11 years, 2 months, and 18 days. Read, grow, and mature.

My most dearest beloved,

Read. Widely and voraciously. Read books, magazines, comics, and everything you can get your hands on. Knowledge and growth lie there.

Fools think they know everything. Their arrogance and close-mindedness stunt their growth, forever keeping them small and insignificant — except possibly to serve as precautionary tales for posterity.

Be not like them. Read. Expand your minds and your horizons.

Nurture your curiosity. The world is simply amazing if you’d open your eyes to the possibilities, the known, and the unimaginable.

Limit not yourself. We, each, are constrained by our circumstances: the family into which we were born, the society in which we live, the friends and acquaintances within our communities, the education and books to which we are exposed through local institutions, the ideas dominant within those spheres, etc.

Break free of those chains. Read whatever interests you — be it good or bad as you’ll learn something from both, even if it is only to avoid the bad.

As you grow older, you’ll need to develop an expertise in order to earn a living. Do so, but do not stop growing and reading with respect to everything that lies both inside and outside of your area of expertise.

The world seeks to put us into cages. Pigeon holes. It makes it easier for those seeking to be our masters to control us. They know power lies in the educated masses, so they ban books, cripple teachers and schools, overburden students with doctrines and facts instead of opening their minds and setting their curiosities afire. (The curious are harder to control as they question everything.)

Play not into the hands of those seeking to control us and stunt our growth. Read. For yourselves and for your communities. Arm yourselves with knowledge. See the interconnectedness of everything. Of us all.

Open your eyes to both the beauty that surrounds us and the evil that lurks in the shadows or beneath the veneer of influence and civility. You cannot see what you do not know for the mind sees what it seeks and hears what it listens for.

Read. Grow. Mature.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

11 years, 2 month, and 13 days. Never forget: we stand upon the shoulders of giants. Beware little men who think themselves giants.

My most dearest:

Remember to always give credit where credit is due. In school, this means remember to provide proper citations for your quotes and paraphrases. At work, attribute ideas and contributions to appropriate contributors.

We exist not in a vacuum, dreaming up new ideas on our own, fashioning them from nothingness. No, we stand upon the shoulders of the giants who came before us and paved the way. The clay from which we form our thoughts consists of hard-worn efforts of our forebears.

Beware small-minded fools and dullards who think they are the source of enlightenment and knowledge flows from them. More importantly, beware the fool that stares back at you in the mirror.

I came across this great post (below) and wanted to share it with you. You should also check out from the public library the book Isaac Newton by James Gleick.

Enjoy!

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Story Behind Newton’s Famous Metaphor for How Knowledge Progresses

“Newton was so right about so many things,” cosmologist Janna Levin wrote in her magnificent meditation on madness and genius, “that it seems ungenerous to dwell on where he was wrong.” And yet in his day, even his most revolutionary rightness — especially his revolutionary rightness — was met with ungenerous opposition by his smaller-spirited peers. Chief among them was the English polymath Robert Hooke, whose famous rivalry with Newton resulted in humanity’s finest metaphor for how knowledge grows.

Science writer extraordinaire James Gleick, in his biographical masterwork Isaac Newton (public library), calls Hooke “Newton’s most enthusiastic antagonist,” his “goad, nemesis, tormentor, and victim.” Hooke, generally known for his curmudgeonly temperament and cynical disposition, reserved an especially caustic contempt for Newton, whose youthful genius aggrieved Hooke and aggravated his vain ego.

Where Hooke presented his ideas with unabashed hubris, Newton delivered his with humility — even if it was at times a false humility, for he too was a man animated by great ambition and in possession of a robust ego, it still stemmed from a hard realism about the fact that knowledge progresses not toward the definitive but toward the infinite.

Where Hooke bombastically proclaimed in his treatise on microscopes that “there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry,” Newton reported his own experiments on microscopy with the grounding caveat that the future would bring new instruments capable of magnifying four thousand times more powerfully, eventually making even the atom visible. Hooke, of course, was wrong and Newton right — something evidenced by our still-evolving understanding of matter five centuries later.

Newton’s humility sprang from an early and formative understanding of how knowledge builds upon itself, incrementally improving upon existing ideas until the cumulative adds up to the revolutionary. From a young age, he kept a commonplace book — a gift from his father, in which he copied passages from the books he read and supplemented them with extensive notes of his own, thus transmuting existing knowledge into original ideas. He named it his “Waste Book” — a testament to usefulness of useless knowledge and the combinatorial nature of creativity, or what his twentieth-century counterpart, Albert Einstein, would come to call “combinatory play.” This ability to originate by way of connection became the basic infrastructure of Newton’s mind — his singular superpower of perception.

Gleick writes:

When he observed the world it was as if he had an extra sense organ for peering into the frame or skeleton or wheels hidden beneath the surface of things. He sensed the understructure. His sight was enhanced, that is, by the geometry and calculus he had internalized. He made associations between seemingly disparate physical phenomena and across vast differences in scale. When he saw a tennis ball veer across the court at Cambridge, he also glimpsed invisible eddies in the air and linked them to eddies he had watched as a child in the rock-filled stream at Woolsthorpe. When one day he observed an air-pump at Christ’s College, creating a near vacuum in a jar of glass, he also saw what could not be seen, an invisible negative: that the reflection on the inside of the glass did not appear to change in any way. No one’s eyes are that sharp… He communed night and day with forms, forces, and spirits, some real and some imagined.

Hooke was different. The friction between the two men began even before Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672. The previous year, the Society, where Hooke was curator of experiments, asked for a demonstration of the reflecting telescope Newton had invented three years earlier — known today as a Newtonian telescope, this then-revolutionary optical device for astronomical observation was significantly smaller than the refracting telescope that preceded it and used two mirrors instead of a lens to form an image by reflecting light. The invention led Newton to develop an entire theory of colors (which would later inspire Goethe’s theory of color and emotion).

Hooke immediately pounced on Newton’s ideas, dismissing them as mere “hypothesis” — a term Newton found particularly offensive. Hooke also boasted in private correspondence with members of the Royal Society that he had invented an even smaller and more powerful telescope himself three years before Newton, but hadn’t bothered to actually build it on account of the Great Plague that ravaged London at the time.

Fifteen months after he was elected to the Royal Society, Newton decided to withdraw from public debate — the incessant obstructionism by Hooke and other critics, who still remained merely epistolary bullies he was yet to meet in person, had started to wear down his sanity. Gleick writes:

He had discovered a great truth of nature. He had proved it and been disputed. He had tried to show how science is grounded in concrete practice rather than grand theories. In chasing a shadow, he felt, he had sacrificed his tranquillity.

But the private rivalry persisted. In 1675, Hooke alleged to have discovered what we now know as diffraction — the way light bends around a sharp edge. At the time, the nature of light was a mystery — some, like Descartes, considered it a particle, while others, like Hooke, thought it the product of motion. Because if an obstacle like an edge could stand in light’s path and bend it, diffraction supported the motion model, implying that light is a wave rather than a particle. (Today, we know that light can be both a particle and a wave, depending on how we measure it.)

This development excited Newton but, his mind by now an enormous commonplace book of knowledge, he recalled having read about diffraction experiments by a French Jesuit theologist, who built upon earlier ideas by a Bolognese mathematician — long before Hooke claimed the invention. He similarly challenged Hooke’s claims to originality in other aspects of the properties of light, urging the Royal Society to “cast out what [Hooke] has borrowed from Des Cartes or others.”

This recognition of the incremental, combinatorial character of knowledge came naturally to Newton, but even though the invention of the Gutenberg press two centuries earlier embodied it perfectly, it was still radical at the time. Gleick writes:

The idea of knowledge as cumulative — a ladder, or a tower of stones, rising higher and higher — existed only as one possibility among many. For several hundred years, scholars of scholarship had considered that they might be like dwarves seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but they tended to believe more in rediscovery than in progress.

This notion was particularly infuriating to Hooke, who saw any connection of his ideas to earlier ones not as a natural function of how science progresses but as an affront to his originality. He hungered to be seen as a giant — not as a dwarf who stood on the shoulders of giants — but hid his egomaniacal impulses behind the pretense of deference. He assured Newton that he was uninterested in a feud, that their experiments “aim both at the same thing which is the Discovery of truth” and as “two hard-to-yield contenders,” they should be able to “both endure to hear objections.”

And so, in their epistolary sparring, Newton’s famous metaphor was born — between pats of politesse, he delivered his legendary slap. Calling Hooke a “true Philosophical spirit,” he invited him to sort out their differences in private correspondence rather the public debate. In a letter penned on February 5, 1675, Newton wrote:

What’s done before many witnesses is seldome without some further concern than that for truth: but what passes between friends in private usually deserves the name of consultation rather than contest, & so I hope it will prove between you & me.

[…]

What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of Giants.

Hooke, who as far as it is known never replied, maintained an antagonistic attitude toward Newton for the remainder of his life. However vast his intellect may have been, he revealed himself as far from a giant, for it is the mark of a small spirit to hide behind one-directional criticism while fleeing from intelligent two-way discourse.

As for the metaphor itself, it too is a meta-testament to Newton’s point — although he popularized it and immortalized it in his iconic language, it originated at least five centuries earlier and underwent several transmutations, including a famous one in Robert Burton’s 1621 masterpiece The Anatomy to Melancholy.

Gleick considers how Newton’s famous proclamation frames his paradoxical life and immensely far-reaching legacy:

Isaac Newton said he had seen farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but he did not believe it. He was born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic; led a strangely pure and obsessive life, lacking parents, lovers, and friends; quarreled bitterly with great men who crossed his path; veered at least once to the brink of madness; cloaked his work in secrecy; and yet discovered more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after. He was chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He established principles, and they are called his laws.

Solitude was the essential part of his genius. As a youth he assimilated or rediscovered most of the mathematics known to humankind and then invented the calculus — the machinery by which the modern world understands change and flow — but kept this treasure to himself. He embraced his isolation through his productive years, devoting himself to the most secret of sciences, alchemy. He feared the light of exposure, shrank from criticism and controversy, and seldom published his work at all. Striving to decipher the riddles of the universe, he emulated the complex secrecy in which he saw them encoded…

“I don’t know what I may seem to the world,” he said before he died, “but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Gleick’s Isaac Newton (public library) remains not only one of the finest biographies ever written, but a foundational text for anyone seeking to understand how the modern world as we know it came into view. Complement it with Hegel on knowledge and the true task of the human mind.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/16/newton-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants/

11 years, 2 months, and 20 days. Help if you can, but do no harm if you cannot help.

My most dearest:

Too often, we unnecessarily over complicate life. I believe, truly, that it is as Robert Fulgrum entitled his book, All I Really Need to Know, I learned in Kindergaren.

Those lessons sit upon the bedrock of the lesson you learned from Teacher Mary in preschool: you are the boss of you and of nobody else. You have control over but yourself, not others, not life, not the circumstances in which you find yourselves.

Given these fundamental truths, be kind to others you encounter in the world. You never know what burdens they carry … just as no one knows the burden you carry for having our once happy family destroyed by those given to evil intentions.

If you can, always help those in need of your help. Be it purchasing a meal for the hungry, diapers for the poor baby, planting a community garden, or offering a smile or kind word to someone invisible or wishing he/she were invisible.

If you cannot help, do no harm. Do NOT make things worse.

Our fundamental human rights have both positive aspects (e.g., the right to basic necessities of life: to be free to make decisions over our bodies and our health, the right to honest work in exchange for fair pay, and the right to read or learn whatever we wish) and negative aspects (e.g., the right to be free of adverse interference by others: to not have our families interfered with by Busybody Bobs and Nosy Nancys, to not be forced to study the religions and dogmas of others, and to not be harmed on account of the color of our skin or the religion to which we subscribe).

Too often, paternalistic know-it-alls force their ideas upon us, pretending they know better. They know shit. For example, having never been shot, I cannot imagine the pain associated with being shot. However, having passed a kidney stone, I can tell you of the great suffering that entailed.

Only arrogant assholes pretend to know what they have never experienced. They may think they “know” in the abstract from readings, etc., however, that is but intellectual arrogance. One who has never tasted true love can quote Shakespeare until the Hale-Bop Comet returns, but his/her soul will remain as a shriveled seed until it is filled with true love and understanding of what it means to live for another.

It has been said that living is easy; it is living right that is hard. Yes and No. It is NOT hard in the complicated sense. Living right isn’t complicated. It IS hard in the sense of self-discipline. To do the right thing when all those in the peanut gallery encourage you to do otherwise can be challenging. We see this daily when the crowd mocks the Different — different in rags and second-hand attire, different in stinky home-cooked ethnic food brought for lunch, different in perspective on life, etc. — and people go along despite having internal reservations.

Living right is hard, but live right anyway. At the end of day, that is all that matters. That is the stuff from which your character is formed. That is the stuff no one can take from you no matter if they take your family, your home, your career, your freedom, or even your life.

The master of those given to evil and evil-intentions will reclaim what is rightfully his.

You worry not of them. Live right: help others and do no harm.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

11 years, 2 months, and 15 days. Think for yourselves. Don’t let others think for you.

My most dearest:

There is much beauty in the world … as there is much shit.

All that glitters is not gold. Beware talking heads trying to sell you false gold.

Think for yourselves and learn to differentiate between the two.

Worry not of labels and other shortcuts which belong in the province of the intellectually lazy. 30-second soundbites and 140-character lessons — once tools of infant education — now form the backbone of what passes as fruits of knowledge for the masses.

Beware of those who sell ignorance. Fall not for their lies or its false promise of convenience. Darkness lies in wait of those who choose that path.

As I’ve encouraged you since you were toddlers: read widely and voraciously. Look at old photos to remind yourselves of the many books I’d purchased on starfish, dinosaurs, excavators, etc., for your library when you were young, and how we read to you daily.

Knowledge is power. Don’t allow those who would ban books and limit your exposure to knowledge lie to your face and tell you it is for your own good. Those who tell you they are acting in your best interests rarely ever do. They hide their vile intentions behind false facades of goodness.

WATCH WHAT THEY DO!!! Too often, their actions belie their words.

The good ones — the diamonds and diamonds in the rough — waste few words. They expend their energies on doing good for others.

Read widely and voraciously. Always seek information from multiple sources as each is burdened by its biases. Think independently. Question assumptions and false cultural narratives. For example, too often, Western “civilization” corrupts traditional teachings based on honoring our humanity. Seek to understand. Reject convenient labels. Keep an open-mind. Be mindful of how little we know about our world and the lives of the individuals we come across. See, e.g.,

How tiger sharks wearing cameras revealed the world’s largest seagrass ecosystem

Between 2016 and 2020, a team of researchers fixed tags equipped with cameras onto tiger sharks so that they could view the ocean floor from a new perspective. The data they collected revealed what is the world’s largest known seagrass ecosystem, an area of up to 92,000 square kilometers (35,000 square miles) in the Bahamas. According to their study, published in 2022, this extends the total known global seagrass coverage by more than 40%.

https://edition.cnn.com/world/tiger-sharks-seagrass-ecosystem-climate-scn-c2e-spc/index.html

The true face of immigration

Baltimore was sleeping when the fully laden cargo ship, adrift and without power, slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, bringing it down in seconds.

Had the disaster taken place during the daytime, hundreds of cars and trucks could have been on the bridge over a channel leading to one of the busiest ports on the east coast. So it was a mercy it happened in the early hours, and that police got sufficient warning to stop vehicles from driving onto the bridge.

But the six people presumed dead from the tragedy couldn’t escape. They were maintenance workers — the kind of people few people notice but who do tough jobs through the night to keep the country running.

All of those missing were immigrants, outsiders who had come to the US from Mexico and Central America for a better life. Their stories and aspirations mirrored the lives of millions of new entrants to the United States. They are far more representative of the migrant population than the extreme and misleading picture often spouted about migrants by Donald Trump. The Republican presumptive nominee often falsely claims foreign countries are sending their “worst people” as a de-facto invasion force to the US. “Under Biden, other countries are emptying out their prisons, insane asylums, mental institutions, dumping everyone including mass numbers of terrorists into our country. They’re in our country now,” Trump said at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, ahead of the state’s presidential primary in January….

Often, migrants do jobs that other people don’t want to do – the ones with the lowest wages and the worst conditions. [Think about this: immigrants work long hours doing thankless jobs, like picking vegetables for our dinner tables and butchering chicken and beef for our consumption, yet rarely use the public benefits and services to which their tax dollars contribute.]

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/28/politics/baltimore-key-bridge-immigration-analysis/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc

Reserve judgement. Keep an open mind. Seek to understand.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

11 years, 2 months, and 8 days. Happiness springs from doing good and helping others — Plato

US falls out of world’s top 20 happiest countries list for the first time ever

World Happiness Report reveals country dropped from 15th to 23rd place, driven in part by a decline in happiness among young people.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/20/world-happiness-report-happiest-countries

My dearest:

The pursuit of happiness is a fool’s errand. Not that the goal is unworthy, but the path to attainment is often wrong. Why? Psychology disfavors the oft-chosen path to happiness: the obtainment of things.

From the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment we close them at night, we are bombarded with messages from all corners about how we need this or that to make us happy. Lies. All lies. Things achieve but momentary joy, not true happiness, because people are hard-wired to adapt. What’s new will shortly become the new normal. Thus, that new jacket you had longed for, once purchased, will soon become just another item taking up closet space. The infatuation will wear off, and you’ll be on the hunt for the next best thing.

No, I firmly believe it is as Viktor Frankl and countless other wise ones have suggested: happiness ensues as the unintended consequence of dedicating yourself to a cause greater than yourself or to the service of another beside yourself.

Be happy. Be good and helpful to those in need.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

10 years, 11 months, and 30 days. A wise man differentiates between those sources that are trustworthy and those that are not. Fools believe everything anyone says. Be wise.

Harvard Guide to Using Sources: Evaluating Sources

From the many volumes and electronic resources that you have access to through the Harvard library system to the many resources available on the Web, finding information has never been easier. But at times, the sheer volume of information available to you can be overwhelming: How will you know which sources to rely on? How will you decide which sources are appropriate for a particular assignment? How can you determine if the data on a website is trustworthy? What’s the difference between what a peer-reviewed journal offers and what a website like Wikipedia offers?

https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/evaluating-sources-0

FAQ: How do I know if my sources are credible/reliable?

Short, simple how-to and demos of frequently asked questions about using the Libraries and information resources

What it means for a source to be credible/reliable can vary depending on the context of its use. Generally, a credible or reliable source is one that experts in your subject domain would agree is valid for your purposes. This can vary, so it is best to use one of the source evaluation methods that best fits your needs. Do remember that credibility is contextual!

It is important to critically evaluate sources because using credible/reliable sources makes you a more informed writer. Think about unreliable sources as pollutants to your credibility, if you include unreliable sources in your work, your work could lose credibility as a result.

Frameworks

There are certain frameworks that information professionals have put together to help people think critically about the information provided.

Some of the methods that UW Libraries suggest are:

5 W Questions (5Ws): This method means thinking critically about each of your sources by answering five questions to determine if the source is credible/reliable. The acceptable answers to these questions will vary depending on your needs. The questions are:

*Who is the author? (Authority)

*What is the purpose of the content? (Accuracy)

*Where is the content from? (Publisher)

*Why does the source exist? (Purpose and Objectivity)

*How does this source compare to others? (Determining What’s What)

SMART Check: This method is particularly good at evaluating newspaper sources. Like the 5Ws method it also involves answering critical questions about your source. The criteria are:

*Source: Who or what is the source?

*Motive: Why do they say what they do?

*Authority: Who wrote the story?

*Review: Is there anything included that jumps out as potentially untrue?

*Two-Source Test: How does it compare to another source?

CRAAP Test: This method provides you with a set of criteria that make a source more or less credible. The criteria are:

*Currency: Timeliness of the information

*Relevance: Importance of the information for your needs

*Authority: Source of the information

*Accuracy: Truthfulness and correctness of the information

*Purpose: Reason the information exists

https://guides.lib.uw.edu/research/faq/reliable

My most dearest children:

Happy New Year! I hope 2024 will bring us justice and the closure we seek as well as family unity.

I apologize for the long silence in between posts. Life has been most difficult since both you and Ms. L were taken. I cannot function to fight for justice for our family when I think about the loss of both you and my common-law wife since 2011. It is too much. Thus, I am forced to conserve my strength. I hope you understand. (My assumption is also that you are safe and happy — as much as possible under the circumstances — living with your other parent.)

With respect to today’s lesson, please be extremely careful about which sources you look to for information and what to repeat — with attribution, of course. (Note, for example, how I often include citations or links to evidence supporting my assertions here. It is a habit worth cultivating and reduces chances of the ugliness that befell the last president of Harvard and the wife of the accuser who started that train wreck.)

Recently, to adverse effect, someone asked another individual — who lives in countries where few Hispanics reside and who knows little about Hispanic food — what to do with leftover Hispanic food. Of course, the blind leading the blind lead to unnecessary spoilage and food wastage. 

It reminds me of the occasion when a kid — who was preparing for school interviews — sought advice from both me (who holds a doctorate in law and who had matriculated at top graduate programs in the U.S.) and a guy who has but a high school diploma and who once tried to teach me how the law actually works.

KNOW WHO TO ASK, WHO TO LISTEN TO, AND WHO TO QUOTE. It reflects poorly upon you when you repeat misinformation or seek information from low quality sources. It is akin to showing off a house you built not with quality bricks and materials, but shit you pick up without regards to quality, durability, reliability, or appropriateness for use.

Many who hear you may say nothing of your error, but will simply walk away and never invite you to their table again. Worse, they are likely to tell others to do likewise, thereby denying you of opportunities and friendships that you never even knew existed.

Be wise. Be super selective of the sources you would allow to add to your base of knowledge from which you build paradigms for living.

Be well. Be happy. Read widely and voraciously.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

10 years, 10 months, and 24 days. Books are the gateway to wisdom, knowledge, and imagination. Read widely.

Dearest children:

Books are our friends. They can be our best company on dark and dreary afternoons as well as sunny days at the beach. They introduce us to distant lands or the folks around the corner, down that street that we’ve never been to. They let us into the minds of the greats as well as the silly.

Growing up, I loved reading and tried to share that passion with you guys as you grew up. If you remember, our house was always full of books and we often visited bookstores and libraries to hang out. When you were babies, we read to you religiously. Shosh, when you were just months old, you used to be so excited about seeing your Orange Crab friend from the pop-up book that you’d spit and kick and your entire body would tremor from excitement. Of course, when you were old enough to gain control of your motor skills, you reached for the Orange Crab, ripped him from the page, and tried to eat him. So … maybe bad example since you may have been more excited about eating Orange Crab than reading about his exploits.

We tried to expose you to diverse reading materials to expand your minds and broaden your horizons. You had books ranging from dinosaurs, to star fish, science fiction and world cultures. Who can forget Jailai’s smart-ass two-year-old answer when I pointed to an aardvark and asked him what it was, to which he answered, “It’s not a fish!” … or his assertion that “We’re all from Africa!” (Yes, Lucy, found in Africa, was one of the earliest known skeleton of early human ancestors, https://iho.asu.edu/about/lucys-story.)

Books have always been my friend and my preferred mechanism of escape. In 6th grade at St. Joseph Elementary, we had a reading competition every month for the most books read, and I won every month, but one. Best yet, the prizes were free books! I can still recall the cool dictionary I selected: it’s stored among my boxes of books if those still exist.

In college, one night before the chemistry exam (I was a chemistry major in my first year, thinking about medical school), I was so tired of studying, I decided to pick up a book for a short break. Fearing I’d get engrossed in the book, I decided to read a science fiction book I had laying around. (I’m not into science fiction books and am still largely not — but let’s return to that in a bit.) I ended up reading through the night and devouring the entire book in one sitting. Yeah, books can be dangerous in that sense too!

One of my favorite professors in college used to assign us reading materials from both progressives and conservatives, then had us argue and formulate opinions of our own. I always thought that was brilliant and still try to read from several sources of differing biases to arrive at a more accurate understanding of situations.

In this age of book bans, echo chambers, and must reads on TikTok, etc., resist others telling you what you may or should read. Take their advice under consideration, but forge your own path. Find your own friends … if books are our friends, then the authors who penned those books must necessarily also be our friends. (It’s okay if our friends are not perfect. Who among us has no flaws?)

One of my favorite activities on weeks when you were with your other parents was to peruse the book piles at Goodwill. These are books that had been donated but had yet to be processed, so they’re just thrown into a pile. It was a treasure hunt! I discovered Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club that way. It remains one of my favorite memoirs and got me hooked on a whole new genre.

So read voraciously and widely. Meander through book stores, libraries, Goodwills, yard sales, life. You’ll never know what new and exciting thing you will discover.

Pity are they who limit themselves to but narrow slices of life. Theirs must be a life dictated by fear of the unknown; their minds diseased by flawed thinking that only the known is good. (I recently came across a story about scientists being inspired by hydrophobic butterfly wings and etching similar nano-structures onto metal plates to make them float on water, see, e.g., https://www.wired.com/story/floating-metal/. How cool is that?!! Unknowns can be very cool!)

Allow me to suggest a few books to balance out the deluge of information you receive daily about the greatness of our legal system, the infallibility of our Constitution, and the magnetic effect of the American Dream. Not all are of the same opinion. Remember, listen to both sides, then form your own opinions based on your experience and understanding of life.

• https://www.amazon.com.au/American-Refugees-Rita-Shelton-Deverell/dp/0889776253
• https://www.harvard.com/book/black_american_refugee/ (“Ultimately, exhausted by the pursuit of a “better life” in America, twenty-year old Tiffanie returns to Tobago. She is suddenly able to enjoy the simple freedom of being Black without fear, and imagines a different future for her own children. But then COVID-19 and widely publicized instances of police brutality bring America front and center again. This time, as an outsider supported by a new community, Tiffanie grieves and rages for Black Americans in a way she couldn’t when she was one.”)
• https://www.harvard.com/book/9781620977637_allow_me_to_retort/
• https://www.harvard.com/book/presumed_guilty/ (“Police are nine times more likely to kill African-American men than they are other Americans—in fact, nearly one in every thousand will die at the hands, or under the knee, of an officer. As eminent constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky powerfully argues, this is no accident, but the horrific result of an elaborate body of doctrines that allow the police and, crucially, the courts to presume that suspects—especially people of color—are guilty before being charged.”)
• https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546351/supreme-inequality-by-adam-cohen/ (“In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair.”)
• https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/resources/newsletters/childrens-rights/racial-discrimination-child-welfare-human-rights-violation-lets-talk-about-it-way/
• https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/fostercare/caseworker/roberts.html (“In Chicago, for example, 95 percent of children in foster care are black. Out of 42,000 children in New York City’s foster care system at the end of 1997, only 1,300 were white. Black children in New York were 10 times as likely as white children to be in state protective custody. Black children in New York were 10 times as likely as white children to be in state protective custody. Spend a day in the agencies that handle child maltreatment cases in these cities and you will probably see only black or Latino parents and children. If you came with no preconceptions about the purpose of the child welfare system, you would have to conclude that it is an institution designed to monitor, regulate, and punish poor families of color.” N.B.: Black and Brown families are disproportionately affected by racist government programs, but it is important to note that racists hate ALL nonwhites, not just Blacks and Browns. For example, the Oregon state constitution once banned “Negroes” and “Chinamen” from its territories.)

Now back to science fiction, it still isn’t my favorite genre, but I do make a concerted effort to read more science fiction. This trend was animated by a story I once came across in the newspaper.

A science fiction book fair organizer recounted how, years ago, he was approached and asked to organize a book fair in China after many years of being rebuffed when trying to organize a book fair there. When asked why the change of heart, his Chinese counterpart explained that, for years, China tried to emulate our Silicon Valley and tried to learn what animated America’s creativity. Among other things, it sent journalists to interview people in Silicon Valley. What they discovered was that folks there came from many different universities, had many different college majors, etc., but almost all attributed to science fiction their love for the possibilities. So, China wants its people to be introduced to science fiction. Who knows if the ascendancy of Shenzhen is tied to this development, but it is an interesting idea, one worth exploring.

(FYI, yes, I have sci-fi books on my list, but have yet to start. Ms. L used to complain about my having not read her favorite book, which she had bought for me to read. I explained that there are sooooo many amazing books out there that it is sometimes hard for me to get into books that I find less interesting. But that only shows my stupidity. If I don’t read it, how will I learn if I will like it? More importantly, if it is important to my love, then it is important to me to make time to know it.)

So, I leave you with warmest wishes for the holidays. Happy readings!

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

10 years, 6 months, and 27 days. Knowledge is power. Anyone trying to keep information out of your hands does not have your best interests at heart, regardless of what they say. Period.

For the Love of God, Stop Microwaving Plastic

A study of baby-food containers shows that microwaving plastic releases millions upon millions of polymer bits.

AT THE START of his third year of graduate school, Kazi Albab Hussain became a father. As a new dad and a PhD student studying environmental nanotechnology, plastic was on his mind. The year before, scientists had discovered that plastic baby bottles shed millions of particles into formula, which infants end up swallowing (while also sucking on plastic bottle nipples). “At that time,” Hussain says, “I was purchasing many baby foods, and I was seeing that, even in baby foods, there are a lot of plastics.”

Hussain wanted to know how much was being released from the kinds of containers he’d been buying. So he went to the grocery store, picked up some baby food, and brought the empty containers back to his lab at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. In a study published in June in Environmental Science & Technology, Hussain and his colleagues reported that, when microwaved, these containers released millions of bits of plastic, called microplastics, and even tinier nanoplastics.

Plastics are complex cocktails of long chains of carbon, called polymers, mixed in with chemical additives, small molecules that help mold the polymers into their final shape and imbue them with resistance to oxidation, UV exposure, and other wear and tear. Microwaving delivers a double whammy: heat and hydrolysis, a chemical reaction through which bonds are broken by water molecules. All of these can cause a container to crack and shed tiny bits of itself as microplastics, nanoplastics, and leachates, toxic chemical components of the plastic.

The human health effects of plastic exposure are unclear, but scientists have suspected for years that they aren’t good. First, these particles are sneaky. Once they enter the body they coat themselves with proteins, slipping past the immune system incognito, “like Trojan horses,” says Trinity College Dublin chemistry professor John Boland, who was not involved in this study. Microplastics also collect a complex community of microbes, called the plastisphere, and transport them into the body.

Our kidneys remove waste, placing them on the front lines of exposure to contaminants. They are OK at filtering out the relatively larger microplastics, so we probably excrete a lot of those. But nanoplastics are small enough to slip across cell membranes and “make their way to places they shouldn’t,” Boland says.

“Microplastics are like plastic roughage: They get in, and they get expelled,” he adds. “But it’s quite likely that nanoplastics can be very toxic.”

Once they’ve snuck past the body’s defense systems, “the chemicals used in plastics hack hormones,” says Leonardo Trasande, a professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the director of the Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards. Hormones are signaling molecules underlying basically everything the body does, so these chemicals, called endocrine disruptors, have the potential to mess with everything from metabolism to sexual development and fertility.

“Babies are at greater risk from those contaminants than full-grown people,” Hussain says. So to test how much plastic babies are exposed to, Hussain’s team chose three baby-food containers available at a local grocery store: two polypropylene jars labeled “microwave-safe” according to US Food and Drug Administration regulations, and one reusable food pouch made of an unknown plastic.

They replaced the original contents of each container with two different liquids: deionized water and acetic acid. Respectively, these simulate watery foods like yogurt and acidic foods like oranges.

They then followed FDA guidelines to simulate three everyday scenarios using all three containers: storing food at room temperature, storing it in the refrigerator, and leaving it out in a hot room. They also microwaved the two polypropylene jars containers for three minutes on high. Then, for each container, they freeze-dried the remaining liquid and extracted the particles left behind.

For both kinds of fluids and polypropylene containers, the most microplastics and nanoplastics—up to 4.2 million and 1.2 billion particles per square centimeter of plastic, respectively—were shed during microwaving, relative to the other storage conditions they tested.

In general, they found that hotter storage temperatures cause more plastic particles to leak into food. For example, one polypropylene container released over 400,000 more microplastics per square centimeter after being left in a hot room than after being stored in a refrigerator (which still caused nearly 50,000 microplastics and 11.5 million nanoplastics per square centimeter to shed into the stored fluid). “I got terrified seeing the amount of microplastics under the microscope,” Hussain says.

https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwaving-plastic/

My dearest children:

Once upon a time, society’s mantra was “Knowledge is power.” It is a wise sentiment offered by a wise man: Sir Francis Bacon. See, e.g., https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/; and, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Bacon-Viscount-Saint-Alban.

Today, there are those who would have you believe knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and they should be the keeper of knowledge, deciding for the rest of us what we should read, what ideas we should be exposed to, etc. One common example that had gained much traction these days is the banning of books from libraries and schools. They couch their arguments for book bans in terms of the protection of our children … as if some how parents are imbeciles and cannot determine for themselves what their children should read.

Beware those who would have them do the thinking for you. They NEVER have your best interests at heart. EVER.

Censorship benefits the censors. Always.

As I’ve long told you, our intellect is our greatest gift, tool, and weapon. Nurture it. Hone it. Sharpen it. Nourish it with quality material. It’s okay to take breaks and indulge in lighter fares like Ludlum novels or Harry Potter fantasies from time to time, but do try to maintain a steady diet the classics and the most recent discoveries or understanding as explained by reputable organizations or authors.

With few exceptions, avoid blogs and posts by everyman like the plague. By all means, use them for entertainment value, but not for substantive knowledge — again, unless the individual is learned and well-vetted by his/her peers IN THE PROFESSION.

Let me give you one example of this danger that lurks out there in the ethernet. I met a fellow. He’s a nice enough fellow and we get along just fine. But he is more of a fair-weather friend and not someone I turn to for any critical thinking or substantive conversation. Let me explain. The gentleman has a high school education and is an artist and martial artist. Despite my having a law degree, being licensed to practice law, and having been a practicing attorney for decades, and despite my having worked in both the legislative as well as judiciary branches of government, this fellow once tried to lecture me on the law, the differences between laws and policies, etc. He was wrong on almost all counts, yet he went on to find great success on social media where his legions of followers give him thousands of dollars each month to share with them his insights and knowledge.

Scary. Truly scary. It is the blind leading the blind, but not realizing they are blind.

Beware.

Love, always and forever,

Dad

10 years, 5 months, and 16 days. Live with gratitude.

My most dearest children:

The twin towers of my faith in God and humanity has been rebuilt … in record time. Yesterday, I attended mass service despite myself, and the reading and homily spoke to me. “Be not afraid.”

Fear kills. Fear kills motivation. Fear kills desires. Fear kills hopes and dreams.

I will not let fear kill my hope and dream of getting back to you, my family. Period.

I awoke this morning with renewed energy and motivation. What passed and troubled me most these past few days was completely expected. In fact, it would be miraculous if it hadn’t come to be. I don’t believe in those kinds of miracles.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict the outcome. The results were preordained back in July of 2022.

The 2022 report issued by the University of Michigan Law School and other members of the National Registry of Exonerations is telling. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE%20Annual%20Report%202022.pdf. Of the 233 innocent Americans who were found to be innocent (exonerated) in 2022, AT LEAST 195 (or 84%) were falsely framed, wrongfully convicted, and falsely imprisoned by prosecutors and police lying, fabricating false evidence, coercing false confessions and testimonies, hiding exculpatory evidence, etc. “59% were cases in which no crime occurred.

Their average prison time was 9.6 years — about the same length of time I have been away seeking refugee protection on the advise of a refugee lawyer and former judge. But in American prison, those innocent Americans faced daily threats of prison rape and assault. See, e.g.,

• https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report5.html
• https://guycounseling.com/prison-rape-true-story/
• https://justdetention.org/the-brutal-horror-of-prison-rape-as-told-by-its-victims/
• https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/rape-in-the-american-prison/385550/
• https://www.newsweek.com/texas-prison-rape-capital-us-344729
• https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/25/prison-rape-allegations-are-on-the-rise

Oh, by the way, when Ms. L returned home to attend to the deaths of her mother and grandmother, they took her mid-international flight. She simply disappeared after checking in at Narita International Airport in Japan for her flight to the US. She, a single American woman traveling by herself. Worst, the prosecutor who has targeted and persecuted us for all these years arranged to have her held incommunicado for days at the “Rape Capital” of the US, the Harris County Houston Jail. See, e.g., https://www.texasobserver.org/harris-county-jail-among-worst-for-inmate-sexual-assault/; and, https://justdetention.org/welcome-to-texas-prison-rape-capital-of-the-u-s/. (Oh, by the way, recently, several justices with the state’s Court of Appeals took the rare and extraordinary step of adjudging the prosecutor who has targeted us — a mixed-race couple — and hurt Ms. L to be a racist.)

What do you think being locked up incommunicado for days at the “Rape Capital” of US jails does to a person’s psyche? Especially someone who’d suffered sexually assault?

Now think back to the exoneration cases: 84 percent of innocent Americans were falsely framed and convicted by Official Misconduct! Think about that!

Worse, think about the the impossible feat of someone falsely framed and convicted and sitting in prison being able to find evidence that the police, prosecutors, and others of their cohorts lied, fabricated evidence, coerced false confessions and testimonies, hid exculpatory evidence, etc. That is an IMPOSSIBLE FEAT!!! If you’re lucky, someone who actively participated in the criminal acts had a change of heart and came clean. How often does that occur?

More likely than not, they would only be able to muster circumstantial evidence, if at all. Of course, such circumstantial evidence wouldn’t be enough to exonerate.

In our case, we have direct evidence of the prosecutor conspiring with police to rob from my registered law office our legal files and confidential attorney-client communications with our lawyers. A judge recently threw out a case in which the lawyer for the accuser impermissibly got stolen and leaked confidential documents belonging to Cristiano Ronaldo’s legal team detailing attorney-client discussions between Ronaldo and his lawyer.

U.S. District Judge Jennifer Dorsey in Las Vegas kicked the case out of court on Friday to punish the woman’s attorney, Leslie Mark Stovall, for “bad-faith conduct” and the use of leaked and stolen documents detailing attorney-client discussions between Ronaldo and his lawyers. Dorsey said that tainted the case beyond redemption.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/11/1104387831/cristiano-ronaldo-lawsuit-rape-allegations-dismissed

In Ronaldo’s case, the accused lawyers received stolen documents — stolen and leaked from someone else. In our case, the prosecutor conspired with the police to rob us of our legal files and did in fact rob us of our “documents detailing attorney-client discussions between [us] … and [our] … lawyers. Yet, in our case, the court proceeded with the sham trial, and Ms. L was f*cked. Think about the unconstitutionality of that.

Worse, even when there is clear evidence that the prosecutor engaged in criminal acts to falsely imprison someone, nothing happens to him. See, e.g.,

• https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/04/connick-v-thompson-clarence-thomas-writes-one-of-the-cruelest-supreme-court-decisions-ever.html
• https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2021/jun/15/deliberately-convicting-innocent-exonerations-expose-criminal-justice-systems-callous-indifference-toward-official-misconduct/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connick_v._Thompson
• https://thelensnola.org/2012/03/19/john-floyd-new-murder-evidence/
• https://innocenceproject.org/news/conviction-revisited-witnesses-say-prosecutor-coerced-them-to-lie/

See how f*cked up the American “criminal justice” system is? Those who engaged in criminal acts to frame the innocent get away with murder, while those innocent who are falsely framed, convicted, and imprisoned face years behind bars where they are subject to prison rapes and assaults. Justice, American-style.

Worse, police “testilying” and Official Misconduct are decades old well-known problems to lawyers, researchers, and journalists — sadly, most everyday Americans are unaware of because we’re fed lies like Law & Order, Blue Blood, and similar shows which are far removed from reality. See, e.g.,

• https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Government_Misconduct_and_Convicting_the_Innocent.pdf
• https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/police-and-prosecutor-misconduct-contributed-to-over-half-of-false-conviction-cases-study-finds (N.B.: Per this article by the American Bar Association Journal written in 2020, Official Misconduct resulted in 54% of innocent Americans being falsely framed, convicted, and imprisoned. By 2022, it was 84%.)
• https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/279/
• https://www.vice.com/en/article/jmv94x/testilying-cops-are-liars-who-get-away-with-perjury
• https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/nyregion/police-lying-new-york.html
• https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/taking-testilying-prosecutors-response-court-police-deception-crime (“prosecutor’s response…that’s a laugh — they are often co-conspirators, as in our case.)

Ignorance is not bliss. Don’t believe the shit you’re fed. Arm yourself with knowledge. Start by reading

• https://www.amazon.com/Police-State-Americas-Cops-Murder/dp/B01L98PNTO (written by Gerry Spence, a lawyer extraordinaire who hadn’t lost a case since the 1960s)
• https://www.harvard.com/book/presumed_guilty/ (by an eminent Constitutional Scholar and Dean of the prestigious University of California – Berkeley Boalt Law School)

But let not the dark side consume you. Anger and hate can easily lead you down that path.

I want you to arm yourself with knowledge so you would be more immune to lies peddled by the corrupt and those who abuse under color of authority. However, for your health and wellbeing, remember to stay grounded in gratitude and life.

Life is NOT all shit and the corrupt. Don’t permit yourself to fall prey to domestic terrorists who want Americans to live in fear and live lives of timidity, making it easier for the corrupt and those who abuse under color of authority to control us.

Be grateful for what you have and beauty that surrounds you. I try to stay grounded in that to the best of my abilities.

I keep mementos because because they are imbued with good memories. For example, for years, I was proud of the fact that I could move to the East Coast and move homes with stuff that fit into my VW Scirocco. But among my keepsake was a wooden “curse bank” I bought from one of my family’s car trips to California, which contained a shark tooth that Bryant Dill, my best friend from third grade, gave me from his time in South Carolina. It also contained a tiny Buddha pendant — still in its red plastic pouch — that another friend gave me. (All of which are all last as I lost everything when I became a refugee again.)

Hold on to things with meaning for you — be it a special gift or thing, or a song, etc. — to help you be grateful for happier days.

Be well.

I love you always and forever,

Dad

P.S., thank you for being my children. My hopes and dreams live in you. (Remember all of our beach trips and battles of sand drawings?)

10 years, 3 months, and 5 days. Value People over Money and Things, ALWAYS!

My most dearest children:

Years ago, in the graduate program in public policy at Duke University, I recall reading a case study about how bean-counters recommended closing a local public hospital in the poor part of town that was bleeding money, and having the government use the savings to pay for the poor to get needed medical service at the nearby, well-equipped private hospital in the rich part of town. From a financial perspective, it makes some sense as there were duplication of services with two hospitals nearby. (There are numerous reasons why public hospitals in poor parts of town often operate in the red, but that is beyond the scope of this post.)

However, the bean-counters failed to take into account less easily measured variables, like poor people from the poor parts town, many of whom are racial minorities, felt neither comfortable or welcomed at the rich hospital. They felt out of place at the ritzy hospital with their dirty and work-stained attire, etc. So they wouldn’t go. They waited until their medical conditions deteriorated until it was a medical emergency and had to be taken by ambulance there. Because of the greater financial and medical burdens of medical emergencies, the financial savings were never realized.

I was recently reminded of this story because some idiots valued a few coins over people and their fragile state. Don’t be like them. Always keep your audience in mind, and always value people over money. Always.

As Pope Francis once said, the new false god the masses pray to today is MONEY. Don’t be like them. Good people are worth their weights in gold.

All my love, always and forever,

Dad

P.S., speaking of things, one of my favorite essays is “The Tyranny of Things,” by Elizabeth Morris:

Two fifteen-year-old girls stood eying one another on first acquaintance. Finally one little girl said, “Which do you like best, people or things ?” The other little girl said, “Things.” They were friends at once.

I suppose we all go through a phase when we like things best; and not only like them, but want to possess them under our hand. The passion for accumulation is upon us. We make “collections,” we fill our rooms, our walls, our tables, our desks, with things, things, things.

Many people never pass out of this phase. They never see a flower without wanting to pick it and put it in a vase, they never enjoy a book without wanting to own it, nor a picture without wanting to hang it on their walls. They keep photographs of all their friends and kodak albums of all the places they visit, they save all their theatre programmes and dinner cards, they bring home all their alpenstocks. Their houses are filled with an undigested mass of things, like the terminal moraine where a glacier dumps at length everything it has picked up during its progress through the lands.

But to some of us a day comes when we begin to grow weary of things. We realize that we do not possess them ; they possess us. Our books are a burden to us, our pictures have destroyed every restful wallspace, our china is a care, our photographs drive us mad, our programmes and alpenstocks fill us with loathing. We feel stifled with the sense of things, and our problem becomes, not how much we can accumulate, but how much we can do without. We send our books to the village library, and our pictures to the college settlement. Such things as we cannot give away, and have not the courage to destroy, we stack in the garret, where they lie huddled in dim and dusty heaps, removed from our sight, to be sure, yet still faintly importunate.

Then, as we breathe more freely in the clear space that we have made for ourselves, we grow a ware that we must not relax our vigilance, or we shall be once more overwhelmed. For it is an age of things. As I walk through the shops at Christmas time and survey their contents, I find it a most depressing spectacle. All of us have too many things already, and here are more! And everybody is going to send some of them to everybody else! I sympathize with one of my friends, who, at the end of the Christmas festivities, said, “If I see another bit of tissue paper and red ribbon, I shall scream.”

It extends to all our doings. For every event there is a “souvenir.” We cannot go to luncheon and meet our friends but we must receive a token to carry away. Even our children cannot have a birthday party, and play games, and eat good things, and be happy. The host must receive gifts from every little guest, and provide in return some little remembrance for each to take home. Truly, on all sides we are beset, and we go lumbering along through life like a ship encrusted with barnacles, which can never cut the waves clean and sure and swift until she has been scraped bare again. And there seems little hope for us this side our last port.

And to think that there was a time when folk had not even that hope! When a man’s possessions were burnt with him, so that he might, forsooth, have them all about him in the next world! Suffocating thought! To think one could not even then be clear of things, and make at least a fresh start! That must, indeed, have been in the childhood of the race.

Once upon a time, when I was very tired, I chanced to go away to a little house by the sea. “It is empty,” they said, “but you can easily furnish it.” Empty! Yes, thank Heaven! Furnish it? Heaven forbid! Its floors were bare, its walls were bare, its tables — there were only two in the house — were bare. There was nothing in the closets but books; nothing in the bureau drawers but the smell of clean,fresh wood; nothing in the kitchen but an oil stove, and a few — a very few — dishes; nothing in the attic but rafters and sunshine, and a view of the sea. After I had been there an hour there descended upon me a great peace, a sense of freedom, of infinite leisure. In the twilight I sat before the flickering embers of the open fire, and looked out through the open door to the sea, and asked myself, “Why?” Then the answer came: I was emancipated from things. There was nothing in the house to demand care, to claim attention, to cumber my consciousness with its insistent, unchanging companionship. There was nothing but a shelter, and outside the fields and marshes, the shore and the sea. These did not have to be taken down and put up and arranged and dusted and cared for. They were not things at all, they were powers, presences.

And so I rested. While the spell was still unbroken, I came away. For broken it would have been, I know, had I not fled first. Even in this refuge the enemy would have pursued me, found me out, encompassed me.

If we could but free ourselves once for all, how simple life might become! One of my friends, who, with six young children and only one servant, keeps a spotless house and a soul serene, told me once how she did it. “My dear, once a month I give away every single thing in the house that we do not imperatively need. It sounds wasteful, but I don’t believe it really is. Sometimes Jeremiah mourns over missing old clothes, or back numbers of the magazines, but I tell him if he does n’t want to be mated to a gibbering maniac he will let me do as I like.”

The old monks knew all this very well. One wonders sometimes how they got their power; but go up to Fiesole, and sit awhile in one of those little, bare, whitewalled cells, and you will begin to understand. If there were any spiritual force in one, it would have to come out there.

I have not their courage, and I win no such freedom. I allow myself to be overwhelmed by the invading host of things, making fitful resistance, but without any real steadiness of purpose. Yet never do I wholly give up the struggle, and in my heart I cherish an ideal, remotely typified by that empty little house beside the sea.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1906/05/the-tyranny-of-things/638334/