Life moves by definition self-directed in real time.  That is the font for having the richness of a soul, so very small, so very intangible, so imbued with feeling.  There the subconscious mind is incrementally impacted by each act of one’s present concentration.  This is a species of conscious control, each such act but a mere infinitesimal, pertinacity for the moment–jewels blessedly for to be involuntarily by the soul accreted at the moment’s lapse so small:

     “G-d did not wish to shower upon men undeserved bliss and good.  He did not want to leave no area for men to work at and exercise their creativity.  On the contrary, G-d wanted to give man a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment, something he could consider his own.  There is definitely a greater appreciation of that which a man earns by the labor of his own hands than what he would receive as a “handout.”  In fact, a person would prefer a single bushel of his own to nine bushels received as a giveaway.”¹

In sooth, appreciation of self finds its own value in one’s having actually moved–even if concentration is ever so small.  But then, as a reformulation of all this in sequence format:

“How do you get to Paradise?  Practice, practice, practice.”²

Fall we in thankfulness on our faces before God but not before men!  Time will not—cannot–comport itself to that.  For motion brooks not competition’s abrogation, and the genetic devices for primacy are no match forever for the lapse of time: 

“Life’s a walking shadow, a poor player,

  that struts and frets his hour upon the stage

 And then is heard no more.”³

It is only God that creates the moment.  And it is there that one’s minuscule motion incident to being alive doth arise–where having a pulse is a metaphor for the infinites inhering therein.  But, unlike learning, writer’s repetition is the mother of writer’s rubbish:

1. Time makes no exceptions at the moment’s lapse:

“And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.”⁴

2. No transaction transpires a lifetime.

3. Time brooks not the moment’s having an eternity.

4. Transactionalities from the past cannot replicate present time.

5. Time morphs antithetical to itself at the moment’s passing.

6. Past time shall discover vulnerability.

7. Present existence succumbs at the moment’s lapse.

8. Past time resurrects past position as phantoms.

9. The amygdala’s displeasure is that the spatial is displaced by the temporal.  

10. The amygdala caroms off into precincts outside present time in search of self-munificence in pretend space.

1I. The past reformulates itself in the present as dross.

12. Time brooks not permanence.

13. Past success is saddled with motionlessness.

14. Books are the embalming fluid that never resurrected anything.

15. Time takes no prisoners.

16. Status quo’s problem is the lapse of time.

17. Even Aristotelian logic will not save the universe from the moment’s lapse.

So now we know:

      “Kisses end.  Dreams vanish, and sometimes cities too.  We long for the perfect ending, but the curtain falls along with our hearts.

       “Beauty is so difficult.”⁵

Nonetheless recall internalized growth is the exception, and it all becomes:

 “The most important thing you cannot get a picture of, because the most important thing about me is my mental attitude.”⁶

Growth is territorial, cumulative as by us developed in the brain’s circuitries.  Repetition now becomes the mother of all learning though excellence cabins no perfection.  Increments of growth are impacted by one’s motion, cadenced with amplitudes small, fulcrums kept discrete, frequencies defined by one’s choice of boundary values for to superimpose on self.  Thusly out of sight must needs we there crawl subterranean among the riches of a present life.  The moment’s rebound, however, is itself blessedly without fault.  Compound not life’s temporal erosions and erasures of exponential decay with heedlessness:

                             “Wirf nicht für eiteln Glänz und Flitterschein

    die echte Perle deines Wertes hin.”⁷

Implement instead life’s resplendent proximities of being loved and of 

loving, of having been loved, having loved.  Yet even within love–perhaps more so–there remains the need for to find a balance between work and management:

“.  .  .  .  [T]heir general theory is dictated by reason; but the merit, as well as difficulty, consists in the application.  The discipline of a soldier is formed by exercise rather than by study:  the talents of a commander are appropriated to those calm, though rapid minds, which nature produces to decide the fate of armies and nations:  the former is the habit of a life, the latter the glance of a moment:   and the battles won by lessons of tactics may be numbered with the epic poems created from the rules of criticism.  The book of ceremonies is a recital, tedious yet imperfect, of the despicable pageantry which had infected the Church and State since the gradual decay of the purity of the one and power of the other.    .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    The vanity of the _____ princes most eagerly grasped the shadow of conquest and the memory of lost dominion.”⁸    

The infinitesimal of the moment is no small thing.  After all, it was God’s forgiveness that redeemed us with the moment’s rise.  It is the such that makes it feasible for us to shower the moment with gems solely its own:

“And a star

 Gems the sky.”⁹

Time therefore is not the hopeless creature.  It is the miracle, not futile, ever new, having an increment of priceless momentum, of itself exciting with:

 “.  .  .  the sort of interest I am taking in this voyage is so different a feeling to anything I ever knew before .  .  .  .”¹⁰

Move, damn it!  You can have faith in the down stroke’s rebound because of the next moment’s buoyancy.  Do not be fooled by the diminutiveness of one step.  It shall find forgiveness in the next step.  Thank we God that all along insignificance is made monumental by the mysteries of real time.  Time’s enablement of motion is miracle enough:

“But it was an interesting deviation from a classic style whose placidity had never expressed the overwhelming energy of the Roman character.”¹¹

Yet stoppages imposed on endeavor shut down initiative, excepting therefrom, of course, the essential regenerative downtimes of ultradian pauses and sleep.  For having given us the course of the quick, God makes self-directed motion the envelope within which to burnish fast passing energies outside keeping’s walls.  Just keep we our bounds small enough that we can still move at moment’s end on our feet and running:

“[H]e felt an immense gratification that he had leapt a chasm, landed squarely on his two big feet in a land of infinite horizon.¹²

In sooth, those horizons are minuities even if of endless value.  Infinite spatial horizons would be the trap of self-destruction as inflating without bound into outer space.  The conjugate is motionlessness.  There covet we resting moribund in predominant decay.  The moment’s own infinitesimal best will instead find freshness if harmoniously, brightly presented, particularly when enhanced with the keen acumens from drinking coffee:

“When we arrived, I was amazed at how this place and its people could be so different.  After a year, I found myself being surprised at how so many people could have changed so much.  In between we never felt sorry for ourselves.  Actually being so poor can be exciting.  You are never sure of what the next new challenge is, particularly when starting out on a new course of life, and we were too busy to lack hope.”¹³

Thusly were my dear Wife’s first steps in the New World, for me paramount forever blessed.  It is none other than time itself that is the font of all new priorities:

“What is the most important step in Masonry?

 The next step!”¹⁴

All development now becomes engrossed in a temporal stitching.  The fallacy is to dissemble permanence on time itself:

“Dissimulation ties but false knots.”¹⁵

Each increment of life has its moment of trajectory–transitory, not empty, finite but having life’s special grace by God uniquely us endowed.  That is the one thing that we can have faith in:

“We can dare to trust God to have joy.”¹⁶

Now then:

We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle.”¹⁷

Add to that character, blessed by its own self-induction of energy at each step in the sequence:

“That energy of character which could emerge into a life of action.”¹⁸

In fact facing us all whether explicit or implicit is the need to restrict self to comply with the lapse of time:

“And finally I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case.  It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear pointless in the normal world, the world of material success.”¹⁹

Yet reducing oneself to materialism too finds failure.  Irrefutable in the end is it that materialism morphs to none the better as just another pointless end.  It is true.  Materialism has motion–infinitesimals of so much, so little, so encompassed in the riches of present time.  The problem is the amygdala’s physical desire for permanence.  Biding time, the conglomerate forces of the universe brook no competing claims of universal control by anything by anyone.  Without reprieve be we ever cast into the next moment.  A single step requires the attention of intelligence yet carries no one to the end of the universe.  Time is the patrimony for patient, controlled strength:

                                               “Blessed are the meek  .  .  .   .”

We can thank Jesus for that exhortation for to achieve self-control and to forbear under injury, i.e., meekly as used in Elizabethan English.  There is much to strategize when the doors open.  But when the doors close, we discover the prior apotheoses become the pain of honor.  He gave his word:

“He was a bondsman for a bank cashier.  The cashier defaulted and General Parker was called upon to make the bond good.  It was a rude shock to have a trusted friend turn out a thief, almost as bad as making up for his embezzlements.

     “General Parker’s attorneys hastened to him with advice.  ‘You won’t have to pay,’ they said; ‘You are an Indian, and the law does not hold you to it.  You can not be compelled by law to live up to that bond.  It is not worth the paper it is written on.’  Here was a loop-hole that would save the accumulation of a lifetime. The elements of escape were few and simple:  ‘Indian, do not have to pay, law can not compel–contract void.’

     “But General Parker gave a single answer, ‘I fully intend to make that bond good,’ he said.  ‘I executed it in good faith.  I am a man and if the law does not compel me to pay, my honor does.’  And he paid, though his fortune was wrecked.  Years after the defaulter became wealthy and respected, but he never repaid a penny.  (emphasis in the original)

     “Again an effort was made to repair the loss of funds, and another small fortune was accumulated, only to be swept away in the crash of the Freedman’s bank.  More money flowed out in the failure of an insurance company and still more in a publishing venture.  This left a man past middle life in a position where he must struggle again for new footing and resources.  What do most men do amid such discouragements?  What did he do?  He went to work.  And herein lay the secret of his life’s success.  It is well embraced in the family maxim–it is Iroquois in its origin:    

 ‘Spend no time in mourning the failures of the past.  Tears make a biter throat.  Look ahead, there is more work to do.  Unstop your ears and listen.  Hear the call.’ “²⁰

The fact of the matter is the brain is the present but variable microcosm within a splendid infinitesimal, uniquely composited like unto a Mandelbrot set’s boundary in infinite detail but evolving by the repeated lapses of time.  We are ill-weaved for personal effectuation of anything except present and prospective moments of motion.  The move itself is the essence for defining the rational mind’s escape from the moment’s mimic of death’s finality²¹ during the lapse.  Paramount even to that are the limbic brain’s frequencies induced by the kindnesses within love’s proximities.  In the mean time in the physical world of realpolitik, being alive was defined by ingesting something else’s protoplasm, i.e., a theft in a FRB²²style of bailout.  Personal truth can no longer be the universal measure.  Eating always was an act of supremacy even if by time kept momentary.  Food sub silentio becomes sprinkled with moieties of flagitiousness, slander, calumny, libel, all of them sanitized in the supper club of self-righteousness, self-interest, self-preservation, and flattery of self.  One’s goodness finds itself saddled with the imprecations of the universal guilt from ingesting food–eating the protoplasm of something else’s last remains.  But hate too won only if it got to eat, and it did, and always will get to eat like everything else–just for now.  All vain-glory ends getting signalized passé:

“But it is not in the city of Constantine, nor in the declining period of an empire, when the human mind was depressed by civil and religious slavery, that we should seek for the souls of Homer and Demosthenes.”²³

The problem with this is that Gibbon sees only the transitoriness of power and overlooks that human minds, including those of Homer and Demosthenes, could love.  Further, he forgets Homer and Demosthenes too in the end did but get classified passé.  For time is egalitarian.  All the King’s horses and all the King’s men cannot save us from the isoclines of time’s lapse.  Thankfully within its lowly yet divine minusculeness, the moment’s excellence ultimately needs no more than itself.  It is internally independent.  And in the situations that find themselves being interpreted as losing, can one move forward unnoticed, then in private burst forward out from the moment–never into universality yet still undeniably moving.  Keep your tailings to yourself.  Combativeness is only the font for competitiveness, conquest shall be a passing confidence, decay has  its very own false sense of self-importance.  And no claim of ours of an apotheosis is an escape hatch from truth:

“.  .  .  .  the words of Bias [of Priene] seem to be well said, that ruling will reveal a man[.]”²⁴

Further are we immersed inside and out in our own microbial microbiome–microbes subject like us to living and dying in inexorable, exponential telomeric decay–or getting killed off in the gut by infusions of fresh alcohol or the ilk.  Yet does the intangible exist beyond the quantitative aspects:

  “Friendship is not a matter of arithmatic.”²⁵

It is only the moment’s preceding lapse that allows the new moment to resurrect as an infinitesimal exuding a God given fragrance.  Morph not time motionless.  Time’s lapse conjoined prospectively to do-nothingness will consume the present moment in the shadows of forever nevermore:

“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted–nevermore.”^26`     

Now do life’s solutions seriatim become getting off the pedestal of stopped dead–out of the pallid pit of make-believe:  

“propagated by vanity, beyond the truth.”²⁷

Further:

“celerity and vigor of operations”²⁸

themselves ineluctably burn out, then languish as lifeless planets.²⁹  Throwing yourself into something is the moment’s salvation within  the overlays of love.  Water not the coffee down if you be the one making the coffee.  It was God who opened the undeniable door to the moment’s one chance.  Time has its diamonds–diamonds never identical elsewhere, never the same, diamonds nevertheless.  The choice made of the endeavor against which for to compete now determines the conscious course of one’s two second attention span.  Concentration is one of those infinite infinitesimals that one protects. But perfection itself is not the issue.  Who needs to pay a compulsed attention to such the nonexistent when you already have God?

“They might lack material things, but who pays attention to that when you have G-d?  Who worries about a lost pebble when they find a diamond?”³⁰

All ordering of transactionalities remain nothing more than the sequenced practices of the blessed Alcoholics Anonymous inside the realm of self-control.  Perfection’s not being the reality, in sooth God must as the starter be relied on:³¹

“I am not remarkable.  I am just a common drunk who does not drink.  The whole of my debt–everyday–is to God.  That I never forget.”³²

Furthermore, there is that which is self-directed and that which is not–such as the parallel lives of the forty billion microbes thriving as a separate microbiome inside and out—in and on–the envelopes of each human being.  We house them, without a doubt feed them, and are influenced by them through their seemingly imperceptible, in numerous cases indispensable transactionalities.  Even at death some of them, no longer kept in check by an immune system, become the immediate agents of global physical decay.  We are mosaics of colonization:

“.  .  .  .  .  Indeed, our body is a complex microbial ecosystem;  a broad variety of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and microeucaryotes is contained here.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  

“.  .  .  .  We are each special in the microbes we bear[.]³³

And then there are the microbial clouds we incessantly be exhaling on everything else around–on everyone else’s keyboards and all.³⁴  In the mean time, our conquests of standardizing other people’s profoundly variable brains merely end in an ubiquitous, sometimes iniquitous transmogrification.  Such conquests are by us deemed as forever but then reduce to a denial of the lapse of time and morph as gone amok.  Even the culinary arts are characterized as the macabre:

“He that kills a breeding Sow destroys all her Offspring to the thousandth generation.”³⁵

However it is true:

“.  .  .  one small lamp may light a thousand.”³⁶

There do we induce growth somewhere whether in self or elsewhere:

  “If you are not thinking five years ahead, you will never go        anywhere,”³⁷  

in any event minutely leveraged by the ensuing effectuations by us impelled.  The complexity is that each traverse doth implicate looking ahead into a whole universe itself in motion.  There are also restraints:  the stone walls of time’s lapse; the judiciousness of a present retreat; achieving continuity of food and other predatorily obtained substances; a   rendezvous of the pernicious fates; and one’s microbial biome’s level of beneficial performance.  In no event do we beat the rap of telomere attrition.  Telomeric permanence is not one of life’s incidents of ownership.  We end up chasing around dodging tombstones and the fate of lying dead supine on the carpet like expired flies.  Nevertheless there is so much more to life than dead flies and a tombstone.  For within a temporal universe God given, the moment’s choice is endowed with the beautiful:                                                                           

“The radiant silver of Summer’s sun

has slowly turned to gold;

A lazy haze creeps over us,

Our Summer is growing old.

Crimson streaks of vivid red, 

Greens and copper shades–

Display one great triumphant fling

Before their brilliance fades.

Their glory lasts just long enough

For Indian Summer’s Call;

And then the sun once more will smile

A Benediction on the Fall.”³⁸  

Specificity is the moment’s anchor.  The telomeric mode of physical failure is just another physical cap.  The interface between time and space remains the present miracle.  And have it what you will, the prize of love’s proximities is what counts.  Now therefore move we on, not just as a matter of salvation, but as a matter of having been blessed.  Self’s each reinvention in real time is meant to be the aliquot, concentration the pathway:    

“If I see something I think is useful for me, I think about how I can make the most of it and take advantage of that.”³⁹

Rank is real.  But reinvention gives the moment’s rank its pulse, every rank without pulse is dead, and absent work, pulse is not much of a pulse.  Passé kept continuous is just the choice for not to compete.  Neither mountaintops nor valleys beget motion in real time prospectively.  They are merely iterates, soon to be relegated to standstill.  No one else wants the motionlessness reconstituted from your past.  Rather each moment is the variable vector in a temporal soul:  

“Nullius in verba.”⁴⁰

[“Do not take my word for it”]

Motion makes the moment the mystery of all mysteries.  It was in the moment that we:

“–put out [our] hand[s] and touched the face of God.”⁴¹

Move, damn it!  Time has no rebounds standing still:

“The wrastling for this world asketh a fall.

  Here n’ is no home, here n’s but wildernesse:

  Forth, pilgrim, forth!  Forth, beast, out of thy stalle!

  Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lede;

  And trouth thee shall deliver, it is no drede.”⁴²

That the universe would shake just because some minuscule starts to quake is not the question for to covet:

“.  .  .  .  .  but the ‘Patrician order’ does not appear all that different from its challengers.  However, __________ ____________ clearly saw a difference, and it rankled him.  The privileges of this ‘aristocracy of wealth’, he wrote, needed to be destroyed in order ‘to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent’, of which he considered himself a prime example.

“He came to see himself as a kind of impresario for America, rescuing his countrymen from their ‘deplorable barbarism’ . . . . “⁴³

It is a favorite trick of mankind to find fault elsewhere–better yet to find a finality of guilt in another, for then to impute to oneself a merit requisite to eternal amygdalar apotheosis.  Specificity is a blessed thing because it is the real life answer to the pitfall of seeking a fallaciously universal supremacy in oneself.  The amygdala–so absolutely necessary to so many facets of having an existence–can at any moment contort itself into a flitting butterfly, then to be frozen solid in universality, there crowned as entitled to no encroachments.  Applause too we may think as tooting the easy win.  However, that too induces one to be affixed to nothingness inside a paper bag for the precious present to be:

“dying in the inside,”⁴⁴

reduced to some critter perched alone on a pedestal eating at pretend supremacy’s feeding trough.  We manufacture ourselves there as  imaginary infinities on the inside to become impersonated fops on the outside.  The problem was not born yesterday:

“.  .  .  .  .  and the name of the Roman Republic, which so long preserved a faint tradition of freedom, was confined to the Latin provinces; and the princes of ________________ measured their greatness by the servile obedience of their people.  They [the princes] were ignorant how much this passive disposition enervates and degrades every faculty of the mind.”⁴⁵

Highs and the lows are lost in life’s next real time passage, though the old objectives can yet remain an option.  But excellence needs more than mere say-so.  Hoeing the long row is life’s entitlement, and even that started as a gift.   Just do not say you did that too.  It is not in spite of, but because of, God’s infinities,⁴⁶  that a loving course by us taken is precious beyond compare.  God’s existence is never to be made the basis for slaking one’s thirst for the upper hand.  It is work’s modicum that becomes the richness of stoking the pulse.  That is not so shabby:

“Busting your ass”⁴⁷

is the grain of sand in the ocean of the divine.  The moment has its very own soul but never endlessness:

“When this body did contain a spirit,

A kingdom for it was too small a bound.

But now two paces of the vilest earth

Is room enough.”⁴⁸

Motion is the mark of being alive, proximity is the font of feeling, time has its own promise of a next freshening.  Hang not dead flies from the past on present time’s neck.  While the amygdala makes pretenses so compelling and abhors to think itself bounded, he who steals the ball never gets to keep it forever anyway.  For we were constructed of 3.8 billion years of thievery–injustices so to speak.  Only for now are we the legatees of the previously stolen goods.  Sundry advantage muted by sequent change shall end in fallaciousness, to be pirated away by someone else, canonized–black beard riding high on the prow of his good ship Lollipop, officiously firing both of his brandnew pistols into the sky:

“Kindness has many details.”⁴⁹

Thank God for that.  But kindness is not the bar before which amygdalas plead their cause:

“Sometimes when you look carefully you can see tiny strings of bubbles rising to the surface as they give up their oxygen.  In two billion years such tiny exertions raised the level of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere to 20 percent, preparing the way for the next more complex chapter in life’s history.

“.  .  .  .   Having prepared the way for more complex life forms, they [the stromatolite cyanobacteria] were then grazed out of existence nearly everywhere by the very organisms whose existence they had made possible.”⁵⁰

It is eating that defines injustice, and mutuality of exchange is not the model in theft transactions.  Of course, mere theft is not the question.  Survival is.  And that is the sequence that implicates vulnerability as it evolved over time and space under the multifariously composited panoply of human judgment, fate, decay, growth, variable modes of competition, usurpation and money.  Thusly be there multitudinous relativities to survival.  And gold is one of them.  However, it is interesting to note that never once does Gibbon in his six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire even mention the byzant, let alone the history of the 800-year inviolability of its gold content.  Instead he dwells on his conceptualization of decay as the decline in a desire to be a soldier.  But decay or no decay, gold is still gold:

             “Perhaps the greatest example of a nation with sound money, however, was the Byzantine Empire.  Building on the sound monetary tradition of Greece, the emperor Constantine ordered the creation a new gold piece called the solidus and a silver piece called the miliarense.  The gold weight of the solidus fixed at 65 grains and was minted at that standard for the next eight-hundred years.  Its quality was so dependable that it was freely accepted, under the name bezant, from China to Brittany, from the Baltic Sea to Ethiopia.

            “Byzantine laws regarding money were strict.  Before being admitted to the profession of banking, the candidate had to have sponsors who would attest to his character, that he would not file or chip either the solidi or the milliarensia, and that he would not issue false coin.  Violation these rules called for cutting off a hand.

            “It is an amazing fact of history that the Byzantine Empire flourished as the center of world commerce for eight-hundred years without falling into bankruptcy nor, for that matter even into debt.  Not once during this period did it devalue its money.  ‘Neither the ancient nor the modern world,’ says Heinrich Gelzer, ‘can offer a complete parallel to this phenomenon.  This prodigious stability . . . . .  secured the bezant as universal currency.  On account of its full weight, it passed with all the neighboring nations as a valid medium of exchange.  By her money, Byzantium controlled both the civilized and the barbarian worlds–‘ “⁵¹

but not the process of decay anywhere:  

“When Fortune loves too much, she makes a fool.”⁵²

Decay is even complicated by specialization, for specialization necessitates simultaneous inactivity in the unrelated fields–creates the very boundary values that impede, nay do exclude, the brain’s Fourier frequency spectrum characteristic to such other endeavors and so likewise to their sundry amplitudes.  A specialization’s failure to match the frequency spectrums elsewhere is not a basis for to be disparaged.  Such shortfall is physically the result of time’s permitting only one course of action at a time:

“The ________, in truth, were an unwarlike people; but they were rich, industrious, and subject to the will of a single man.”⁵³

Move, damn it all!  The moment must you needs pass through.   Seriatim there do we receive from God infinitesimals that are infinitely much.  At the onset of the moving moment–at the starting shot, thank we you, God.  Yet present time’s redemption never was ours to keep.  It is instead ours within which to receive, cultivate, and then transmit.  Gifting of itself is time’s entitlement.  Giving that the slip, we merely deify keeping and transmute self into spinning in the wind in the name of more–ever more–be gotten.  Stopped dead, we find warpage and decay in accumulation’s obstructed bowels.  Per Shakespeare,⁵⁴ Will Durant,⁵⁵ Adam Smith,⁵⁶ Apollonius of Tyana,⁵⁷ and Natalie Angier,⁵⁸ gold is not the rate determining process for life itself.  From evolution’s standpoint we must needs meet successive step function linkages of food, sleep, and reproduction, each preceded by having thus far survived, i.e., eating something else and not getting eaten up as were the single-celled stromatolite cyanobacteria for their carbohydrate content previously by them photosynthesized.  An oxygenated world was the norm here to stay.  Per ruminations on the internet:

“Mammals, for instance, have an average species ‘lifespan’ from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist as long as 10 million years.  There are about 5,000 known mammalian species alive at present.” (Google:  8-13-25)

Spiritually just be we not a-claiming to have been the ones who did it all, to have it all, to be master of it all:

“This unbounded creation of sun, and moon, and stars, and clouds, and seasons, was not ordained merely to feed and clothe the body, but first and supremely to awaken, nourish, and expand the soul, to be the school of the intellect, the nurse of thought and imagination, the field for the active powers, a revelation of the Creator, and a bond of social union.  We were placed in the material creation, not to be its slaves, but to master it, and to make it a minister to our highest powers.”⁵⁹

This is nothing more than a statement that the monopoly of all subsidies presently controls the panoply of worldly advantage. There is more to life than that.  Life bounded in time finds richness by weighting self small, not coterminous with the whole universe, but by a love not afflicted by:

“ingratitude in casting off what has been done for your benefit as well as for that of all the world, and which ought to make you still more careful, perhaps even fearful lest you should not have taken all the pains you could to judge truly .  .  .  .  .

             “I do not wish for any answer to all this–it is a satisfaction to me to write it.  Don’t think that it is not my affair and that it does not much signify to me.  Everything that concerns you concerns me, and I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other forever.  I am rather afraid my own dear will think I have forgotten my promise not to bother him, but I am sure he loves me, and I cannot tell him how happy he makes me and how dearly I love him and thank him for all his affection which makes the happiness of my life more and more every day.”⁶⁰

Our getting anywhere, including finding personal meaningfulness and survival, remains, however, a variation of the old traveling salesman combinatorial problem inherent to every sequence that is fronted at each step by multiple destinations:

“In the jargon of mathematicians, the problems that Graham specializes in are known as ‘hard’–because of the mind-boggling complexity they assume in successive steps.”⁶¹

But the essential question is uselessness–nothingness.  In any event, the finality of the moment’s lapse makes universality in us the impostor.  Again, it is the specific that is the anchor within the bound imposed by each increment of time and allows tacking temporal specificities together into a lifetime.  Nonetheless there are kingdoms in the universe.  They are capable of being crafted.  And like stars, so are kingdoms capped, then crash.  Fortunately we are not kingdoms, for mutual love enabled by devoting individual brain stems to proximity does exceed physical bounds.  Nevertheless the individual life has rules of its own as controlling precedent.  As written by one of our Masonic brothers from the Fulton Masonic Lodge No. 69:

 “From my lifelong observations,

The best thing I have learned:

My mistakes have taught me lessons . . . 

And good things must be earned.”⁶²

Time’s present lapse is the reversion that catapults us into the high stakes of the next moment.  A most choice thing is it that motion’s sacrifice of all options except its own sets the stage as the moment’s concentration.  So bounded, the intellect’s two second attention span is brought to its unique though never perfect present fruition.  Yet what makes the moment precious beyond compare is the interaction therein of one’s best with one’s spouse.  Absent that, how hopeless we be.  Time is the Achilles heel of having neglected to achieve a spousal interpersonal limbic relationship: 

“After a few weak efforts, [they] sunk into the grave with vexation to see the rising generation gain ground upon them.”⁶³

So long as we be alive, the presence of some decay is universal, it just does not have to predominate. Otherwise, so soon do we find ourselves alone–alone clipping gold from life’s for now deprecated coin:

“As with any great event, a hollowness soon prevailed.”⁶⁴

Wealth can deny, but never end time’s existence.⁶⁵  For naught does money march us to a demise while macroscopic supremacies and their extensions by group think are destined to become more of the same flat busted balloons once fraught, now collapsed.  Then be we doomed to being passed through the merciless gauntlets of amygdalas not our own, all of the such being connected to their own panoplies of self-interest.  Highs and lows are immutably transitory.  Life as we got it was endowed as an infinitesimal, and shortfalls are the inevitable.  In fact we crawl.  We masquerade ourselves anyway as the forever, then at some point discover self to be alone, ossified into enervated, vulnerable misfits of the:

“instinctual and tribal”.⁶⁶

All supremacies–but not foresighted caution–are no bulwark against the fates of tragedy:

“Better to live on beggar’s bread with those we love alive.”⁶⁷

Amygdalas, it is true, are the engines of initiative:

“Competition is ruthless, unprincipled, uncharitable, unforgiving–and a boon to society.”⁶⁸

Whose society?  Again we be a-facing partial truths.  In sooth cause and effect are not ours outright. They are ours to use but not to own.  The best and the worst in a society compete.  Both are encompassed by the stockade of a moment that irreversibly will lapse.  Both are subject to mutating rules many-variabled.  Both thirst to pontificate center stage and hurl thunderbolts here, there and everywhere with guarantied acceptance nowhere.  Every move is doomed to a final anonymity.  And everywhere the best and the worst  are superimposed with having to achieve the surplus of a Machiavellian realpolitik so often deterministic of eating’s:

“passionate confidence of interested falsehood”.⁶⁹

Even so, the amygdala must needs seek a strategy sharpened by an intellect kept inside the due bounds of tempered, temporal jewels of a minuscule  God given soul:

“This seemeth incredible unto those that know not the principle that the mind of man is more cheered and refreshed by profiting in small things than by standing at a stay in great.”⁷⁰  (emphasis in the original)

Infinitesimal is not fictional.  Thank God that at least work gives blood the pulse the whole world feels.  A sequence space on symbols without work converges to customized downfall.  Continued idleness distills minuteness as nothingness:  

“Alas, for the man who has not learned to work!  He is a poor creature.  He does not know himself.  He depends on others, with no capacity of making returns for the support they give; and let him not fancy that he has a monopoly of enjoyment.  Ease, rest, owes its deliciousness to toil; and no toil is so burdensome as the rest of him who has nothing to task and quicken his powers.

 .  .  .  .  . .  .  .  .

 [And] fashion is a poor vocation.  Its creed, that idleness is a privilege, and work a disgrace, is among the deadliest errors.”⁷¹

Such truth is so tantalizingly true.  However, the cause and the effect harbored within us are too myriad for to be monotonic.  Nevertheless without work perfection grows stale.  While present primacy is the query inside the amygdala, time’s lapse is the price all moments of goodness and evil must pay–even as each success happily and each failure unhappily are contemplating permanence.  A demise is the finale.  Progressive telomeric decay at the chromosome’s tip is the inevitable.  Instead thank we God for the moment’s chance.  The only genuine apotheoses are those of the moment.  And as Achilles once he was doomed to Hades would fain have had it:

“I’d rather feel the earth beneath my feet.  Yes I would.  If I only could, ——- I surely would. _______”⁷²

Absent death, what we plan next is what we do next.  But desires are also real, all of them triggered lying in wait:  

“.  .  .  .  .  .  It was well that Schopenhauer should force philosophy to face the raw reality of evil and point the nose of thought to the human tasks of alleviation.  It has been harder since his day, for philosophy to live in the unreal atmosphere of a logic-chopping metaphysics; thinkers beg[a]n to realize that thought without action is a disease.

       “After all, Schopenhauer opened the eyes of psychologists to the subtle depth and omnipresent force of instinct.  Intellectualism–the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends–fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer.  After two centuries of introspective analysis philosophy found, behind thought, desire; and behind intellect, instinct[.]  .  .  .  .  .  .  he revealed our secret hearts to us, showed us that our desires are the axioms of our thought as no mere abstract calculation of impersonal events, but as a flexible instrument of action and desire.”⁷³

Clearly in the year 1926 on the date of publication of the above, no one but no one knew about the physical functioning of the amygdala and the correlative interpersonal limbic regulation generated by proximities between brain stems, for couples richly engrossed by romanticisms of spousal oxytocin.  But everyone knew that some form of cumulative decay defined eventual death.  Even so, life’s cottage industries are blessed with work’s present overlays, and happily, loving experiences accumulate:

“I love [that] these _____ last years have been filled with all the beauty, love, and joy that you deserve.”  

For it ever remains that:

“Experience is by industry achieved”⁷⁴

where:

“Every move must have a reason”⁷⁵

to find and keep our commitments to proximity with another’s infinitesimal of love:

“And what is it to work with love?

“It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.”⁷⁶

However, we must needs also face a physical survival wherein we do for food compete using irrefutable multiplicities:

“This winter run took the Washakie pack across Wyoming’s Absaroka range in search of food.”⁷⁷

Though ever we only:

“.  .  .  see through a glass darkly”,⁷⁸

a stomach full of protoplasm filched from something else is patently none other than The Origin of Species‘ formulation of a divine right to eat–a divine right having civic sufferance, then personal justification by the ineffaceable demands of one’s intestinal tract.  This is never pretty everywhere.  Simultaneously all supremacies, including having had the culinary upper hand, are struck down, then doomed by becoming passé and truncated for good measure in a petri dish of no-holds-barred competing amygdalas.  Even so:

“Freedom has its identity in commitment”⁷⁹

–where blessedly yet:

“By my soul, there is no time so miserable but a man may be true.”⁸⁰

Yet food succumbs to digestion, and renewed eating becomes a power player:

”  ‘A power player’ refers to someone with significant influence, power, or skill within a specific field or context, often in a way that is commanding and assertive.  The term can describe a person who actively seeks to strengthen their position and achieve their goals, whether in business or politics, or games, and is characterized by ambition, leadership, and a strategic mindset.”⁸¹

Life-forms lacking photosynthesis demand intestinal consumption kept constant:  

“They [the coral polyps] have tiny arms that capture food from the water and put it in their mouths.”⁸²

Being so encased by such necessity, one’s person is subject to  endless variable ramifications, some of them delicious, some of them life at its best, some of them not so melliferous, including but not limited to the manifold tentacles of guilt inherent to self-contempt kept frozen on stage in hopeless standstill.  Self-contempt is further often enough grated by the contemptuous scorn of others.  Time made prior rank passé, motion under the temporal aegis displaced prior position, and shortfalls upstaged us all. Rank morphs wildly subject to change–never did transmit very far for long.  Top dog today, zero dog tomorrow means getting forgiven by God tomorrow but not reconstituted as today in real time.  Self’s spatial differential equations that are a function of time may covet solutions converging to asymptotes exaltedly static.  But the result is net decay in real time.  Now then:

“After a victory, tighten your Helmet cord.”⁸³

Winning’s and losing’s compulsively-obsessively spiraling into outer space is just another path to an ending:

“Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk.”⁸⁴

We are filaments of time, not empires.  Glory and gloom transmute as getting stuck.  There can be no reinvention lying down:

“And he [the beggar Bartimæus, the blind son of Timæus], casting aside his garment, rose and came to Jesus.”⁸⁵

Post win, post losing, it all is the same.  A new beginning demands  reinvention.  But forget not that this is made possible by the mystery of God given time.  Thank we you, dear God:

“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind                                                                                                                          is stayed on thee:  because he trusteth in thee.”⁸⁶

Peace, yes.  But let no increment of perfect peace however that is defined fail to have respect for the vulnerability of one’s subsidies.  Every pedestal is destined to collapse.  Yet work is its own species of reinvention–a passing reinvention:

“I was pleased with my time–the average runtime for the Marine Corps Marathon is just over five hours–but even more pleased that I’d had the will to get myself in shape in the first place.  As grueling as the experience had been, I found in it a kind of honesty and simplicity that was rare in 

Washington.  Either I prepared each day, or I didn’t, either I paid the price and suffered through the pain, or I didn’t.”⁸⁷

The moment from the get-go does have a font that issues from a loving trust by God created.⁸⁸   Trusting in that, approach we our temporal resurrections ensconced in finite fragments of eternity.  Wasted not is an act of faith:

“My message is not to give up.  Three strikes doesn’t mean you are out.  There’s always one more thing you can do.  Give it time, and you can finish your journey.”⁸⁹

Time makes self-directed rectitude into minuities of feasibility:

“My goal isn’t to be be better than anyone else.  My goal is to be better than I once was.”⁹⁰

Excellence has no need for applause.  Proximity made continuous ends in love.  Love’s reality becomes the possible.  And a wedding is a consecration.  There is more.  It is competition.  And the requisite for competition is none other than having a functioning amygdala, as graphically proven by surgical extractions performed on the amygdalas of mice with disastrous consequences for the mouse, i.e., the loss of any meaning for survival:  ambition, resistance to setback, and a desire to live.  No one would want the amygdala posited tip top on the temporal 

limbic system surgically removed.  Further, the amygdala is requisite to excellence.  The soul’s very own diminutiveness is the gem through which the said must needs pass–where love’s interpersonal limbic proximities are such key parameters that cost is reckoned in space, not endlessly extended, but rather kept proximate to one’s spouse.  Mutuality of presence makes the moment dynamically infinite in value, just not infinite, never futile, just not forever, yet its reality within reach.  We proceed anyway to defy time and posit ourselves in some never ending stop.  Pauses⁹¹ are necessary, stopping in perpetuity is disaster.  Self-obstruction within the bowels of standstill is the strategy of no strategy, and being self-spotlighted past spotlight’s moment is vain-glory standing still at one’s worst:

“.  .  .  .  .  and we sink into the gulfs of insatiability, only because we do not sufficiently consider, that all real need is very soon supplied, and all real danger of its invasion easily precluded; that the claims of vanity, being without limits, must be denied at last; and the pain of repressing them is less pungent before they have been long accustomed to 

 compliance.”⁹²

Over and over again overextension ends as predominant decay’s warped 

disaster:         

“But Agripinna [Nero’s mother] had more determination and less scruple.  Perceiving the emperor’s intentions she [his fifth wife] risked everything:  She fed Claudius poisonous mushrooms, and he died after twelve hours of agony, without being able to utter a word.  When the Senate deified him, Nero, already enthroned, remarked that mushrooms must be the food of the gods, since by eating them Claudius had become divine.”⁹³

Mummifications are obfuscations.  We there are alone, churned within keep-all’s bowels.  Expansiveness there doth sterile ring:

“But the son of Theodosius passed the slumber of his life a captive in his palace, a stranger in his country, and patient, almost the indifferent, spectator of the ruin of  .  .  .  .”⁹⁴

Fossilization begets not competence:

“Show me one scar character’d on thy skin:

                               Men’s flesh preserved so whole do seldom win.”⁹⁵

We settle for the stagnant state.  But that is the doom of an end run around the lapse of time.  Intrinsic freshness lies within action’s sinew irrespective of how eclipsed it is.  Salvation from necrosis abides if we be posited within a specific move.  Unlimited space is a species of damnation, and overextension’s fallacy is that only time’s renewals expand past the prior moment:

“But an important distinction has been already noticed:  the ________ were stationary or retrograde, while the ________ were advancing with a rapid and progressive motion.  The nations were excited by the spirit of independence and emulation; and even the little world of the _______ states contained more people and industry than the decreasing circle of the ________ empire.  In ________, the lower ranks of society were relieved from the yoke of feudal servitude; and freedom is the first step to curiosity and knowledge.”⁹⁶

This is oversimplification, but simplification can have its say.  The rational mind ceases not to be center stage for an infinitesimal to play life’s progressions in a pageantry of wonder.  Permanence is the mirage.  Endowed be we with the degrees of freedom mathematically inherent to all independent variables.  Within the bounds of decay, fault, and divinity, there is an ocean of variables, but the moment is it that catapults us into love’s limbic proximities.  Meanwhile achievements shall be deemed a fly in another’s ointment.  Acceptance is never monolithic.  The solution sets 

for excellence great or small do not match the feasibilities for amygdalar approval elsewhere within amygdalas not your own.  Our presence in that case is viewed as an intrusion, and the critter so intruded upon spews out spin-offs of deprecation in a cloud of the hate originally designed as the fast getaway from getting eaten or conversely as getting to eat.  However one’s guilt may be defined, the final move is to ban the guilty mired in execration:    

“Having been once wrong, he can never be right.”⁹⁷

This is just the bubble’s babble:

“prone to the base practice of insulting and calumniating a fallen     enemy”⁹⁸

–a false premise that sours when the truth be known–like unto the real number system’s having forgotten that having the duality of complex numbers has real number meaning.  It is true that One’s getting shunned is a source for others to seize control.  But love’s proximities are yours for to cherish.  Specificity simplifies the bulwark of morality.  But falseness masquerades as a cure for shortfalls, and no one competes forever whining out repertoires of lies.  There do the:

“Little wrongs grow into big wrongs.”⁹⁹

It is therein that the dramatist looks for a finale–for the requisite tragic flaw–the flaw that fails to measure up at the end.  It is none other than the rise of the moment that morphs as God’s forgiveness.  It is just not for us to 

dictate how God does it.  One who there makes himself a friend with God:

“waxeth wiser than himself.”¹⁰⁰

Even the cankered soul–ever yet a God given soul–can unleash the miracle of kindness:

                                  “When counting all your blessings, folks

                                         Be thankful that you’re you;                                                                                                                                                                                          Just minimize what’er your faults,                                                                                                Your virtues will shine through.”¹⁰¹

Our good fortune is that God himself cannot repress his perception of us ringing true.  The moment’s ring itself, however, comes from God.  God 

presently puts grandeur somewhere into every soul.  From God come the tectonic forces arising from his having stooped to tend us.   Again and again we discover the anticipation for giving kindness for to be metamorphosed by God into forces of goodness:¹⁰²  

The woman who triggered the above memories put her wing around me only once.  By her invitation through my family, we two sat on the porch of the house where she roomed, and we talked.  She told me about her days as a sanatorium worker, and she turned over to me for my collection her old post cards of Waukesha, some of which cards are now enlarged and posited on a wall in our city hall’s corridor.  He aurora of genuine goodness was obvious to me.  Even then I could appreciate the close up look at it.  I remember thinking during our conversation about how important a woman of her stature must have been to people in the old sanatoriums–to the Civil War veterans crippled from life.  I opened the shutter of my mind wide and drank her image in.

What is left of our kindness at day’s end gets reworked by God himself:

“Oh my soul, Oh my soul!” ¹⁰³

Now can right action in real time refute shortfall’s extrapolation.  God’s birthing the moment at its start now makes the moment the honor of all 

honors.  The diminutions in one’s course are not the rate determining processes for the infinitely variabled infinitesimals of one’s existence.  Life itself is the ultimate rank, the present moment’s rank is being alive, and blessed is it that the temporal renewals are themselves inalienable:

“God’s call for transformation of their lives was just the beginning.”¹⁰⁴

God is not interested in resuscitating our dead on arrival moments from the past.  The moment is the birthright, not perfection.  If we be immersed in some nothingness, we are left behind as pretenders to the throne of the present tense.  That is the incontrovertible flaw of making the present moment into prior space.  Our past is not by God vindicated, but forgiven,  

for we are at that point endowed with a new moment.  There time brooketh not universality.  Goodness is monolithic, we are not.  As profoundly written by one of our brothers of the Silas H. Shepherd Lodge of Masonic Research No. 1843 F. & A. M. of Wisconsin:

“The Royal Arch Degree gives us these great tools .  .  .  .  .  .  .     crow, pickax, and spade to discover that great truth we need to move forward and rebuild our spiritual and moral temple.”¹⁰⁵

We whine anyway that we be so small.  Wake up!  It is only God, universal as he is:

“who hath not taken [our} soul[s] in vain.”¹⁰⁶

We be by him kneaded in love–unseen–intangible–beyond any ken of ours.  He breathes into us for the taking the infinities not by any of us created–the fragrances God given::

“Ka makani hali `ala o puna.”¹⁰⁷

Pass on from the raptures outside love’s realm.  Forward motion’s buoyancy will revert prior motion back into the inchoate.  We be by time made infinitesimal.  We are not dead stopped egalitarian–not lifeless pretend universalities kept within the fallacious ramparts of some nonstarter standstill.  

The amygdala’s self-interested conceptualizations of what is enough, then followed by looking for more than enough, does not give cognizance to time’s one choice at a time.  On earth only time is justice–the same everywhere for everybody for everything.  It is territory that is the bone of contention–endlessly never the same everywhere for everyone and everything.  Every differential there will get a rise out of someone.  Territory is endlessly variable, but the lapse of time is the same everywhere.  This skirting on nothingness means move on.

The brain and its lifelong development, however, are known to be fundamentally different from person to person,¹⁰⁸ and the lapse of time coupled to telomeric attrition will dement all claims of permanence.  We soon find there is nothing more subject to change than our present array of perspectives.  So posited in us, they are all a-begging for to be acted upon.  Choice becomes plethoric.  But motion’s one choice once made shall in present time override the unrequited perspectives.  Thusly is it specificity is the asymptote of choice.  And all choices made are something higher if higher means smaller and if all things smaller mean proximity juxtaposed to love’s circuitries of interpersonal limbic regulation.¹⁰⁹  It is God only who showers on us the jewels of time.  It is so simple to be one thing at a time, so much smaller all the time.  Harmonization of love’s infinities within motion’s minusculeness now becomes the high calling:

 Thank I God that you, dear Wife, are the female half of my soul–my salvation–the part of myself ever by me adored unabated–the blessed measure of my life.

Death will rob us of proximity’s euphoria except that past memories of love in the living are not delusional.  The dead themselves are dropped like dead flies.  Monuments to the past are like unto expired exoskeletons of  insects lying supine, lifeless on the carpet–have the consummation of sheet music no longer played.  During life, however, each moment’s ending ends as a stepping forward into the ensuing temporal increment.  By having died, we irretrievably lose that:

“.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  

‘On this home by horror haunted–tell

       me truly, I implore–

Is there–is there balm in Gilead?–

       tell me–tell me, I implore!’

Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’

” ‘Prophet’ said I, ‘thing of evil!–

         prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us

       –by that God we both adore–

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if,

       within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom

       the angels name Lenore–

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden

       whom the angels name Lenore.’

Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’

” ‘Be that word our sign in parting, bird

       or fiend!’ I shrieked, upstarting–

‘Get thee back into the tempest and

       the night’s Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plumage as a token of 

       that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken–quit

       the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and

       take thy form from off my door!’

Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’

“And the Raven never flitting still is

       sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above

       my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a

       demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamplight o’er him streaming

       throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow

       that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted–nevermore!”¹⁰¹⁰

We be each bounded by a point of space.  If our claim is any more than that, we become alone in fact, in essence nullities alive, posited in the flatlands of the dead, taking flights into a conceit whose mathematical limit is nothingness.  It is possible, of course, to control two points at one time, just not occupy them both.  Motion is the single entity’s sine qua non for time’s bound of a conscious state.  Contemporaneously we cannot move if we are not minuscule, concentration comports with the lowliness of of the gloriousness inhering in an infinitesimal, and ‘alive’ first of all means ‘small’.  But now comes it God’s gift all along was proximity’s divine drop of love in the bucket–the drop that has not time to waste.  At the spouse’s death, we became the emptied out shell but for gratefulness for the infinities of once limbically together being, of having been.  Not the dead, but the living must endure putting their shoulders to the temporal yoke.  While beauty is not a matter of just deserts, time is the given and is the soul’s requisite to gratefulness.  Gratefulness is:  

“the surcease of sorrow.”¹¹¹

There seems to be a certain fallacy here about just who is the prime mover.  But being alive does enable an infinitesimal to be redeemed by love in real time.  But lacking proximities and having only summits and valleys will bear us no tidings of solutions to our death’s interpersonal limbic demotion.  Nor will summits and valleys pull us ahead from any moment’s truncation.  It is only  the temporal renewal that does that.  Delay is not the terminology at the moment’s lapse:

“.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    All is whole;

 Not one word more about the consumed time.

 Let’s take the instant by the forward top;

 For we are old, and on our quick’st decrees

 The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time

 Steals ere we can effect them.      .  .  .  “¹¹²

The amygdala is the organ for not going extinct.  But God made love’s infinities, and that means being placed proximate.  Irrespective of the endless cookbook compendiums of the philosophers and saints, love within the moment’s bound remains as two creatures together situate.  Time itself  makes, however, no distinctions.  Now is all now or never:

   “And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said 

unto him, ‘Zachæus, make haste and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house.’

   “And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully.”¹¹³

Love is infinite for the lovers.  Yet it too must bow at death to the loss of temporal renewals of proximity’s physical fact.  Memory is all that the survivor has got.  Thank you, dear God that I do have that:

My dear, dear Editkiém, when I met you, I discovered profoundness.  How most fortunate I was–by the grace of God–that I somehow did the same for you.  Our proximally mutual limbic existence died when you died.  I am alone.  I am so sorry for you.  Yet my life remains so honored by your name.  Without you, however, I now be just the hitter that struck out:

                        What incoherent fools we are to fret            

when our lives shared are the jewels we get.¹¹⁴                                        

I lost life’s summit when I lost you.  But that does not abjure the moment.  That does not abjure the moment I must needs pass through.  No greater happiness, however, is there than your having been my happy wife.  That was, and now is the vindication.  While the lapse of time pays no heed to summits, thankfulness does.  It was a supremely precious gift from God himself that my own love’s each act was like unto a single flower in your divine lei.  Now forever by me beloved, that lei doth hang upon my neck.  Oh!  Oh, thank you, dear God!

“E lei no au i ko aloha.”¹¹⁵

You, dear Wife, are the eternal garden in my soul.  You are the blessed eclipse of my mere minusculeness, always were, continue to be.  Perhaps we should say love is self-eclipsing of oneself but not of itself.  Oh, God, thank you, thank you!  Thank you that I yet can be joyous in that.  Her happiness made me among the most fortunate of human beings.  For within the domain of interpersonal limbic regulation, nothing but love and having loved survives in the moment.  Once cast into the ditch of lapsed time, all the rest finds itself fast fading.  Found by me in a drawer long forgotten, the below I read again and again:

“I love you!

I want to see you

before you leave–because 

I love you!

                  Editkéd”            

My dear Wife, your soul is the soul of my soul.   Every thoughtfulness towards you morphs as a blessing.  It is much more than a: 

“reunion [of] sheer intellect”.¹¹⁶

Your journey as extended in mine is in my mind paramount even though death did sever us physically in twain.  Success is discounted at the moment’s lapse.  Once we are dead, there are no temporal renewals.  But love finds consummation in far more than endings–in much more than achievements in real time now lapsed.  Our marriage always was bigger than we were, and my memories of its previously sequenced proximities remain profoundly rich:

There is no higher point in the practice of law than to arrive on a house call my dear Wife at my side as the second witness and find the clients there waiting with expectation unabated, homemade muffins, fresh black coffee, and four carefully set place settings of paper plates and old tinned flatware.¹¹⁷                      

Life needs be crafted diminutive for to refine its positive forces.  There be  you the mirror in which I did and do contemplate our minuscule lives–contemplate the:

“images created but [now

 no longer] incarnated.”¹¹⁸

Not because of myself did I deserve, nor could I ever be entitled to, the miracle that was you.  And profoundly so, you were the gift by God to me given–a gift by God made divine.  And did we not together have a brush with God?  That was the gift God given by us shared:  

I want you to know that this coming Friday, Edith and I  were married in this Church 50 years ago at which time we received an anchor–a spiritual anchor–a matter for which we are profoundly indebted–a matter for which we are ever thankful–to you as a Church and to the Church as an institution.

You are the motif of our achievements.  Take I anything that is good in our lives, and I see your craftsmanship.  Without you, I am truly just progressing posited on the final decline on a remaining strand of time composited into aging’s diminutions.  I remain yet blessed to worship your love–to keep the precious imprint of your soul stamped on mine, endowed with a:

 “a love that is willing to go on loving”¹¹⁹

–you, my dear Wife, forever.  Oh, God!  Thank you!  I still remain shaped by her.  Oh, Editkém!  Your image is my life’s prime boundary value–mathematically or otherwise.  You be my universe ensconced in my soul:

“Oh my soul, Oh my soul!” ¹²⁰

But life is an iteration in sequenced time–the long row to hoe–the  row where successive measures taken add up to their own  form of continuity.  For me, it is through you yet kept heavenly as self’s temporally variable fractl infinitely delightfully contoured:

   “We love in [the] small things . . . . .  [within the         miracle of] love.”¹²¹

How big I may have been, or now am, explains not the miraculous glow by God showered on me through a smile on your face–the miracle of your smile of marriage and motherhood.  And your scaffoldings, dear Wife, of treasured standards have suffered no diminution, no absolution in my life.  Drága Editkém, I need you, and earnestly do pray that you still need me.  My life is to you forever indebted.  For paper thin was I before your appearance.  But we sculptured our lives in each other’s presence–God given infinitesimalized miracles–

“adventures which regularity admits”.¹²²

How incredibly rich for me you be–a richness stretching out from my commitments to you from the start–if not now as a fiduciary to you physically, then let me be allowed by God as a fiduciary to my present best as formed by you–where yet:

“`Ono kāhi `ao lu`ae me ke aloha pu.”¹²³                                                                                            

Oh, thusly does my memory of you yet interact within the loving brainstem within me albeit without leaving a visible trace except in my mortal heart.  How sterile it all is but for the memories.  Death is a physical move, the last one, the one truncating forward steps in an eternity that doth not repeat prior time:

“Of human life the most glorious or humble prospects are alike and soon bounded by the sepulchre.”¹²⁴

But life was not nothingness, just not forever.  There doth the moment brook not the soul not to move:

“[t]he callous palms of [a] laborer .  .  .  conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, [more] than the languid fingers of idleness.”¹²⁵

Thusly were we in fact paltry small, and the commitments had bounds that allowed:

“Als Ik kan.”¹²⁶

My own gratefulness to you doth still survive:  Now then in all matters of our love’s miracle, you in your last Valentine Day card captured it best–your loving card of so many:  

“God has been good to us, ______kám.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  

Editkéd”

Yes, God!  You were good to us.  It was you in your miraculousness that made our love most choice.  It is you to whom we remain eternally grateful.  God, we could not want more than the infinities of our together being, of having been:

Your wife gets all the credit.  She’s your wife.”

For Edith’s happiness was a gift, God–for me the ultimate of all miracles.  I thank you.  Prostrate I fall before you, God:

The question is not whether my dear Wife led me around by the nose with an attached string.  She did.  Instead the question is whither to did she lead me—into a chamber of her beautiful, divine and contented love for me.  But, Oh how full of love’s fortune it was for me to be within its undiminished, unimpeded ambiance—unforgettably hers!

The present gets reshuffled at the lapse.  That is why in marriage the locking in of its two interpersonal limbic systems is the physical sine qua non of permanence—the crown jewel.    Otherwise the given of change would start from the moment’s inception.  Just look not in the mouth God’s gift of the moment.  Negate not the meaning of infinitesimal goodness now earned, now earned within the munificence of having been simultaneously by God crafted into two composite lives having minuities of goodness pushed through each moment’s temporal keyhole, there together made infinitely much.  Absent love one settles at death for a presence fast fading:

“________ expressed his hope that the virtues of his son and successor would erect the noblest mausoleum to his memory.  His memory was embalmed by the public affliction [grieving]; but the most sincere grief evaporates in the tumult of a new reign, and the eyes and acclamations of mankind were speedily directed to the rising sun.”¹²⁷

Having loved, however, we see proximity was the salvation from futility.  At the spouse’s death, one becomes quixotic seeking more than a phantom.  Only the memory remains.  How very rich the memory is that, though the world was never devoted to me, my Wife, my dear, dear Wife, was.  It was her miracle of devotion that allowed the delighted acceptance of my  reciprocations–so small, so rich, so plain, bounded so minutely from within.  Without love, even perfection lies in the tomb:

“The last delusion of great minds–an immortality of fame.”¹²⁸

A man presently gets a safe passage from his wife’s love and its global resonances.  Concomitant to that, he finds her acceptance to boot.  A wife’s happiness means:

“A man’s role in life is to serve his wife.”¹²⁹

A man never stops wooing his wife.  For a man’s measure is the softness of her heart.  Her happiness is its own infinity even after death.  It is so simple.  To your wife, goodness transferred.  It was all right all along to be your wife’s secondary:

“freely giving as you have [been by her] shown the way.”¹³⁰

In a sense, a woman’s love means nothing else much counts.  A wife is the magic in a man’s life–magical within the interpersonal limbic regulation of two human brain stems posited close.  In the end, one’s love only requires that:

“I don’t have wisdom, merely patience and affection.”¹³¹

At the mate’s death, the roles are gone, the nest is empty, the fulfillment is not.  Life’s great futility is the doom of never having loved–single-handedly the frozen solid, insurmountable final temporal trap.  Time doth then bite excellence in the back.  Specialization becomes sameness in a shortfall of nothingness–even if excellence was the blood that once pulsated in the bloodstream of the present tense:

  Like every other living thing, a city fights for each breath of its life.  And just as this river is our center of motion, every citizen’s present moment is the living blood pumped through _________’s heart.  Look at yourselves, fellow citizens.  Know that your best is just as good as the genius of the 

 City States of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy.  That your every excellence is the soul of this City.  God bless you.  And thank you all for today coming to honor this our river.

It is true one’s developmental course is monumental as daily done right in:

“simplicity, dignity and subtle proportions”.¹³²

The infinitesimal mind’s nonlinearities are there tempered by the legitimate and strategized by one’s own output to be competitively stirred internally, to become then the moment’s freshness for unleashing the minuscule infinities therein posited.  Absent love’s proximities, however, the transmissibility of the resonances of one’s existence is doomed incomplete.  We there find that our:         

“Vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.”¹³³

Woe unto him whose myriad temporal renewals are made to be empty, in perpetuity kept alone, whining out distorted images ultimately morphed as non sequiturs.  How blessed it is when choices made become some species of motion where what we give of ourselves self-rectifies, self-vindicates.  Proximity there nuances love.  Rely not on apotheosis of your merit however it be induced.  By itself merit saves you not from the inevitable getting trashed:

“Flattery adheres to power, and envy to superior merit.”¹³⁴

The rules politik, however, do have their overlays.  In worldly matters, one does find it efficacious:

“To speak as little as possible of one’s self.

To mind one’s own business.

Not to want to manage other people’s affairs.

To avoid curiosity.

To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.

To pass over the mistakes of others.

To accept insults and injuries. 

To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.

To be kind and gentle even under provocation.

Never to stand on one’s dignity.

To choose always the hardest.”¹³⁵

One’s increment of divinity is not an invitation to make the moment into an infinitesimal of nothingness—not an invitation to make the amygdalar and instinctual triggers of life to be the only components therein—not an invitation to be no more than a scrambled orbit, followed by continuities of inaction inexorably reduced to stitched decay.  Decay is too multifaceted bo be simple.  But it is the handmaiden of a moment’s senseless lapse if kept unsurpassed by incremental growth.  Growth has its inception as vigor bred to the flesh:

“Tragedy does not exist in history, not pure tragedy that sweeps away the hopes and dreams of men and makes an end to everything; for history is motion, and motion does not stop.  The days of wrath passed by in Philadelphia, life went on, survivors looked ahead, not back.  What men could, they forgot; and what they could not forget, they translated into usable experience.”¹³⁶

Even if riding on the coat tails of pain, virtue facilitates the moment’s passage:¹³⁷

“She’s untiring in her efforts

 to make our day seem brighter.

 Regardless how her heart may ache 

 She keeps our burdens lighter.

To teach us love and peacefulness, 

God gave the world a Mother[.]”¹³⁸

Oblivion is the price infinitesimal motions pay, but it is God, not we, who opens time’s monumental next door.  There is it that proximities make  infinitesimals of love.  Ultimately must we thank you, God:

” .  .  .  .  .  .  .

The lives which seem so poor, so low,

     The hearts which are so cramped and dull,

 The baffled hopes, the impulse slow,

     Thou takest, touchest all, and lo!

 They blossom to the beautiful.”¹³⁹

Ascribe we not to our doing life’s infinite spectrum of Fourier-like  frequencies in a God given luminosity.  There is more to a seed’s growth than one’s having planted it:¹⁴⁰  

“For the erth bryngeth forthe frute off hersilfe, first the blad, then the eares, after that full corne in the eares.”¹⁴¹

While tragedy may not exist in history, the moment is made tragic if it is by us for to be dead frozen–alone in some cemetery of the living.  Sparkle!  You have the dewdrop’s ephemeral glory embraced by the sun.¹⁴²   Move forward seriatim a step at a time inside the infinitesimal of life’s delight.  Do not morph self into a buried stone’s mimic just because you have been cut from some team.  Blessed is it that we can strategize the thrusting of self’s current impulse of momentum into the present cosmos of cause and effect.  Reject not minusculeness in real time, for it is there that we find:                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

“Having nothing, but having it all.”¹⁴³

 As Dostoevsky writes after his last minute reprieve from the firing squad, his sentence commuted to exile in Siberia:

         “Yes, it’s true!  The head which was creating, living with the highest life of art, which had realized and grown used to the highest needs of the spirit, that head has already been cut off from my shoulders.  There remain just the memory and the images created but not yet incarnated by me.  They will lacerate me, it is true!  But there remain in me my heart and the same flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this after all is life.  On voit le soleil! [The sun is shining.]  Now, good-bye brother!  Don’t grieve for me!”¹⁴⁴

Gentlemen, my Masonic Brothers, life has the special grace God given, and time ‘s guaranty for the existence of present motion is the font for the inception of meaning.¹⁴⁵  There can you look for the dewdrops embraced by the sun.  One thing meaning is not is uniformity.  Most fortunate is it that no one’s meaning is coextensive to another’s.  Uniquely did God make one’s time the miracle of the present.   Blessedly does God morph our each downstroke into the buoyancy of the moment’s rebound past itself.  As quoted in the history from 1855 to 1921 of Fulton Masonic Lodge No. 69:

“He was the type of man who does good by stealth and blushes to find fame.”¹⁴⁶

And while past, present, and future moments end in some sort of shortfall, the truth is:

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”¹⁴⁷

There do we discover infinitesimal infinities.  And there are many of them by God born to us each, composited in some form of our own boundary values by us to be with specificity crafted.  Within the gloss of each moment’s high standards, we can make conduct to converge to acceptable 

asymptotes, blessed by an infinitesimal of God’s presence:

“Heart of my own heart, whate’er befall,

 Still be my vision, O’ Ruler of all.”¹⁴⁸

Conscience is the control panel for directing the soul’s temporal progression.  Though never perfect, conscience is in us each posited indispensable.  We are coupled to balancing the dichotomy of self-interest and the concomitantly existing commitments of loyalty and good faith in consensual fiduciary relationships.  In cases of public trust, the duty’s standards are raised higher yet.  Self-direction ineluctably comports not with universality, and once we get to the peak, we are still minuscules.  That is not the amygdala’s cup of tea, no comfort to instinct.  Decay bears no analgesics for passé.  Renewed vitality does, and choiceness is to:

“Have good boundaries.”¹⁴⁹

Or, as our Masonic metaphors are wont to say, have good boundaries:

  kept within the due bounds of the compass–within the straight and narrow of the square.

There craft we the harmonies by tuning the moment.  Choice determines the pitch, and profound become the boundary values for the brain’s frequency spectrum as one moves through sequenced fragments of eternity.  Fame by itself–but not love–distorts:

“`Oni kalalea ke ku a ka lā au loa.”¹⁵⁰

Pass over the summits and past the lows lest you find ridicule as you be cast into the common ditch of lapsed time.  People like stars in the heavens do not last forever just eating.  The measure of divinity is God’s, not mine, not yours, not anyone else’s:

“And a star

 gems the sky.

 Gleaming bright.

 From afar.”¹⁵¹

Time is the kernel of the greatness by God bestowed bounded small on us:                                                   

“The crudeness and inadequacy of materials and techniques constrained the masters of these works with certain monumentality of the style.”¹⁵²

Beauty itself in real time is not a possessory interest that survives the moment’s irreversible lapse.  All motion truncates in temporality:

“Maybe you watched a show I did in November with a young woman name Jacqui, who was burned alive when the car she was riding in was hit by a drunk driver.  She’s had more than 40 operations and basically has no face—it melted away in the raging flames.   A paramedic at the scene who heard her screams said he prayed for God to take her so her suffering could be over.

“Burned on more than 60 percent of her body, Jacqui survived.  An How!   One breath at a time, she kept healing herself, through the most excruciating pain and scarring.  She told me she only allows herself five minutes a day to cry.  She said she has to keep getting up and moving forward.  When I asked her if there were times she wished she died in that fire, she said, ‘No, I have too much left to do.’  I got goose bumps sitting before this woman with the face of a tortured soul and the heart of an angel.  I knew in that moment that I was looking at the loving breathing definition of inner beauty, inner strength, and love of self.”¹⁵³    (emphasis here added)

For within our each endowment of a God given real time divinity, find we our present aliquot of his forgiveness.  God does not wait to forgive.¹⁵⁴  It is self’s present giving as we do now select so to do—no matter how dimensioned diminutive by the eclipse of a whole universe, i.e., by everything else—that we are are brought face to face with a miraculously monumental beauty within the minuscule moment of real time, to be woven indefeasibly deep into the soul.  This is the great treasure of a life.  And then there comes the matter of cause and effect in part by us pliable: 

“Luck is what you have left over after you give 100%.”¹⁵⁵

How nice it is that:

“The harder you work, the more you like your work.”¹⁵⁶

Oh, Gentlemen, my Masonic brothers, a single point doth lie in us each–the single point that moves in real time within our own sine qua non interpersonal limbic cosmos of love.  Love makes life its own miracle:

“amor que quiera seguir amando.”¹⁵⁷

Being bounded never did foreclose that:

“Forget not then thine own approved

 The which so long hath thee so loved,

 Whose steadfast faith yet never moved–

                                           Forget not this!”¹⁵⁸

Happily as written in 1927 by one of our very own Job’s Daughters:

 “We leave with you this message true–

  ‘We’re loyal and grateful to you.’ “¹⁵⁹

But what about the cosmos?  What about eternity?  The nice thing about the craft is that the compass and the square are metaphoric for staying ‘inside the due bounds of mankind’ and making ‘life stand on the square’.  But profoundly do the same also imply, implicate, tie into a mystery of the universe beyond mortal ken, i.e., to the existence of Deity.  Draw a square.  Inscribe a circle inside the square.  We all know the perimeter of the square is four times the side.  And we also know absolutely–indisputably–mathematically per the circa 1425 Madhava of Sangamagrama and 1786 Gottfried Leibniz formula for pi¹⁴⁹ that the circumference of the said inscribed circle is the square’s aforesaid perimeter multiplied by a fraction equal to the transcendental (per von Lindemann), convergent alternating infinite series:

1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – 1/11 + 1/13 – 1/15 +  .  .  .  .  .    

While we know the principle to be mathematically true, it is impossible because of the endless number of terms for us merely mortal Masons—and so likewise everyone else—for to compute the actual value of the said infinite series and therefore the exact value of pi, i.e., four times the said series’ value.  This is no trivial matter because pi is universal in defining the traverse of every motion in the universe past, present, and future, i.e., their innumerable linear, and relativity’s nonlinear, vector combinations of rectilinear and rotational displacements.  Furthermore pi is ubiquitous–all over in mathematics itself.  Undeniably all along we had the capacity to understand the mathematical definition of pi but were always powerless to compute the sum.  Again, summation of an infinite number of terms is beyond mortal ken.  We be left in the lurch facing a stone wall.  But this is blessed, for it is the impossibility that constructively proves the existence of a Deity–a higher power–the higher power that doth know the actual, but to us forever unknown value of the said known to exist transcendental number.  See Figure 1 infra.  While the lynchpin of persuasiveness in all this is that this is one mystery whose exact underlying nature we know conclusively to exist, the above constructive proof of the existence of a Diety beyond ourselves also has the added significance for Masons of being tied symbolically to the craft’s very own icons, i.e., our symbols of the compass and the square, though never as a matter of appropriating the Deity, nor the above power series, to ourselves.  No one owns that which is universally connected to everything:     

“Thusly the circumference of every circle is equal to the perimeter of the square inscribing said circle, multiplied by the infinite alternating series whose respective terms are (as respectively multiplied each by minus one to the nth power):

 1/(2n + 1), where n = 0, 1,  2,  3,  4,  .  .  .  .  .  .       

 Figure 1 illustrates the case of a unit circle inscribed by a unit square.  Within the realm of infinity, squares can now be transformed by the Supreme Architect into circles, and circles into squares, each the inverse of the other, and there is mystical significance in the symbolism of the square as prerequisite to every compass’s circumscription of the due bounds of mankind.

“The solace of the Infinite in us made fleeting humbles us with the hope of the quick.

“So small!  So ephemeral!  So infinitesimal!  So quickened by the Supreme Architect!  An aliquot of mysticism becomes within reach.  We are shrouded in the evolving mists of the infinite–not as stones, dead stopped in some increment of time past.  As Geometers of the Blue Lodge, strive we ever to ordain the passing, fast flowing mysteries of the craft, i.e., to decree pi a mystery of the craft, demonstrable¹⁶⁰ but not by us measurable.  Its numerical value is known only to the Supreme Architect but not comprehendible to any of us, only revealed in principle.”

So mote hyt be!”

Every craft has to have some kind of mystery.  What is nice is that the belief here is no belief at all.  The knowledge that the mystery exists is absolute, and the then ensuing constructive proof of God’s certainty of existence allows a concomitant certainty to one’s own present fragment of eternity.  Now have we complete confidence in one dimension of the unseen, i.e. to have a:

“.  .  .  .  .  faith that baffles all calamity and ensures genius and patience in the world.”¹⁶¹

There are other certainties that prove the Deity’s existence, e.g., those         c-values in the quadratic fractal boundary of a Mandelbrot set in the complex number plane.  In any event, even though there are no apotheoses of perfection in any of us, it is only because God exists as we now indisputably know that we can discover:

Souls of Richness!  One miracle is miracle enough.¹⁶²

Class dismissed.  It too has lapsed:

“The bell strikes one.  We take no note of time

   But from its loss.  To give it then a tongue

   Is wise in man.  As if an angel spoke,

   I feel the solemn sound.  If heard aright,

   It is the knell of my departed hours:

   Where are they?  . . . . “¹⁶³

Nonsense!  For each one of us they are today’s arrayed present Matrix of precursors—billions upon billions of years of them.  But motion bears itself no temporal permanence.  Our best found itself bounded in time infinitesimal, telomeric decay denies personal continuity, and we are left only with the cocoon of love’s infinities.  Again thank we God for the fortune of the new day—the new day among the living that morphed as time within the unseen:  

“Life itself is a positive force, and every normal function of it holds some delight.”¹⁶⁴

Irrespective of the amygdala’s aberrations of time’s sundry bounds, the epicenter of the moment is revealed as none other than a universe unto itself.  There, dear Lord, then in the moment so small, please:

“Abide with me.  Abide {Lord} with [us all]”¹⁶⁵      

within today’s thankfullness¹⁶⁶ for so endlessly much.¹⁶⁷  But now must 

needs we be thankful for our progenitors’ each moment of the eons past that did forward pass from the Big Bang to our own present  moment’s unique essence for our now:

“husband[ing} the great deposit of [the] Creator.”¹⁶⁸

Now Gentlemen—my Brothers and anyone else who wants to share—make your infinitesimal possibility within the moving moment your passion,¹⁶⁹ but knowing that possibility achieved is diluted nigh unto worldly insignificance by the current 8.33 billion simultaneous moments in the world’s other contemporary lives, each thusly and blessedly being sequenced in a medium that moves.  The amygdala has its own essence but its sundry machinations are not the whole explanation.  A pretty stone by me found on the beach does not make me into a pretty stone:

“I dwell in possibility”¹⁷⁰

means that we must also forthwith bow to the beauty of one’s jewel of a life posited in the present choice—but one that found vindication in reciprocal love engendered by the proximity of two limbic brain stems.  It is the vindication worth the search:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”¹⁷¹  

There, having given your full soul to the moment, you find its memory, and your presence therein are yours and yours alone:¹⁷⁰

“The associations were exceedingly strong, and my dear, dear Wife a number of times thought she heard her mother’s voice.  The fact of the matter is not the point.  The experience was deep and a matter for our own personally profound thankfulness.”¹⁷²  

It remains present best means competing against time even if no one else puts a premium on the plodding of a work horse: 

“When a man does all he can though it succeeds not well, blame not him that did it.”¹⁷³

For God doth knead our goodness within the unknown—whatever and wherever:

These rules¹⁷⁴  were transcribed by Washington at age 14, circa A.D. 1746,  in his own hand, i.e., with indisputable authenticity, as an exercise in his home schooling.  The Rules themselves were originally a treatise prepared by the Pensionaires at the Jesuit College at La Fleche in 1595, entitled Bienseance de la Conversations entre les Hommes.  It was then sent to the Brothers at the monastery at Pont-a-Mousson and there supplemented by Father Peron as to manners at table.  It was first published in France in 1617, translated into German, Spanish, and Bohemian, and lastly in 1636 into English by Francis Hawkins and printed in England in 1640.  Beyond the Pensionaires’ wildest dreams, the seeds of their souls were on a journey to a faraway place, so distant in the future, to be sewn in such fertile soil.¹⁷⁵

Of such is the miraculous.  Thank you we, Dear God, goodness still transfers!  Furthermore, after all:

“All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals.  If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled, and oceans bounded by the slender force of human beings.”¹⁷⁶    

Otherwise human beings are:

“.  .  .  .  hourly swept away by time among the refuse of fame.”¹⁷⁷

We, of course, all do wish the famous well–just not with our time.  Even so, fame and reputation can be rated high stakes by us also.  Like anything not per se evil, it is only our capture by fame that is the insidiousness:

“But when the world’s loud praise is thine,

    And spleen no more shall blame;

     When with thy Homer thou shall shine    

    In one establish’d fame!  

“When none shall rail, and every lay,

    Devote a wreath to thee:

  That day (for come it will) that day

    Shall I lament to see.”¹⁷⁸

For just let everyone else walk away, and see what happens to fame.  It goes to hell.  We are left in a newly found state of nothingness within the vacuum of a disappearance, posited on the outside of some critical mass of interpersonal limbic regulation no longer by us manageable..  There doth:

“[o]ne fraud tread fast on the heels of another.”¹⁷⁹

This is particularly the situation at major changes of phase in life.  In any event and not to fame’s liking, all moments themselves must needs end in a friable state.  It is only the regularly conducted activity—inherently  infinitesimal—that jettisons before the lapse to recycle in the brain in real time.  Sequenced choices now become factors in the course the mind itself is somewhat involuntarily taking on its ephemeral and essentially microscopic, potpourri journey.  Fame’s masquerade of universality ceases to be the soul’s measure, and the present strike on the hot iron of present time is one’s incremental conscious control over the mind’s long term, multifariously faceted course but not, we pray, alone.  

So mote hyt be!