Plumbing

Mess
CE
Civil Engineering
"charlie"
"Stonewall"

Prov. 3:5

"Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.Blick auf den Bryce Canyon-

Bryce Canyon

Chess: "CE" "C" "charlie" "wall" "lead" "plumbing" "Civil Engineering" "Stonewall" "mess" "Leo Messi"

The Skin of our Teeth

I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris. On one side of the Seine is the harmonious, reasonable façade of the institute of France, built as a college in about 1670. On the other bank is the Louvre, built continuously from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century: classical architecture at its most splendid and assured. Just visible upstream is the Cathedral of Notre Dame--not perhaps the most lovable of cathedrals, but the most rigorously intellectual façade in the whole of Gothic art. The houses that line the banks of the river are also a humane and reasonable solutions of what town architecture should be should be, and in front of them, under the trees, are the open bookstalls where generations of students have found intellectual nourishment and generations of amateurs have indulged in the civilised pastime of book collecting. Across this bridge, for the last one hundred and fifty years, students from art schools of Paris have hurried to the Louvre to study the works of art that it contains, and then back to their studios to talk and dream of doing something worthy of the great tradition. And on this bridge how many pilgrims from America, from Henry James downwards, have paused and breathed in the aroma of a long-established culture, and felt themselves to be at the very centre of civilisation.
What is civilisation? I don't know. I can't define it in abstract terms--yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it right now. Ruskin said : 'Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only the only trustworthy one is the last.' On the whole I think this is true. Writers and politicians may come out with all sorts of edifying sentiments, but they are what is known as declarations of intent. If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.
Civilisation, by Kenneth Clark


"Messaic":

"there is nothing…half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats" [ Kenneth Grahame (oenomel)]

"Arabia had become entangled in the meshes of …politics" [W. Montgomery Watt ("Civil Engineering")]

mesquite (algarroba, "honey locust" "carao") Prosopis juliflora "

'I just couldn't seem to mesh with the job,' he says." [New York Times ( "The Red Sea: or "Pollera Colorá")]

"Strange faces come through the streets to me/ like messengers" [Archibald MacLeish ("Washington Irving")]
"the life of Britain, her message, and her glory" [Winston Churchill ("Alhambra")]
"at their savory dinner set / Of herbs, and other country messes"[Milton ("Dieta Mediterránea")]
Mesolithic : designating the cultural period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages, marked by the appearance of the bow and of cutting tools.