" is full of third-rate late Modernists, just it was once full of third-rate late Romantics. Although they continue to pat themselves on the back for sticking it to the bourgeoisie, today's institutionalized, bureaucratized, subsidized shock troops no longer shock. Instead, they've reached the end of the line: they have become banal.
I think we deserve better than a culture of banal, third-rate ugliness, don't you?
This doesn't mean we have to return to the banal, third-rate prettiness which preceded the Modernist revolution. That's neither possible nor desirable, in large measure because we should have learned some valuable lessons from the Modernist experiment. Because those lessons are specific to each art form, here I'll limit myself to the two in which I'm active: music and poetry.
As to music, I wrote about it recently so I won't go too deep here. Suffice it to say that when the emptiness of much late Romantic music became clear, atonality (especially in the form of serialism) was not the only path forward. If we revisit that fork in the road, we can see and hear that composers like Sibelius, Bartók, Scriabin, and Ravel were scouting out different kinds of tonality rather than discarding tonality entirely. In an American context, the tonalities and rhythms of jazz represent a priceless gift that even now is far from fully explored; composers like William Grant Still, Florence Price, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Thelonious Monk were exemplars of creativity and insight who all on their own should be able to inspire a few hundred years of music-making! For myself, I'm intensively studying, practicing, and composing along these lines and will have much more to share in the coming years.
As to poetry, I'll simply say this: meter matters. The measure of a meter is called a foot for a reason: it's what makes language dance. The arbitrarily truncated lines of Modernist poems limp and hobble like some klutz who just twisted his ankle on a tennis court without a net. Such poems might look intriguing on paper the first few times you see them, but they don't sound or sing.
Not that we want to go back to the vapid skipping of 19th century sonneteers, mind you. At its best, Modernist criticism and practice demonstrated that the poet's craft had become flabby with unnecessary adjectives, padded lines, hackneyed metaphors, forced rhymes, and plenty of other cruft.
But between hobbling and skipping there are some striking and spectacular forms of motion and emotion: dancing, spinning, whirling, sauntering, ambling, strolling, striding (à la Art Tatum and James P. Johnson), maybe even strutting with some barbecue (as Louis Armstrong would have it). For American poetry, here too the rhythms of jazz come into play, as in the poems of Langston Hughes and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.
Beyond American shores, one of the beauties of poetic form is that it's a worldwide and timedeep phenomenon: dozens of languages and cultures with celebrated poetry traditions have developed unique rhythms and measures, from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter, from pantoum to villanelle, from sestina to sonnet, from waka to haiku, from alexandrine to chant royal, from Sapphic to Anacreontic. These forms and many more provide numerous tonalities, as it were, for poetic composition.
And that's not even to get into styles like high, middle, and low; genres like epic, dramatic, narrative, didactic, elegiac, and lyric; and movements like Metaphysical, Romantic, Symbolist, Imagist, and yes even Modernist.
With this endless bounty to work from, it's a shame that English-language poetry of the last hundred years has mostly narrowed to short, free-verse, confessional, lyric poems. Boring! For myself, my primary poetry project these days is an epic poem in blank verse about Pyrrho and Alexander the Great. Take that, Modernists!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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