Time Capsule #92
A poem written in a French garden.
Welcome to the Time Capsule — a weekly newsletter that serves as both my public journal and personal scrapbook. I write about the things on my mind and close to my heart in hopes that those who read it find value and enjoyment in it, and perhaps some solace too.
💭 Quote(s) of the Week
In writing, you need to go where it hurts.
Alex Schulman
✏️ Le jardin à la française
The world was probably perfect before —
Before cellphones, and artificial sugar, and artificial grass.
One would live by the soil, like a bee, and return to it.
The animals suffer to adapt to our man-made world;
What has happened to our paradise?
Only small fragments and the sun remain.
The air is still.
I sit in the sun. I take my sweater off to feel the wind breathe.
I knew the transformation would come,
I just didn’t expect it to be so painful.
It has turned me into a man:
I work harder, I care for myself,
I lean on God more closely — He is the only one who speaks my language here.
Is it arrogance, or observation?
Grown men and women,
dressing like children,
playing Candy Crush,
distracting themselves with pop culture.
This is the world I am in.
I try not to be of it.
I fail sometimes, but I get up and try again.
📸 Photo(s) of the Week
A late winner from Les Girondins.
Title push?
📖 Book of the Week — La formation de l’esprit scientifique by Gaston Bachelard
The Formation of the Scientific Mind is an epistemological essay by Gaston Blachelard.
Gaston Bachelard maintains that modernity has been marked by the transition between a pre-scientific mind and an authentically scientific mind. This evolution has been made possible by taking into account and overcoming what he defines as epistemological obstacles. This going beyond allowed the rational construction of an experience. This, through the long reflection that precedes it, goes beyond the direct observation of an empirical fact and leads to the abstraction and mathematization of the physical phenomenon, the only way in his eyes to escape the prejudices inherent in human nature which have long paralyzed scientific progress.
Throughout the work, he cites a large number of pre-scientific works illustrating the various obstacles he highlights, in particular works by alchemists and scholars of the Age of Enlightenment.
I found this on the shelf at a bar in Victoire.
💡 Food for Thought
‘Tis easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.
Benjamin Franklin
🔭 Sunday Best
Science, Competing Values, and Trade-offs in Public Health: The Example of Covid-19 and Masking — by Dupont et Galea in the New England Journal of Medicine (2022)
So you want to be a writer? — by Charles Bukowski
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it […]
2009 — by Mac Miller. Shoutout to MS for showing me this track in his basement many years ago.
A tout à l'heure!
AT