Pages and Screens

Besides the NY Times, TV, CNN, MSNBC, WNET, multiple websites like Axios, and Huffington Post, google, I have been reading books.  You know that informational site that tries to bring you the world that's been observed over the course of years rather than 24 hours. 
I am reading 'The Cave and The Light, Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization' by Arthur Herman. 
The book is very much a reflection of the title: 570 pages, with chapters like 'Christ has come: Plato and Christianity', and its following chapter 'Aristotle Strikes Back'. 
On Plato ' for every quality in life - goodness, justice, ... there has to exist a single standard.'  That standard is referred to as the 'form' by which we judge 'all individual instances - which are only pale, dim copies, like shadows in a cave.'  The form exists and is possible because of 'Plato's God'.  That is the world exists in it's perfect form elsewhere through the work of the 'unknown'. 
For Aristotle: ' We must trust the evidence of the senses rather than theories, and theories as well as long as their results agree with what is observed. ... Reason steps in after experience not before, it sorts out observations into meaningful patterns and arrives at a knowledge as certain and as exact as Plato's Forms.  Aristotle's term for this knowledge is 'episteme', which Latin commentators translated as scentia or science.
I'm on page 45.

Quiet Time

Taking a break from the medical & political pandemics, the 24 hour news cycle, the theories, conspiracies, the he said, he didn't say, he did, he didn't do, world, for quiet.  You'd think I'd find something else of interest, as important, timely? 

Well there's this: 

'Cocktails with Curators' on youtube by and at The Frick.  The last one was Holbein's portrait of Thomas More which is hung juxtaposed to Holbein's portrait of Thomas Cromwell.  The cocktail choice fittingly was the 'Bloody Mary'.  I enjoyed being there in the details of a hand and the beginning of a 5 o'clock shadow.

It was quieting even without the Bloody Mary.

Then there's the Irish Rep's 'The Weir' on youtube.  One of my favorite plays that they've done.  I'd call it a very close play, to be absorbed as much as heard like O'Neill's 'Moon for the Misbegotten'.  We'll see if it works on youtube. 

Thanks for listening.

The BMI count continues and when there's breaking news you'll hear it here first.

Now this: