Will Manidis:

I do think the AI thing is the single greatest jump ball of meaning that we’ve ever had. The questions of how then do we live and how do we conduct ourselves are incredibly consequential over the next few years. And I just don’t think there are particularly good answers, secular answers to them that exist outside of religion.

Got in the car this morning thinking Aside from the usual (and reliable) politics chatter, I haven’t heard a good podcast in a while, not one that actually gets your attention. Leave it to Demetri Kofinas to correct this.

John Brehm’s poem “Over the Moon” — quite lovely. And I love love love that a poem about rain can have that title. (You’ll see.) And it made me think of Vasiliki Anastasiou and the Amalgamation Choir’s incredible performance of Ksenitia tou Erota.

Conversations overheard from the kitchen

Meghan: Whatcha doin’, Monk?

Will: I’m just not.

M: You’re just not? You’re just not what?

W: I’m just not poopin’..

A poem for Theo

Currently Reading: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor 📚

Instantly smitten, I am. (Excerpt from the introduction)

Finished reading: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi 📚

A very refreshingly lovely novel. I confess that I stalled a couple months ago, about halfway through. As curative as its loveliness was, I admit to getting bored; it seemed for a stretch that there really wasn’t anything “happening,” which I assume, and also confess, is my own problem. But it was worth returning to. The two people who strongly recommended this book — my mother-in-law, when she gave it to my wife for Christmas, and a surgeon I work with when he returned from vacation — gestured in the same way with their hand over their heart when they did so. A few others spoke similarly of it when it was brought up. I, too, offer that gesture.

I wonder if, like newborn children, we go through our entire lives looking for a face, longing for a particular gaze that calms and fills us, that loves and welcomes us, that recognizes and runs to greet us.

I leave for five minutes…

Realism for realists — “All this / Is here eternally, just because once it was.”

Here it comes!

The low shall see high: “try to praised the mutilated world”