Shannon Warren.com

From this morning’s readings:

Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightening storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now - whenever
we’re not looking.  Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade - surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

Mary Oliver
Long Life

A contemplative poem from the Writer’s Almanac this morning:

875
I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch—
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

Poem: “875″ by Emily Dickinson. Public domain.

I found this in an old journal & really like it.

Tom says, �??we may be the smartest & dumbest people of all time.�?� He was referring to our indescribable ability to foretell the future but incapacity to act on it.

Probability was one of my favorite courses in undergrad.  I remember liking it because it was both completely obvious and a total mystery at the same time. 

This quote reminds me of many a late night of study at A&M — all of which would end in an “AH HA” moment followed by an hour of kicking myself for not seeing what was hidden any sooner.

We see that the theory of probability is at bottom only common sense reduced to calculation; it makes us appreciate with exactitude what reasonable minds feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to account for it… It is remarkable that this science, which originated in the consideration of games of chance, should have become the most important object of human knowledge…  The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.

Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace
(Known as the “Newton of France”)

Here’s something fun for Halloween.

Google has made exploring some classic spooky tales part of Halloween’s treat by digitizing the full text of a few fun stories and novels. Read them online or download as PDF’s�?� the details & books available are here.

My favorite? The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, of course!

Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But tomorrow I die, and today I would burthen my soul.

Scary stuff, eh?

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

“In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

- Milan Kundera, from Slowness

This Supreme Court opinion strikes me as clever this morning at 2:47am.

Justice Jackson is commenting on evidentiary rules and the need to keep parties’ advantages in check.

Experience taught a necessity that [the defendant’s illogical advantage] be counterweighted with equally illogical conditions to keep the advantage from becoming an unfair and unreasonable one.

Michelson v. United States, 335 U.S. 469, 478-479 (U.S. 1948).

Later in the same opinion, Jackson defends the Court’s decision not to tear down the “illogical” system by following that sage advice, “Let sleeping dogs lie”.

We concur in the general opinion of courts, textwriters and the profession that much of this law is archaic, paradoxical and full of compromises and compensations by which an irrational advantage to one side is offset by a poorly reasoned counter-privilege to the other. But somehow it has proven a workable even if clumsy system when moderated by discretionary controls in the hands of a wise and strong trial court. To pull one misshapen stone out of the grotesque structure is more likely simply to upset its present balance between adverse interests than to establish a rational edifice.

Id. at 486.

This little excerpt (below) reminded me that life happens at the margins. While I’m busy planning out my perfect life in ideal black and white, human relationships occur somewhere along the edge of the page. Life and feelings refuse to be simple.

Similarly, lawyers don’t make a living in the black and white. People who come to attorneys do so with all the confusion and complexity in which they live. The attorney’s job is to sort through the mess and make as compelling an argument as he or she can based on the client’s story…

You may think, “The law is what it is,” but that thought implies that the law always is concrete and black and white. Not so. The black letter law legal principles in any given area usually are not the rules over which you will be litigating. The law at the margins of every area of law (and they often are broad margins) is fluid, changing, painted in shades of gray, not necessarily well-defined, and sometimes even inconsistent. In many cases, it will take all your skill as an interpreter and analysis of legal sources to take the raw material of the law and find a way to present it in such a way that the client’s position looks reasonable, logical, and downright righteous under the law. But at least you often will have a good supply of paint and canvas that the authors of legal sources have provided for you.

Adversarial Legal Writing and Oral Argument, pp. 30 (Murray).

Happy contractual relationships are all alike; but every unhappy contract relationship is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina

the higher you climb
the greater the pressure.

those who manage to
endure
learn
that the distance
between the
top and the
bottom
is
obscenely
great.

and those who
succeed
know
this secret:
there isn’t
one.

Poem: “about competition” by Charles Bukowski from the Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line the Way. © Ecco.