Fall Classic

Varigated leaves, Maine 2009

We’re off for a few days in Vermont and Western Massachusetts with our Jack’s Place gang of friends. Jack’s Place is a house in the western corner of Vermont that a group of us are building together. At the helm of this project, emotionally and architecturally, is my favorite pied piper and visionary friend, Gerald Horne. He was gifted with the land and a rudimentary suggestion of a house foundation by Jack, a classmate from his days of studying architecture in New York City. In turn Gerald gifted all of us by making it a collective project.

Jack’s Place, a work in progress

So for the next few days we will be feasting on leaves of every tone, autumn angled light, crisp early morning air, and the warm companionship of old and good friends.

My parting thoughts as we set sail for the mountains are from Whiskey River’s commonplace book. The following three quotes should be read once a day for a lifetime.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them – never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

–C. S. Lewis

Let us not forget that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; all else is remote inference.

–Sir Arthur Eddington

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

–Albert Einstein