What do you get when you mix a profound rant about cheese by Seth, with a rant about technology and suffering by Jack, with a rant about the dancing plagues by Sam? Well, you get episode 61 of The Color of Dust. Despite the felicitous title, this is a serious episode about death, technology, suffering, and the joy of living.
Henri Nouwen wrote:
It is the gift of our own life that shines through all we do. As I grow older, I discover more and more that the greatest gift I have to offer is my own joy of living, my own inner peace, my own silence and solitude, my own sense of well-being. When I ask myself, “Who helps me most?” I must answer, “The one who is willing to share his or her life with me.”
Below you’ll find some of the odds and ends mentioned in the episode. So, let’s not delay—let’s cut right to the cheese!
The song used throughout the episode is “Harmonic Banjo” by Jack Baumgartner, which you can listen to here:
Sam reads the poem “Valediction” by R. S. Thomas:
VALEDICTION
You failed me, farmer, I was afraid you would
The day I saw you loitering with the cows,
Yourself one of them but for the smile,
Vague as moonlight, cast upon your face
From some dim source, whose nature I mistook.
The hills had grace, the light clothed them
With wild beauty, so that I thought,
Watching the pattern of your slow wake
Through seas of dew, that you yourself
Wore that same beauty by the right of birth.
I know now, many a time since
Hurt by your spite or guile that is more sharp
Than stinging hail and treacherous
As white frost forming after a day
Of smiling warmth, that your uncouthness has
No kinship with the earth, where all is forgiven,
All is requited in the seasonal round
Of sun and rain, healing the year’s scars.
Unnatural and inhuman, your wild ways
Are not sanctioned; you are condemned
By man’s potential stature. The two things
That could redeem your ignorance, the beauty
And grace that trees and flowers labour to teach,
Were never yours, you shut your heart against them.
You stopped your ears to the soft influence
Of birds, preferring the dull tone
Of the thick blood, the loud, unlovely rattle
Of mucus in the throat, the shallow stream
Of neighbours’ trivial talk.
For this I leave you
Alone in your harsh acres, herding pennies
Into a sock to serve you for a pillow
Through the long night that waits upon your span.
Here is the Wikipedia page for the Dancing Plagues, and let’s be sure to support Wikipedia, as Jack admonishes us!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
Finally, here is the interview Seth mentions with Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel; we do not necessarily endorse this interview, but we are just using it as a “gargoyle,” as Seth helpfully instructs:
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