A little personality

You've got to love a gargoyle.

If water spouts out of the mouth, they are gargoyles; if not, they are grotesques. In either case, I assume, they ward off evil. There is one inside my house - a "decorative feature" surely put up by the previous owner. Maybe my dark moods are related to the grotesque seeking to ward me off?

When it wasn't raining in Oxford, it was suitably picturesque.

It's funny as one of the tasks on the AI project has involved looking at photographs of cities. I think this selection of images of Oxford, perhaps with the exception of the shot of the painted window of the covered market, would have been an ideal selection for the task. It asked for different images of the same place and with the same aesthetic. Whatever that means.

My day involved a connection with history in a somewhat synchronistic fashion. Exeter College (not featured in the images above, but referred to yesterday) was J. R. R. Tolkien's College. They have a bust of him. There's also a board showing the students who were killed in the First World War: they would have been Tolkien's contemporaries. They were the band of friends, as it were, later immortalised in his novels.

Not all of what we humans do is contemptible. The beauty of buildings and works of art is not just a statement of bankrupt ideologies and politics. It is also beauty. It is also the finest part of our spirit which, counter-intuitively, shines through the murk of even our most anthropocentric accomplishments.