Turtles All the Way Down
Robert was outside moving the old bricks that were dumped next to the side of the house, so that he could get the ladder in there, so that he could work on the library window – the windows were not only painted shut, the bottoms had been caulked on the outside – so that we could go ahead and paint the woodwork in the library – but only after we have put on the second color coat and put down the shoe molding. It’s turtles all the way down.
This phrase in its present form is from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, with variations back through Bertrand Russell, William James, and Thoreau, who cites a Hindu myth that the world is supported by an elephant who is supported by a turtle. The question is, of course, “What supports the turtle?” I often quoted the phrase in my career as a programmer and systems analyst, where there often seemed to be an infinite regression of prerequisites or errors to be fixed, and progress was measured by new error messages which indicated that one problem had been fixed and giving a clue to the next one.
As long as he had moved the bricks, I decided to try cleaning up the rest of that area. There was what appeared to be the edge of a concrete slab beside the house. So I got the hoe and started uncovering it (after removing another ton of English ivy) and it was clearly where the garbage cans used to be kept. Which was a much better place than they are now. And there was a huge pile of rocks under the ivy at the corner of the house, where they were directing water into the foundation. So we ended up re-sloping the dirt away from the house and building a set of shallow stone steps up to the the garbage can area.
During this Robert did get the second window in the library loose, so it opens more or less. Now we have to get the top sashes, which have dropped, unstuck, so we can raise the top sashes, stop the air leaks, and be able to lock the windows.
Someday we will be able to paint the woodwork.
Filed under: New Old House, News and Musings | 3 Comments
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I did not know that about the Hindu myth. However, I am sure that our family’s favorite author, Terry Pratchett, did know it. He has written a series of Discworld books, all based on a disk shaped world on the backs of four elephants on the back of a turtle. The books are humor/satire/fantasy. That is to say, laugh-out-loud humor, biting satire, and witches, wizards, trolls, gollums, and other species just trying to get along (or not) on a world. If you haven’t read one, you should. Julia lent one to a professor, who was reading it behind the hymnal in church, and got in trouble with his wife for laughing during services.
The turtle is supported by the old shell game!
Lisa,
I was tickeled to see your name in one of the UU list serves…followed your link to this site. No idea you were a WV native, so glad to know you are fighting the mountaintop mining travest/horror.
This post made me laugh out loud: I work for the Austin Fire Department as the IT manager. There’s a long-neglected (but extensively used) software application that fits this saying perfectly: every time we go to fix one thing, we discover two more things underlying the initial issue, and more problems underlying that. Business process, user training, data architecture, blah blah blah. I had heard this saying before but completely forgot it. It is now the credo for our system optimization efforts.
First UU Austin limps along. The cancer is gone, but we still seem to shoot ourselves in the foot every opportunity we get.
Regards,
Elizabeth Gray