Drive to Buffalo

I took a lesson with a Buffalo Philharmonic Trumpeter today, and discovered on my way back the best used book store I've been in since EdMcKay. I don't remember the name, but it was somewhere along Route 62, and I found Buber's I and Thou, a Loeb edition of Plotinus, two Gaskell novels, a Wilde play I'd never heard of (Lord Arthur Savile's Crime), a beautiful edition of Troilus and Cressida, Postman's How to Watch the News.

Having talked about cheap pessimism, I ought to mention that cheap optimism is no good either. To deny evil or sin in the world is perhaps a worse foolishness than thinking it omnipresent, and Christendom requires a Kempis for every St. Francis, someone to remind us of wickedness. We need Ecclesiastes as well as Philippians. It is a logical distinction of the utmost importance, however, to note we are not talking in opposites. Good and evil are no more opposite than God and Satan. Evil has no proper existence of its own; it exists only parasitically, and neither creates nor sustains itself. Any evil imaginable was at one point a good which has now become misused or mistimed. Thus when folks talk about the glasses half empty and half full, I worry they may chatter their way into some eternal padded cell of false opposites, symbols of eastern religions, and circles. Regardless of the contents of the cup, is there any doubt as to the purpose of the cup? To hear some talk you would think the cup exists only to pose the question, but there never was a cup debated that wasn't created to be filled. This may seem to be a dodge, but that moment in which one acknowledges a creator is when the whole world is sanctified and every man in it, and the moment when wall of the padded cell is broken down.

This half-full or half-empty glass is the result of millions of chance variations over millions of years.

Reading today: Aeneid 6, Is. 41, Rev. 11, and Udolpho