Honesty of intention

Some people I have encountered in this life have impressed me with their integrity-of-purpose, the coherence, sincerity and compellingness of their objectives and mission.  Sometimes these objectives have been political, as in the case of Don Day and Bill Mansfield. In other cases, they have been spiritual or religious, as in the case of Jes Albert Moeller, whom I first met in 1984. There are other people whose purposes are both political and spiritual, something which seems to have been true for Vaclav Havel.
 
In my experience, this human attribute is rare.  And I have never seen or heard anyone else talk of it, until now.  In Judith Wright’s autobiography, she speaks (page 234) of her partner and later husband, the philosopher Jack McKinney, meeting her father:

That my father was grieved by my relationship with Jack is undeniable but, once they met, he gave in to Jack’s obvious honesty of intention and the needs of my own that Jack was filling. . . . “

Judith Wright [1999]: Half a Lifetime.  Edited by Patricia Clarke. Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing.

Pangrams

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!
The five boxing wizards jump quickly.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Piping 101

 

Leslie Claret (Kurtwood Smith) in Patriot (S1, Ep2, min 17):

Sell them on the structure. You can talk about it with confidence. Keep it simple. A little something like this, John.

Hey. Let me walk you through the Donnelly nut spacing and crack system rim-riding rip configuration. Using a field of half-C sprats, and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps, and splay-flexed brace columns, vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one half meter from the damper crown to the spur of plinth. How? Well, we bolster twelve husked nuts to each girdle-jerry, while flex tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically-composited patch-hamplers. Then, pinflam-fastened pan traps at both maiden-apexes of the jim-joist.

A little something like that, Lakeman.

Praise to the writers of this series! The sounds here reminded me of the second stanza of Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin:

Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.