Math­e­mati­cians took 2,300 years to prove squar­ing the cir­cle is geo­met­ri­cal­ly impos­si­ble. In one day, six kayak­ers and two loons showed me why it became the per­fect idiom for try­ing to rec­on­cile two con­flict­ing things.

The kayak­ing part came in the form of half a dozen young peo­ple pad­dling past our cot­tage, chat­ter­ing over loud music.
Among the advan­tages and joys of slid­ing across the water in  a kayak is the gen­tle mini-sym­pho­ny of  the dip of the pad­dle, water slop­ping against the rocky shore, a breeze sough­ing through the thick for­est that embraces the lake, and the occa­sion­al haunt­ing call of a loon.
Add the soul-sooth­ing sound of what you don’t hear — traf­fic, horns and sirens, the inces­sant, aton­al din of human­i­ty in packed prox­im­i­ty, — and you have a sub­lime, alter­nate reality.
That the pad­dlers were unable to cleave their nor­mal real­i­ty from the one they can only expe­ri­ence here, is to me, a conun­drum as great as geo­met­ri­cal­ly squar­ing a circle.
Enter the loons, and a lesson.
This far along in the sum­mer, loon par­ents are focused on teach­ing their off­spring how to catch fish. An adult con­sumes about 26 kgs a day. With the excep­tion of direct threats, any­thing that dis­tracts from or inter­feres with that real­i­ty is superfluous.
Since I did not dis­tort the para­me­ters of their imme­di­ate needs, the pair in the pho­to allowed me to drift gen­tly to with­in five or six meters of them, and go about what­ev­er busi­ness I had in mind, which was savour­ing my time with them, and tak­ing pictures.

               MORE ENDS UP LESS

That’s a les­son for those who have more than they can pos­si­bly need or use, but keep blud­geon­ing away in a futile effort to square the cir­cle of avarice and ego.
Once upon the time, the over­ly rich off­set envy and resent­ment of their wealth by spend­ing some in the inter­est of  those upon whom they could, in effect, look down. Today’s ver­sion look at how they com­pare to oth­ers like themselves.
In the “Gild­ed Age”, rough­ly the 1870s to the out­break of World War I, the U.S. surged through an unprece­dent­ed peri­od of rapid eco­nom­ic growth.
The so-called “rob­ber barons”, Rock­e­feller, Carnegie, Mel­lon. Mor­gan, Van­der­bilt and a hand­ful of oth­ers who cre­at­ed it were, in adjust­ed terms on the lev­el of today’s mul­ti-bil­lion­aires whose names are house­hold words.
But the rob­ber barons are most remem­bered for the mam­moth lega­cy of libraries, uni­ver­si­ties, muse­ums and con­cert hall that bear their With the notable excep­tion of Bill Gates, how many tech and cryp­to mega-rich can you name who are more famous for phil­an­thropy than con­spic­u­ous, and often seri­ous­ly bad taste, consumption?

                    WISE VERSUS WASTEFUL

Willian Paley, who by today’s mea­sure was mere­ly extreme­ly rich, is remem­bered not for the num­bers after a dol­lar sign, but for hav­ing used his wealth to cre­ate CBS News and 60 Min­utes, a com­bi­na­tion that was arguably among the great­est Amer­i­can news organ­i­sa­tions ever.
David Elli­son, who got his mega for­tune seed mon­ey more by birth than nose-to-the-grind­stone, will bear the dubi­ous hon­our of hav­ing wrecked it by try­ing to square the cir­cle of enter­tain­ment and polit­i­cal appease­ment news coverage.
His hagio­graph­ic, cliché-rid­den Op Ed defense of his merg­er mania says every­thing you need to  know about his rela­tion­ship with any real­i­ty but his own; (Com­ments in bold are my reactions)
“Our jour­nal­ists will con­tin­ue to answer to the facts and to all the peo­ple they serve — not to any par­ty or cause.” (So why have you put an avowed ide­o­logue in charge of them?)
“Trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back — sto­ry by sto­ry, day by day. (60 Min­utes nev­er lost the trust of view­ers, but the new order you have imposed is hell-bent on doing so).
 In an age when so much of what fills our screens now is machine-gen­er­at­ed or engi­neered to enrage, jour­nal­ism from real reporters mat­ters more than ever. (That is what the real jour­nal­ists of CBS News have always done. It’s why it was called “The Tiffany Network”)
That is the work I intend to pay for, patient­ly, for a long time.”(So why did you replace jour­nal­ists who were doing that work with avowed­ly ide­o­log­i­cal pseu­do-jour­nal­ists with zero broad­cast news experience?)
The rich can­not and should not be expect­ed to fix the world on their own.
But it would be great­ly appre­ci­at­ed, and far more use­ful, if they at least tried to behave more like loons than youths unaware of the sin­gu­lar  joy of pad­dling a kayak, and try­ing to square the cir­cle of greed and self-absorption.

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