A Garden of Thoughts
Barnsley Gardens, GA
May 17, 2019
This week started quickly, like a piece of trash in a fast-moving stream.
It ended peacefully, in this corner of paradise an hour-and-a-half northwest of Atlanta.
This is our second consecutive year coming here for the annual meeting of The Georgia Tech Alumni Board, of which my wife is a (soon the be executive) member.
These grounds are an ideal location, offering solitude and serenity conducive to productive thought.
While The First Lady spent yesterday afternoon discussing the fate of our Institute, I sought refuge to contemplate larger issues…to unfold my mental map and consider which road to take next.
I found such a place – on a beautiful Jim Fazio golf course, playing by myself, in weather that was the meteorological equivalent of Mozart’s 40th symphony.
The course, like most in the rolling topography of North Georgia, goes deep into the trees, with periodic views of the forest. This was a welcome tonic, given how much time I’ve lately spent in the weeds.
This is an age of impulse, of shooting first and asking questions later. Jefferson counseled delay as preferable to error. The modern mentality considers delay to be error.
Our ancestors had shorter lives, but more time. They could think, and their thoughts nurtured perspective and bred wisdom. We are now praised not for thinking, but for deciding – quickly. And for contemptuously discarding our cultural and intellectual patrimony.
In business as in politics, nuance is discouraged, shades of grey are disdained. We can have any color we desire, as long as it’s black…or white.
Our leaders tend toward cyclonic personalities, becoming unstable in times of low pressure, destructive when it rises. Then, they cushion their inevitable fall…by feathering their enviable nests.
For the rest, sauve qui peut!
Technology liberates and confines us. It expands our world, and shrinks it. It is molar, and molecular. It frees and condemns us to work from anywhere…with the expectation that we will do so at any time.
Long work days are sometimes necessary, but often counterproductive. You usually arrive in the morning with same thoughts you left with the night before.
The night before I wrote this, we enjoyed dinner and drinks amid the ruins of the Barnsley mansion…the history of which I’ll spare you, as I believe I inflicted it on you last year.
The structure, adorned with strings of light resembling strands of pearls, stood gracefully under a clear moonlit night. It had the dignified grace of Paris in the snow, or of a beautiful woman with a secret she is never able to share.
Architecture is the built form of ideas. Today’s buildings don’t express internal coherence, because we don’t know what internal coherence is. Which is why our cities are littered with innumerable buildings that are chaotic pieces of junk.
This structure – spared by Sherman but felled by a later tornado – was not exuberant or exquisite, but was elegant in its way…and anchored the surrounding gardens in a coherent portrait on a rustic canvas.
Board meetings resumed this morning, leaving me time to stroll the grounds… seeking not for answers, but content to stumble upon the occasional intriguing question.
Chesterton observed that it is easy to be blind to a thing, as long as it is big enough. I don’t know what I am after, but it must be fairly large. And that’s OK. Fortunately, I am blessed with some time and opportunity to look.
Like building a fortune or seducing a woman, finding the dots can be as much fun as connecting them.
As I wandered this morning, looking up at the ruins and back on the week, I fell over a stray dot lying like a ball bearing on a sidewalk.
We should not take too seriously the material things we think we need and that we relentlessly seek.
Before long, they may be gone.
JD
