In a digital broadcast environment, it might be good idea to broadcast one feed with just audio from the hall. No matter how good the music, I'm not going to be able to endure a summer of announcer enthusiasm.
Proms season starting up. American programming prominent in the first night. The German orchestras also seem to have been doing a fair amount of Gershwin recently.
I'm still trying to fathom how American music seems to Europeans. I was walking through a Christmas fair in Transylvania a year or two ago, and all of the carols playing over the loudspeakers were in English. Beyond the notion that St. Nick (relics at the trading center of Bari) might have been overwhelmed by Jolly Ol' Nick of the U.S.A., there's also the distance between my hearing of the carols and their hearing. What is it to hear a song from America at Christmastime? Or a jazz-classical piece by Gershwin? And what are the outer limits of that idea -- when does it begin to ring false for them? It rings false for us because of over-familiarity and easy sentiment. Perhaps the outer boundary for American music is different overseas; perhaps it rings false when they suspect that it might be some distance from the thing itself.
Dewey was quite taken with Emerson's thought of the long logic of a life. That sense made of things only within the long duration. Perhaps: βιοσ not ζοε.
I would categorize my two levels of struggle as being beneath that long logic. There's the struggle to survive the present and the near term, and separately, the disjoint between degrees and experience and the prospects at hand. Both of these, though, have an endogenous logic to them, and the long logic of the life supervenes both. As to what it means for a single life that these things have happened within it, I think I have yet to understand, as perhaps is appropriate, and perhaps even fortunate. Not in the sense of not yet realizing something, but in not presuming to understand something before its hour.
This looks very Regie. Would still go, though, to hear it in Paris. If I had my druthers, the post-Barenboim one at an der Linden that was on Arte a year or two ago really struck me. Sometimes you get the feeling that you're watching the story of your own life on the stage, which of course is a trick, much like a docent at an art gallery trying to strike any chord in their audience's life in order to establish some connection with the painting.
But the discipline of art that requires and rewards attention might yet prove very useful against the instant-access sensibility of television news (and, for that matter, Broadway shows).
Approaching a fortnight in these Humble Quarters. Still negotiating the transition, of course. Lower entropy to higher entropy, and considerable difficulty to the lack of actual, present physical danger and exertion. Biblical difficulty, survived by the same means. Gave half of the 24 to sleep for the first week, and now am arcing back to the proper five or six.
Hopefully, will be back at full power and function in order to listen in on the Bayreuth opening cycle at month's end with a bit of vino and the local soft cheese. And the mountains are just sitting there, waiting to be walked up.
In one of Neal Stephenson's novels, a ship leaving port is sunk -- unsurprising, as entering and leaving port were the two most perilous times in old sea journeys. But the reason was that it was carrying a cargo of mercury, and the boxes were of a certain length, which caused the periodicity of the waves in the individual crates to break up the ship.
Many's the slip from cup to lip. In addition to keeping an eye on everything, keep an eye on each individual thing. Onward.
I'm fairly sure that I didn't set out to be an academic. I went to conservatory with the plan of making theatre from then on, and then when 'then on' didn't last nearly as long as I expected, I went to law school with the plan of practicing law from then on.
I suppose I made the first tentative steps in that direction when I sensed that I was not of a type with the tyro lawyers taking as few classes as they could and networking furiously (in the Midwest, in midwestern ways, in New York, in the ways of that place), and when I came to understand how far things had drifted from meritocracy. (That's not a controversial claim. It's quite openly discussed. Jobs are for the connected folks.) But I set out to find a place afterward, and came up empty, even after several years. (During which I was frequently reading and briefing every circuit slip opinion in the country).
Then I tried for a research doctorate in the field in which I had worked professionally for many years. Took as many courses across the university as I could, passed a peculiarly grueling week-long set of qualifying exams, and wrote a full dissertation shaped to the interests of the committee, all the while grading up to 4,000 undergraduate papers and projects a year -- and they refused to schedule a defense.
So. I'm left with what I'm able to do -- Now my credentials/charms are overthrown/ And what strength I have's my own... And after all these years of study, I've picked up a few things. Learning things has always made the world more complicated for me, not less. I'll start in a certain area, whether it's Pynchon at his most wide-ranging, or a certain line of modern philosophy, and just pugnaciously plow through the reading, and I find that after a while, sometimes after a long while, I have access to the thoughts, and the world is more complicated. One example -- several years ago, I saw a review in the NYT of a contemporary philosopher's book on Hegel. Went to the main room at NYPL and plowed through pugnaciously. I'm not sure what I thought I took from it, but I certainly didn't have access to the thoughts. Then, over the next several years, I made it a point to read that author's work and listen to his talks and seminars, and now I think I have access to his work, and it's useful.
Arguably the most important thing about life is that it's an ascending series. The box you're in tomorrow needs to be bigger than the box you're in today. Because if you start going in the other direction, everything will start to diminish. And with it, you.
Seek. Strive. Find. Don't yield.
Not the first time I've booked a site specifically for the mountain/sea air and been confronted with upwind second-world construction practices (smells of burning trash, etc.) Minor inconvenience. And a great incentive to get back to the predawn, to have the coffee in the clean air.
I can't fault them -- laws in some of these countries limit construction to the tourist off-season, so they're likely racing the clock.
Gently down the stream.
When one comes back from the front, one doesn't just re-tune the cacophony. That way madness lies. One allows things to come to rest, to settle into the center of the frame. Which often reveals quite a few more rifts in the lute than one had supposed. The danger at this point is that the folding-in takes on a momentum, so the exercises from the center need to keep the immaterial but substantial, unified, and perceptive soul alive. Yoga, not running or lifting. Kant, not Hegel.
Then, outward again.
Philosophy, and this is where the academy might get it wrong in the interests of keeping the game going, isn't about gaining status, or learning a sequence of strategies as if you were studying chess, or even gaining facility with a language game that you could play as if you played no other. It is about attunement to the present, in repairing the lines of code inside you that get in the way of experience and learning. Evey iota of thought works to clarify the basic relation to the world.
W said that he was merely trying to help the fly out of the bottle. So there is this sense that the way that the others think might have some problems to it. Conversely, there is also a care for all of the ideas of the past in a sort of pastoral sense. The second human philosopher was probably motivated, at least in part out of care for the fellow who had been wandering through the marketplace a few days ago shouting that everything was made of water.
The danger is that one can make a profession of this pastoral care for the souls and ideas of the past. The souls of the past were attempting to repair their present minds. To clarify their present relation to all things. As should we.
Always a bit of a discovery that mental and spiritual focus is necessary in places of rest and recovery as they are in the place of the struggle. The abyss is still there -- it's just not making itself present to you in the same manner.
You and the universe are still basically in the same relation, no matter what part of the world you happen to be in, and how it seems to be with that part of the world. It's going to take focus and work.
Part of the reason that I can't ever recall going on vacation. We can't vacate the place we are in, in the larger sense. And the sense in marking out a certain duration within which we will deliberately not care about the most important things eludes me. Even the weekend rest is the rest into the center of things, hence the habit of church.
Also, one of the first things that Russell noticed about him was that he had private money, and that offered him some assurance that W was capable of being an academic.
Even at the state universities in the US, this ethic still lingers. Conference funding is usually only a fraction of the cost. I still recall observing a leading historian inquire eagerly whether a "De" in the name of some mentor of his interlocutor was an aristocratic particle.
Well, with industrialization, we shall eat cake while they browse the Almanac de Gotha. And of course, with industrialization, another dangerous social set pops up, and they're a bit more difficult to handle. Despite the fact that they're occasionally obsessed with owning the cherry orchard of their childhood.
Gently down the stream. Free-minded, like all of us Americans should be. The long months reading Dewey had an effect, I think.
W said at the preface to one of his works that he would dedicate it to the greater glory of God, but he would be afraid of being misunderstood. Tractatus, of course, but I think that, and even the more informed gossipy reading might miss something that his mind hovered over. I'm not at all sure what this German aristocrat was about, but despite the fact that he was doing his best to dislodge Russell's certainty with every element of thought at his command (tracing from Frege to Bohme), Russell saw in him his only hope of a real protegee.
tl;dr: Not at all an expert, I've only begun to read his stuff seriously, but I don't think we can read W apodictically, but in the manner of disputation. And in every disputation, the reason for each engaging in the question might not at first be obvious.
Feast of Kateri Tekakwitha. She (unlike Issac Jogues) made it onto the peculiar mural at the back of the nave at St. Pat's. Subject of a peculiar and somewhat blue biography by Leonard Cohen. Also on the bronze doors of St. Pat's, although memorialized in the "Blessed" state. There are worse things, I suppose.
In the mural, she seems to be missing the disfigurement from smallpox, though there is some texturing. Just as Jogues is often shown without his mutilated hands. The ειδελον omits the wounds. An inevitable aspect of humans picturing humans, perhaps.
About a week ago, I could see the scattered fireworks below, as my
flight to Rome lifted off from New York City. It had been a difficult
winter. Revenues from editing academic journal articles had abruptly
stopped the previous autumn, and I was forced to abandon my nomading
through the Balkans and fly back to the city before the coffers ran down
to nil. It has been a very difficult existence for the last decade or
so, so I had some experience in how to live, and work, and think in the
city when no source of work was to be found. But these experiences are
very far from the usual American life, and the days and nights are very
difficult, particularly in winter. ... As the celebrations in America
continued into the night, I found myself stepping into the clear, cold
light of the morning, as I changed planes in Iceland. To be clear, this
is not a record of that winter and spring, or some picaresque narrative
of survival. These are my thoughts while these events were going on, and
would only be of interest to those who were interested in my thoughts,
rather than my experiences. More, this text was the instrument by which
these thoughts survived. I have divided the book between my journal
entries and my meditations on the readings of the day, but of course,
they were written together.
(Not a commercial endeavor; priced at the Amazon minimum.)
(Not a commercial endeavor; priced at the Amazon minimum.)
An odd experience on the first leg of the flight from New York on Iceland Air. For the first hour or so, the gentleman in the seat directly behind me kept snorting like a pig. Rather loudly, once or twice a minute. Finally, after an hour of it, I turned squarely around and faced him. An otherwise professional presentation, but very impish-seeming. He gave a sort of gleeful smile and was silent the rest of the journey. Perhaps it was just his way of equalizing the pressure in his ears, but if so, it was a strange way of doing it.
From time to time, some Americans do that, in my experience. Someone who appears to be very civilized, but not in a serious manner, more the type of fellow you might think worked in a marketing department, will idly do something malicious, and sort of gleefully smile at it.
Peculiar. Not worthy of further thought, really, by anyone. Just noting the event.
And this anger that rises in me every time I cross the threshold, back into times of more academic work, is certainly a problem. Mediocrity and corruption, yes -- I did challenge myself on that point in situ, and am confident that I'm right in saying that. But raising the ire is also part of the process in these things, and and the point is that it's not supposed to get one's goat, as it were. But usually, this doesn't involve matters of criminal-level corruption and complete disregard of traditional norms.
qed.
At any rate, it would be best not to think of such things any further than the point of resolving myself towards the specific groups of folks that I've encountered. The 19th c. texts are, and should be, strangers to my ire.
Reading some 19th c. criticism on the Greek drama. All immensely interesting and valuable, much more so than the (often radical feminist) tripe that I was asked to purchase and discuss during Ph.D. work. When I arrived, I had a notion of working intensively on an Oresteia, and learning absolutely everything I could about the Greek drama. Several months later, I floated a notion to do a scholarly edition of the masque by Milton in the rare books collection, which hadn't yet had a proper scholarly edition. Both impulses were met with shrugs. They were more interested in building networks of personal domination and influence than the scholarship itself, a fact evident from their scholarship; anyone who manages to locate their CVs would likely agree with that. At one point they did suggest that, since I had managed to get an outdoor Shakespeare festival off the ground in the last Midwestern city I'd studied in, I should try to network and tap my connections to get funding to revive an outdoor ampitheatre on campus. At which I shrugged, and continued to try to do as much work in Philosophy, English, and History as I could. (Freedom to take courses across the university was one of the points that I had insisted on before coming, and unlike the funding guarantees, they didn't welch on that one.)
The difference between what the state universities are and what they seem to be (the Saturday football view) is quite significant. Largest landowner in the state, sometimes. Like some of the most excessive English monasteries before the sack and plunder in reaction. But putting things in plain terms like that can be perilous for one's future job prospects.
This is fascinating. Most outlets are only reporting the black screen, but DW points out it only lasted for four hours, more a stunt than a shutdown. And the semiosis in the resumption time. Media, like the old shortwave (the budget didn't allow for this trip, but I did have one once, in NYC) can always broadcast on side channels at each frequency.
https://www.dw.com/en/hungary-public-media-reform-begins-with-black-screen-apology/a-77880569
Media is now the central mechanism of political legitimization. The ideas spoken by the news readers already existed in the audience, or the news readers wouldn't have said them in an attempt to curry favor with the audience. The people with these notions then gain a collective identity as a particular audience, and can come to agreement on a coherent (vel non) political narrative, which is to say, an understanding of the mechanisms of power that legitimates the exercise of power.
Democracy used to function differently. It was less susceptible to manipulation, because it had more to do with private judgment than discursive rationality.
Some days of work, yes, but the fact of it was rest. Last night, a very clear dream perhaps suggesting the telos of the present place. For an inhabitant, perhaps a dwelling spot; for the traveller, perhaps the point of inflection. And indeed, at the end of it, I had made my way to the bottom of the fire escape. (Though it was a very amiable place; it certainly wasn't an escape from the flames.)
The work is progressing a bit more slowly than I had hoped, but that's due to its careful nature, I think. Will try to speed the plow as I head into the weekend.
I can tell from the tang in the air that the west wind brings the scents of local industry. As I'm here for the ancient mountains, the modern connivances and pollutions are the distinct downside. If you go up the mountains here, you can see the haze frequently hovering over the towns and the clear air over the meadows. This slightly acrid scent is quite common in southern Europe, but I didn't expect to find it in the summertime. The advantages of the developed areas: properties listed on the rental sites, walkable groceries, reliable internet, and safety. The advantages of the remote areas: basically everything else. At least in the summertime -- in the autumn and afterwards, there's theatre and music in the cities. But that list is sufficient for me -- I keep to the pools of electric light, even in summer.
Brilliant encore in an eavesdropped concert: Rachmaninoff after the Rite of Spring. Amelioration.
Today was about washing up from the long journey, and getting the projects underway. The sorts of mindless ground-laying that AI probably could have accomplished almost instantly. But it got me to the desk at the new setup and typing.
Although all of my work in the last several years has been based on the academic structure (law, philosophy, history), my means and manner of doing it has been based on my conservatory training and decade in the professional theatre. I suspect that I'm attempting to vindicate (and find vindication in) the latter much more than the former. But we'll see how it turns out. During this recent swing into action after a very difficult winter, I realized how much it felt like summer Shakespeare repertory work. I suspect that the engine powering everything is still that actor fellow. Onward, then.
Graces will appear, and there's an end.
Amazing. My flight in was delayed past midnight, so the wisest thing to do was to wait in the (24x7) airport terminal until the Metro opened in the morning. I'm walking through the usual cavernous airport lounge, right next to dozens of humans, some in a catastrophic state, sprawled out on benches and the floor, and I'm carrying a package of overpriced crackers that I had just bought at the newsstand, and carrying a mid-sized backpack. A border patrol fellow (Border Patrol apparently is in charge of security in the airport lounge) stops me and questions me. (Literally, "dokumenti") He then takes my passport and radios up the information in military initialisms (side note: apparently folks in this country have trouble pronouncing the word "Romeo") and explains that they need to keep people from just showing up here. (I had arrived on the shuttle from the other terminal, and had explained my reasons for being there at the beginning.)
The reality of it, of course, is that I'm wearing aviators, and milspec boots and cap. Perhaps people in this part of the world learn that they need to actively demonstrate their harmlessness in order to be left alone.
This was a very difficult journey following a very difficult time, and the embarkation day was 100 in the shade in midtown, so at points I likely haven't exactly come off as Phineas Fogg fresh from a rubber or two of whist at the captain's table. Through the course of the three days, I tried to keep some distance when I was at my most run-down, and tried to keep as civilized an appearance as possible. (But again, showering after working out at the discount gym, then a day running around in a 100 degree city, and then three days of flights and layovers -- I'm honestly not sure how I compare, in an olfactory sense, especially against a planeful of folks fresh from their McMansions.) Perhaps I didn't cover myself in glory, but appear to have gotten here. (Though there's still the final leg of it, so I won't post this until I actually get to the mountains.)
An unreasonably difficult life, and unreasonably difficult journey. It teaches one to query the basis of reasonability.
Relatedly, was completely overwhelmed by standing in Iceland for a brief time. The light, the air. If I had my druthers, these perigrinations would be in the north of the continent. Ancestral homelands and points north. Heaven is there, it seems.
But aside from the increasing military scrapping over the Arctic, the world-effective social confluenes remain in the south. (Cf. "Dostoyevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and burst s into tears")
So, the Fates apparently want the useless and Quixotic fellow in the Balkans. Amor fati.
A warm Sunday afternoon in an airport in Rome, the immense terminals filled with swarms of people, apparently a few days before the official start of the holiday rush. I suppose some would say that this is the material correlative of Kant's kingdom of ends. No grand social purpose, just the assumption that everyone here is able to further their own existence in their own manner. All seem quite placid. There are enormous stores lining the walls of the terminals, filled with expensive goods. A piano player somewhere is doing his or her level best to replicate the effect of Muzak on the mind.
So what right does a dissentient fellow have, against the obvious prosperity, and the fact that the people have obviously become more civilized (if not more cultured) over the last few generations?
Perhaps it's that having the necessary or desirable things at hand is distinct from creating a situation in which it is made plain that abundance is at hand. It is the difference between grocery stores or websites being filled with a wide range of products and inventory, and people actually possessing the things that they desire. Before we even question these desires as desires, there's something else going on above that question.
The monstrance holding the medium-sized dry good is the modern mall, a desire machine. Shopgirls (yes) , video monitors flashing successions of images of fit and attractive folks cavorting in the sunlight, that sort of thing. Making plain that abundance is at hand isn't an abstract intellectual point. That's not how shared ideas work. The material reality of the proof of abundance is the material existence of desire in the people. If we didn't want these things, there would be no point in having them, and more directly, one couldn't prove that the industrial mechanisms were creating abundance.
Which is not to say that we should shift questions of production to centralized bureaucrats or committees. Desire is the reaching-forth of the people not just to the object, but to the object as they understand it, in the manner in which they have come to think about it. And the forces of production tune their production to the objects that the people more intensely desire, desire, again, being the creation of the possibility of the sense of abundance.
Desire then begins to govern the form of the object (the socialists of the east didn't make dungarees, because they thought that they had to condition this desire). The form of bread emerges, not by a scientifically determined process examining how best to use wheat, but because the people desire bread. If the categorial term didn't exist, bread would be simply the action of doing to wheat the thing that resulted in people wanting to have it. And the people, at least in the abstract, are right in this.
Things can imbalance, though. The process of acquiring the goods becomes about accomplishing the satisfaction of desire, rather than acquiring the necessary objects. The sense of abundance comes from the presence of objects of desire -- something that requires both objects and desire. The people then feed on their own sense of abundance in possessing the object that they had desired. That sense gives the object an extra cachet, and the people take satisfaction in having it because it is a sign of that abundance, which they knew as desire. If you paraphrase this sequence more explicitly, the people gain satisfaction in possessing the object that had caused them to desire things, thinking that a need has been resolved. This enters into their comportment. But this pride of possession is of the owner, not of the author. Although the fact of desire was the thing that shaped the object, the possessor imagines that he has taken something of undoubted worth from the outside world and introduced it into his world. But he only possesses it to the degree that and in the manner that he has thought it worthwhile, The idea both determines and negates the experience. And so, his own notion that this specific object would be worthwhile is what gives him satisfaction, as he possess it in the manner of his imagination; having himself imagined the form, he nonetheless values it (independent of his use of it) more for its substance. And so he begins to value the authoring and determining aspects of desire less, and then looks to the mind of industry to give him the best bread.
We need objects in order to live. But we shouldn't feed on the satisfaction of desire, as it necessitates the existence of (at least temporarily un-fulfilled) desire, and when the satisfaction happens, we imagine it a gift from the gods that we had wrenched from them with Promethean force of spending, when in fact we were the authors of the manner and means of the satisfaction of desire, and its object. We sit in the airports, surrounded by expensive goods, and by virtue of the fact that we don't yet possess them, we think ourselves amid abundance. But there is a true form of abundance, and a true form of desire, and a true form of satisfaction; in the last, we recognize our own limitations, and have merely acquired the useful object in order to repair a few of those.
While couched in the language of the Enlightenment, that claim is ultimately grounded in an understanding of the human person...
There's a ten-thousand mile explanation behind those words. And he's gesturing towards the right place.
Though I query the plural form "forbearers" -- these were not abstemious folks.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/july/documents/20260703-liberty-medal.html
Randomly observed:
The advertising in the New York subways is now incredibly obstreperous. Repeated short phrases incessantly flashing, mixed with images of food and recipes apparently unconnected with the ads. Chocolate Bundt cake, fried pork bellies, etc.
--
Based on the inflight displays, Icelandic oddly appears to have at least three apparently non-cognate words for time. Duration (eftir), clock-time (klukkan), and time-point of the event (arrival: komutami, poss. ---tami.).
AI now tells me that timi is not a suffix but a second word--from Old Norse timi, auspicious time, fragment of time, division, etc. The happy hour of arrival, perhaps, rather than a Cartesian dot of no dimensions. Apparently, eftir is cognate with "after", and has the sense of following or sequence (accusative -- the dative refers to physical relation). And klukkan, unsurprisingly, is from clock, which traces back to bell, as in church bell marking the hours, from late Latin Clocca, by means of Old Norse.
So three fundamental notions of experiencing time: the promesse du bonheur, the sequence of things, one after the other, as experienced, and the abstract notion that the clock will chime for us, and has chimed for us, and some guess as to where we stand in relation to the event.
Also--immensely beautiful, even just standing outside the airport in an unremarkable area geographically -- the light, the clouds, and especially the air.
The lack of food service on the short, multi-transfer discount trips, combined with the duration, is a great incentive to the food arrayed temptingly at inflated prices at the airport. Keeping firmly to the budget. Will likely go 36 hours on a pack of cookies from the vending machine, but oddly, no physical hunger. Panis angelicus.
Odyssey impends
Eight o’clock, Idlewild to Rome.
Strether finds another opening.
Hope to be reliably online by Monday evening.
The 250 celebrations locally are underway, a faint shadows of the bunting and bands of the hundredth and the televised two-hundredth. Of course, it's the celebration of declaring that the states are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, which they're not anymore, since after confederation, the people in the states ceded sovereignty to the Republic in 1789.
But songs, unlike printed words, can't be disputed. One merely doesn't sing along, and remembers with gratitude the fact of the Republic.
The people here are genuinely subhuman. Including their "bosses." And as they are drawn into the social matrix here, they become even more so.
Perhaps Boston has it right in preserving the old asperity, or Chicago in preserving the ways of the old world. But what this place is is not good in itself. It merely raises the immensities and keeps the highways moving.
Heidegger on the "event." My first exposure to it. In the context of the thought of the time, I think what he's doing is responding to the triumphalist industrialist pragmatism of the Anglo-Americans with basically the same sensibility, except in an interior key. And he uses the ontological distinction (being/beings) as the fulcrum -- it long pre-exists this in his thought. Or perhaps there is more in these thoughts than I've yet realized.
Continuing my daily post-breakfast slogs through the novels of Henry James in chronological order. I'm firmly into the second mood, now -- The Tragic Muse.
One of my teachers in conservatory was a playwright in residence at the Guthrie when Tyrone et al. were starting it up. He used to tell stories about how Sir Tyrone would wander the halls during the long first winter, department to department, in each room and hallway raising his arms and calling out "Rise above!"
Mission territory.
Had set aside 2 or 3 classic 19th c. texts on the Greek drama, with the intent to give them the last day before the holiday, but having only recently having become aware of the free scanner, I instead continued to add to my files. Avoiding the popular and accessible stuff -- mostly things on the penumbra. I can buy the Bertrand Russell complete works (those in the public domain) for a dollar or two, but the output of FCS Schelling is a bit harder to find. At any rate, after a long day of work, I had only about a half hour for my Elysian corpus of 19th c. (largely German) criticism in translation. Fortunately, having foreseen this, I had gone into the deeper databases and found some electronic copies that hadn't been listed in the main card catalog.
So I have all of the necessary knowledge, even if I haven't read all of it yet.
The library at Alexandria was one of the wonders of the world, because they forced each ship that passed through to allow them to copy any books on board. In an ideal world, the ships would have done the same. (And it's considerably easier now, at least compared to wax tablets.)
Got irked at a few things during the day, and a gentle remonstration sort of came upon me in the early afternoon as to that sort of thing. I have to pretend to be under monastic discipline in order to keep the right frame of mind -- which, as long as I keep it sub pectore, at least when not blogging, that seems practicible. Like the worker-priests in Simone Weil, in the world, but not of the world. The recent season of adversity has given some remarkable gifts, and I certainly don't want to lose hold of them.
Spent a couple hours scanning the good bits of Ralph Barton Perry's 2 vol. book on James (which, unlike the 1 vol version, isn't online, I think). Shelf copy at a major research library, written almost a century ago, and yet I still had to trek back and forth to the staff desk a half-dozen times to cut some uncut pages. Amazing. Apparently no one reads anymore. Last of the Gutenberg minds.
Brilliant short note from Chas. Peirce to Wm. James -- Peirce was at his place far in the country, where he worked and thought in absolutely penniless monastic seclusion with his French wife, near Port Jervis, I think. He mentions to James that he remembered that James's brother "Harry" had talked about writing novels, and asked James to send him one. James's reply: " I will send you a copy of my brother's Golden Bowl, which is the most elaborate thing in his "third manner."" (Also to be sent: H.G. Wells's Tono Bungay)
Midsummer in the city of the power of evil. Had hoped to have left here long before now, and the stoppage time, as it were, feels a bit perilous. A certain type of person is filled with passionate intensity at times like these. Neither a good nor a safe place for the son of man.
Gently down the stream, which is to say, as if there were a stream, and the times were noble enough to permit gentility.
Live nobly. Onward.
Had been looking forward to spending a few hours with a 19th c. printing of an important book by an Old Bostonian, but when it arrived at the library table, it was obvious that I would destroy it by attempting to read it, so I opted to retain a digital version. Which is not the same, but it is sufficient for the task at hand. They'll probably just discard the old book, (New Yorkers) but at least it won't have perished by my hands.
I see the digital edition is a photostat of a printing held in California. Have been reading some of Royce's early histories of law and order there. An almost mythical place of abundance and the flowering of humanity, but the experience of Tom Joad et al. is instructive.
I daydreamed on occasion about going to LA and working as an actor, and possibly an acting teacher there, but if they didn't like me in New York, they'll certainly not like me in Los Angeles. And things are much farther apart there. Very easy to vanish into the space between.
It seems sometimes that there is a ruthless leveling downward in the froth of industrial production and consumer desire on these shores. Those who understand, or who seem to understand, or who seem to make an effort to understand face a very difficult life. The mimetic fury of desire becomes the only litmus of social encounter. An indolence, and a refusal to think.
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Separately: I realized rather suddenly an ominous implication of the historical mistake of celebrating the present year as the 250th of the country. (It is the anniversary of independence of the colonies. Confederation resulted, and then fell apart. Then, much later, came union.)
But if you celebrate the 250th of "America", you might as well be celebrating the America of some future republic -- or other form of government.
Still bedeviled by computer problems. Hopefully, the parts will arrive in the next few days.
Midsummer in the city. Gym (new record on the Hammerstrength supine press), church for a bit of meditation, then walking through the neighborhoods with many people indistinguishable from medieval demons and thick clouds of marihuana, then a bit of breakfast amid the wealthy soccer fans and clouds of vodka fumes in the park nearby, and now to the books. Managing to take notes on the broken machine, but that's about the limit of it.
Midsummer -- the social forms, the animal nature. Commemorated by the feast of the Baptist, none born of women greater than he.
A land of prosperity, and corruption within the prosperity. Play it true, and your life will be a test of the soul. Play it false, with the others, and you'll be quite comfortable, materially speaking.
Onward.
[And As I write this, I discover a quick fix (on the order of tapping a certain point, or holding it at a certain angle, that makes the problems with the machine considerably less. For graces received.]
Bit of difficulty with the computing machines. Thought I could finish some work outside in a light misting rain, but the hinges on the laptop and associated wiring apparently thought otherwise. Expect sharply reduced verbiage in the coming days, hopefully not weeks.
Have seen the surrounding culture with almost startling clarity in recent days. The sort of frothing insolence and mimetic anger one might expect from lifting a lot of people into economic comfort without imparting virtue. And it's been many generations now. The democracy will rise or fall on the strength of the single soul.
In retrospect, the park next to the library was not the best place to work vis-a-vis the ongoing goal of avoiding the marihuana-smoking over-entitled greed machines. Bit woozy, and a bit mad about that.
Genuinely the worst people on earth, precisely because of their position in the civilization. I'll leave this city (hopefully before the thunderbolt) with absolutely no regrets.
There is a world elsewhere. Next year in a holy country.
So, explain how the rhinoceros thing is even remotely plausible.
Okay, think of it this way. If someone says that there is not a rhinoceros in the room, you might look around the room, ascertain the lack of an immense horned beast, and then agree. This is verification, and it's what you consider to be truth itself.
Steady on.
Well, okay, in fairness, if someone said that, in the larger sense of the term, there is no rhinoceros in the room, you might think about the ways in which this might be true, but you'd likely feel a duty towards your habit of verification, and these would be only slight forays into that other territory, and you'd likely say that, when it comes down to brass tacks, and given the obvious reality of things, it would be more logical to conclude that the room was rhinoceros-free.
But how is it false to say that there is not a rhinoceros in the room?
It's not false, it's simply nonsense. First, there was never any possibility of a rhinoceros being in the room, so in a Hegelian sense, there is no specific lack of a rhinoceros.
But it suggests an absence, not a thing lacking.
Precisely. It only suggests an absence in a situation where there was never a possibility of a presence. It's like saying that time isn't running backwards, or that a giraffe isn't π. The statement cannot be agreed to because it's simply nonsense, despite the fact that this one offers a foothold of attempted verification. I might similarly say that running off the edge of the Grand Canyon doesn't cause the river below to turn into the Napoleonic Code, but the person who tried to verify it would be a fool, and if they tried to verify it conceptually, they'd have nothing to grab onto. The possibility of verification doesn't mean that the claim makes sense.
But its not theoretically impossible for there to be a rhinoceros in the room.
Well, that depends on the kind of theories that you have.
I mean, some undergraduates could have, as a prank, gone to the zoo, brought a small one back and tossed it in the window.
Legitimate, but the question is if that's enough to create the genuine possibility of the event. Genuine doubt is as difficult as genuine belief, as Peirce said to dispel the Cartesian demon. And so the expression in language at best might reduce to the claim that the situation that no rational person would think to be the case is in fact not the case. Which for W, might be precisely the same as the stronger form.
So we can never know if there is a rhinoceros in the room?
No, we just can't make the claim that there isn't one coherently, if there was never a possibility of the event. It's about how we think and talk, not what's going on in the world outside. Knowledge is understanding that the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable, but wisdom is not putting it in the fruit salad.
Bit trite.
Indeed. And perhaps entirely wrong. Just wiseacring and procrastinating.
#notexpert #dontrely
Interesting. When W first knocked on R's door at Cantab, he refused to speak German, and his English was so bad that R lost the 45 minutes that he needed to prepare for his lecture.
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Also -- a key early debate twixt the two -- whether the statement that "there is no rhinoceros in the room" is true. Ionesco, prhps? He was reading obscure philosophy at the time. Perhaps a motif.
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