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Tuesday, October 22nd, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 5:22a | The Wisdom of Alan Watts in 4 Mind-Expanding Animations
Perhaps no single person did more to popularize Zen Buddhism in the West than Alan Watts. In a sense, Watts prepared U.S. culture for more traditionally Zen teachers like Soto priest Suzuki Roshi, whose lineage continues today, but Watts did not consider himself a Zen Buddhist. Or at least that’s what he tells us in the talk above, animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. “I am not a Zen Buddhist,” he says, “I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell.” Instead, he calls himself “an entertainer.” Is he pulling our leg? After all, Watts was the author of such books as The Spirit of Zen (1936—his first), The Way of Zen (1957), and ”This Is It” and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (1960). Then again, he also wrote books on Christianity, on “Erotic Spirituality,” and on all manner of mysticism from nearly every major world religion. And he was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1945 and served as such until 1950. Watts was a tricky character—a strict anti-dogmatist who found all rigid doctrine irritating at best, deeply oppressive and dehumanizing at worst.
While Watts may not have been any sort of doctrinaire Zen priest, he learned—and taught—a great deal from Japanese Buddhist concepts, which he distills in the video at the top. He gleaned very similar insights—about the unity and interconnectedness of all things—from Daoism. Just above, see a very short animation created by Eddie Rosas, from The Simpsons, in which Watts uses a simple parable to illustrate “Daoism in perfection.”
The concepts Watts elucidates from various traditions are instantly applicable to ecological concerns and to our relationship to the natural world. “The whole process of nature,” he says above in a parable animated by Steve Agnos, “is an integrated process of immense complexity.” In this case, however, rather than offering a lesson in unity, he suggests that nature, and reality, is ultimately unknowable, that “it is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad.” The most reasonable attitude then, it seems, is to refrain from making judgments either way.
It’s that tendency of the human mind to make hasty, erroneous judgments that comes in for critique in the Watts talk above, animated by Tim McCourt and Wesley Louis of Westminster Arts & Film London. Here, he reaches even deeper, investigating ideas of personal identity and the existence of the ego as an entity separate from the rest of reality. Returning to his grand theme of interconnectedness, Watts assures us it’s “impossible to cut ourselves off from the social environment, and also furthermore from the natural environment. We are that; there’s no clear way of drawing the boundary between this organism and everything that surrounds it.” But in order to discover this essential truth, says Watts, we must become “deep listeners” and let go of embarrassment, shyness, and anxiety. If you enjoy these excerpts from Alan Watts’ lectures, you can find many hours of his talks online. What Watts would have thought of this, I do not know, but I’m certain he’d be glad that so much of his work—hours of lectures, in fact—is available free of charge on YouTube. Related Content: The Greatest Hits of Alan Watts: Stream a Carefully-Curated Collection of Alan Watts Wisdom What If Money Was No Object?: Thoughts on the Art of Living from Eastern Philosopher Alan Watts Zen Master Alan Watts Discovers the Secrets of Aldous Huxley and His Art of Dying Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Technology Can’t Grasp Reality Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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| 9:00a | Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks
A foreign traveler road-tripping across Europe might well feel a wave of trepidation before driving a fully loaded modern automobile over a more than 2,000-year-old bridge. But it might also be balanced out by the understanding that such a structure has, by definition, stood the test of time — and, for those with a grasp of the history of engineering, that its ancient designers would have ensured its capacity to bear a load far heavier than any that would have crossed it in reality. With no scientific means of modeling stresses, as classical-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, they just had to build it tough. Key to that toughness were arches, “made of heavy blocks laid over a falsework frame until the keystone was slotted into place.” From the late first century, stonework was supplemented or replaced by brick and Roman concrete, a substance much-featured here on Open Culture. We’ve also covered the Roman bridges you can still cross today: Spain’s Puente de Alcántara (from the Arabic al-qanţarah, meaning “arch”), for example, which, though crossed by a quarter-million vehicles every year, “shows no signs of failing”; or France’s Pont des Marchands, which “has supported a neighborhood of multi-story shops and houses since the Middle Ages.” But the arches of the nearly 1,000 wholly or partially surviving Roman bridges haven’t done all the work by geometry alone. “The load-bearing capacity of a bridge depended both on the solidity of its abutments and the strength — ‘shearing point’ — of its voussoirs,” or the stones of its arches between the keystone at the top and the springers at the bottom. “Since Roman builders carved voussoirs from the strongest readily available stone, their bridges tended to be impressively solid.” You wouldn’t want to run a freight train across the Puente de Alcántara, but 40-ton trucks are no problem — to say nothing of a car filled with luggage, a few kids, and even a dog or two. Related content: The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Travel Today The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable? The Beauty & Ingenuity of the Pantheon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Preserved Monument: An Introduction The Roads of Ancient Rome Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps Roman Architecture: A Free Online Course from Yale Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
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