Ben Crowder

The Library of Congress is now on Flickr. (Thanks to NorthTemple.com for the heads-up.)

Not the whole thing, of course, but they have uploaded around 3,000 public domain images. Why? They explain:

We invite you to tag and comment on the photos, and we also welcome identifying information—many of these old photos came to us with scanty descriptions! We are offering two sets of digitized photos: the 1,600 color images from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and about 1,500 images from the George Grantham Bain News Service. Why these photos? They have long been popular with visitors to the Library; they have no known restrictions on publication or distribution, and they have high resolution scans. We look forward to learning what kinds of tags and comments these images inspire.

Very, very cool. This is the kind of thing libraries and archives need to start doing — crowdsourcing. Sure, it’s not as sure-fire as doing it in-house, but let’s face it: most libraries and archives are low on budget and high on backlog. Why not open description up to the public? I don’t really see any conflict, even from the accuracy/authority viewpoint, because all you have to do is make it clear what’s “official” and what’s user-generated. Simple.

Yes, user-generated data will probably not be perfect, but that doesn’t take away from the rest of its usefulness. And yet I think librarians and archivists have often looked down their noses at ideas like this, mainly because job security starts to flicker and — in their minds — vanish. But to me, this is where it really begins. It’s exciting.

Now if I can just get my library on Flickr…

[tags]Library of Congress, Flickr[/tags]

I’m reading Lewis Thomas’s The Medusa and the Snail, and the other day I came across his brilliant essay entitled “The Health-Care System”:

As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body. The new consensus is that we are badly designed, intrinsically fallible, vulnerable to a host of hostile influences inside and around us, and only precariously alive. We live in danger of falling apart at any moment, and are therefore always in need of surveillance and propping up. Without the professional attention of a health-care system, we would fall in our tracks. This is a new way of looking at things, and perhaps it can only be accounted for as a manifestation of spontaneous, undirected, societal propaganda. We keep telling each other this sort of thing, and back it comes on television or in the weekly newsmagazines, confirming all the fears, instructing us, as in the usual final paragraph of the personal-advice columns in the daily paper, to “seek professional help.” Get a checkup. Go on a diet. Meditate. Jog. Have some surgery. Take two tablets, with water. Spring water. If pain persists, if anomie persists, if boredom persists, see your doctor…. We are, in real life, a reasonably healthy people. Far from being ineptly put together, we are amazingly tough, durable organisms, full of health, ready for most contingencies. The new danger to our well-being, if we continue to listen to all the talk, is in becoming a nation of healthy hypochondriacs, living gingerly, worrying ourselves half to death.

Amen!

(On a side note, I’m here in Vegas and just finished the first day of classes. It’s…well…boring. Probably mainly because I didn’t get much sleep last night. And sitting at a table for eight hours a day is just slightly conducive to daydreaming. But I’m a quarter of the way done! And I came up with an idea for my class project (a database) that I’m rather excited about, but more on that later. And I’d better stop this parenthetical barnacle because it’s already out of balance to this completely unrelated post. So far I haven’t had much time at all for the Internet, but I’ll try to keep up with e-mails and comments as best I can.)

I love downtowns. There’s something about them — something alive, something spine-tingling, something mysterious — that’s got me hooked. So many interesting things. So many intertwined lives and histories. And so many stories. You know, I think that in a way it’s the stories that giddify me. And cities, particularly downtown areas, are pregnant with ‘em. Every alleyway has something to say.

Beyond that, though, there’s the feeling of exploration and discovery. Of course, it only lasts as long as there still remains an unknown, but even just a small bit of it is vastly satisfying. For example, I haven’t spent much time in downtown Provo, and so it’s mostly unknown and therefore mysterious and therefore even just the thought of Center Street gives me goosebumps. I’m a man of simple pleasures. :)

Anyway, I’ve got a master’s degree seminar in Vegas this weekend (I leave tomorrow and get back Monday night), and while Vegas isn’t exactly my favorite city in the world (why couldn’t this seminar be in London? ~wistful sigh~), the exploration factor has me excited. (No, no, not that kind of exploration. That’s why I detest the place. I’m talking about innocent venues.)

I think I’ll still have occasional Internet access, but my guess is that y’all will get lucky as this torrential deluge of blog posts from the top of the mountains slows down to a trickle for the weekend. Let the rejoicing begin. ;)

I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer lately, and I came across this passage which really spoke to me:

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life…we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good…. It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore…. And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. “Unless a seed die…”

Thoughts? (I agree with Lewis, by the way. :))

[tags]C.S. Lewis[/tags]

The other day I came across a quote about happiness that I can’t get out of my head:

It has given me much of trouble, and a great amount of perseverance, to be happy under all circumstances. I have learned not to fret myself. It has taken me a great while to arrive at this point … I want the Saints to live in a way that they can feel happy all the time, and then we shall enjoy the Holy Spirit. (Jedediah M. Grant, Journal of Discourses, 3:11-12.)

Happy under all circumstances? Isn’t that a little too idealistic?

I don’t think that’s what Jedediah meant, though. Sure, there’s a time to mourn. A time to cry. A time for sorrow. He doesn’t mean we have to be bubbly and chipper every moment of every day. There are limits. ;)

But that’s not really the point. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like the happiness he’s talking about is the soul-deep joy that encompasses even our sorrows, infusing us with the strength we need to get through whatever trials come our way. It’s a quiet happiness. It’s soothing. It’s mature. It’s real. And it’s even realistic — it doesn’t ignore the bad things in life, but it shines its light upon them and transforms them from bogeymen into something we can deal with. It’s beautiful and poignant.

Too many of us, however, live far beneath our privileges too much of the time. One of those privileges is happiness. After all, men are, that they might have joy. Why are we settling for anything less? Sometimes I think our “thy will be done” attitude renders us a little too complacent, to the point where we completely deflate ourselves and think that whatever happens to us must be the will of God, of course.

But that’s not the case.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not denying that God is omnipotent. He is. And he wants the best for us, even when that means sending us through the refiner’s fire.

And yet as far as I can tell, the last thing he wants us to do is just slouch back and let life happen to us. Ours is a God of activity, not passivity. Act, not acted upon.

Now, things do happen to us, of course. We can only control external events to a very limited degree; the rest is beyond our sphere of action, and every day of our lives we’ll have things happen that weren’t in our plan.

But just because we can’t control externalities doesn’t mean that the state of our heart and mind has to succumb to outside pressures. Each of us has a will. And that will, that self, is a whole lot more powerful than we realize. And God is okay with that.

That’s the point, after all: to become like him. Gods and goddesses and angels are beings of power and glory who move mountains and shake the heavens. Apathy just isn’t going to get us there, I’m afraid. God doesn’t want to remove our will — he wants to train it into a mighty force for good. He wants us to burn with that same power and glory that cloaks the celestials, because there’s a kingdom of God to build here on earth and a kingdom of heaven to populate when we pass on to better things.

A huge part of the training is, of course, learning to want the things that God wants. And God wants us to be happy. Do we?

Of course we do. We may cover it up with self-deceptions, we may try to bury it in the backyard of our mind, but deep down inside we all want to be happy. It’s part of who we are as humans and as children of God. It’s okay to want to be happy. We don’t need to apologize for it.

And, like Jedediah says, we really can be happy under all circumstances. It’s up to us. We do need the Lord’s help, yes. There’s no way that we can do it without his love and light pouring into us. It’s impossible without him.

But he’s not going to just give it to us. It’s part of that training, where we learn what it really means to be kings and queens, princes and princesses in the palaces of the Most High. If it only took a casual request in passing to get true happiness, we’d all end up brats. :P

No, we have to want it bad. We have to be willing to sweat for it, to sacrifice, to work our tails off until we come off conqueror. Joy comes at a price. In fact, I don’t think it could come any other way — part of the richness of happiness comes from the tears that precede it. The Himalayas of happiness are mere foothills unless you have a Mariana Trench (of misery? I don’t want to stretch this alliterative taffy so far that it breaks :)) to give you a point of comparison. Happiness only has meaning when there’s something out there that isn’t happiness.

Anyway, I know that I for one could stand to be happier. It’s not like I’m moping around the apartment in a cloud of depression all the time, but too often I settle for a pallid middle ground that isn’t bad but it really isn’t all that good, either. Happiness is a choice. Am I choosing?

On page 70 of Stephen Covey’s The 8th Habit, I found a quote from Willam James that I’ve swiftly become a fan of:

Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. We all have reservoirs of energy and genius to draw upon of which we do not dream.

In trying to find the source for this, I found that Covey had abridged the quotation. I also found that hardly anyone knows where the quote is found — one source said The Varieties of Religious Experience (wrong), another said it was from 1899, which would have been Talks to Teachers (also wrong), and finally, through Wikiquote, I discovered that it’s actually in a May 6, 1906 letter to W. Lutoslawski, published as part of the second volume of The Letters of William James, page 253 (with the last sentence coming two pages later). Here’s the full quote:

I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed…. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.

Interestingly, Covey alters the last sentence (which is on page 255) to says “reservoirs of energy and genius” instead of “reservoirs of life.”

At any rate, I certainly agree with James, and I’m mainly wondering how to tap into those reservoirs and juice this life for all it’s worth. ;)

[tags]William James[/tags]

One week down, one and a half to go. This library power outage is tormenting me — almost every day so far I’ve gotten excited to go up to the fifth floor and check out a book I’m interested in. And almost immediately I have to remind myself that I can’t get past the security desks. (No, I’m not going to pull a National Treasure just to check some book out.)

You know how when you lose a hand or a foot, you can usually still feel it there, because of the nerve endings? It’s like that. I wasn’t joking when I said losing access to the rest of the library was like losing an arm. Muscle memory.

And memory is what I wanted to write about, actually, before getting distracted by wistful and nostalgic memories of the library. Last week, before the outage, I was skimming through the Old English aisle. As soon as I saw the titles, memories of my Old English class started washing through me — with delight I recalled the feel of the class, translating old poetry like “The Dream of the Rood” and hacking away at the grammar. It was the same sort of feel I get when reading about Tolkien and, to a lesser degree, C.S. Lewis. It’s the excitement of studying dead languages.

But then I had to wonder, was it really like that? When I was actually in the class, did I feel that way?

I don’t think I did.

Sure, there were brief moments of exhilaration scattered here and there, but for the most part the class just felt…normal. Not at all the magical experience I’d expected.

I think that’s generally how things go.

I’m not saying that joy lives solely in the past, or that disillusionment is the order of the day. But the passage of time gives memory a texture and a flavor that simply wasn’t there when the events themselves happened. Nostalgia sugarcoats the past with a bittersweet icing.

I haven’t been back to Thailand since I got home from my mission three and a half years ago. When I first got back, though, I used to get piercing pangs of memory, I missed it so bad. If I could just scrap together enough money and fly back! I even had dreams where I’d find a wormhole that sent me straight to Bangkok without a plane ticket. Over time, though, I’ve realized that when I do finally go back, it’s not going to be the same. It can’t be. What has passed is past. Not future. My memories of my mission have taken on a rose-colored tint.

Now, not all memories are nostalgic, of course, but it’s surprising how many are. (Or at least for me; does this happen to anyone else?) I look back on my high school years, or my childhood, or even my last year of college, with fond affection. I’m sure that the feelings I’m ladling out on that last semester before I graduated weren’t actually there when I was living it, so they’re not historically accurate, but they are nice. I’m not complaining. :)

Walking home today, with the melting snow puddles exploding into brilliant kaleidoscopic reflections of the sun wherever I looked, I decided I like winter after all. There’s something remote and poignant about it that makes me feel like I’ve just zoomed out the camera (because of course there’s my life camera watching things from above — manned by my guardian angel — not to mention the background soundtrack) and suddenly I’m in some antarctic wilderness with nothing around (not even penguins) for hundreds of miles. Just wind, snow, sun, and me.

It’s times like this that I remember that there’s beauty in pretty much everything, if we only have eyes to see it. (Disclaimer: every normal thing. There are twisted evils that have no beauty in them whatsoever, but we’re not talking about them.)

Getting into photography this past year has taught me that, if nothing else. You really can find beauty in almost anything — in a slab of concrete sidewalk, in a moldy apple barely dangling from its mother branch, in forty yards of magnetic tape strewn over your front lawn (I still don’t know who does it, but it happens every few months), in every creature and every plant on this earth and all the others.

Conversely, you can find ugliness and irritating imperfections in almost anything, too. Life ain’t pretty. Nobody’s perfect. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

But while some cling to any excuse they can scrape together to focus on the negative, I prefer liking life, thank you very much.

And you know, it’s up to me. True, my perception of reality doesn’t actually alter it (even though I wish I could do telekinesis :P), but it does change me. It’s a choice. Heck, to fall in with modern parlance, it’s a lifestyle.

Now, I don’t think that anyone is 100% polarized at either end of the optimism/pessimism spectrum. We’re all a grab bag with some black marbles and some white. While we can’t get rid of all the black ones, we can decide to paint most of them white. Seeing the beauties in life doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t distort reality, either, contrary to the opinions of the pessimists. The good is there in just as much force as the bad. And since happiness is a choice, we may as well choose to see the good. It just makes sense.

Besides, when we’ve got our eyes trained, life is so much more fulfilling. Joys follow you around wherever you go. Even your sorrows are tinged with gold and light around the edges. It’s not a way to escape the bad things in life, mind you — it’s a way to deal with them that puts you in control, not the other way round. You go through your trials in this ship of light, so to speak, not away from them. And while the darkness batters you till you feel like you’re almost dead, as soon as you pass through it, the light flies in and surrounds you and then you’re changed, refined, and lifted to a higher level of existence. Those accustomed to see only the darkness, however, find that when they get through their trials, that’s exactly what meets them.

The difference between the two is like that between slumber and wakefulness. Real life is so much sharper and clearer than dreams, which usually start to get fuzzy and blurred as soon as you wake up.

All of this reminds me of a passage in C.S. Lewis’s 1947 essay “On Stories” that I seem to keep coming back to over and over again (the bold is mine):

If some fatal progress of applied science ever enables us in fact to reach the Moon, that real journey will not at all satisfy the impulse which we now seek to gratify by writing such stories. The real Moon, if you could reach it and survive, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else. You would find cold, hunger, hardship, and danger; and after the first few hours they would be simply cold, hunger, hardship, and danger as you might have met them on Earth. And death would simply be death among those bleached craters as it is simply death in a nursing home at Sheffield. No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden. ‘He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.’

Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

In a conversation I had the other day, it hit me: pretty much everyone feels inadequate. It’s not just me. :) And yet “I’m the only one” is inadequacy’s ever-present traveling companion, which grabs a handful of salt and shoves it into the wound — after all, knowing you fall short of the standard is ten times worse when you’re isolated from the rest of humanity, off in your own barren and lonely wilderness.

Except these feelings of inadequacy are usually dead wrong. As is the perceived isolation. It’s an emotional illusion.

Not to say inadequacy doesn’t exist — it does — but it’s generally blown way out of proportion. It’s like putting on a pair of glasses that make the world look like a nuke just completely ravaged it. And even if things are that bad, there will always be a rose growing somewhere, buried underneath a fallen slab of concrete or some rusty corrugated metal.

And yet being aware of the folly of these feelings usually isn’t enough to overcome them. Maybe it’s built in to the human condition. Keeps us humble. (But then again it seems like there are people who don’t feel inadequate, who are always über-confident. The exception, perhaps? Or are they the same as the rest of us, they just don’t show it? We’ll never know…)

Two things help. First, forgetting ourselves and focusing outside, not inside. (This is often so hard for an introspect like me.) Lose your life to save it. Since these feelings of inadequacy are parasites living in our perceptions, not our reality, it’s okay to ignore them and do other things. After all, isn’t it kind of pointless to fret about something that doesn’t even exist? It’d be like losing sleep because the Death Star destroyed Alderaan.

Second, kind words make a huge difference. When I feel like I’m absolutely pathetic and will never make the cut (in whatever area of life is under the microscope at the moment), it helps a lot to remember some of the nice things people have said to me. Isn’t it amazing how just a few words can totally make your day? Compliments — sincere ones, of course — ought to be our default mode of discourse. No man is an island, after all, and since we’re all in this together, we really need to be lifting each other up, giving out strength to buoy us up when the storms come. I know that I for one don’t do this the way I should. (Hmm, is this inadequacy creeping in? Live specimen, folks! Just kidding. :))

I’ll add a third thing. We may think we’re pretty lame, but God evidently thinks otherwise. After all, he did give up his only begotten Son for us. You don’t do that for people who aren’t worth anything.

Yesterday at the ward conference I was attending, the elders quorum president read this little story which I rather liked. I spent a couple minutes trying to track down its original source, but so far it seems to be anonymous. If you know who wrote it, please let me know! I’ve also taken a few small liberties in revising it to make it flow more to my liking. (But I’m going to be late for work if I don’t get this posted quickly, so I didn’t spend that much time on the editing. Oh well.)

Anyway, here it is, courtesy of the Unknown Author, with my own title attached:

The Circle of Life The American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. “Only a little while,” said the fisherman. The American scratched his chin. “Why don’t you stay out longer? You could catch more fish that way.” “I have enough to feed my family,” said the Mexican. “I don’t need more.” The businessman then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?” “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed. “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, both processing and distribution. You would be able to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then L.A., and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.” With raised eyebrows the Mexican fisherman looked down at his boat. “But how long will all this take?” “Fifteen to twenty years,” said the businessman. “But what then?” The American laughed. “That’s the best part,” he said. “When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.” “Millions,” said the Mexican. “Then what?” “Then you would retire,” said the American. “You would move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your children, take siesta with your wife, and stroll into the village each evening where you would sip wine and play guitar with your amigos.”

Regardless of what the world says, it’s not all about the money. Man, I want to be that Mexican fisherman. :)