In Company with Simon Stylites

I'm here in Cambridge, England, for the Mayweek Seminar, and have been fairly busy preparing my remarks on the virtue of magnanimity in Cicero's De Officiis, especially, the contrast between Cicero's treatment of that virtue and Aristotle's.

This is a fairly sharp change in subject from the difficulties in Aristotle's Metaphysics which I have recently been considering, and that largely explains the paucity in posts over the last week.

I also sometimes find it difficult to post on something that I don't have definite thoughts on yet. Sometimes it seems that a post can help me think, but other times I want to think something through more without sharing with others, yet, what I have formulated. Currently I'm in the latter condition.

So here is a lighthearted post involving scenes from the homestead in Massachusetts, which we call "Sparrow's Nest". The first is a photograph of that noble yet elusive Great Blue Heron which frequents our pond in the summer. It showed up this last week. Viewing it, I find it easy to believe that birds are descended from dinosaurs, because, given its size and the character of its movements, it looks how I suppose in general a (smallish) dinosaur might have appeared. It always astonishes me when I see it.

The second photograph may be entitled, "Testimony to My Laziness", or, to alter the figure, "Simon Stylites of the Front Porch". Last year I moved out to the front porch a couple of closet doors that came unhinged. I should have done something with them or disposed of them. Now they've been sitting there so long, that a robin actually built a nest on top of them; laid her eggs; hatched her young; and is feeding them with caught worms. (You can see the casters on the top of the sliding doors, where the nest is built.) So you can see that in this case my inaction was so stable that a bird could find refuge in it.

This expression of firmness of purpose is an instance of my ... stoicism.