Swimming Literati

Whereas this, I enjoyed very well. Go for a swim when done. This literary experience will undoubtedly better your time in the water.
A most eloquent essay by Willard Spiegelman.

"To a bookish, intellectual youth, a transformative revelation occurred when, at the age of 23, I decided that I had a body that required tending to. Does one have a body? Does one inhabit the body, a soul within a carapace? Are you your body? The philosophical dimensions of the questions interested me at the time. In graduate school I lived next door to the university swimming pool. Swimming seemed the easiest and the most expedient exercise, and one that depended on no one else’s schedule. For sheer convenience, running or walking is always the easiest thing to do: neither weather nor location should ever inhibit you. Swimming demands both a place and scheduling, but since I was free at 10 in the morning when the pool opened, and since it was never crowded at that hour, I had no excuse other than laziness for not doing it."

and

"Although we know that the ancient Greeks enjoyed swimming, the activity underwent changes in popularity. Under Christianity it declined but was revived with spectacular energy at the start of the 19th century. In Britain, the homoerotic, or at least the homosocial, angle was strong, as it was in Germany. Cyril Connolly summed up the old Etonian tradition in a prewar journal: “a fusion of my old trinity, grace, greenness, and security” came from his sense of the tradition of “two friends going down to bathe.” Hellenic worship of the body and pastoral sinlessness merged, at least in the imagination. Bloomsbury swam. Rose Macaulay as well as Virginia Woolf swam naked with Rupert Brooke before the Great War. Iris Murdoch was one of the last great English river swimmers."

...

"Ludwig Wittgenstein articulated the connection best: “Just as one’s body has a natural tendency towards the surface and one has to make an exertion to get to the bottom—so it is with thinking.” The opposite might also be said: the body unaccustomed to the water has a tendency to sink; only buoyancy, innate or learned, can keep it up. And with thought, the same is true: we divide our focus between what remains on the surface and what seems to lie below it, seldom realizing that the very metaphor we are using to describe the mind’s realm has an analogy in water and our experience of it."

Also, "an enlarged version of this essay will be included in his forthcoming book Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness."

text and info per the american scholar

Melancholy for a Loss of Melancholy?

The premise of the article is interesting, albeit a tad dated. Still, an ok read. A bit says:
"I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?"

But there is brilliantly written paragraph in this article and, per me, it would have to be this:

"Keats understood that suffering and death are not aberrations to be cursed but necessary parts of a capacious existence, a personal history attuned to the plentiful polarity of the cosmos. To deny death and calamity would be to live only a partial life, one devoid of creativity and beauty. Keats welcomed his death so that he could live."
Read it all here.

The Power of Mascara

This, well, it begged for attention.

"The anthropologist behind “Love Signals” says mascara on women attracts men because men have darker, more uniform complexions. So, “a pronounced contrast between the eye area and the skin is a symbol of femininity.”
via ny times

Best Paragraphs Read Today

From the Wall Street Journal:

"A father writes that in getting his kids to do chores, he relies on Karl Marx more than Adam Smith: “Humans need work, and they need to see that their work has a purpose. Come to think of it, you’ll hear that from any of America’s countless business gurus. We’re all Marxists now.” Wait, didn’t Marx have a housekeeper?"

Chicago: City of Art [and wind]

Another good reason to check out Chicago?
The Museum of Contemporary Art.
Good feature on the Times this morning.
"What they found was a shocking simplicity, accessibility and pleasure. “Puppy” was intensely lovable, triggering a laugh-out-loud delight that expanded your sense of the human capacity for joy. It was a familiar, sentimental cliché revived with an extravagant purity, not with enduring materials like marble or bronze but with nature at its most colorful and fragile. The flowery semblance of fur made “Puppy” almost living flesh, like us."
Read more here.
graph per ny times