Happiness and some others' writing

Happy. To Nar!

Lost in the YMCA men's basketball playoffs today. Horrible.

My favorite New Yorker writer, one of my favorite period, art critique Peter Schjeldahl;
snippet from "Old and New: The reopening of the Islamic wing at the Met," New Yorker, Nov. 7, 2011:

Details in illustrations of a Sufi poem, "Language of the Birds," were painted with hairs from the bellies of squirrels. Sit, look.

...

But for the majestic halls that are hung with Iranian and Ottoman carpets, a gallery of mostly Iranian ceramics, often created for middle-class markets from the ninth to the thirteenth century, harbors more concentrated beauty than any other in the wing. I can close my eyes now and summon the aqueous aura of a blue-glazed bowl in which silhouetted fish swim, surrounded by radiating lines that are sublimely both perfect, as design, and imperfect, in the slight vagaries of the painter's hand. As a one-off visual definition of the word "sophisticated," that bowl will do. Exiting the room, I felt a trifle different from the person I had been when I entered.


The vagaries of war illustrated by World War II US Major General Curtis LeMay, who led the US firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 civilians, quoted in Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atom Bomb:

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time. It was getting the war over that bothered me. So I wasn't worried particularly about how many people we killed in getting the job done. I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side. Incidentally, everybody bemoans the fact that we dropped the atomic bomb and killed a lot of people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That I guess is immoral; but nobody says anything about the incendiary attacks on every industrial city in Japan, and the first attack on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic bomb did. ... I guess the direct answer to your question is, yes, every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.