Labor et otium I
Quia mox observabitur in Civitatibus Foederatis feria quae vulgo dicitur "Labor Day," mihi occurrit rogare cuius mentis fuisset Augustinus de labore et otio. Inter multa inventa et pensa, haec ex eius De opere monachorum tractatu sententiis ceteris (ibidem et aliubi inventis), mea quidem opinione, anteit:
Paulus praecipiens operari servos Dei, non vult tamen eorum necessitates minus curari a fidelibus. Labor servis Dei eligendus qui animo libero exerceatur, sine cura et cupiditate.... Aliud est…corpore laborare animo libero, sicut opifex, si non sit fraudulentus et avarus, et privatae rei avidus; aliud…ipsum animum occupare curis colligendae sine corporis labore pecuniae, sicut sunt vel negotiatores, vel procuratores, vel conductores: cura enim praesunt, non manibus operantur, ideoque ipsum animum suum occupant habendi sollicitudine. Augustinus. De opere monachorum, xv.16.
Ephata
Ephata by Evan Smith My grandmother died and the world slowly fell empty, not of people, but of a song. Her song. She did not sing to me; it wasn’t her singing that drifted away, but a song I didn’t know I’d been hearing all my life, and when she left, I heard it as it died. I was thinking a lot about song when she died. I had just learned of the Mambai of Indonesia and their two forms of ritual song: keo and beha. In keo, they make a lot of noise; in beha, there is none. Keo is their gift to the world, which in their accounting, is silent: birds do not make music, nor does the wind in the trees. The Mambai impress the silent world with voice through keo, and the world gives them life in return. Their rituals, their places of song, show them as part of the working of nature, the spontaneous processes that require no human guidance. Without keo, they have no life, and with it, their place in the world becomes natural. The Mambai have remembered something that mechanized modernity ...
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