"Continued neglect is a kind of violence."

Cardiosubstitute

One, two, three, four.

Music, I hear. I hear it is Music.

The rhythm. Less suspect to fortune.

It changes, by choice. By choice, it can be controlled.

The beat. It beats. More dynamically.

Dynamic, the expansive detail, quality.

The Echo. It reverberates a hollow.

Ever full it sounds. Even fuller it sounds.

One, two, three, four.

The sounds that fill the space, of what was beating once.

Music, I hear. I hear it is Music.

Omega

You have lost the battle and the war. You have lost the trust and the love. You have lost your mind and your heart. You have lost the will to live. 

Because you have failed spectacularly to live, your only recourse is to write.

There is nothing else within your immediate grasp that is worth anything except the lens in which you see the world.

Because you have to, or that inhibited venom will eat you inside out, as it has before.

Even if nobody hears. Even if it is just inscribing on a cold wall. Even if it is just a silent monologue. 
Come here.

Because you have to, to survive.

Because you're not of the same space, of the same reality, of the same praxis. You're only in this cauldron due to a dark turn in fortune. You're this century's accident.

Come here. Come find your soul in the depth of the subconscious, your solace in the forest of the forgotten, and your membership in the sanctuary of the wind.

Because you have to.

If not, you're better off dead.

Not

Need to go back in time

Let's not be like others, because we are not like others

"For eyes, bright

For ears, penetrating

For countenance, cordial

For demeanor, humble

For words, trustworthy

For service, reverent

For doubt, questioning

For anger, circumspect

For facing a chance to profit, moral."

Confucius

We chase misprinted lies

The Black Goat

The black goat trotted around a small room. Was it afraid? It started running into the walls. There was no blood but the walls started to crack. It hurt. The black goat became more aggressive; it seemed to have grown in size and with more force threw its weight at the walls. It hurt more. It grew horns like a ram. Curling backwards stylishly. Head like a rock. Head like a rock star. It attacked the walls without reservations. Smashing. It hurt massive. Where was the pain coming from? I looked down. My chest felt like it was about tear open. The trembling pain escalates. Okay. I am the wall? The black goat trotted into the room. Okay. I am not the wall? The black goat looked vicious. I'm afraid. If a black goat could come out of my body it may help. It actually does, slowly - with no sound. The pain is crippling but blunt. It is graphic but monochromatic. It is silent but complex. It isn't worth making a big fuss but it doesn't stop.


23
 

The White Mind

11

Skill of the Particular

"What makes statesmen, like drivers of cars, successful is that they do not think in general terms - that is, they do not primarily ask themselves in what respect a given situation is like or unlike other situations in the long course of human history. Their merit is that they grasp the unique combination of characteristics that constitute this particular situation - this and no other. What they are said to be able to do is to understand the character of a particular movement, of a particular individual, of a unique state of affairs, of a unique atmosphere, of some particular combination of economic, political, personal factors; and we do not readily suppose that this capacity can literally be taught."

Isaiah Berlin

You should see how it feels with your feet on the ground

The Binding Fabric that is Justice

"If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least abstain from robbing and murdering one another. Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it. Justice, is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice."

Adam Smith

The Resonance of the Omitted Thing

"There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like a shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."

Wolf Hall

Was it a trickster using mirrors and sleight of hand

Eyes that are seen

18

The Effect of the Division of Labour

"The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference."

Adam Smith

The Soul's Mirror

"We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural stations, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them."

Adam Smith

Porcupines in Winter

"On a cold winter's day, a group of porcupines huddled together to stay warm and keep from freezing. But soon they felt one another's quills and moved apart. When the need for warmth brought them closer together again, their quills again forced them apart. They were driven back and forth at the mercy of their discomforts until they found the distance from one another that provided both a maximum of warmth and a minimum of pain. In human beings, the emptiness and monotony of the isolated self produces a need for society. This brings people together, but their many offensive qualities and intolerable faults drive them apart again. The optimum distance that they finally find that permits them to coexist is embodied in politeness and good manners. Because of this distance between us, we can only partially satisfy our need for warmth, but at the same time, we are spared the stab of one another's quills."

Arthur Schopenhauer

If

"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!"

Rudyard Kipling

Nature's Nonchalance

"Nature abandons without reserve her organisms constructed with such inexpressible skill, not only to predatory instinct of the stronger, but also to the blindest chance ... She expresses that the annihilation of these individuals is a matter of indifference to her, does her no harm ... With man she does not act otherwise than she does with animals ... Everything lingers only for a moment, and hurries on to death ... But despite all this, in fact as if this were not the case at all, everything is always there and in its place, just as if everything was imperishable ... Death is for the species, what sleep is for the individual, or winking for the eye. "

Arthur Schopenhauer

After-wants

"If in a Utopia, everything grew automatically and pigeons flew about already roasted; where everyone at once found his sweetheart and had no difficulty keeping her; then people would die of boredom or hang themselves."

Arthur Schopenhauer

Why decisions sometimes come faster than thought

"He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

Aeschylus

"The pain of getting things wrong and the effort required to overcome error creates an emotional experience that helps burn things into the mind."

2, 3, 23

Pride of Asia

Manny Pacquiao wins again!

Anticlockwise Afghanistan

Afghanistan – touch down in flight from Augustin Pictures on Vimeo.

^.-

Well, I stand up next to the mountain

Food is Energy

When people tell me to 'search for strength within', I always wondered if they were referring to the Penang Laksa in my tummy.

22

Sophrosyne

Sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) is a Greek philosophical term etymologically meaning healthy-mindedness and from there self-control or moderation guided by knowledge and balance.

Greeks upheld the ideal of sophrosyne, which means prudence and moderation but ultimately its complex meaning, so important to the ancients, is very difficult to convey in English. It is perhaps best expressed by the two most famous sayings of the oracle at Delphi: "Nothing in excess" and "Know thyself."

The term suggests a life-long happiness obtained when one's philosophical needs are satisfied, resembling the idea of enlightenment through harmonious living. It is a nearly lost Classical ideal, but is enjoying some revival today with its emphasis on individuals to live within the proportions of reason and nature, this being achieved through practical wisdom and self knowledge. Parallels abound in eastern thought, in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. The Analects of Confucius, for example, has several passages on humility that resemble discussions of the Greek ideal.

It is conceptually the opposite of hubris.

The word is found in the writings of Ancient Greece, especially that of Plato in ethical discussions of the dialogue Charmides where it refers to the avoidance of excess in daily life. This term in Plato's use is connected with the Pythagorean idea of harmonia.

Not when the skies are clear and the day is bright, a lighthouse is only useful when it is dark.

5

Cardinal Wolsey's Final Prayer

"God, we have not spoken this long or as often as we should. I've often been about other business. If I wanted forgiveness I should ask for it, but for all that I have done and for all that I am yet to do, there can be no forgiveness. And yet I think I'm not an evil man. Evil men pray louder, seek penance, and stick themselves closer to Heaven than I am. I shall not see its gates Lord. Nor hear your sweet words of salvation. I have seen eternity, I swear. But it was in dream and in the morning all was gone. I know myself for what I am. And I throw my poor soul upon your forgiveness, in the full knowledge that I deserve none at your loving hands."

The Tudors

The Leitmotif of Vulnerability

"Singapore’s ‘encirclement complex’ is informed in the first instance by its material reality. It is a small, geographically confined state, lacking in strategic depth, with a mainly ethnic-Chinese identity in a predominantly Malay-Muslim region, “wedged between the sea and airspace of two larger neighbours with which [it] has never been politically at ease.” Furthermore, Singapore lacks a significant domestic market, and is almost totally dependent on external sources for capital, technology and, most importantly, raw materials – including food and drinking water. Accordingly, the government of Singapore has never taken the city-state’s survival for granted."

My Empire of Dirt

Immortalising a slice of human frailty, memory and space for those who have been.

A week of two great concerts and two momentous songs.

No matter what your friends try to tell you.

That was just a dream.

The New Humanism

"...This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

When Sigmund Freud came up with his view of the unconscious, it had a huge effect on society and literature. Now hundreds of thousands of researchers are coming up with a more accurate view of who we are. Their work is scientific, but it directs our attention toward a new humanism. It’s beginning to show how the emotional and the rational are intertwined.

I suspect their work will have a giant effect on the culture. It’ll change how we see ourselves. Who knows, it may even someday transform the way our policy makers see the world."

David Brooks

I shall pass this way but once

"I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again."

Stephen Grellet

Caspar David Friedrich

Wanderer Above the Mist




Monk by the Sea





Polar Sea

"The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead."

Caspar David Friedrich

Taken away

"...dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to slaughter."

Raising the Retirement Age

"Economic growth is a function of the size of the workforce, the amount of capital employed and the rise in productivity. If the workforce shrinks, as demography shows it will, all the growth will have to come from capital investment and productivity improvements. In Japan, where the working population is already getting smaller, economic growth has been minuscule, despite a good productivity record. To counteract a shrinking labour force, the retirement age needs to be raised."

Id and Age

"A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"

George Orwell

Fire so cold

Aristotle's Ethics

"Justice is used both in a general and in a special sense. In its general sense it is equivalent to the observance of law. As such it is the same thing as virtue, differing only insofar as virtue exercises the disposition simply in the abstract, and justice applies it in dealings with people. Particular justice displays itself in two forms. First, distributive justice hands out honors and rewards according to the merits of the recipients. Second, corrective justice takes no account of the position of the parties concerned, but simply secures equality between the two by taking away from the advantage of the one and adding it to the disadvantage of the other. Strictly speaking, distributive and corrective justice are more than mere retaliation and reciprocity. However, in concrete situations of civil life, retaliation and reciprocity is an adequate formula since such circumstances involve money, depending on a relation between producer and consumer. Since absolute justice is abstract in nature, in the real world it must be supplemented with equity, which corrects and modifies the laws of justice where it falls short. Thus, morality requires a standard which will not only regulate the inadequacies of absolute justice but be also an idea of moral progress.

This idea of morality is given by the faculty of moral insight. The truly good person is at the same time a person of perfect insight, and a person of perfect insight is also perfectly good. Our idea of the ultimate end of moral action is developed through habitual experience, and this gradually frames itself out of particular perceptions. It is the job of reason to apprehend and organize these particular perceptions. However, moral action is never the result of a mere act of the understanding, nor is it the result of a simple desire which views objects merely as things which produce pain or pleasure. We start with a rational conception of what is advantageous, but this conception is in itself powerless without the natural impulse which will give it strength. The will or purpose implied by morality is thus either reason stimulated to act by desire, or desire guided and controlled by understanding. These factors then motivate the willful action. Freedom of the will is a factor with both virtuous choices and vicious choices. Actions are involuntary only when another person forces our action, or if we are ignorant of important details in actions. Actions are voluntary when the originating cause of action (either virtuous or vicious) lies in ourselves.

Moral weakness of the will results in someone does what is wrong, knowing that it is right, and yet follows his desire against reason. For Aristotle, this condition is not a myth, as Socrates supposed it was. The problem is a matter of conflicting moral principles. Moral action may be represented as a syllogism in which a general principle of morality forms the first (i.e. major) premise, while the particular application is the second (i.e. minor) premise. The conclusion, though, which is arrived at through speculation, is not always carried out in practice. The moral syllogism is not simply a matter of logic, but involves psychological drives and desires. Desires can lead to a minor premise being applied to one rather than another of two major premises existing in the agent’s mind. Animals, on the other hand, cannot be called weak willed or incontinent since such a conflict of principles is not possible with them."

IEP

Image-making

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. The alternative to manipulation is chaos."

Edward Bernays

Frank Stella: Harran II (1967)

Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (1959)

Arundel Castle.



Tomlinson Court Park.



Die Fahne Hoch.



Marriage of Reason and Squalor.

ABC, everyday, ABC, everywhere

Andy Warhol

Coyote Flying

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin

Range of Grief

"He was envious nevertheless, not of the longer life Malkie enjoyed, but of Libor's range of grief. He could not as Libor did, throw his sorrow into the future. He did not miss the Tyler who never got to be, only the Tyler who was."

The Finkler Question

Out and With

'It will only make you more upset. Forget all that'

'Forget all what?'

'Music.'

'So I can't have a cello either?'

'The cello will make you even sadder. Go and play football.'


The Finkler Question

We are Our World; We are Only But Our World

"We are what we are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristics -- physical, psychological, social -- that is has; what we think, feel, do is conditioned by it, including our capacity for conceiving possible alternatives ... Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others; a world too different is (empirically) not conceivable at all; some minds are more imaginative than others, but all stop somewhere."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Wisdom?

"It is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot be either altered, or even fully described or calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb -- the 'immemorial wisdom' said to reside in peasants and other 'simple folk' -- where rules of science do not, in principle, apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic orientation is the 'sense of reality', the 'knowledge' of how to live."

"It is the ever present sense of this framework -- of this movement of events, or changing pattern of characteristics -- as something 'inexorable', universal, pervasive, not alterable by us, not in our power, that is the root of Tolstoy's determinism, and of his realism, his pessimism, and his contempt for the faith placed in reason alike by science and by worldly common sense."

"Tolstoy himself knows that the truth is there, and not 'here' -- not in the regions susceptible to observation, discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which he is so much the greatest master of our time."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Ignorance?

"Men's acts may seem free of the social nexus, but they are not free, they cannot be free, they are part of it. Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it. 'Power' and 'accident' are but names for ignorance of the casual chains, but the chains exist whether we feel them or not. Fortunately we do not; for if we felt their weight, we could scarcely act at all; the loss of the illusion would paralyse the life which is lived on the basis of our happy ignorance. But all is well: for we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section."

"Since we are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction that we are what do we do?...it is better to realise that we understand what goes on as we do in fact understand it -- much as spontaneous, normal, simple people, uncorrupted by theories, not blinded by the dust raised by scientific authorities, do, in fact, understand life -- than to seek to subvert such commonsense beliefs, which at least have the merit of having been tested by long experience, in favour of pseudo-sciences, which, being founded on absurdly inadequate data, are only a snare and a delusion."

"Man is at once an atom living its own conscious life 'for itself', and at the same time the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such elements."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Recognising Unimportance and Irrelevance

"There are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Ole Ordinaire

"And so Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes: the higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon that history."

"Those who went about their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the most useful to their country and community, while those who tried to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in history, those who performed acts of incredible self-sacrifice or heroism, and participated in great events, were the most useless."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Tolstoy's History and Anti-history

"History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space -- the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment -- this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers -- answers needing for their apprehension no special senses of faculties which normal human beings did not possess -- might be constructed."

"History alone -- the sum of empirically discoverable data -- held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century. What is to be done? How should one live? Why are we here? What must we be and do? The study of historical connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyate voprosy became fused into one in Tolstoy's mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly."

"But side by side with this there is the beginning of an acute sense of disappointment, a feeling that history, as it is written by historians, makes claims which it cannot satisfy, because like metaphysical philosophy it pretends to be something it is not -- namely, a science capable of arriving at conclusions which are certain."

"History will never reveal to us what connections there are, and at what times, between science, art, and morality, between good and evil, religion and the civic virtues...What it will tell us (and that incorrectly) is where the Huns came from, when they lived, who laid the foundations of their power, etc."

"History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names. The death of Igor, the snake which bit Oleg -- what is all this but old wives' tales? Who wants to know that Ivan's second marriage, to Temryuk's daughter, occured on 21 August 1562, whereas his fourth, to Anna Alekseevna Koltovskaya, occurred in 1572...?"

"History does not reveal cause; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events."

"If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed."

"No matter how scrupulous the technique of historical research might be, no dependable laws could be discovered of the kind required even by the most undeveloped natural sciences. He further thought that he could not justify himself the apparently arbitrary selection of material, and the no less arbitrary selection of emphasis, to which all historical writing seemed to be doomed."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox

"For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel -- a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance -- and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision."

Hedgehogs - Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzache, Ibsen, Proust.
Foxes - Shakespere, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce.

"Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation."

Isaiah Berlin

Her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood

"Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."

Araby, Dubliners

Zoom

"Indeed, the condition of becoming generic is that of being specific...All generic patterns are impositions upon a reality that is always in excess of their embrace and that the very idea of order and meaning is itself a delusion from which we must escape or to which we have to give a reluctant and disillusioned consent. It may be a delusion, but it is all we have got."

Seamus Deane

Look at the stars, look how they shine for you

"The futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars"

Ithaca, Ulysses

Change, without fire or lightning

"It's all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so to speak."

Eumaeus, Ulysses

Non Serviam

"I understand your point of view though I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age patent medicines. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the point. You die for your country. Suppose. Not that I wish that for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn't want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!"

Circe, Ulysses

Come on, you drink!

"Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushes, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy!"

Oxen of the Sun, Ulysses

Motivation

Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose.

On Positive Thinking: Willful Ignorance and Delusion

"It's cruel to take people who are having great difficulties in their lives and tell them that it is all in their heads and they only have to change their attitude."

"Biggest evidence is the financial meltdown...people who tried to raise problems in the last decade were shut up or fired...people who said 'I'm worried about our sub-prime mortgage exposure' or to point out that the housing prices could not rise forever, were fired."

Barbara Ehrenreich

Advertisement in the Mirror

"Plain and loved, loved for ever, they say. Ugly: no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be handsome for tomorrow we die."

Nausicaa, Ulysses

One-eye Nations

"But it's no use. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

What?

Love. I mean the opposite of hatred."

Cyclops, Ulysses

Hersexysounds

"It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make the most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss."

Sirens, Ulysses

Q, not Q

" 'The men where you live,' said the little prince, 'grow five thousand roses in the same garden and they do not find what they are looking for ... and yet, what they are looking for could be found in a single rose or in a little water.'

'Yes, indeed,' I replied.

And the little prince added: 'But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart.' "

The Little Prince

In routine, there is difference, without which days are randomly everything and nothing.

" 'It is something which is all too often forgotten'. said the fox. 'It is what makes one day different from other days, one hour different from other hours. For example, there is a rite among hunters. On Thursdays they go dancing with the village girls. So Thursday is a marvellous day for me. I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters were to go dancing just any day, every day would be like any other day for me and I would never have a holiday.' "

The Little Prince

Every life is many days

"If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstop. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."

Scylla and Charybdis, Ulysses

Plato vs. Aristotle

http://www.philosophos.com/knowledge_base/archives_9/philosophy_questions_961.html

Opiate

"It's that sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it's called. There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish. Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old fellow asleep near that confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year."

Lotus Eaters, Ulysses

Subjective Science

"What was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no the weight of the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the volume is equal to the weight? It's a law something like that. Vance in High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum. Cracking curriculum. What is the weight really when you say the weight? Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It's the force of gravity of the earth is the weight."

Lotus Eaters, Ulysses

A Shout in the Street

"- History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: a goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
- The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
- That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
- What? Mr Deasy asked.
- A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. "

Nestor, Ulysses

Smashing Pumpkins

"I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery store to buy a pearl necklace - or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons - rid of my provincial squemishness forever."

The Great Gatsby

One up on down

" 'Oh, and do you remember' - she added - 'a conversation we had once about driving a car?'

'Why - not exactly.'

'You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.'

'I'm thirty,' I said. 'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.' "

The Great Gatsby

Medusa's Odds

"My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?"

Wolf Hall

Anti-gravity

Walking. Writing. Talking. Thinking. Laughing.

Change

" 'The multitude,' Cavendish says. 'is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down - for the novelty of the thing.'

...'I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better.'

'But what do they get by the change?'

Wolf Hall

Helpful emendations

"And all outcomes are likely, all outcomes can be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer and pressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass will pass by God's design, a design re-envisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal. He used to say, 'The king will do such-and-such.' Then he began to say, 'We will do such-and-such.' Now he says, 'This is what I will do.' "

Wolf Hall

Lockean Practicality

"Since the world is what it is, it is clear that valid reasoning from sound principles cannot lead to error; but a principle may be so nearly true at to deserve theoretical respect, and yet may lead to practical consequences which we feel to be absurd."

"Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true."

Bertrand Russell/John Locke

Box' of Shaded Memories #15

I watched too many days pass me by. What is the focus?

Leviathan: Fear of Anarchy and the Duty of Submission

"Hobbes holds that all men are naturally equal. In a state of nature, before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty, but to acquire dominion over others; both these desires are dictated by the impulse to self-preservation. From their conflict arises a war of all against all, which makes life 'nasty, brutish and short.' In a state of nature, there is no property, no justice or injustice; there is only war, and 'force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues."

"Hobbes considers the question why men cannot cooperate like ants and bees. Bees in the same hive, he says, do not compete; they have no desire for honour; and they do not use reason to criticize the government. Their agreement is natural, but that of men can only be artificial, by covenant. The covenant must confer power on one man or one assembly, since otherwise it cannot be enforced. 'Covenants, without the sword, are but words'. The covenant is not, as afterwards in Locke and Rousseau, between citizens and the ruling power; it is a covenant made by the citizens with each other to obey such ruling power as the majority shall choose. When they have chosen, their political power is at an end. The minority is as much bound as the majority, since the covenant was to obey the government chosen by the majority. When the government has been chosen, the citizens lose all rights except such as the government may find it expedient to grant. There is no right of rebellion, beause the ruler is not bound by any contract, whereas the subjects are. A multitude so united is called a commonwealth. This 'Leviathan' is a mortal God."

But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

"... Then they saw what Clover had seen.
It was a pig walking on his hind legs.
Yes, it was Squealer. A little awkwardly, as though not quite used to supporting his considerable bulk in that position, but with perfect balance, he was strolling across the yard ... And finally there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napolean himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.
He carried a whip in his trotter.
...Then came a moment when the first shock has worn off and when, in spite of everything - in spite of their terror of dogs, and of the habit, developed through long years, of never complaining, never criticizing, no matter what happened - they might have uttered some word of protest. But just at that moment, as though at a signal, all the sheep burst out into a tremendous bleating of --
'Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better!'"