...
In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.
[Channing]
From: Elias Canetti. “Het boek tegen de dood.”
i like it when you — that is i, but in your case it's you — feel happy for no apparent reason; it is a good counterpoint to yesterday (and the day before) when you felt unhappy for no apparent reason.
funny, when you're happy it's fine that there is no apparent reason for it but when you are unhappy you're like, but ... i have ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to be unhappy!
“I’m living the way I want to live, doing the work I want to do, and I’m being paid for it. What could be better than that?” as ali smith said to jeanette winterson in this lovely interview. quite. actually i think not being paid for it, which means people are not having to pay for your work, is even better but ok, not everyone is a retired australian academic living in an old monastery just north of the belgian border, frugally on a very modest pension, but nonetheless.
and i love that ali smith loves life❊ — and loving life for no apparent reason is best of all.
❊this puzzled l'astronave (where i learned of this interview) but she's working on it. i am one of the almost million. hi!
In every instant a self exists and is in the process of becoming. The self does not actually “exist,” but is only that which it is to become. Insofar as the self does not become itself, it is not its own self, and not to be one’s own self is despair.
your kingdom for a good pdf of kierkegaard's 'the sickness unto death' you say? ok then, download it → here.
You could read The Grauniad for three years and not find a single thing worth reading in it (only snooty and/or juvenile opinion columns or articles pretending to be informative which are actually promotional pieces for the writer's book subedited to within an inch of their life ... mind you they do pay €0.15 a word) and then on one and the same day find three.
fifty years later when i arrived in england as a fourteen year old they were still doing it, but on the hand. when i was due to be caned (for smoking) my mother let the headmaster know in no uncertain terms what her views on corporal punishment were and i got off with a severe warning unlike my friends.
From The Times, February 15, 1921
How, when, and where should pupils in schools be punished? The question was debated by members of the Medical Officers of Schools Association after a questionnaire had been circulated asking as to the forms of corporal punishment in their schools. Dr E H T Nash, who opened the discussion, referred to physical injuries, temporary and permanent, that had been known to follow caning on the hands, and cited cases in which it caused loss of nails, blood blisters, and bruising. This kind of punishment had an injurious effect on the careers of children who were destined for the profession of music. Caning on the hand was only in vogue in State schools. The universal site for it in public and other schools had been described as “a safe soft spot”; no cases of injury had been reported as a result of applying the cane thereto. The authorities in two English cities were in one case against corporal punishment save in exceptional cases, and in the other opposed to it unless the pupil was defiant. Dean Inge had said recently that the son of an earl took caning as part of his education and the son of a bricklayer brought an action for assault against the schoolmaster. The caning given to schoolboys by monitors was of real value in house discipline in public schools. Dr Nash said he was against punishments such as the memorizing of poetry, the writing out of Latin verse, and extra school work, because they created a dislike of literary subjects. Moreover, they were all detrimental, because they kept the pupil from outdoor exercise. Penal drill was bad because, in view of our dependence on a territorial army, it produced a subconscious dislike of all physical training. Punishments, the speaker continued, should be useless and hated by the defaulter. He believed in a modified form of shot drill done with croquet balls. This produced no antipathy to learning or sport. Caning on the hand should be deleted from the list of school punishments on medical grounds. In the discussion that followed, reference was made to the painter Furse, who drew a pony when he was supposed to be working. “You will bring me 50 ponies at 1 o’clock,” said the master, and the 50 were produced, but in one picture which, it was stated, still hangs in a room at Haileybury.
interesting piece in trouw by ethicist frits de lange from 2009 (archive) which i came across by way of this maxim februari column in the nrc (archive) recently about, amongst other things, being tired of being your self.
Ten tijde van Freud, schreef De Lange, kwam geestelijk lijden voort uit je verhouding met je verleden. De moderne depressie is echter een gevolg van de toekomst. „Door de druk om zichzelf morgen weer opnieuw uit te moeten vinden, verkeert het soevereine individu in een voortdurende staat van oorlog met zichzelf.” Soms implodeert die zelffabriek. Dan lukt het niet meer om een nieuw zelf te maken voor de nieuwe tijd.
Epistemic chaos is how Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” describes the situation the world finds itself in.
In other words we don't know how to tell if what we believe is true or not. In fact we don't know how we know what we know. And this is a serious problem.
In 1966, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a short book of seminal importance, “The Social Construction of Reality.” Its central observation is that the “everyday life” we experience as “reality” is actively and perpetually constructed by us. This ongoing miracle of social order rests on “common sense knowledge,” which is “the knowledge we share with others in the normal self-evident routines of everyday life.”
Think about traffic: There are not enough police officers in the world to ensure that every car stops at every red light, yet not every intersection triggers a negotiation or a fight. That’s because in orderly societies we all know that red lights have the authority to make us stop and green lights are authorized to let us go. This common sense means that we each act on what we all know, while trusting that others will too. We’re not just obeying laws; we are creating order together. Our reward is to live in a world where we mostly get where we are going and home again safely because we can trust one another’s common sense. No society is viable without it.
“All societies are constructions in the face of chaos,” write Berger and Luckmann. Because norms are summaries of our common sense, norm violation is the essence of terrorism — terrifying because it repudiates the most taken-for-granted social certainties. “Norm violation creates an attentive audience beyond the target of terror,” write Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman in “Political Terrorism,” a widely cited text on the subject. Everyone experiences the shock, disorientation, and fear. The legitimacy and continuity of our institutions are essential because they buffer us from chaos by formalizing our common sense.
There is a major flaw in Professor Zuboff's thinking which might be a related to her being a professor from the Harvard Business School and this big article in the NYT meanders all over the shop but it's well worth reading.
We are merely ashes endowed with a soul, lacking any shape, not even that of water, which takes the shape of the glass containing it. Fernando Pessoa — The Book of Disquiet
In 1935, the family members of a recently deceased corporate translator were sorting through the detritus of his home, in Lisbon, when they unearthed a large wooden trunk. Inside was a collection of paper scraps, notebooks, memo pads, and envelopes so vast that it is still being archived and transcribed today, where it is housed in Portugal’s National Library. This assemblage of writing, the nearly overlooked offerings of one Fernando Pessoa. The collection of poetry, letters, horoscopes, and prose, all in the author’s distinctive scrawl, is ascribed to no fewer than 137 aliases, which he referred to as “heteronyms,” each with their own distinct history, education, and relation to the other members of this vast interior society. Often, all they have in common, across various forms and styles, is a shared belief in the unknowability of the self and the porousness of all identities.
The second thing you have to know about quantum mechanics is that measuring the system changes its wave function. We can’t predict with certainty what outcome we will see. All we can predict is the probability. And once that measurement is made, the wave function “collapses” into a state that is purely what is observed.
Only the minutest fraction of what my second favourite quantum physicist, Sean Carroll — the first being Karen Barad but she is also, and perhaps more importantly, a philosopher — says is intelligible to me, but I am so glad he is saying it.
Multiple parentheses—or the “echo,” as it is sometimes referred to is a typographical practice used by some anti-Semites on-line. It typically consists of three pairs of parentheses or brackets used around someone's name or around a term or phrase to indicate to others “in the know” that the person being referred to is Jewish.