Homo Sapiens - by Harari

I bought this  2014 book two years ago.  I started it, reading maybe a third before I put it down. I liked it enough.I’d read H.G. Wells, History of the World as a teen. Later I’d be moved by Future Shock and Culture of Narcissism. It was that kind of read.  Seminal, they’d say, in history circles. Yet I’d found the author at times pedantic, opinionated, and even pompous.  I didn’t feel this eway about Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond or Niall Ferguson’s Ascent of Wealth, a Financial History of the World,  or Paul Johnso’s  Modern Times, great read I’d so enjoyed.  It was that sort of Omnibus Read.  But I’d put it down. I was reading a History of Christianity at the time and I’d bogged down reading that too. I often have several reads on the go and with work I have to read increasing amounts of drivel and nonsense.

But a friend commented on Homo Sapiens. She’d really enjoyed Harari and I'd almost unfairlly damned him with faint praise.  The truth is I’d not finished his book and it really was well written and quite brilliant at the time. He certainly was erudite.  I’d wearied of marketting and saless, all that propaganda nonsense that passes as subtlety but irritates me in my advancing years. I realized I’d been unfair to Harari.  It was in the midst of Covid, being bludgeoned by misinformation and disinformation, lies and corruptions, Anitida uprising and Capitol hill mobs,  creating an overwheming stench when I picked Homo Sapiens up again. We quite well might be on the verge of something. War and Rumors of War.  Did Harari have an answer?

I was jealous of Harari, I realized.  It was clear in his thinking he knew something. With Rolling Stones singing Living in a Ghost Town, lockdowns and hysteria, I’d fallern to  reading westerns and erotic romance for escapism, binging watching Netflix tv. Animal Kingdom, the Crown, Tombstone, Flea Bag. It was getting me through the day.  So much despair and loss, depression and anxiety.  i’d just read Kate Lister’s a Curious History of Sex and could hardly put it down. it well research but also so wittingly written.  I considered Harrari more substantial.  He did make history appealling though like a Druidic Story teller he wove patterns with words.  He cast a spell.  I settled down to listen.  I am glad I did.

I was younger when I read the great omnibus reads and less opinionated and judgemental myself. I wouldn’t have noticed that when Harrari was critical of Christianity he didn’t mention Judaism and was almost gentle with Islam. He barely commented on Hinduism but almost sang the praises of Leonard Cohen’s Buddhism, his knowledge apparently deep yet almost superficial and very biased all the while he presented as unbiased in that deeply offensive way that the politically correct do. I kept asking who his audience was and realized he was writing to appease or appeal to his masters. Now who did he see these were I kept asking?  

Marx said Money is the God of the Jews. Harari certainly made a case for the religion of materialism and secularism.   I was half way through when I looked him up, finding he taught at the University of Jerusalem. I’d actually thought he was Persian at one point. I did though like how he included the Armenians and Georgians.  Later I’d really like how he brought in South America and Africa. He’d been focussing so much on ancient China and Europe. Yet his ideas were magical. Great swaths of data gathered and woven into this masterful tapestry.  

I actually grew to like him.  Halfway through the book I looked forward to reading it, not quite like a war thriller, or a Clancy.. He wasn’t Khalla or Coban. But there reaally was a Jurassic Park quality in the writing. He was truly brilliant. History as fiction. The whole notion that we have the imaginative scenarios and we prop them up with a whole lot of ritual. He gave us ancient history but he really got into his stride in modern times making sense of the Corprate power that toppled governments and the scientific advances that were so recent , mere hundreds of years or daring after  hundreds of thousands of caution.  I actually loved his explanation of exploration and colonialism and was delighted with his discussion of the ideas of religions and ideology, the confusion created by different words with similiar meanings.  He really was extremely erudite. 

I felt like I’d attended a lecture by a master. I’d signed up for a lecture by psychologist Jordan Peterson a year ago, cancelled by Covid, only because I’d loved  the way Peterson debated,more like a supreme court judge than an academic. I’d loved Steven Hicks lectures on philosophy yet here was this giant of literature and history, Harari,  entertaining me with his wit. He had a wealth of knowledge but his skill was selection.  

As I progressed I really did like his comments on behaviourist Harlow.  He mentioned Freud but didn’t give Victor Frankl his due though he was clearly a student of Seligman discussing happiness in modern times versus happines in medieval times. It was my area of expertise and I frankly thought he did a magnificent overview. Which is what he was doing with history. Overviews of economics, anthropology, culture, sociology, ethics and religions. I’d read Fields of Blood a marvellous work of history exploring whether religion or politics caused war.  There was the same selection bias and yet I couldn’t help but rememer the great talking head flick of all time, Dinner with Andre. The more I read Harari the more I felt like I was at a retreat with one of the spiritual masters, like Richard Rohr or Trungpa.   He told stories of facts like Jesus or the Dubliners. There was that quality of being given insights like the classic Spirituality of Imperfections gave to the wisdom teaching. More political and still with talk of war but nonetheless he included the bio engineering of a phosphorescent green bunny. He talked of the cyborg future and gave whole chapters  each of which could be a Ted’s talk on it’s own  

Crime overall is declining. War overall is declining. The life epectancy is increaing. Gigameth is a project of immortality. Science is religion.  Yet as different as life and death. There’s a novelty in the notion of today and yesterday, our perception of then so coloured by our immersion in now. Harari hints at this but doesn’t quite laugh at himself as one might imagine Kate Lister laughing at herself.  There’s a vanity to man and by the end of this great read I was actually amused by the human Harari.  He could admit to be lost as well as the next but there was an amusement to his predictament.  A reason for carrying on.  

I suppose I was arrogant when I first read Harrari, before Covid, before the disillusionment with politics and academics.  Yet I am so glad I picked him up after she said how much she liked him. It was in fact a gift of a read, an omnibus account of life, little weak on music and art but with a whole lot of the stuff that we learned with dates and numbers and names of self important people marketted by the powerful..  History is always written by the winners. Men but even nthe occasional woman gains  fame. Harari does well to mention Georgia, and talk of the little guys and gals suffering under the kings and queens, bankers and generals.   It was a serious work. There was a bit of tantalising porn for the intellectual, even some bits of Australian wankerism at times.

It didn’t leave me feeling like Waiting for Godot but again it gave me hope.  Slouching towards Bethlehem or Baghdad for that matter, Beijing or Washtington, London or Rio de Janeira I felt there was something special in a monkey sent to outer space. I suspect that Adams of Hitchker’s Guide to the Gaxay fame or Mr. Bean might well enjoy Harrari as much as Obama or Reagan. It might even appeal to a Saudi Prince though I doubt that Xi Jinping would care for it.  There are always those who read for dominance and would never like a DH Lawerence account of love.  Harari loves history, his subject and clearly us Homo Sapiens. That was what redeemed the work.  He is truly interested in all of us, the big guy and the little guy, the girls and the boys, the babies and the greats. It’s that kind of read. It was the Economist and New Yorker written with a view to the person who would like to listen to the BBC or watch PBS but not be above reading a People magazine waiting in line at the supermarket..  

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

So enjoying this ‘brief history of human kind’

Learned that humans evolved in East Africa 2.5 million years ago. Use of tools identified early mankind.  Bone marrow scavenger tools.

Only 400,000 years ago did humans hunt large animals together. Use of fire and society and large head Neanderthal and Sapiens.  Sapiens appear 150,000 years ago.

Interbreeding theory - Sapiens spread into Neanderthal Lands north.  Sapiens spread into Erectus lands east, Chinese a mixture of Sapients and Erectus

2010 geneticists - Middle East and Europe - 1-4 % human DNA Neanderthal/ 6% of modern DNA of Melanesian and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA

50,000 years ago Neanderthal, Sapiens and Denisovians...Then genocide and taking over of other’s resources. Last remains of Homo sole sis 50,000 years ago. Last homodenisova about 50,000 years ago.  Last Neanderthals 30,000 years ago.  Last human drarvs of Flores Islands 12,000 years ago

Last 10,000 years Homo Sapiens.

Theory - Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks to it’s unique language.

- details from Sapiens

Insight -

The bottom line is that aboriginals were not kind to their neighbours and neither are we.  The conquerer writes the history though.  

Memory

I laughed when I heard the joke , “if you remember the 60’s and 70’s you weren’t there.” Alice Cooper who made his first four shock rock albums drunk and stoned and his next 20 clean and sober joked recently about reading celebrity autobiographies.”I was there and I know that they’re only vaguely true... the memories of then are more like a dream’
I just enjoyed one of many neurological and psychiatric podcasts I’ve been listening to on ‘constructive memory’ The last neuroscientist said the implications of the research are huge and should revolutionize the legal system. Unfortunately it remains 19th century in a 21st century world. Nothing was more trubling than to listen to the OJ trial handling of DNA evidence appreciating how scientifically outdated the legal system is regarding some aspects of evidence.The same holds true regarding memory and testimony.
There are state and trait factors affecting memory. Mood,  attention, group agreement, social acceptability, medication, drugs , marijuana, time of day and pre conception are all factors involved in memory. The basal ganglia affects attention as the hippocampus affects memory but short term and long term memory are also affected by neocortical and subcritical structures.
The reason I remember Beatles songs is as much to do with them being replayed endlessly through my life.
Retrospective falsification is the phenomena of consciously or unconsciously mis remembering events previously held true. The simplest near ubiquitous example are the post divorce claims “I never loved him. I never loved her.’ despite the obvious hard evidence of wedding children and photos and then the change of heart with anterograde ripples. It’s been said that after WW2 not one German could be found who said they’d supported the Nazi party. Even Peter denied Jesus until the cock crowed.
False Memory Syndrome was a term that arose when biological fathers were serially and routinely accused of infant rape and pedophilia not just for psychopathic reasons but based on the fallacies of emotional memory. Metaphors become reality and marketers like Goebbels knew even a lie repeated loud and long enough becomes the perceived truth. Individual memory is like the collective memory of history. There it is said the winner writes history. In the individual there are similar characters
Competing for the dominant narrative.
It’s all further complicated by research on time, causation and perception. The questions regarding time travel are complicated by the multiplicity of possible pasts. This are all sobering considerations to be considered in this latest mental health epidemic of memory and false memory. All this of course is occurring at a time when an aging population fears forgetting their car keys is a sign of dementia. Time really to study neuroplasticity and how that affects memory and read again the classic ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat’

GSO , New York City

It began as Work’s Publishing. It’s a  special destination for writers if only given the number of books sold.  There are tours daily and 17000 people visitted last year. I asked if I could take pictures in the Archives and was told that was okay.  I love the history.  I have been blessed to have chatted with Ernest Kurtz who wrote Not God and the Spirituality of Imperfection with Ketcham.   I loved both books.  Dick B is another of my favourite historians. I’ve been blessed to communicate with him as well.  It was great to see his histories of the books that the originals read and books from their libraries at Stepping Stone and in the Archives.
I loved learning about Works Publishing.  I want to come back to New York if only to visit 17 William Street in New Jersey and 30 Vesey Street, New York.   We actually walked by where the offices had been on Lexington.  I’d love to go to Calvary House 61st East 21st Street New York City.  It was where the Oxford Group met. I’m not sure if it’s anything today.   We did get to a most uplifting meeting near there in the Chelsea area last night. The first meeting in Canada was in Toronto.  Now it really is international and there’s an International desk in the GSO to address all the correspondence and communication from all around the world. Another desk was the conference desk, this aiding with divisional conferences ,as well as the world service one, the next being in Detroit.
We learned at Stepping Stones there was place in Vermont where you can stay in one of the historic houses.  Akron is definitely a place I really want to go.  I’d just love to see where the Mayflower and hospitals were.  I loved hearing Bob and Anne’s son Smitty at the North Shore Round Up talking about being a kid with all these strangers having coffee in his kitchen.
The tour of Central Office was informative and most enjoyable.  I certainly wish government ran with such apparent modesty and efficiency. A hundred are employed and given the millions touched it’s so very worthy.  When I asked Jocelyn who showed us about if that was the Hudson River, she said, yes and added that some of the people there had seen Scully’s plane landing.  Prayers and miracles.
I learned that when they first approached Rockefeller he refused their request for $50,000, a huge sum in the day, but gave them $5000 for basic support.  He gave Bill a living subsidy for a while too.  Bill got a royalty for the sale of the book but it wasn’t until the famous articles Morris Markey and Jack Alexander wrote that sales increased.
The building the GSO is in is called the Interchurch Building and was developed by Rockefeller as an interdenominational location. The Riverside Church which he was a member and benefactor for was next door. It’s inter racial and inter denominational. A picture of the founding pastor, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick was on the wall alongside John D. Rockerfeller’s picture in the Archives.
I loved seeing a picture of Rev. Shoemaker, Dr. Leonard Strong and Henrietta Sieberling. I’d read about all these people but loved seeing photographs of them in the Archives.  They have the most amazing things in the archives, newspaper clippings going back to the 30’s.  I’d seen pictures of Sister Mary Ignatia who worked with Dr. Bob but loved seeing these again.
I  first learned of Hank and the Honor Dealer’s at Stepping Stones. Bill’s  “Wits End” desk ,with it’s cigarette burns along the edge, came from Hank’s. Their secretary Ruth Hock was a really beautiful girl and was quoted as saying the Big Book ‘wouldn’t have been written without Bill, and it wouldn’t have been published without Hank.”  There are just so many important people in this whole story which so often gets reduced to the two founders.  Roland and Ebby are just another couple of characters in the whole long line of participants in this great story, called the miracle of the 20th century.
Having just been to Stepping Stones Laura and I enjoyed seeing the picture of Bill with his violin and Lois at her piano.  There were so many great pictures.  We loved it.  Everyone was so friendly and helpful too.
After we left the Interchurch Building we went next door to the Riverside Church which is really a great Roman Gothic edifice. In the Gethsemane Chapel there is a famous picture of Jesus praying.
It certainly was an afternoon of history and spirituality.  Spiritus contra Spiritum.

Museum of Sex, New York City

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Saturday Morning Journal

Rain on the roof of the RV all night.  Gilbert let me sleep in till 10 am then lay on my chest as his way of telling me he wanted to go out to pee.  I dressed dog walking fashion. It’s a style that’s in with dog owners but for some unknown reason never shows on the Milan Cat walks.  Flipflops, sweats, t shirt, overcoat , half asleep face, dog pulling on leash, watering trees. Gilbert dumped half his body weight almost immediately.  I had doggie bags but should have brought large green garbage bags.  It was a momentous occasion.  They relieved of onerous weight he danced about sniffing nature with alacrity.  I followed. I’d long since let him on the leash in defiance of the leash law watching for strangers so I could leash him up again.  No one came. We walked a long ways and circled back.
Morning coffee. I ground the beans.  The noise was loud.  I’m rested. The month long flu which went and came and went is clearing with rest.  My ear ache and cough have all but gone this morning. The lethargy remains. I’m uninspired. I go through the day doing rituals but the brain isn’t sparking.  I am on automatic pilot.  I sometimes see myself saying and doing the right thing and am amazed. I think of government jobs and union jobs and sick leave and remember that every winter as long as I can remember I get the west coast sinus infection with or without the flu shot. I think the flu shot helps.  It’s a placebo thing in my mind.  I think I was sicker before I got it. I took a week or two off work a few years back but now I only lose a day or two.  But every weekend and evening I’m ‘recuperating’ . There are no holidays, just work and recovery, over and over again for weeks. And I try to maintain the schedule and meet the commitments and half to pay the rent and overhead and fear homelessness.  We’re all only months away from it except those in the elite with the security once promised but now no longer.
I could be depressed.  All day long people are angry with me because I’ve no magic wand.  More and more they want me to help them get money from some agency that withholds and like a circus masters makes the once great free beasts of the forest jump through beaurocratic hoops and take the whips.  I learned to jump years ago.  I’m an indoor nigger.  I try to help people stop running into glass walls, show them doors, encourage them to stop howling at the moon, save your breath.
Mostly I’ve been told there is no life after medicine.  16 years we must hold our files and wait daily for someone to complain and a lawyer to get rich when we’re demented and can’t remember what the cultural mores were of the day.  Over the years I’ve said whatever needed to be said to stop people from suiciding and know that now suicide is no longer a ‘bad” thing but the “in thing’ so for sure somebody is going to complain I convinced them to live another day. All those folk I convinced to not smoke marijuana are going to be forever angry now that smoking marijuana is all the rage.  I’m a very bad man and hated and despised for thinking ‘morbidity and mortality’ were what I was supposed to addressing rather than political correctness. The doublespeak of 1984 is commonspeak today. I’m a dinosaur and dying breed.  I hoped for some place I could go to lick my wounds and die quietly but know they always want to put people like me in carts and drag us through the streets of the New Rome.  I had thought 10 years I could wait for peace but if I retired at 65 and now it’s 16 years it’s not going to be till I’m 81 that I can be free of medicine.  I can’t recommend anyone be a doctor anymore and wish I’d never gone into this field where today we’re being told that killing people is the goal.  I took the hippocratic oath, do no harm and understood why that was the ideal but that was then and now ‘cure’ isn’t in the ‘lexicon’ of ‘health care spending’. Only the rich can afford old age and I made the mistake of focussing on keeping people alive and measured health as function and worked with the most angry and sick and defeated and psychotic who no one wanted to work with. I gave up the lucrative cushy jobs to work with the dangerous and insane and the addicts and try to help them to be free but now I’m told I’m wrong. Even calling a patient is wrong ‘nomenclature’.  They’re ‘customers’ .
Yet if the climataloogist fear mongers are right we’re be dead next week or the week after. They say we’re going to be extinct.  And the Rich want us to kill ourselves off so the rich can inherit the earth.  But I’m not rich and I’m just sick and tired at the end of the week. By friday I’ve run out of steam. I used to be able to work in the evening. I did university courses and studied till midnight but now I’m feeling age or fatalism and I’m exhausted by 6 pm and my brain seems not to work on friday.  Saturday like today I’m just trying to rest, walk the dog, do anything but think.  I can vomit my brain but I can’t analyze or understand. I feel like my poor head injured patients. There’s just been such a bombarding of desperation on one side and then insensitivity and uncaring on the other side. I’m in this middle place and feel like a soldier on a battlefield with his position over run and the administration saying we have to sign and counter sign for bullets and really we shouldn’t need bullets but should commune with them and besides they’re no longer the enemy.  People are trying to get HIV to ‘show solidarity”.  I’m told drug addiction isn’t a ‘disease’ but a ‘culture’.

(The Cognitive Behavioural Distortions of the above thinking include - Emotional Reasoning - based on my feeling physically sick and run down, i.e. depressed, I project that depressed thinking on the future and Selective Reasoning - chose to Awfulize and Catastrophise - a particular loop then occurs in my thinking to 'confirm' the obvious irrational thinking.  Any number of possibilities can occur tomorrow or the future - projections (especially all those 'media accounts' are notoriously erroneous.  Politically who would have 'guessed' ISIS.  Syria was never 'predicted'.  The climatologists can't even get the weather right weeks ahead and generally speaking the FUTURE IS BRIGHT but the fact is WERE ALL GOING TO DIE so it's right to be concerned if you are in DENIAL about DEATH.  So I don't know the future.  I'm just tired and exhausted.  It's always been a tough time of the year. End of winter, Spring slowly coming along, work overwhelming because life is even more difficult for those with less of anything. )


Sometime today my head will clear. I can only hope.  A nap. Distraction and then I’ll be in the hot seat again with no hope of reprieve.  Even if I left today I’d face being called to accountability for ancient history in a rapidly changing world. I’m in a society of historians ignoring the reality of the present and playing mind games with their selective versions of history for personal profit.  It’s group insanity.  The world is bizarre.  Meritocracy has died in Canada and it’s just who you know. I’m called a hater because I don’t agree with public corruption and waste of resources. I don’t like money for the poor spent on limousines.  It’s all name calling now and logic doesn’t count because the main stream is ‘ends against the middle reasoning’ and obfuscation.  Bullying is everywhere in suits and pseudo kindness.  I’m killing you for your sake.  You’re right to want to die. Let me help you. And can i have your organs too.  No of course I won’t give you anything that would make life more palatable.  I’ll just take the money to write a report.  We’re all paid to record and no one anymore is paid to sit and hold the hand of a person alone.  But this is just the negativity of tiredness and silliness. I must rally. I’ve only hours and a day at most before I must drag myself back to work thankful the coughing has stopped and the pain in ear and throat is less. But the weakness and tiredness how much longer. At least I can sleep now. My nose isn’t stopping me from breathing.
But thank you lord for the sleep I had last night. Thank you for the restfulness. The companionship of my friend and dog. Thank you for the work since lots of it isn’t as I colour it. Lots of what I do makes some sense. I’m pleased to see the smiles return to the faces and the light return to eyes. I’m thankful to be there. I’m glad to have an answer. I ‘m glad for the science I know. I’m thankful for the opportunity to reduce some suffering. I’m too sensitive. My heart is too wounded but please Lord don’t let me ever be closed hearted or hard. Thank you for empathy. Thank you for the colours. Thank you for the scent. Thank you for the wonderful times I had with friends this week. Thank you for the incredible joy I had watching Gilbert and Matty his little girl dog friend down the office. Thank you for the god children and the delight I see in their wonder at life. Thank you for the good parents I know who care so much for their children and are raising them to know science and music and to be good and kind and moral. Thank you for all those who are walking towards the light. Thank you for the politicians and beaurocratts and courts and judges and the police and military and the space cadets and space station. Thank you Lord for hospitals and nurses and doctors and technicians and all those incredible breakthroughs in medications and solutions and genius. Thank you for the wonder. Thank you for the stories. Thank you for the books and entertainment, the music and movies and tv. Thank you for bed. I love my bed and my couch and the comfort my back feels in lying. I love the showers and the heat and the walking. Thank you for mobility and feet and knees and the ability to use my hands . Thank you for my health  Lord. Thank you for my eyes and clothing and indoor plumbing. Thank you for refrigeration and the space heater. Thank you for taps and pressure and running water and reservoirs. Thank you for home delivery Canadian Meat Lover Pizza and internet and telephones and communication. Thank you for skin. Thank you for guitars and song. Thank you for breath. Thank you for the galaxy Thank you for all human endeavour. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you for the sunshine we’ve had and that will return and remind me always that blue moods are so much just a product of the rain and that I simply like the sunshine and dry and every day we’re getting closer to more and more and more of that.  The last weeks were glorious so I could drive with the hood down. Thank you for convertibles.  Soon I’ll be sailing and the boat will be out and the motorcycling will begin but thank you for the day and the knowledge that I have to live in the present to truly be with god.  Help me more and more be thankful for everything now and to have less regret and less worry but focus always on what I have right now. Thank you for this computer, these fingers, the friends and all the blessings and those I see and don’t see. Thank you God. Thank you Jesus.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

My goodness, this is the most awesome museum.  Rated alongside the British Museum and the Louvre it’s a masterpiece of it’s own.  The Winter Palace was begun in 1754 by architect Rastrell.  Catherine II purchased Gotzkowski collection,  first collection. The little Hermitage and then the great Hermitage were built, 1764 to 1787. 1852 was the opening of the Imperial Museum of the New Hermitage. 1865 Leonardo Da Vinci’s  Madonna and Child (Litta Madonna) was purchased. 1914 Leonardo Da Vinci’s Madonna with Flower was purchased.
Vlad, Barrett’s brother in law, accompanied us.  Through translation I learned from Barrett that ,”he likes to go to art galleries to improve his mood.”  I thought that as good a reason as any. I’d just told Barrett I thought a walk in a museums and art gallery was as close as one could get in the city to a walk in the woods in the country. I love museums and art galleries and have been truly blessed to have enjoyed many of the world’s finest.  It was when I was a young man working in London I made a point of using my lunch hours to stroll the British Museum. No wonder I was thin back then.
Today we hiked for hours and miles. We mounted the famous Jordan Stairway first.  Then there was just an endless collection of art and not enough time to see it all.  Vlad asked what I most wanted to see and I said, the da Vinci, Picasso, Rafael. He said he liked the Medieval period most..  On the way to the da Vinci he pointed out his favourites, mostly religious scenes. There was so much.  The Leonardo Da Vinci is of the mother and child, the child suckling.  It’s is a moving portrait. Later I’d learn I walked right past the only Michelangelo there. I was looking at the Rodin sculptures and missed the Michelangelo. I can’t say how much I missed but what I saw was truly inspiring.
I love the Manet.  More Picasso Blue Period.  We’d walked and walked and were hungry and wanting lunch when Barret asked if there was anything else I wanted to see. I’d been reading about the Hermitage and it came to mind that this was the place where Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son was. I’m a big fan of Henri Nouwen’s Prodigal Son writing and loved the idea that there are two sons, not just one that returns.  It’s really an amazing discussion of Faith and Works, or more importantly Grace.  I’m moved personally by the story.  And there was the painting. What an amazing portrayal.
More Matisse, more Gauguin, Flemish school, French, and finally leaving some Roman and Egyptian floors. We’d fluttered about and come to nest here and there but so much had just been wall art which we’d passed as if it were elevator music. It was beautiful. The whole of the museum is that. There’s everything, from great wooden carved desks to massive bowls and intricate porcelain.  It makes one admire the human capacity for transcendence.  I loved it all and feel my mind has had a marvellous cleansing, a rite of purification, a morning and afternoon, of being pointed upwards.  I know I’ll go back to dragging my knuckles but the memories are there. I love the line from Cohen in Chelsea hotel, “We are ugly but we have the music”.  Well, I may be ugly but I’ve got the most beautiful memories.