Today is the Optional Memorial of Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Priest and Martyr (died 1622). And today is the forty-second anniversary of the Saturday in April 1982 when Richard and I met for the first time.
Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Priest and Martyr (died 1622) was born in 1577 at Sigmaringen, Hohenzollern, Germany as Mark Rey, and he became a lawyer and philosophy teacher. Disgusted by the greed, corruption, and lack of interest in justice by his fellow lawyers, he abandoned the law, became a priest, became a Franciscan friar with his brother George, changed his name to Fidelis, and gave away his worldly wealth to poor people in general and poor seminarians in particular. He served his friary as guardian, and worked in epidemics, especially healing soldiers. He led a group of Capuchins to preach to Calvinists and Zwinglians in Switzerland. The success of this work and the lack of violence suffered by members of this mission were attributed to Fidelis spending his nights in prayer. He was, however, eventually martyred for his preaching in Switzerland. Today is also the anniversary of when Richard and I met each other in April 1982. Richard’s sister Susan (now in Iowa) was holding a get-together at her house in Baton Rouge for friends and relatives in honor of the upcoming May 1982 marriage of Richard’s sister Juanita and her fiancé Bill. I was invited because I had been Nita’s friend in college between 1977 and 1980 (and did typing of some of her college papers), and Richard was invited because he was Susan and Juanita’s sister. Richard and I talked, and agreed to meet at a concert the next day at the Memorial Oak Grove at the LSU Union for an outdoor concert. Unfortunately, this was long before cell phones, and we did not find each other at the concert. I next saw Richard at Nita and Bill’s wedding the next month, for which he was an usher; at the reception we talked, and talked, and talked, and the rest is history. (We have been married for forty years, and Nita and Bill will be married for forty-two years as of next month.)
Last night I started reading The Cat Who Went Up the Creek by Lilian Jackson Braun (Ebook).
Richard fed the cats and went to drink coffee. I woke up at 9:00 am, posted to Facebook that today is the anniversary of the day when Richard and I met (1982), started my laundry, and started the Weekly Computer Maintenance and Virus Scan. Richard came home, and I did my Book Devotional Reading. I paid a bill, and ate my breakfast toast and read the Acadiana Advocate out on the porch. I then did my Internet Devotional Reading, and continued reading Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel. I then finished the laundry. I left the house at 2:00 pm, got some groceries (mainly for my bread making) at Walmart, saw Deborah (she might come over to visit on Monday), and got home at 2:45 pm. I then did several Advance Daily Update Drafts for this weblog. We watched Jeopardy! and News, ate the rest of the red beans, rice, and cornbread, and watched The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which won Best Picture, Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Joseph Schildkraut, who played Dreyfus), and Best Screenplay. And I will now finish this Daily Update, do some reading, and go to bed. At the NBA Playoffs – First Round, our New Orleans Pelicans will be playing an Away game with the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday, April 24th, with the series at 0 and 1 in favor of the Thunder.
Tomorrow is a Major Rogation Day in the Church, the Feast of Saint Mark, Evangelist (died c. 68), and the Optional Memorial of Saint Pedro de San José Betancur, Founder (died 1667). In the Secular World, tomorrow is World Penguin Day and the first day of the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. My major chores tomorrow will be washing the sheet on our bed (and the mattress cover), and cooking.
Our Parting Quote on this Wednesday evening comes to us from Robert M. Pirsig, American author and philosopher (died 2017). Born as Robert Maynard Pirsig in 1928 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he was of German and Swedish descent. His father was a University of Minnesota Law School (UMLS) graduate who started teaching at the school in 1934. The elder Pirsig served as the law school dean from 1948 to 1955, and retired from teaching at UMLS in 1970. He resumed his career as a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law, where he remained until his final retirement in 1993. Meanwhile, as a precocious child with an IQ of 170 at age nine, Pirsig skipped several grades and was enrolled at the Blake School in Minneapolis. At age fourteen, in May 1943, Pirsig was awarded a high school diploma from the University of Minnesota’s laboratory school, University High School (now Marshall-University High School) where he edited the school yearbook, the Bisbilla. He then entered the University of Minnesota to study biochemistry that autumn; he was interested in science as a goal in itself, rather than as a way to establish a career. While doing laboratory work in biochemistry, Pirsig became greatly troubled by the existence of more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and that the number of hypotheses appeared unlimited. He could not find any way to reduce the number of hypotheses, and he became perplexed by the role and source of hypothesis generation within scientific practice. The question distracted him to the extent that he lost interest in his studies and failed to maintain good grades. Finally, he was expelled from the university. In 1946, aged eighteen, Pirsig enlisted in the United States Army. He was stationed in South Korea until 1948. Upon his discharge from the Army, he returned to the United States and lived in Seattle, Washington, for less than a year, at which point he decided to finish the education he had abandoned. Pirsig earned a bachelor’s degree in 1950 from the University of Minnesota. He then attended Banaras Hindu University in India to study Eastern philosophy and culture. He married in 1954, and had two sons. At the University of Chicago, he performed graduate-level work in philosophy and journalism but he did not obtain a degree there. In 1958 he earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota. That same year he became a professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, and taught creative writing courses for two years. Shortly thereafter he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pirsig suffered a mental breakdown and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 and 1963. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electroconvulsive therapy on numerous occasions. His wife sought a divorce during this time; they formally separated in 1976 and divorced in 1978. In December 1978, Pirsig married his second wife. His published writing consists most notably of two books. The better known, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974) developed around Pirsig’s exploration into the nature of quality. Ostensibly a first-person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris had taken from Minneapolis to San Francisco, it was an exploration of the underlying metaphysics of Western culture. He also gave the reader a short summary of the history of philosophy, including his interpretation of the philosophy of Socrates as part of an ongoing dispute between universalists, admitting the existence of universals, and the Sophists, opposed by Socrates and his student Plato. Pirsig found in “Quality” a special significance and common ground between Western and Eastern world views. He had great difficulty finding a publisher for the book. When he did, his publisher’s internal recommendation stated, “This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I’ll wager, attain classic stature.” Pirsig received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 for General Nonfiction, and he received an Outstanding Achievement Award conferred by the University of Minnesota in 1975. He was vice-president of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center from 1973 to 1975 and also served on the board of directors. In 1979 his son Chris, who figured prominently in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was fatally stabbed in a mugging outside the San Francisco Zen Center at the age of twenty-two. Pirsig discussed this tragedy in an afterword to subsequent editions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writing that he and his second wife decided not to abort the child they conceived in 1980 because he believed that this unborn child (later their daughter) was a continuation of the “life pattern” that Chris had occupied. In 1991 he wrote Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, in which he developed a value-based metaphysics, Metaphysics of Quality, that challenged our subject–object view of reality. The second book, this time with the narrator as “the captain” of a sailboat, followed on from where Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance left off. On December 15th, 2012, Montana State University bestowed upon Pirsig an honorary doctorate in philosophy during the university’s fall commencement. Pirsig was also honored with a commencement speech by MSU Regent Professor Michael Sexson. Due to his frailty of health, Pirsig did not travel to Bozeman in December 2012 to accept the accolade. In December 2019 the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History acquired Pirsig’s 1966 Honda CB77F Super Hawk on which the famous 1968 ride with his son Chris was taken. The donation included a manuscript of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a signed first edition of the book, and tools and clothing from the ride (died 2017): “The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.”
From The Recamier 