1. Still in Maine, though the siblings have all gone home, save for the ones who are home here. I’m staying on until next week, since who knows when I’ll be up here next?

2. One common thread in all the wisest men I’ve read is this: you should not allow yourself to worry over what you cannot control, but only what you can.

We are each of us granted a little kingdom which is our soul, body, and whatever colonial possessions we have in the form of property, and this is what we ought to concern ourselves with. The care and cultivation of these little kingdoms are more than enough to occupy us for a lifetime, and it is this that we shall be judged upon.

We are like men set a specific task who, instead of attending to what we’ve been assigned, keep looking over each other’s shoulders and criticizing one another’s work and worrying over how badly someone else is going to muck it up while letting our own work lie neglected.

3. Related to this is that railing against what has happened and how very wrong it is is much less useful than looking at what can be done now. To quote Apollo 13, “I don’t care what it was designed to do, I care about what it can do.”

One of the lessons of history is that only God and academics care about who was right; everyone else only cares who won.

4. The more voters there are, the less valuable anyone’s vote becomes. Thus you cannot expand voting rights without simultaneously reducing voting rights.

5. Freedom is a kind of moral fuel: it exists to be sacrificed in the form of love and duty.

So, making individual freedom the end of the social order is akin to making oil reserves the end of economics

6. Reading the biography of Grover Cleveland, I was struck by something:

In his swearing in ceremony Barack Obama rather ostentatiously used the Lincoln Bible. In his swearing in, Grover Cleveland used his own personal Bible, given to him by his mother.

There seems to me a lot contained there in terms of character and priority.

7. On that note, one consistent impression I get from reading the biographies of great men is that the human capacity for work is far greater than most of us allow. To paraphrase Longfellow

Lives of Great Men all remind us,
Of the hours we let seep:
Twenty-one should go to working,
Three is plenty left for sleep.