Wednesday February 22, 2006 5:00 am Ballina NSW

A. Morning Musings

5:00 am This is the earliest I have been up for quite some time. It is still dark outside but the coffee is in the plunger and I am about to make a few notes about Alain De Botton's "How Proust Can Change Your Life". The question arises as to whether these notes should be placed in the Literature web site or on this Journal web page. I am opting for the latter. But first the cuppa.

6:10 am This has been a good hour. I am simply reviewing my Project Management web page and making sure that it is up to date. I still occasionally fail to up date this when I complete an activity. But it is a worthwhile activity. For example, I am acutely aware that I still need to create 7 new web pages for the birds we have seen this month.

In summary, at the moment I have two main projects on the boil: Technology and Mathematics. Technology is primarily focusing on digital photography and Mathematics is languishing a bit on both calculus and number theory. 6:40 am

Chores: none

Exercise: beach walk.

C. Actual

6:40 Here are a few points from "How Proust Can Change Your Life":

• "Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies it - our life - hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly." [p. 4 - 5].
  • This web site is one attempt to impose some structure and rigor into projects that then demand attention.
    
    
• "... a central theme of the novel: a search for the causes behind the dissipation and loss of time." [p. 8]
  • Thanks for identifying this theme. I was focusing on the psychology of memory. Both are valid.
    
    
• "Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued that: 'In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.' " [p. 25]
  
  
• "However unusual the attempt to compress seven volumes of a novel into fifteen seconds, perhaps nothing exceeds, in both regularity and scope, the compression entailed by a daily newspaper. ... The more an account is compressed, the more it seems it deserves no more space than it has been allocated. ... It shows how vulnerable much of human experience is to abbreviation, how easily it can be stripped of the more obvious signposts by which we guide ourselves when ascribing importance." [p. 37 - 42]
  
  
• "Hence Proust's assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter." [p. 43]
  
  
• "And an advantage of not going too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process." [p. 48 - 49]
  • This is another statement on the value of slow. Much like these web notes facilitate enjoying a book, either fiction or non-fiction.
    
    
• "Perhaps the greatest claim one can therefore make for suffering is that it opens up possibilities for intelligent, imaginative enquiry - possibilities which may quite easily be, and most often are, overlooked or refused. ... Though philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the pursuit of happiness, far greater wisdom would seem to lie in pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy." [p. 78]
  
  
• " 'The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgement, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life - and therefore we judge it disparingly.' These poor images arise out of our failure to register a scene properly at the time, and hence to remember anything of its reality therefter." [p. 156]
  • Excellent! This is the heart of the memory problem. Once again, these Journal entries and these web sites provide a first effort at preserving some memories. Perhaps the photos help, but overall I feel I am still only scratching the surface, that I am failing to capture the immediacy of the moment. For example, the enjoyment we both had yesterday while trying to identify birds at Lismore Lake. Although I have many images of close-ups of the birds, I did not take any of the lake itself. And I am not providing a rich verbal description of the afternoon: the clearing of the sky after a sudden rain shower as we arrived, the darting in and out of a large tree of about a dozen or two small birds that we identified later as White-breasted Woodswallows, the preening of a Royal Spoonbill (our first view of one) in a spot that earlier had no such bird, as well as a couple of Comb-crested Jacanas walking on the lily pads. The excuse is usually that I have no time for such descriptions as there are so many other things that need to be done, yet the above description only took a few minutes and I now have, at least, a better record of the event than I had before. Similarly the nice cappuccino at the uni plaza after spending almost two hours in front of this screen downloading and installing a software program. All three of us were simply relaxed and enjoying the moment. What an excellent way to spend 30 minutes, and then to see the lizards on the sidewalk near the Education building.
    
    
• "When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes." [p. 164]
  • As I have just done!
    
    
• "... one could not therefore evaluate people on the basis of conspicuous categories." [p. 169]
  • How much educational research is specifically about trying to do exactly that?
    
    
• "... one can have a very lofty idea of literature, and at the same time have a good-natured laugh at it." [p. 190]
  
  
• "We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel, it is our own thoughts we should be developing even if it is another writer's thoughts which help us to do so." [p. 195]

7:40 am A fine beginning to the day. The currawongs are outside gargling and I have the rest of the day in front of me. We may decide to take a trip to south Ballina and see if we can see a Pied Oystercatcher (a rare bird, but one that is known to frequent the coast south of here), or we may opt for a leisurely reading and playing with Photoshop Elements software.

Here is my first attempt to locate an image in Elements, crop it to focus on the bird and then save it for this page:

Clamorous Reed-Warbler

1:40 PM We took the ferry across the Richmond river to South Ballina this morning. The goal was to see if we could see a Pied Oystercatcher. In one word, no. We took a fairly long walk on South Ballina beach. We were the only two on the entire beach. I took a number of photos of birds, including two raptors (osprey?). On the way out, I managed to get the car bogged down in the sandy approach road. I was pretty sure we would need assistance, but in our last try, with our floor mats under the tires, we were just able to pull out and onto firmer ground. It was very hot and sunny (30+) and we were getting a bit ragged. There was no sign of anyone in the area so it had the potential to be a long day. Anyway, we saw South Ballina, drove to Wardell, and then back to Ballina on the Pacific Highway. There is sand on everything. We rinsed ourselves off, outside with water, inside with beer. With all the excitement, I forgot to take a break and take a few photos of us in the sand.

Now to see if any of the photos turned out. The images allow us to identify a Whistling Kite and an Osprey, both of which we have seen previously.

Here are 6 images from our trip today:

Road to beach	Looking north on south Ballina beach
Looking south on South Ballina beach	Bluebottles on the beach
Too many bluebottles on beach	Terns on beach

8:30 PM I have spent a pleasant hour reading a biography of Vincent van Gogh: "Vincent by Himself".

D. Reflection

9:20 PM Today was a hot one. The primary activity was the bird watching along South Ballina beach. No new birds, but positive identification of a whistling kite and an osprey. Getting mired in a sandy road turned into a bit of an adventure but it all ended well. And I learned a lot about sand.

The book on van Gogh was a pleasant hour. The text is a set of excerpts from his many letters to his brother Theo who supported him financially for his entire life.

At the moment I have no plans for tomorrow, but I'm sure I will think of something in the morning. Prime candidates are to start looking at the Photoshop Elements 4 Book plus some mathematics. We shall see... 9:35 PM