You’re probably not going to find serene calmness in the online news pages. Crimes, injustices, plain old human folly, natural catastrophes, and accidents headline cyberwire news. Spas and wellness centers, shrines and “sacred places,” and meditation rooms are all designed to instill a sense of ataraxy. But not everyone can afford to visit such places, and not everyone can find time for peacefulness in a busy schedule.
 
What about during sleep? Isn’t sleep a cost-effective substitute for the calm people seek in expensive spas? Do you find calm, then?
 
Dreams, of course, interrupt peaceful slumber, and then there’s the potential to fall off the bed. But why is that potential mostly potential? Why do you not tumble to the floor each night? Are you aware of where you are even during your unconscious period? Is your sense of place so important that you can’t ignore it even if you wanted to? Are you only rarely awakened by the thought that you don’t know where you are?
 
Place is so primary to us that we are driven to keep constant track of our relationship to the world. You realize that you can fall asleep with a high level of confidence that you won’t forget where you are. Only occasionally does someone fall out of bed or twitch in a dreamt fall. Could it be that our “grid cells” work without a break?  
 
Apparently, grid cells don’t rest. At least, that seems to be the finding of G. Trettel and others in “Grid cell co-activity patterns during sleep reflect special overlap of grid fields during active behaviors.” The authors say in their online abstract:
 
     “…we explore whether cell-cell relationships predicted by attractor models persist during sleep states in which spatially informative sensory inputs are absent. We recorded ensembles of grid cells in superficial layers of medial entorhinal cortex during active exploratory behaviors and overnight sleep. Per pair and collectively, we found preserved patterns of spike-time correlations across waking, REM, and non-REM sleep, which reflected the spatial tuning offsets between these cells during active exploration. The preservation of cell-cell relationships across states was not explained by theta oscillations or CA1 activity. These results suggest that recurrent connectivity within the grid cell network drives grid cell activity across behavioral states.”*
 
Knowing where we are is a key to finding serenity. It’s not the only key, but it’s definitely one we can’t ignore even in our unconscious state. And then there’s this from The Guardian:
           
     “According to a study commissioned by the National Trust, people experience intense feelings of wellbeing, contentment and belonging from places that evoke positive memories far more than treasured objects such as photographs or wedding rings.”**
 
The study by Surrey University researchers sought to define the relationship between people and place in establishing serenity. “This visceral but intangible feeling is something the National Trust set out to explore; to understand the depth of people’s connection with place. This is the first piece of research of its kind and has revealed that meaningful places generate a significant response in areas of the brain most commonly associated with positive emotions; demonstrating the strong emotional connection between people and places.”**

​Maybe we already knew this, but it’s reassuring to know that our awareness of place plays an important role in our finding ataraxy. The studies also imply that some places, such as decaying neighborhoods and war zones, can thwart an individual’s attempts to find inner peace. Those who cannot afford to go to a special restive place or who are trapped in disorder and disruption are aware even in their sleep that serenity lies elsewhere. Our knowledge of place’s importance in establishing serenity underlies even our economic drives when we refashion and revitalize homes and neighborhoods.

​Our search for peace is ceaseless and originates within our entorhinal cortex. Ironic. The search for serene restfulness is driven by the ceaseless activity of our grid cells.   
 
 * Sean G. Trettel, John B. Trimper, Ernie Hwaun, Ila R. Fiete, Laura L. Colgin. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/198671, Online at bioRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/05/198671
 
**Study conducted through fMRI by the National Trust through Surrey University and headed by Nino Strachey.  https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/12/wellbeing-enhanced-more-by-places-than-objects-study-finds

You would probably argue that society is complex and that there’s no justification for a reductionist sociological philosophy. “Just look around,” you might say, “there are too many shades of gray, too many alternative lifestyles, too many people to reduce into simple categories, just too many subcultures for any unified perspective.”
 
Yet, all the while we claim our current complexity, we seem to be stuck on simplification. What do I mean? Follow along.
 
We awoke today to hear that the Boy Scouts will admit girls into their fold. Okay, I don’t have a problem, except in the name.  “Scouts,” will do for me, rather than “Boy” or “Girl” scouts. I suppose this will be the talk for some time, how, for example, one group is culling youth from the other group and how one will gain at the expense of the other. And what will we call those cookies? Solving one perceived problem often engenders another, in this instance, a problem with language. Suddenly have a desire for simpler times, when boys might not be selling girl scout cookies and girls might not be camping out with scout masters? Okay with any or all of the potential effects?
 
In 1914 one of the numerous books on scouting by Scout Master Robert Shaler begins with a conversation among boy scouts and their leader during time hiking in the woods:

​“Wasn’t that the far-away hoot of an owl just then, Mr. Scout Master?”
“I wonder if it could be one of those tenderfoot recruits that expect to make up the new Owl patrol of our troop? How about that, Hugh?”
“I’m sure that was the distant growl of thunder we heard,” came the answer from Hugh Hardin, an athletic fellow who had long been the leader of the Wolf patrol.”*
 
Ah! The assumed simplicity of those days before World War I, when distinctions were distinctions, and little seemed indistinct. Look at us a century and a few years later. Can you understand how traditionalists might be confused by an organization named for one gender that includes another? Obviously, the Boy Scouts originated under cultural circumstances that differed from our own. Obviously, also, the Girl Scouts originated under a similar set of distinguishable cultural circumstances. What, we might ask, will be the proper way to address a girl who is a boy scout? And how will we address the future master (mistress?) scout? Not that it’s an important matter for the culture at large, but certainly it will be for the micro-culture of scouting. And yet, for all of us, this new evolutionary step in boy scout history might help us identify a dilemma in language and culture.
 
Anyway, in Shaler’s book, the boys debate the alternatives of building a lean-to for protection, finding some sheltered area, and hiding beneath a large tree. I’m not sure how this will work under the present circumstances, but no doubt those wiser than I will work out the details of boys and girls camping out during a storm or having to pee in the woods. Shaler’s chief lesson in the scene, however, seems to be giving advice against taking shelter beneath a tree because of lightning.
 
But here’s where anyone unfamiliar with vocabulary would caution against so free a mixing of the sexes in the wilderness. Shaler has one of the boys under Mr. Scout Master’s care add this to the conversation when he sees the large oak tree with a cave-like hollow big enough for the small group.
 
“’Whoop! I’ve guessed a way out of trouble!’ ejaculated Arthur….”
 
Sorry, parents of little girls are going to balk when someone like Scout Master Robert Shaler so freely uses a word like ejaculated in a time when the word’s use to characterize the nature of an expression has been usurped by its use with another meaning. Shaler wrote an entire series of books for boy scouts. Will his early twentieth-century language put his books on the proscribed list? I can imagine the misinterpretation: “Well, I don’t want my little girl reading about a boy “ejaculating” in the woods.”
 
Human life has always been complex, of course, but those bygone times were, as many imagine, ostensibly simpler. Distinctions were distinctions, at least on the surface of everyday cultural propriety. Shaler’s Mr. Scout Master also says to his charges, “If you fellows will take the trouble to look up through the treetops [sic.] you’ll notice that there’s a lot of queer flying clouds racing overhead right now.”
 
As always, connotations abound. Vocabulary changes. What was simple has become complex in some ways and oversimplified in other ways. Meanings have never been stable, but they have definitely become charged with emotional simplicity. No doubt, language reflects culture. But is it a matter of the chicken or the egg? Some would argue that language forms culture. Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, argues that language shapes the way we see the world.* There are linguists who make the counterargument that the world looks the same in different languages. But, what about how the world looks in the same language at different times? Isn’t it in this last question that traditionalists find grievances against changes in both how we view the world and how we speak about it?
​
I might argue that the language of Scout Master Shaler’s time was English, but a different English. Those reading Shaler’s book understood a slightly different world from the one we currently “understand.” Of course, there are many who are so familiar with multiple meanings of specific words and both their etymology and philology that their only objection to contemporary usage lies in the restrictions and simplifications that contemporary society imposes ironically in the name of complexity and diversity.
Have we, like the Boy Scouts, solved a problem of understanding or created a new one? Have we generated a new perspective that requires a series of redefinitions? Have we now exposed ourselves under the name of freedom to a new variety of restrictions on language and thought? Have we, in the name of erasing distinctions, just added new ones?
 
*Shaler, Robert, Scout Master. The Boy Scouts and the Prize Pennant, New York, Hurst & Company, Publishers, 1914, p. 6.
**Deutscher, Guy. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2010.

“I laughed so hard, I cried.”
 
Guess what? We don’t always have distinct emotional responses. We’re a mix of feelings. Anything new here? Well, maybe not, but now there’s evidence for what we all know. Emotions can grade one into another. Feelings aren’t simple. There is gray.
 
Here’s the Science News headline: “Psychologists Identify Twenty-Seven Distinct Categories of Emotion.”* The senior author of the study, Professor Dacher Keltner, notes, “...in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, we found that there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration.” Feel justified and proud that you knew this and that you were so happy at the last wedding that you cried? That at the last funeral you felt both remorse and release or peace and despair?
 
We’re complex. Maybe too complex to ever quantify, regardless of the number of studies we perform on ourselves to identify our emotional states. That’s one of the reasons that I personally doubt that AI will ever reach human status. How does one program artificial intelligence for an infinity of gray shades? Maybe the best we can hope for is a robot that is stuck in a variant of Rain Man.
 
Think of an infinity you can understand, such as the number of fractions between two whole numbers, as Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor explained. There you are, sliding from one-sixth to one six-hundred-millionth or from 2 to 2.11 to 2.11111112323..... And there I am, sliding with you, close to feeling what you feel, though I might be a billionth of an emotion different.
 
That’s us. Sliding on a scale that robots might never “understand” or “feel.” Program as many variants of “feeling happy while feeling sad” into a machine, and still you might not get to a particular fractional feeling or shade of emotional gray experienced by a human.
 
Do you simultaneously feel elated, perplexed, proud, humble, and confident because you are human? Anytime you concern yourself with your finite existence, think of those infinite fractions of feelings you have had and can have. Want infinity? Feel it. 
 
 
* http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/psychology/27-categories-emotion-05212.html  

I have no way of knowing whether or not Marv Levy, the successful coach of the Buffalo Bills, had some special insight into human success and failure. I know of a remark attributed to him, and I don’t doubt, because of his successful record, that he could well be its author. He established a reputation as a highly intelligent man both inside and outside the arenas in which he coached. The remark? “I can’t guarantee you success if you work hard, but I can guarantee you failure if you don’t.” Levy supposedly made the remark to his team as they trained for the season ahead.
 
Makes sense, doesn’t it? It makes even more sense if you consider Marv Levy’s record. In the early 1990s, Levy led the Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls, and somewhere there’s a quotation from his quarterback Jim Kelly that Levy was responsible for keeping the team focused and prepared. But, of course, working hard doesn’t guarantee ultimate success as both Levy and Kelly discovered. The Bills lost all four of the big games. Yet, who could deny Levy’s accomplishments in getting to a championship game that eludes all but two teams every season? His work ethic and his inspiration led his team into that final arena. As hard to accept as those losses were, they didn’t seem to dishearten the coach or throw him into despair. He even survived a bout with cancer.
 
I wonder what Levy might say to Job, the successful guy who has a whole book named for him in the Bible. Job had everything and then, through no apparent fault of his own, lost everything: Land, wealth, and family. Job obviously did something right early on. Let’s call him the billionaire of his time. He seems to have reached the Super Bowl of wealth and happy family. But then the losses came. Like Marv Levy, he made it to the big game, but he left without the trophy, and even worse, his team—his family—was destroyed, and he suffered from diseases.
 
This isn’t about taking the story literally. That requires belief in a bet between God and Satan, with the latter arguing that Job was faithful merely because he had inordinate wealth. The non-billionaires might argue that people with wealth are prone to be happier than those without it. Satan tells God, “Yeah! Sure. Who wouldn’t be pious and righteous under Job’s circumstances. You gave the guy everything. I’ll bet he would sing a different tune if he didn’t have anything.”
 
Bold and crazy, right. I mean, who’s going to challenge the Supreme Being and tell him what’s what? God, if you know the story, tells Satan that he can do whatever he wants to Job’s status. So, Satan takes everything Job had worked for and built up. As the story goes, in his loss, Job refuses to blame God and remains pious and humble. By the end of the tale, Job is wealthy again.
 
Back to Marv Levy. He certainly reached a pinnacle of success under his philosophy of hard work. Some, of course, judging from their less successful positions, would say, “Yeah. But he failed to win the Super Bowl.” Of course, from their perspective, not winning everything is a mark of failure—even though they themselves never accomplished as much as Levy who, after retiring, became an author and a speaker.
 
The Old Testament story doesn’t detail any hard work Job might have put into rising from his losses. We could assume that God returned to him more than everything he had lost, but in the world that we understand, such acquisitions usually require some work, maybe lots of work. Levy, also, never seems to have stopped working, even coaching with the same enthusiasm after cancer as he had before cancer. Now in his nineties, he still appears to have the drive encapsulated in his advice to his team.
 
Certain people seem to be capable of persistent drive in the face of adversity. Like every human, they face crises, but they rise from any setback to new accomplishments, and in doing so, they become models for the rest of us. If Job were around today, he, like Levy, might be sought out for his opinion and for words of inspiration. No doubt—well, maybe, some doubt because I have never spoken to Marv Levy—they would probably have similar messages about hard work and perseverance and about keeping a positive attitude. They would probably also speak about life’s priorities.
 
You can judge whether the following is relevant to the stories of Job and Levy. It’s the last paragraph of Chapter VII in Hamilton Wright Mabie’s Essays on Work and Culture.
 
     "No man is free until he can dispose of himself; until he is sought after instead of seeking; until, in the noblest sense of the words, he commands his own price in the world. There are men in every generation who push this self-development and self-mastery so far, and who obtain such a large degree of freedom in consequence, that the keys of all doors are open to them. We call such men masters, not to suggest subjection to them, but as an instinctive recognition of the fact that they have secured emancipation from the limitations from which most men never escape. In a world given over to apprenticeship these heroic spirits have attained the degree of mastership. They have not been carried to commanding positions by happy tides of favourable circumstance; they have not stumbled into greatness; they have attained what they have secured and they hold it by virtue of superior intelligence, skill, and power. They possess more freedom than their fellows because they have worked with finer insight, with steadier persistence, and with more passionate enthusiasm. They are masters because they are free; but their freedom was bought with a great price."*
 
Hard work has no substitute. Persistence is a key to success. Obstacles are inevitable. No one has to surrender to inimical circumstances. Success is attainable, but never guaranteed.
 
*Mabie, Hamilton Wright. Essays on Work and Culture, 1898. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6143/pg6143-images.html

There’s an interesting contradiction underlying human relationships: We don’t want advice, but we seek it. We can’t know how long the contradiction has run through our and other hominin species, but it certainly goes back before Ann Landers and the rise of modern pseudo psychology. Did it begin in the family? Did it arise in relationships outside the family setting in those who had trouble with family members? Did it arise in the first rock shelters that provided communal living conditions? Or, did this need to get advice that we ignore simply arise in some twisted set of axons as neighboring neurons tried “to inform” across a synapse.
 
Neuron #1, looking across a synapse: “If you want to know what I think,…”
Neuron #2, acknowledging, “What should I think?”
Neuron #1, having communicated with neighboring neurons over synapse fences, “Well, I heard that So-n-So isn’t treating you fairly, and it’s time for you to take a stand and simply say, ‘I don’t want any of your neurotransmitters.’ Tell him to shove his transmitters up his own axon.”
Neuron #2, looking shy, “I don’t think I can think that out loud.”
 
The Japan News by Yomiuri Shimbun for October 9, 2017, carries an Ann-Landers-type of correspondence between M, living in the Okayama Prefecture and Professor Ohinata, who offers advice.* Unhappy M, a homemaker in her thirties, has a problem with her husband: She wants a second child, whereas he wants a luxurious condo. She believes he wants the condo “to make himself look good” and to hold down all the costs associated with rearing children. “I’m certain I will bear a grudge against him for the rest of my life…if I listen to his request and the three of us live in a luxury condo….”
 
Prof. Ohinata’s advice? Well, Masami doesn’t really offer a definitive solution, but rather presents a way of solving the dilemma. “You should make him understand how much you want a second child. At the same time, you should understand you can’t change him as long as you assume you are absolutely right. I…recommend you imagine his position and feelings as much as possible, rather than trying to make yourself understood.”
 
Okay, what do you think M will do? She has the advice. She obviously wanted it since she wrote to The Japan News seeking help. Now, will she follow it, and will it lead to a solution? M has already said she will “bear a grudge” even though, in another part of the letter, Prof. Ohinata says, “I suggest you listen to what he is thinking a little more, because he is the one who will pay for your child’s education, housing loans and other financial burdens….” And he argues that her husband might be motivated by a desire to provide the best life for his young family rather than by a desire to climb the social ladder.
 
What does this all mean in the history of humans seeking solutions from other humans? Can we suggest methods but not suggest solutions beyond “just tell him to shove his ideas up his axons”? Does this mean that we shouldn’t ask or offer anything beyond methodology?
 
Are your problems YOUR problems alone? Do solutions to dilemmas lie in personal decisions? Should you ever offer a neighbor anything more than procedures? I wish I could give you definitive advice that you would accept.
 
*Troubleshooter/My husband wants a luxury condo rather than 2nd child http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003964523  

Music and love! They go together like two turtledoves. Corny. I know. But come to think of it, birds do sing, and now we suspect that cockatoos use objects as instruments of serenade. Sciencenews.org has put a little video online to show a cockatoo pounding a nut rhythmically. The species seems to be highly adaptive: Other cockatoos use sticks. What’s next? Pounding a spoon on an overturned pot?
 
The narrator of the video notes that not even our close relatives the chimpanzees use tools to make music. That practice seems now to lie in the realm of only two animals: Cockatoos and us. Our kindred musical spirits are birds. And they do what we do: Use music to attract mates.
 
Lest we consider ourselves a little diminished by having another species match our accomplishments, we should remember that we can use syncopation in our drumbeats. Cockatoos seem to be relegated to a consistent beat.
 
Syncopation might also be cause for claiming our superiority over all other species. We can do the unexpected. There it is! Humans are creative. They can surprise. Many first dates and marriage proposals center on creativity, on some strange drumbeat that separates suitors.
 
It’s not only in our mating that we like a creative rhythm, it’s also in our daily lives. Some seek to live syncopated lives, searching restlessly for a beat no one else has produced or heard. It’s our protection against ennui.
 
Cockatoos can use different kinds of nuts and sticks to make their music. Unlike them, we seem to have an endless variety of musical instruments, some even oscillating on quantum levels. But it isn’t in the instrument that our creativity in love stands out. A repeated drumbeat can mesmerize, but it can’t revitalize. Rather, it’s the unexpected, and sometimes, arrhythmic nature of our pounding that attracts one of us to another. Mating to a different drummer isn’t just a human thing; it’s the essence of our passion.
 
It’s in misunderstanding how humans make music to attract one another that advertisers err in imposing only “ideal” people in “ideal” circumstances. We don’t always look for the ideal. We can be attracted to the real, however strange it might seem against a background of cultural perfection. Ideal and regular drumbeats can eventually dull our senses.
 
Think back or forward. If you have already found that creative drummer or if you are still looking, isn’t attraction manifested in syncopation? 

I wish I could really see myself without all my defense mechanisms. But no matter how I try to perfect introspection, I always return to the point of view of one interpreting and judging a world outside.I take myself too personally. How do I remove myself from myself?
 
Even though you might be better at self-knowledge than I, don’t you also find that the cares of the world force you to spend more time looking outward than inward? And doesn’t that outward perspective often entail judging others?
 
Making oneself a stranger to arrive at self-understanding and tolerance for others is at the heart of a book published in 1912 by Al. G. Field. Field seems to have gotten the inspiration for his book Watch Yourself Go By in verses by S. W. Gilliland:
 
Just stand aside and watch yourself go by;
Think of yourself as "he" instead of "I."
Note closely, as in other men you note,
The bag-kneed trousers and the seedy coat.
Pick the flaws; find fault; forget the man is you,
And strive to make your estimate ring true;
Confront yourself and look you in the eye--
Just stand aside and watch yourself go by.
 
Interpret all your motives just as though
You looked on one whose aims you did not know.
Let undisguised contempt surge through you when
You see you shirk, O commonest of men!
Despise your cowardice; condemn whate'er
You note of falseness in you anywhere.
Defend not one defect that shames your eye--
Just stand aside and watch yourself go by.

And then, with eyes unveiled to what you loathe--
To sins that with sweet charity you'd clothe--
Back to your self-walled tenements you'll go
With tolerance for all who dwell below.
The faults of others then will dwarf and shrink,
Love's chain grow stronger by one mighty link--
When you, with "he" as substitute for "I,"
Have stood aside and watched yourself go by.*
 
Seeing ourselves in the third person is difficult, but it is essential to understanding both ourselves and others. And it is particularly helpful if we wish to be nonjudgmental.
 
As long as we can’t look into our own hearts, we will have difficulty looking into the hearts of others. Give it a try: Watch yourself go by. For as long as you can maintain the process, privatively refer to yourself in the third person. “She is doing this. She has done that. She will do something. He thinks it is wrong. He has long thought thus.” See whether or not you find yourself a bit more tolerant after this little experiment of watching yourself go by.
 
*Gilliland published his poem in Penberthy Engineer and Field included it as the opening of his book. Field, Al. G., Watch Yourself Go By, Columbus, 1912.

Ever see a movie, TV show, magazine, or stage play that offended your moral or social sensibilities? Ever think, “This is just going too far. I’m liberal-minded enough to explore the fringes of society, but I’m a bit embarrassed by the debauchery I’m witnessing.” No? Think of yourself as one of the enlightened. Nothing bothers you. “Bring it on, Producer. Bring it on, Director. Bring it on, Actor. You can’t reveal anything I don’t already know and haven’t already read, heard, or seen. I’m not a prude, you know.”
 
One of the most shocking moments in movie history occurred when Rhett said to Scarlett, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Not that Clark Gable was first to say the word in a movie; he wasn’t, but in 1939, audiences weren’t accustomed to hearing cussing from movie stars. Bawdy language and scenes were not a regular ingredient in censored films shown in most theaters, though there was from the very beginning an underground of bawdy films. After Gone with the Wind, censors softened the rules of scripts as moviegoers hardened their hearts against the arrows of unspeakable speech. Maybe the atrocities of a second world war played a role in a widespread relaxation of decorum. Today, damn is a euphemism in expletive-laced tirades in books, films, cable TV, satellite radio, and, of course, the various forms of social media. In contrast, such a word would have drawn criticism from the moral watchers of centuries gone by.
 
Anyone familiar with ancient Greek playwrights knows that bawdiness and debauchery were part of their plays. Of course, there were complaints about what the language and actions in the plays might do to the morality of the theatre-goers. Those who were scandalized by Rhett’s use of damn would have fit into the society of their ancient like-minded counterparts. Playwrights have long pushed the envelope of propriety in the opinion of a committee of censors, and every generation seems to have had such committees.  
 
Greek plays, however, were lost to Europeans for a long time. When drama emerged in England during the Middle Ages, it was in the form of “morality plays” like Everyman, mostly allegorical works that featured personifications of virtues. But then the Renaissance happened. With increasing “englightenment” came increasing liberty. By the end of the seventeenth century, there was a growing body of the bawdy. Scandalous!
 
An anonymous pamphlet published in 1704 addressed the problem of scandalous language in plays.* Not that people of the time didn’t cuss and swear. They did in everyday life. And they often used the same four-letter words that one hears today. But there was a difference in when and where they cussed. Street language hasn’t changed much; neither has the language of workplace, tavern, and arena. One can imagine that war has always been a context for profanity, also. Yet, just as the ancient Greek keepers of a moral culture objected to the language and themes of their contemporaries, there was some four hundred years ago a sense that a decorum should prevail in the arts and public pronouncements.
 
The anonymous author of the pamphlet on “Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage” decried the foul language in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century plays. In quoting from Sir Courtly Nice, the author includes as an example of impiety the following Rhett-like line: “Let him Plague you, Pox you, and damn you; I don't care and be damn'd.”**  The pamphlet includes many other such lines from various plays of the time. In almost every cited line most modern readers might find a rather bland version of “foul” language and probably no impious meaning.
 
Have we been on a centuries-long movement toward iniquity? Every generation has its prophets and righteous people proclaiming judgment on those who would vary from the straight-and-narrow path of strict rules of decorum and morality. In almost every generation those who find no offense during their youth somehow find offense during their old age. Are they wiser? More prudish with age? Just experienced enough to think that what entertained them early on was trifling by comparison to the cares and events that weighed them down as they aged? Is it the swing of a moral pendulum that makes the bawdiness of youth yield to the chastity and decorum of age? And as one generation ages, does the next generation try to push the same boundaries of acceptable language and behavior? Do we all start out on impious side of a pendulum's swing? 
 
But is there a possibility that the pendulum might stop swinging and lie either in indifference or remain forever poised on the side of debauchery? Are the members of the new tradition of social media, steeped as they are in the “impieties” of ubiquitous entertainment suspended on one extreme, the extreme of the bawdy and lewd? Has the current generation, in examining the play of life on the world stage, become so indifferent to any sense of decorum that they have adopted Rhett’s attitude? Are we on the verge rejecting any regard for either a prescribed morality or acceptable decorum? With regard to complaints by the Watchers of Morality do we say like Rhett, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”?
 


​*It’s interesting that language is a continuously changing intellectual endeavor. Although it has a fundamental structure that conveys meaning (syntax), its grammar is subject to generational changes, and its words acquire new meanings as users coin more words to meet changing fashions and technologies (No Elizabethan would understand upload--or download—digital pics) It is also ironic that cuss words seem to persist largely unchanged through generations in contrast to the rest of a language’s rather fluid vocabulary. A seventeenth century person would have little difficulty understanding your cuss words.
 
**Anonymous. A Representation of the Impiety & Immorality of the English Stage, with Reasons for putting a stop thereto: and some Questions Addrest to those who frequent the Play-Houses, The Third Edition. London. J. Nutt Near Stationers-Hall, 1704. 

Among the ways that species spread around the world is hitchhiking. Apparently, there’s no better example of this process of moving plants and animals from their endemic habitats to exotic lands than the tsunami that struck the Fukushima reactor in Japan. Since 2011’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in eastern Japan, researchers have found hundreds of native Japanese species living in Hawaiian and western North American coastal waters. They got there by rafting, that is, by being attached to floating debris caught up in Pacific Ocean surface currents. Polystyrene foam, wood, and plastic provided the chance materials for floating rafts.*
 
Although some rafted organisms can’t survive in new their environments, others can find comfortable ecologies conducive to their lifestyle. The latter can establish themselves and become invasive species. The number of species from the recent tsunami that will become invasive in Hawaiian and North American coastal waters remains to be documented.  
 
On a human scale, books have long provided the rafts of thought that have spread from points of origin to distant minds. However, the speed of idea dispersal throughout the world has increased with the wired and wireless “rafts,” so that now it is difficult to separate the endemic from the exotic. You probably have parasitic ideas in your mind, and you are also probably unaware that they are there. They arrived on some electronic raft, maybe in just a flash of subliminal imagery acquired during some channel surfing. Your intellectual surfboard also picks up some invisible organic idea that has the potential to grow in its new home.
 
You could, of course, try to clean your surfboard regularly, but who has time for that? You’re in the ocean every day, and the waters are filled with the plankton of both younger and older ideas, not to mentioned the dissolved substances that have become a part of the water itself.** Immersed in and floating on the ocean of ideas, you can’t always avoid picking up something you didn’t have in your head before you entered the water.
 
Adding to the influxes of thought that arrive on traditional currents over the course of years, a tsunami of ideas hits your shore, overruns your landscape, and forces you to deal with whatever the water carries to your mental threshold. In our milieu, such tsunamis seem to occur with more frequency than they did in the past. We have waters overrunning waters and organic ideas invading endemic ideas, sometimes fully replacing native species with invasive ones. At times the effects of such tsunamis are welcome changes to our intellectual environments, but no endemic species wants to give up its traditional ecology for an intruder.
 
We can’t stop the tsunamis of ideas whether or not we deem them “good” or “bad,” “constructive” or “destructive.” Tsunamis will occur, and the currents will continue to move the debris they displace. As a consequence of more frequent episodes of rafting, all of us need to look at what species of ideas have arrived on our shores. It’s time for each of us to become oceanographers in the ocean of ideas, not necessarily to kill all the microscopic and macroscopic organic ideas that have invaded our coasts, but rather to study them to see which have a potential to improve our mental environments.
 
Each of us also might consider that all of our ideas, even those that we consider traditional and endemic to our philosophical environments, probably derived from previous rafting events. Studying the currents that carried ideas to our mental shores will provide clues to the origins of our thoughts and give us insights into the intellectual ecology we now find comforting.
 
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/japanese-tsunami-transported-hundreds-species-united-states-and-canada-video-reveals
 
 **Trivia stuff: The ocean is on average 3.5% dissolved solids. What you see when you look over the sea isn’t just water.

In Deep Thought, Gazing at the Moon
By
Li T'Ai-Po (b. 701-d. 762)

​The clear spring reflects the thin, wide-spreading pine-tree--
And for how many thousand, thousand years?
No one knows.
The late Autumn moon shivers along the little water ripples,
The brilliance of it flows in through the window.
Before it I sit for a long time absent-mindedly chanting,
Thinking of my friend--
What deep thoughts!
There is no way to see him. How then can we speak together?
Joy is dead. Sorrow is the heart of man.*
 
*Ayscough, Florence, Trans. Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems.  English Versions by Amy Lowell. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1921, p. 94. Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48222/48222-h/48222-h.htm#Page_39