Orts #853

[Memories] are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
    — Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations


   Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not mine.
     -- Montaigne, in an essay, Of presumption


   The early Christians seem to have worshiped the way David did, with ecstatic dancing, communal joy and what Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.” In her book Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that in the first centuries of Christianity, worship of Jesus overlapped with worship of Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry. Both Jesus and Dionysus upended class categories. Both turned water into wine. Second- and third-century statuettes show Dionysus hanging on a cross.
     — David Brooks, The Lord of Misrule, New York Times, Jan. 17, 2017 
          https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/opinion/the-lord-of-misrule.html

_________________

Beware the Krampus:    http://nyti.ms/2zblTSJ