Notes to the First Gallery of Images
Descriptions of images from left to right, top to bottom:
Estas tardes obscuras me asustan
y no me hace bien
caminar en sentido contrario
a lo que es mi edén.
These dark afternoons frighten me
and it does not help
to walk away from
my paradise (Eden).
B. The title of Æcornomics 6 “I Started a Joke” comes from the Bee Gees’ song with the same title. At the beginning of the essay, McShane quoted the first stanza of the song: “I started a joke / Which started the whole world crying.” In the second paragraph of the essay, he identified 1961 as the beginning of a joke that he started, “built on the previous decade of laughter and sorrow.” McShane was fond of the Bee Gees music and lyrics and cited “Words” in Æcornomics 2 and Æcornomics 4 and “Closer than Close” in Questing2020 B. (Please note that in both the Æcornomics and Questing2020 series there are hyperlinks to essays hosted on an earlier version of this website. All of those essays are now available on this website and can be easily found using the search bar.)
C. McShane included this image of painters at the Last Supper in a one-page handout he prepared for “Cultivating Categorial Characters,” the Second West Dublin Conference, Nova Scotia, Canada, August 14–18, 2000. Underneath the “Frankly” quotation, he added in handwriting: “And how many Howard Cosells are needed in the game of grace?” Howard William Cosell (1918–1995) was an American sports journalist, broadcaster and author.
D. This is a mock-up of one of three proposed covers for Economics for Everyone, 3rd edition (2017). McShane did not have anything personal against Trump, and even posed the challenge to “think him through and true” (Seeding the Positive Anthropocene, p. 27). On November 10th, 2016, the day after Trump surprisingly won the US presidential election, McShane made various modifications to the manuscript of Profit: The Stupid View of President Hilary Clinton. The revised book was available for purchase within a few days. In February 2017, an interview with the author was requested for a press release.
E. This image appears at the end of chapter 15 “Horizons” in Introducing Critical Thinking. A number of times McShane thought he had reached a decent finish line as a writer, but within days the finish line “moved away.” (See, for example, the description of the essay series Public Challenging Method Board). In various essays, McShane quoted Eric Voegelin on the challenge of making a beginning: “Where does the Beginning Begin? As I am putting down these words on an empty page I have begun to write a sentence that, when it is finished, will be the beginning of a chapter on certain problems of Beginning.” In Search of Order, Vol. 5, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1987, p. 13.
F. This photo was taken at the Vancouver Lonergan Conference at the University of British Columbia, July 5–9, 2010. McShane gave morning lectures on economics and the eight functional specialties. Afternoon sessions consisted of presentations on papers that had been pre-submitted to the conference participants. Twenty-five people from various countries and backgrounds participated in the conference.