All Hallows' Eve

What Hacker News says

1. HarryHirschApr 2021
   Aditya decided to join a supervisor with questionable ethics who ran a very ill-conceived research project. He could have chosen someone else for his thesis or spoken up when the paper went for submission, or at least stepped aside from kernel development but instead decided to dig in. It's all very poor judgement on his part, in multiple instances. There's no need to normalize that behaviour, because it's not normal, at least not in the world I'd like to live in.

   Recommended reading: All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams, a meditation on where stupidity and selfishness lead.

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2. svieiraMar 2020
   Young Adult

   * _The Chronicles of Prydain_ (https://www.goodreads.com/series/40371-the-chronicles-of-pry...)

   * _The Chronicles of Narnia_

   * _The Hobbit_

   * _John MacNab_ (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161001.John_MacNab / http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300621.txt)

   * _The Postman_ (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/889284.The_Postman)

   Adult

   * _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm) - what is the right size for things in this world? A gentle introduction to the romance of the small and distributism.

   * _A Leaf, by Nigel_ (http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Leaf_by_Niggle) - Tolkien's allegory.

   * _The Space Trilogy_ by C. S. Lewis - the adult version of _The Chronicles of Narnia_

   * _All Hallow's Eve_ (https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/All-Hallows-Eve/978150400668... / http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400061.txt)

   * _The Eschaton Sequence_ (https://us.macmillan.com/series/theeschatonsequence/) - if you like Neal Stephenson's imagination of future society, if you are amazed by Iain Banks' scope, if you think that Asimov is brilliant ... you'll want to read this 6-book sequence.

   Excellent, recommend by others in this thread already:

   * _The Lord of the Rings_

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3. svieiraDec 2022
   > anyone claiming that it does hasn't thought about it very hard yet.

   Or maybe you haven't given enough thought to what "beauty" might mean such that it could be objective. Not everyone means by "beauty" "that which I find appealing". Some mean "the will's response to truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals

   A wonderful example of this is given in _All Hallows Eve_ by Charles Williams:

   > "Over here," Jonathan said, and took his friend round to the other side of the room. A second easel was standing back to back with the first, also holding a canvas, but this uncovered. Richard set himself to look at it.

   > It was of a part of London after a raid—he thought, of the City proper, for a shape on the right reminded him dimly of St. Paul's. At the back were a few houses, but the rest of the painting was of a wide stretch of desolation. The time was late dawn; the sky was clear; the light came, it seemed at first, from the yet unrisen sun behind the single group of houses. The light was the most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting, and almost to dominate the room itself. At least it so governed the painting that all other details and elements were contained within it. They floated in that imaginary light as the earth does in the sun's. The colours were so heightened that they were almost at odds. Richard saw again what the critics meant when they said that Jonathan Drayton's paintings "were shrill" or "shrieked", but he saw also that what prevented this was a certain massiveness. The usual slight distinction between shape and hue seemed wholly to have vanished. Colour was more intensely image than it can usually manage to be, even in that art. A beam of wood painted amber was more than that; it was light which had become amber in order to become wood. All that massiveness of colour was led, by delicate gradations almost like the vibrations of light itself, towards the hidden sun; the eye encountered the gradations in their outward passage and moved inwards towards their source. It was then that the style of the painting came fully into its own. The spectator became convinced that the source, of that light was not only in that hidden sun; as, localized, it certainly was. "Here lies the east; does not the day break here?" The day did, but the light did not. The eye, nearing that particular day, realized that it was leaving the whole fullness of the light behind. It was everywhere in the painting—concealed in houses and in their projected shadows, lying in ambush in the cathedral, opening in the rubble, vivid in the vividness of the sky. It would everywhere have burst through, had it not chosen rather to be shaped into forms, and to restrain and change its greatness in the colours of those lesser limits. It was universal, and lived.

   ~ All Hallows Eve: II. — THE BEETLES by Charles Williams https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400061h.html

   See also: * _Beauty as a transcendental in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger_ by John Jang for University of Notre Dame Australia at https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

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4. HarryHirschJan 2021
   People generally misunderstand Hanlon's Razor. It's immaterial if someone is evil or just stupid, the only thing that matters is that they should not be making decisions about other people.

   (Charles Williams' All Hallows' Eve is an extended meditation about just that.)

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