Tuesday, February 10, 2009

New Glasses

For the last couple of months I have been squinting more. It's become harder and harder to read ahead.

I went to the eye doctor last Saturday and sure enough, in the last two years, my eyes have changed to the point that I needed a new prescription. New lenses with a new frame.

Reading ahead. It was becoming harder and harder to see myself in the new organization that was developing since my company was purchased by another. Then in November I got a call from a career doctor and he had a new prescription:

A new job. In Vermont. Matching my skill set. In a forward-looking company. With nice people.

And so the adventure begins...

Monday, February 02, 2009

John Updike – on “Going to Church” - from Pigeon Feathers and other stories

There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church.

Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for us one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts?

To listen, or not listen, as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts, hopelessly compromised by words, of those intimations of divine joy that are like pain in that, their instant gone, the mind cannot remember or believe them; to witness the windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers arranged by withdrawn hands and the whole considered spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance; to pay, for all this, no more than we are moved to give—surely in all democracy there is nothing like it.

Indeed, it is the most available democratic experience.

We vote less than once a year.

Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one equals one.