Consider the principle of sufficient reason in the context of the development of technological infrastructure. Only a broad-based adoption of technology could focus a sufficient amount of resources on the central infrastructure. Perhaps, instead of seeing the end-gadget and the visual images on it, as an end in itself, the point of the whole thing -- also see it as a mechanism used to tap the resources of the end-user towards the creation of centralized infrastructure.
Went to the city's castle -- very ancient, has been held by a few empires over the last thousand years. Extraordinary views out over the plain, which are also visible at the (much smaller) citadel at the opposite end of the insular channel at the confluence of the two rivers. I try to make at least one visit there each time I visit here. I much prefer the castles in Transylvania, though -- there's something very discomfiting about seeing signs for lurid exhibitions of medieval torture devices, given the events of the last fifty years hereabouts -- at least in the northern castles, I'm absolutely confident that they haven't been used for warmaking or carceral purposes for a few centuries. One does get odd vibes. But I suppose I'm peculiarly sensitive. I still wonder a bit why people listen to orchestral requiems as art or entertainment.
Whatever the merits of nature and nurture, the directly proximate environment does shape the person. The traffic noise, the chaotic sidewalks, the scents of fried foods, the clouds of secondhand vapes.
Wealthier place aren't marked by these objective phenomena, and their residents seem to have a different general personality. Persistent correlation can indicate partial causation. Though having a lot of money can do other things to protect one's personality from the vicissitudes.
This is perhaps why, during the republic, they looked across the river and built apartments there. (Though curiously, they appear not to have extended the tram lines.) There is a famous local novel about the old architecture of the city, the protagonist, a romantic madman, looks in horror through is telescope at the characterless housing growing on the other side of the river. But there was green space, and planned development, and quiet. These things don't cost that much, except in the context of the band of detritus around urban areas, where square footage is costly, neighborhoods are ad hoc, etc.
One doesn't seek out sane housing for the sake of sane housing, as reasonable as that might sound. The housing shapes the mind, and the sensitive spirit. One turns into a bit of a troglodyte among the detritus, vaping, etc.
To their credit, they make it a point here to build sufficient housing for the population. I've seen this in several post-communist states. Whatever the many sins of the authoritarian state, it publicly preached a strong social ethic, and that ethic has persisted somewhat -- a very valuable residuum.
I can honestly say that I never encountered a law professor who appeared to care more for the object of their study than their own personal social standing. And I was looking rather closely.
That rule obtains in the academy generally -- the exceptions whom I've encountered have almost invariably been in philosophy or the arts.
To be clear, I studied the arts to practice the arts, then found things in the field to be a bit off-target, to use the mildest possible phrase. Then I studied law to practice law, and found the practice of law to be, with similar discretion, a bit corrupt. When, finally, I turned to the academy, it was largely animated by a sense that it was the source of the fact that ideas were no longer guiding things. It would have worked, but as it turns out, if you don't think that there is any truth to be found in the objects of study, there's apparently no need to preserve basic truth and honesty in the interpersonal world. At the end of it, I was basically trying to play baseball in the middle of a fistfight.
Onward. The old texts are still available, and they speak. There's also the possibility of making art at some point in the future, and if I ever find a path past the gates of the law, I'd be able to use those ideas to explain a few things.
The purpose of society is not to preserve and populate the forms of social life and industry. That can be done with a fraction of the population, and if necessary, within a context of near-absolute injustice and corruption, especially when social connections are mediated by technology.
The purpose of society is the answer to a single question: What is it that all of us should do now?
I remember reading Newman's Lectures on the Irish University when I was working at the hardware store on the Upper East Side, just after passing the bar exam. That, and Trollope, preserved some airy spaces in the mind during the hardscrabble days. Which were, of course, shortly to become even more hardscrabble.
Hardscrabbler. Harderscrabble. It's very important to find the right words for things. Cf. I. Berlin's anecdote about Akmatova in the bread line.
Looking at a map of the region in the 11th c. -- with possibly one exception, all of the places that I've visited were cities then. (And I think the one not on the map was in existence then, as well.) Not always under the same names, or in the same country, but still there. Perhaps the norm in Europe.
I have consciously looked for cities that were historical capitals or sees, sometimes in preference to current capitals. The ruins of time...
From the first draft of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, per today's entry in Chambers:
The thoughtless World to majesty may bow,
Exalt the brave, and idolise success;
But more to Innocence their safety owe
Than Power and Genius e'er conspired to bless.
And thou who, mindful of the unhonoured Dead,
Dost in these notes their artless tale relate,
By night and lonely contemplation led
To linger in the lonely walks of Fate,
Hark how the sacred calm that reigns around
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease;
Instill small accents whisp'ring from the ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.
No more with Reason and thyself at strife,
Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool, sequester'd vale of life
Pursue the silent tenor of thy doom
Proverbs for Paranoiacs, cont'd: If you are travelling in the Second World, and a large commercial van with dark tinted windows that was outside the apartment yesterday pulls up again the next morning, and then pulls away again a few minutes after you put some towels out to dry in front of the window, it's undoubtedly a coincidence. If anyone's asking.
[Update, apparently just a van in the local commercial traffic that decided to make an abrupt departure at that particular moment. But in the Balkans, any excuse for paranoia is useful. Keeps one on one's toes.]
Rather profound shift in powers of mental focus (not for the good), together with mild respiratory oddness. Assuming it's from the rooms above the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which were quite a shift from the quiet, somewhat swampy city of the Jedi Council. The paradigm for it in my understanding is the beginning of Tarkofski's Solaris -- the earthly home (which we see in the director's ending to be the world of forms), and then this deeply disturbing soundtrack of automobiles and traffic counterbalanced by sedative visuals. From the place of understanding to the difficult work and alienating journey.
Given the preponderance of the visual in experiencing films, people often take the traffic section to be simply soporific and sedative -- but if you listen to the audio on its own, it's actually deeply disturbing.
Walkure on the Bayreuth broadcast for the Sunday late afternoon/evening. Rheingold was in the Starbucks across from the national parliament, which went from daytime to nighttime lighting at the finish, which was quite powerful. But for the first day of the festival, the rooms adjacent to the busy road. Sufficient for the wanderer.
In this listening, I'm seeing Wotan as a sort of protestant figure. (Much to do with the reading of the past year, perhaps.) Building Valhalla against the ones who have gained spiritual power by renouncing earthly love. Walhall seems a more contingent proposition -- not a universal heaven, but a collection of the noble souls that Wotan's Valkyries are able to capture (St. Michael figures, perhaps) after Wotan had intentionally made the mortals' lives difficult and quarrelsome. Built by the human giants, not by the Gods. And he fears that the armies of the ones who have renounced love might even reach these souls that have been taken there and convert them.
And the ending with the Valkyrie who disobeyed him, even though entirely a creature of his will -- perhaps reckoning the cost of reformation, and attempting to ensure that its spirit will reach the future?
More things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Particularly earth.
Bit of a break in the heat. Rooms much more liveable. Still the busy road, but that's only noise. The absence of fumes and heat (presumably a change in wind with the weather) makes much more of a difference. The cost is much higher than what the locals pay in rent, but absent the caravanserai mentality, there would be no market whatsoever, an nowhere to travel to. The caravan continues.
The fundamentals are good -- wood floors, open space, double-glazed windows, but the clothesline is an old synthetic yarn that leaves tiny splinters in the clothing, the air conditioner was literally packed with dry and oily dirt (a half inch on the filter), and there were other electrical/plumbing things. In addition, there wasn't an open laundry room, so it's been a few weeks of hand-washing. It's being run as an inexpensive rental, so this apparently the mentality of an inexpensive rental in this part of the world. Which is odd. There's no reason that it couldn't be run shipshape without doubling the rent, but that's apparently the distinction. Hopefully, the month of exhaust fumes from the road won't cause any lingering cloudiness.
Oddly, I came here from the Jedi Council city, which had its own difficulties at times (Yoda's swamp, perhaps), and just before I left, I was watching Tarkovski's Solaris one night after dinner, and was struck by the soundtrack on the driving scene after the rural home at the beginning. Listening only to the sound, I was struck by how nightmarish it was. Just the constant rush of traffic, but...
In a moment of cynicism, I wonder if the world (multiplied tenfold in the last hundred years) has thought through what might happen if hundreds of millions of people in its most powerful country just start lying as hard as they can -- which seems to be the way things are going. Our mediated ways of understanding the way things are in the world won't necessarily pick up on this, but the context of everyday experience will change, and unrest will grow. And the mechanisms that have been developed to suppress unrest have grown quite potent, albeit quietly, over the last fifty years or so.
Ultimately, you do have to be a good person, if this civilization thing is going to work. ("You," not "one.") You don't have to accept the prevailing notion of the good, but you do need to formulate your own idea of the good, and especially in that case of exception, hold to it with all your being. The real danger is in the (now apparently increasing) thought that neither the common notion of the good, nor private notions of the good, nor the notion of private notions of the good can claim authority. In a crisis, of course, the wagons will circle around the first, but precisely because that will happen at the expense of the second and the third, we, quite wisely, won't entirely believe it.
Followed a small rabbit-hole to a digital facsimile of an early Gospel text at the Vatican library. On a whim familiar to anyone with a smattering of Greek or Latin who has ever visited a museum with artifacts from ancient history, decided to zoom in to see if I could make out anything myself, across 1700 years. Literally the first word I looked at: αποκαλυται.
And to bed, I think.
Again, my yeoman's Greek is full of misleading notions, but...
Conjecture: The missing root in "αρτον επιουσιον" was from a neologism, perhaps by the first translators to Greek.
"Should we say αρτον eχουσια?"
"Νο, it's not about power or authority, it's about the thing itself. Επι-ουσια is more like it."
"But that's not a word."
"Perhaps you haven't grasped what it is that we're doing here..."
In the Soviet film "Road to Saturn," the Russian spy who infiltrated the training program that the Germans were using to train Russian operatives is sitting at the table, drinking with one of the Russian women who are apparently being run in a parallel program. She looks at him with disdain, and says "You even drink like a German...We Russians have the truth, but we live in s--t up to our ears."
One peculiarity of some folks from the large country to the east whom I've encountered is a disdain for brooms. It took me a while to realize that this was a learned aversion, rooted in social distinction. The poor have brooms, the normal folks have vacuums. Similarly, both there and in other places, excessive organization or hygiene practices is sometimes marked as German behaviour. The need to distinguish yourself, for what might be entirely legitimate reasons, from the people of another culture can sometimes cause you to cede to them some objectively necessary aspects of human, as distinct from animal, behaviour. I presume this happens unconsciously.
The only way to keep this from happening is perhaps a culturally distant model. Two random cultures in the Americas might equally cultivate a specific Japanese mental discipline. Or perhaps it is possible to only have completely transcendent cultural models, notions of perfection not associated with any lineage or region. Perhaps America serves for this in the global context, or used to serve for this.
But there does have to be a discipline. Like the spy infiltrating the training program, you do need to have sufficient distance from both your own culture and the culture that is being proposed as the model, and yet be focusing your mental and spiritual energy on the task. As a result, being neither fish nor flesh becomes an objective of the psyche. (And the character is genuinely between two worlds a bit, as demonstrated by an almost unconscious sniff of the knuckle after sipping the drink.)
That focus is perhaps equivalent to the truth that the woman was speaking about. The desire for perfection that is so strong that it makes you consider the lesser perfections (e.g., hygiene, brooms) something that should be renounced. And yet, this focus, this apperceptive awareness, left to its druthers, would likely find those sorts of things useful.
Rheingold livestream from Bayreuth, a coffeehouse across from the capital of the old Republic, while trying to finish Jaeger's Paideia. The argument of giants over the completed hall, mortals hungry -- not for the spirit of youth, the original bargain (that which giveth joy to their youth, perhaps), but gold. And then the question of the ring of power, and then the murder of the brother. An old story.
We fashion aesthetics, picturings, of past dystopias in an attempt to avoid them. Jack-booted thugs, etc. (Which, to be fair, is sometimes necessary due to the danger of imitation.) But if you are acting in a craven manner and causing harm, you are creating that which the observers will eventually fashion an aesthetic around and learn to fear, and to teach others to fear. And the aesthetic, or picturing, which is to say, the sense of how it is with the world, will then necessarily describe you. This might be the place just beyond where the thinker sits.
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