A backward/forward look

We have been immersing ourselves in intermittently glorious, surprisingly dreary Oxford: first showcased in Inspector Morse (1987–2000); continued in Inspector Lewis (2006–2015), which features Morse’s former Detective Sergeant; and prequeled in Endeavour (2012–2023), which is titled after Morse’s Christian name. It’s the last of these we’ve started with. Long ago we saw some of “Morse Proper,” and knowledge of it gives Endeavour a foreboding air: this young 1960s constable will turn into a first-rank curmudgeon, an object of near-horror. There are some explicit portents – Endeavour Morse is solitary, has a savior complex, relishes crosswords and classical music perhaps too much – yet the dread is largely inchoate. There is unease even as this hero, with each new success, rises in his profession. There is gravitas although the genre trundles out its tropes. The classic “Morse” theme music, equally suited to a mountaineering documentary, has been retained. As Young Endeavour, Shaun Evans is brusque, skinny, and sallow, with a deer-in-headlights expression. The show’s real human treasure, however, is Endeavour’s mentor, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) – surely one of the genre’s wisest men. Had he been higher-born, he could have been a don; as it is, he holds his own against the silly college men he questions, who consider him beneath them. Rank is all in Thursday’s world (and at Oxford). And yet, unlike his own superior, Thursday doesn’t lord it over Morse. The show’s other great virtue is its artifact selection. I’ve not seen another in which beer mugs and wallpaper were so lovingly displayed. The story could be nonsense, the historic University could be ignored, and I’d still watch just for that.

Our chemical romance

Ziva (cat no. 2) and Dory (no. 3) used to fight several times each day, really brutally; but since we’ve been using air fresheners to pump feline pheromones into our house, they’ve gotten along much better. This gives me hope for the harmony of our household, and for that of humankind.

Seriously, things are more peaceful now.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We attended a quite lovely wedding after-party this evening, in someone’s back yard. There were many children. There were dogs of very different breeds and sizes, to warm the heart. The music was from the nineties and early aughts; the catering was local Mexican. There also was much uninhibited vaping. I was amused to see the bride and groom puffing away together at their special table. But they weren’t the only ones. Everyone was at it. Perhaps all the vaping was what made everything harmonious. Halfway through the party, it started raining, and no one really minded.

The children played in a sandbox and got filthy. They had a precious time; afterward, we had to drag Daniel, kicking and screaming, to the car.

Apparel

Warm congrats to my cousin, Matthew, and his wife, Megan, on the birth of their second daughter.

Most of my paternal grandparents’ grandchildren began having children rather late in life. So, although perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me, it always does – pleasantly – when another little niece, nephew, or once-removed first cousin comes along.

What a world to come into, though.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Then again, things arguably were worse in Genesis-time. I have a couple of colorful t-shirts with the caption, “Need an Ark? I Noah Guy.” There’s a picture of the ark on the shirts. (Alas, I can’t find the picture online – just other shirts with the same caption but different artwork.) I obtained these shirts after a children’s program at my church. They were spares.

I wear them around because I’m edgy like that. And because they fit.

No one ever has commented on them – the occasional raised eyebrow is as far as things have gone – until today, when I wore an ark shirt to the to the Salvation Army Kroc Center. (The boys have been taking swim lessons there.)

My goodness, how many laudatory remarks I got.

Did you go to the Ark Encounter?, one man asked.

My people.

Now what I need is a Coach Cignetti shirt to wear to the Kroc.

August’s poem

… is “If – ” – by Kipling, of course.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

One of the best poems. Kipling thought it too popular for its own good. No doubt the parodies irked him. Some are clever indeed: see Elizabeth Lincoln Otis’s “An ‘If’ for Girls” (but her last couplet is nothing as fine as Kipling’s; it’s his “my son” that makes the difference).

“The jellyfish that has cracked the secret to immortality”

From the Guardian:

[Turritopsis dohrnii] “is unique,” [says marine biologist Maria Pia Miglietta,] “because when faced with unfavourable conditions – and I mean high temperature, physical cutting, starvation, chemicals in the water, you name it – when you try to kill the jellyfish, it doesn’t die.”

Most normal jellyfish start off life as larvae. They metamorphose into polyps (tiny, stationary soft bodies) that bud off swimming medusas, which grow up to become adult jellies. Eventually, after reproducing, most will stop swimming, crumble a little and then die.

But the immortal jellyfish escapes that fate. It reverts to a juvenile form, and starts its life cycle again.

The process is called “cellular transdifferentiation,” Miglietta says. The jellyfish looks like it’s dying and sinks to the bottom. Then – like a butterfly returning to a caterpillar – it shrinks into a ball, and within 24 to 48 hours, buds off a new polyp with the same identical genome, she says. …

In the lab, where Miglietta studies them, these jellies can theoretically live for ever. However, for some in the wild, getting eaten may eventually end that dream run.

(My italics.)

Some more quotes:

James Lenman (“On Becoming Extinct,” p. 254):

The Second Law of Thermodynamics will get us in the end in the fantastically unlikely event that nothing else does first.

Peter van Inwagen (“The Possibility of Resurrection,” p. 121):

Perhaps at the moment of each man’s death, God removes his corpse and replaces it with a simulacrum which is what is burned or rots. Or perhaps God is not quite so wholesale as this: perhaps He removes for “safekeeping” only the “core” person – the brain and central nervous system – or even some special part of it.

John 3:3:

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

And see Lewis’s Mere Christianity – especially its last chapter, “The New Men,” to which everything in the book conduces.