...wrapping can be an art!

I spent most of Christmas Eve wrapping these: tipp-ex, brown paper, string, and ribbon. I’m not much of a ‘crafty’ person, but I like making presents look pretty. Probably silly to spend so much time on something that will only get looked at for a few seconds before it is torn off, but it was fun to make them. It was just a pity they had to be opened! The presents underneath weren't quite as exciting.

an interesting sentence.

Picture from: here.

'If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. ‘Dark’ would be a word without meaning.’

~ C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, 1952).

I read this on the way to buy Christmas presents last week. An interesting idea. I probably think along the same lines. It seems strange to think there is no meaning when humans are so preoccupied with finding meaning in everything they do. Health professionals, philosophers, psychologists, artists: they all recognise this. Human instincts seem to be there for a reason. Hunger signals that we need food. Loneliness reminds us that it is not good for us to be alone, that we are better, stronger, when we're together. Emptiness, the longing for something more, for answers... surely this desire, this niggling feeling that something is missing whispers that there is something more to be found... that life is a quest.

shooting stars.

We wrapped up warm in vests, long sleeved t-shirts, wooly jumpers, a pair of woolly tights, thick pairs of socks, boots, a skirt, a pair of pyjama bottoms, a duffel coat, and two scarves (and that was just me) ...and with heads thrown back, we let our eyes look. Looking without trying to understand. (It is interesting how, the longer I look at the night sky, the more stars I can see. It's quite amazing, and makes me feel at once tiny and insignificant, and peaceful and filled with awe. I must have seen over 30 of them. Small, fast, speeding across the sky. They are still behind my eyes: beautiful.

Shooting stars are like Pringles (only less fattening): they make you greedy. 

'I'll go inside after one more -- oh! Did you see that! -- Lovely! ---Okay, well just one more (please let me see one more...)'

(The astronomical show: the Geminid meteor shower.

The picture: here.)

'I know that I know nothing.'

Today, this caught my attention. I found it in the middle of a chapter about Shakespeare and Renaissance print culture:

‘Much of the recent resistance to editing has been a result of the rhetoric of certainty that many editors adopt. For most of them ... “certainly” is good, “probably” is bad, and “possibly” is worst of all. If everyone accepted that most of what they do is grounded on a measure of probability about which rational agents could reasonably disagree, most arguments in editing (and in the world) would end.’

~ Colin Burrow in ‘Editing the Sonnets’ from A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets

(Interesting.)