That's beautiful.

AMDG

Thanks to photography.

I frequently look like that, Paul, even over 100 years later--or at least I feel like I look like that.

AMDG

Exactly. Moreover, everything including the people was gray or sepia.

Paul's modernist picture is a good representation of my inner life, so perhaps there was something to that stuff after all.

Avant-garde art never much impressed me when I just happened upon it in museums, but having to look at it more closely in order to translate art catalogues has given me some appreciation of it. As long as people don't disdain other approaches for not being Modernist (with that strange absolutising intolerance that self-proclaimed open-mindedness seems to breed) it has a lot to be said for it. The artists were often skilled and sensitive individuals responding to the pressures of modern life and culture with genuine human feeling, although often without the benefit of the antidote to modern poisons that the Church provides.

I don't really have a categorical opinion one way or the other. Some I like, some I don't. I doubt if I'm ever going to be able to say anything more than "mildly interesting" about Jackson Pollock, although I find now that when I see his and similar work it provokes a nostalgic feeling.

I've seen some of that in Maritain, too, although I haven't read that much of him.

Van Gogh and Munch aren't the kind of thing Paul was talking about, but a lot of Picasso is. I remember many years ago a friend who had seen Guernica "live" saying that it really was very moving.

I remember the first time I ever saw color tv. It was at my uncle's house when I was about 4 years old. It was the 10 o'clock p.m. weather forecast on the local tv station. I was really thrilled. We didn't have color tv for years after that--not until well into the 70s, I think.

Which I meantersay I didn't even see the Wizard of Oz change from black and white to color until I was in college.

For us it is usually the neighbor driving off to work, then the birds, then the light.

I actually have slightly bad associations with dawn, stemming from times in my college/bohemian days when I stayed up all night. When the sun came up I'd be really tired and it seemed depressing. Nowadays if I'm awake when the sun is coming up it's because I have to be somewhere early, and I don't have time to notice it.

I avoid the dawn as much as possible.

It was the way a dark world was suddenly replaced by an illuminated world

The ancients were sufficiently impressed by that to worship the sun and many of them were farmers.

There are birds out there but Im not susceptible to sounds. I notice their return in spring but not the sounds they make

There is a teenager who is moved to the country as part of witness protection and he cant bear all the strange noises and moves back to Baltimore. I can identify with that

He is killed

I recognized that story without you mentioning The Wire. A very sad moment in s series that had many of them.

Grumpy,

If you were here and awake in the mornings, you would hear the birds. They are quite loud.

When we lived in Memphis, there was a street that ended across the street from my driveway, so there were frequently people playing REALLY LOUD music sitting in front of the house, waiting to make a turn into the other street. And there was quite a bit of traffic, even though it was a small street, because we lived about 500 yards from the train tracks and there was a tunnel a bit further down the street that people use to avoid the train and they would roar down our street to get to it. And then the train was noisy, too.

My 7 year old granddaughter moved to Mississippi with us and after a couple of months, she went to spend the night with her mother in our old house. "What was it like to sleep in the city again?" "Oh it was great, it was so quiet!"

AMDG

Now you point iy out to me I can hear the birds

That is great, Robert.

AMDG