Research areas: Noncommutative Geometry, Hegelian Philosophy, Mathematical Philosophy
E-mail addresses: apat1erson@gmail.com, m1p1t@yahoo.com
Contents
1. My Books 2. Recent Conference talks 3. Research interests 4. Recent mathematical research papers (with files) 5. Recent mathematical/Hegelian philosophy research papers (with files) 6. Some Quotations
1. My Books
Amenability, by Alan L. T. Paterson, was published in 1988 by the American Mathematical Society in their Mathematical Surveys and Monographs Series, Number 29, 452pp.. ISBN: 0-8218-1529-6. Second edition, paperback, came out in December, 2000.
Groupoids, inverse semigroups and their operator algebras, by Alan L. T. Paterson, was published in 1999 by Birkhäuser and is Volume 170 of their Series: Progress in Mathematics, 290 pp. ISBN: 0817640517.
2. Recent talks
Great Plains Operator Theory Symposium 2009, University of Colorado at Boulder, 6/2/2009: Talk title: An approach to the groupoid equivariant analytic index.
Canadian Abstract Harmonic Analysis Symposium 2009 - an International Conference Honoring Anthony To-Ming Lau on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday - University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 5/14/2009, Talk title: Groupoid stabilization and invariant sections.
Seminar, University of Colorado, Boulder, 3/26/2009, Talk title: The groupoid stabilization theorem.
Groupoidfest 08, University of California, Riverside, 11/22/2008, Talk title: Equivariant K-theory for proper groupoids.
Analysis Seminar, Iowa State Mathematics Department, 03/27/2008, Talk Title: Asymptotic morphisms and the families index theorem.
Iowa State University Mathematics Colloquium, 03/25/2008, Talk Title: The index theorem from an analysis perspective.
Southeastern Analysis Meeting, Vanderbilt University, 03/06/2008, Talk Title: The families index theorem without embedding.
Groupoidfest 07, University of Iowa, 11/03/2007, Talk title: The E-theoretic descent functor for groupoids.
Great Plains Operator Theory Seminar, University of Nebraska, 5/16/2007, Talk title: Exactness for the groupoid functor.
Workshop on ``Groupoids in operator algebras and noncommutative geometry'', Institut Henri Poincare, Centre Emile Borel, University of Paris, France 02/26/2007-03/02/2007. Talk title: The E-theoretic descent functor for groupoids.
Groupoidfest 06, Arizona State University, 11/11/2006, Talk title: A definition of ``groupoid action'' on a C*-algebra.
3. Research interests
My main mathematical research interest is in the area of Noncommutative Geometry. Central in all of this is the concept of a C*-algebra, which can be thought of as an infinite dimensional generalization of the matrix algebras: while matrices act on finite dimensional inner product spaces, C*-algebras act as algebras of bounded operators on complete, infinite dimensional inner product spaces (Hilbert spaces). The main motivation for C*-algebras arose in quantum mechanics out of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is an expression of the fact that the position and momentum observables do not commute. Here the observables are no longer conceived in terms of functions (for these commute) but in terms of non-commuting operators on a Hilbert space. Noncommutative Geometry is largely the creation of the great French mathematician and Fields medallist, ALAIN CONNES, and it extends to the noncommutative context an astonishing range of ``commutative'' mathematics, not just in the study of C*-algebras and von Neumann algebras, but also in ``noncommutative'' algebraic topology (KK-theory, E-theory and cyclic cohomology), noncommutative differential geometry (such as the quantized calculus), noncommutative index theory (involving, for example, the C*-algebras of foliated spaces and groupoids) and the noncommutative geometry of particle physics and string theory. The classical vehicle for symmetry - the group - is no longer adequate to deal with the symmetry structures that arise in noncommutative geometry. Instead, one has to use a generalization of the group concept called a groupoid. My particular field of interest is in groupoid theory and its associated index theorems. The reader is referred to Alain Connes's web page http://www.alainconnes.org/ , from which his famous book Noncommutative geometry (Academic Press, 1994), a preliminary version of his recent book with Matilde Marcolli - Noncommutative Geometry, Quantum Fields and Motives (American Mathematical Society, 2008) - and many of his papers, can be downloaded.
My main philosophical interest lies in developing a new philosophy of mathematics based on self-referential logic. The thought of such a logic initially appears rather strange, but in fact, close inspection of the ``paradoxes'' of modern mathematical logic - in particular, in model theory and the Gödel incompleteness theorems - show, I believe, that underlying normal mathematics and its logic is such a self-referential logic. Indeed, this inescapable self-referentiality in mathematical logic was pointed out by Gödel himself in one of his papers (see infra). The most profound, well-developed classical logic of this kind is that of the Wissenschaft der Logik written in the early 1800's by the great German philosopher, G. W. F. HEGEL, and this is studied and developed in my papers. Unfortunately, the mathematics discussed by Hegel is pre-Cantorian (for he lived well before the time of Cantor), and much work is still required to develop a self-referential philosophy of mathematics in a manner that will give a satisfactory philosophical basis for present day mathematics. There are many traces of a self-referential logic operating in human culture and science, and this indicates for me that such a logic is fundamental to human thought and experience in general rather than just to mathematics. It is my long term plan to develop this logic beyond mathematics and develop a philosophical basis for other fields, notably for science, religion, ethics and aesthetics.
Recent Research Papers (many with WORD/PDF files)
4. Mathematical papers
The E-theoretic descent functor for groupoids, Journal of Functional Analysis 255(2008), 1458-1479. YJFAN5323.pdf
(with A. T. Lau) Amenability properties for group actions on von Neumann algebras, Indiana University Mathematics Journal 55(2006), 1363-1388. 2787.pdf
(with Amy E. Welch) Tychonoff's theorem for locally compact space and an elementary approach to the topology of path spaces, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 133(2005), 2761-2770. tychonoff3.pdf
The equivariant analytic index for proper groupoid actions K-theory, 32(2004), 198-230. Index10.pdf
The Fourier algebra for locally compact groupoids, Canadian Journal of Mathematics 56(2004), 1259-1289. falg6.pdf
The Fourier-Stieltjes and Fourier algebras for locally compact groupoids, Contemporary Mathematics 321(2003), 233-237. memfour.pdf
Graph inverse semigroups, groupoids and their C*-algebras, Journal of Operator Theory, 48(2002), 645-662. graph.pdf
The analytic index for proper, Lie groupoid actions, Contemporary Mathematics 282(2001), 115-135. jsrc.pdf
Continuous Family groupoids, Homology, Homotopy and Applications, 2(2000), 89-104. families.pdf
(with Roger Smith) Higher dimensional amenability for operator algebras, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 349(1997), 1919-1943. Highamen.pdf
Virtual diagonals and n-amenability for Banach algebras, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 175(1996), 161-185. cohom3.pdf
Invariant Mean Charaterizations of von Neumann Algebras, Indiana University Mathematics Journal, 41(1992), 233-252. invarvN.pdf
(with A. T. Lau) Inner amenable locally compact groups, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 325(1991), 155-169. inneramen.pdf
Invariant mean characterizations of amenable C*-algebras, Houston Journal of Mathematics, 17(1991), 551-565. invarcs.pdf
5. Mathematical/Hegelian Philosophy papers
G. W. F. Hegel: Geometrical Studies - translated with Introduction and Notes, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 57/58, 2008, 118-153. Earlier version in: gstrans3.doc
The Hegelian Concept and set theory, 15 pages, 2007.
A modern Hegelian Philosophy of Special Relativity, 32 pages, 2006.
Hegel's Early Geometry, Hegel Studien 39/40, 2004/2005, 61-124. Heggeom7.doc , Heggeom7.pdf
Does Hegel have anything to say to modern mathematical philosophy?, Idealistic Studies 32:2, 2002, 143-158. sjp6.doc , sjp6.pdf
The Successor Function and Induction Principle in a Hegelian Philosophy of Number, Idealistic Studies 30 (1) 2000, 25-61. inductio.doc , inductio.pdf
Frege and Hegel on concepts and number, 22 pages. nnfregh.doc , nnfregh.pdf
Self-reference and the natural numbers as the logic of Dasein, Hegel Studien 32(1997), 93-121. HEGSTUFR.pdf
Towards a Hegelian philosophy of mathematics, Idealistic Studies, 27(1997), 1-10. TOHEGFF.doc , TOHEGFF.pdf
6. Some Quotations
That in the end
I may find
Something not sold for a penny
In the slums of Mind.
That I may break
With these hands
The bread of wisdom that grows
In the other lands.
For this, for this
Do I wear
The rags of hunger and climb
The unending stair.
[Ascetic, Patrick Kavanagh]
Few live for the sake of eternity.
But if the passing moment makes you anxious
Your lot is terror and your house precarious!
[Osip Mandelshtam, 1912, in: Osip Mandelshtam: Selected Poems, trans. James Greene]
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. [J. G. Hamann]
Small doubt, small enlightenment; big doubt, big enlightenment. [Zen koan]
... no one is satisfied with something that only appears good for him, but wants something that really is, and has no use here for appearances. [Plato, Republic, 6.505e, trans. H. D. P. Lee]
[the deceptive appearance of the really good] But we have not yet learned to accommodate in our understanding of such figures [e.g. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi] what the ancient seers, Sophocles and the King David chronicler and Shakespeare and Cervantes, knew – that while evil can wear the most civil and sensible and respectably rectitudinous demeanor, good can seem blunderous and uncertain, shockingly wayward, woefully flawed, like one of Graham Greene’s dissolute, shabby, God-haunted saints. [Martin Luther King, Jr. (A Life), Marshall Frady, p.10]
[Against the culture of glamour] Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them. [Abraham Lincoln]
... the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits ... by TV stupor and by intolerable music. [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]
P.B.I. [World War 1 British acronym for poor bloody infantry]
If you're going through hell, keep on going. [Walt Disney]
A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is not a meditation upon death but upon life. [Spinoza, Ethics, Part 4, Proposition 67]
A figure and a stepping stone, not a figure and three obols. [Pythagorean proverb - mathematics is not about making money]
A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!! [Friedrich Nietzsche]
Our first question about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance? ... Almost always, the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed; the ``specialist'' emerges somewhere - his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back. ... No, my scholarly friends, I bless you for your hunched backs. And for despising, as I do, the ``men of letters'' and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft ... with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuoso-like, demagogical ... [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 366]
I’m nobody! Who are you? [Emily Dickinson]
I tried Prozac and Paxil and Wellbutrin, I studied religions and philosophies...but cheerfulness kept breaking through. [Leonard Cohen]
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
[Martin Luther King, Jr.]
Ego tanquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo I am like the center of a circle equidistant from se habent circumferentie partes; all points on the circumference; tu autem non sic. you, however, are not. [Said, in a dream of the great Italian mediaeval poet, Dante (1265-1321), by a thoughtful young man in white, after the poet had fallen asleep in tears, ``like a little boy crying from a spanking’’, heartbroken because his beloved Beatrice refused to greet him. (Dante, Vita Nuova, XII, trans. Mark Musa)]
The man of God [the dervish] is a palace in a ruin.
[Shams of Tabriz (great Sufi mystic) in: Awakening, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, p.169]
[On huge egos] Just look How big I am! Jove up there in the sky ... he can't be any bigger. [Ovid, Metamorphoses]
.... O to be wise
As Respectability that knows the price of all things
And marks God’s truth in pounds and pence and farthings.
[Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger]
Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
[Rumi, trans. Coleman Bark]
On prophets and poets
[On prophets and moral hypocrisy - Joseph Brodsky’s comment on the furious reaction of the Moscow intelligentsia to the publication of the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelshtam (which, among other things, charged them with virtual complicity with the Stalinist regime).]
There is something in the consciousness of literati that cannot stand the notion of someone’s moral authority. They resign themselves to the existence of a First Party Secretary or a Führer, as to a necessary evil, but they would eagerly question a prophet. This is so, presumably, because being told that you are a slave is less disheartening news than being told that morally you are a zero. After all, a fallen dog shouldn't be kicked. However, a prophet kicks the fallen dog not to finish it off but to get it back on its feet. The resistance to those kicks, the questioning of a writer’s assertions and charges, come not from the desire for truth but from the intellectual smugness of slavery...
[Excerpts from: Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899-1980) – an obituary, by Joseph Brodsky]
[The agonizing, quiet death of prophecy, with graffiti as the remains]
And the sign said, ``The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.’’
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence.
[The Sound of Silence, Paul Simon]
The thing about poetry is that once somebody swallows a substitute he will feel poisoned for ever. [Anna Akhmatova]
Once there were the prophets whom we couldn’t shut up, lacerating us with their relentless ``Thus saith the Lord’’; then there were the poets, whose pitiless probings exposed our hollowness, and who didn’t seem to care in the least about hurting our feelings in the process; but now there are the public relations experts with their antidepressant grins, seemingly affirming, in their ``mission statements’’, a saintly ``dedication’’ to our welfare, soothing our worries with cliché’s, sensitive about our ``comfort level’’, assuring us that we are like ``family’’ (pronounced with a long ``ah’’) and easing themselves into the parent role, smilingly trading their placebos for money and tenderly ``nurturing'', for the next time, the growth of our emptiness as if it were a young plant.
Come, my friend, let us turn aside from our agitated grazing in this future-driven world of trickery, material plenty and spiritual vacuity, and feed instead on the astringent, genuine sustenance of the ignored poets.
*****
[On the hatred shown to poets in their lifetime, and their adoration when they are dead]
When the dog is dead, rabies are at an end.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. [T. S. Eliot]
It is difficult to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there. [William Carlos Williams]
Look around — there’s only one thing of danger for you here — poetry. [comment made by the 20th century Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, terminally ill with cancer, while his house and grounds were being searched by the armed forces of the Chilean general and dictator, Augusto Pinochet]
[The poet – the surviving, modern form of the prophet – has, like the latter, a disturbing, irritating, often disrespectable, quality about him or her, and a disposition that ``doesn’t fit in’’. A good example, I think, of such a poet is Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), who during his life, was more likely to be found in a Dublin pub than in Saint Patrick's Cathedral. He was the son of a shoemaker and, for the first half of his life, an Irish peasant farmer at Inniskeen, County Monaghan.
His masterpiece, The Great Hunger, of 1942, describes uncompromisingly (but with humor) the existence of an Irish peasant farmer,``poor Paddy Maguire’’ with his ``fourteen-hour day’’, in a state of grinding poverty, barked at by
His mother tall hard as a Protestant spire
with her ``venemous drawl’’,
``Did you let the hens out, you?’’.
For Paddy in his earlier years, the sight of a young woman walking along the road carrying a basket, has, superimposed on it in his mind, another vision, that of
Sin written in letters larger than John Bunyan dreamt of.
But sadly, as Paddy (and his sister Mary Anne) find out,
For the strangled impulse there is no redemption.
He ``gives himself another year’’ at the farming but is still at it the next year. The years drift by, and on the death of his mother, he realizes that now there is no escape: Who bent the coin of my destiny
That it stuck in the slot? ....
I am locked in a stable with the pigs and cows for ever.
Despite his social status:
His face set like an old judge’s pose:
Respectability and righteousness,
Stand for no nonsense.
and his ``holy rise’’, envied by the neighbours - that of holding the collecting-box in the chapel door during all the Sundays of May - at the end,
He will hardly remember that life happened to him,
although he
... is not afraid of death, the Church will light him a candle
To see his way through the vaults and he’ll understand the
Quality of the clay that dribbles over his coffin.
All copies of the poem were seized by the Irish police on the order of the Minister for Justice because the work was considered an overt attack on the sexual and religious oppression of the Catholic Church on rural Ireland, and labelled as obscene.
The following is not from The Great Hunger. Rather, in it, Kavanagh describes what is involved in being a ``true’’ poet and - in present day terms - how little in common the ``calling’’ has with comfortable, academic ``creative writing’’, criticism and coming up with a ``best seller’’. It consists of excerpts from the Author’s Note to Kavanagh’s Collected Works, and in particular, refers to his experience with the police over the matter of The Great Hunger.]
I have never been much considered by the English critics. I suppose I shouldn’t say this. But for many years I have learned not to care, and I have also learned that the basis of literary criticism is usually the ephemeral.... I am always shy of calling myself a poet and I wonder much at those young men and sometimes those old men who boldly declare their poeticality. If you ask them what they are, they say: Poet.
There is, of course, a poetic movement which sees poetry materialistically. The writers of this school see no transcendent nature in the poet; they are practical chaps, excellent technicians. But somehow or other I have a belief in poetry as a mystical thing, and a dangerous thing. ... For reasons that I have never been able to explain, the making of verses has changed the course of one man’s destiny. I could have been as happily unhappy as the ordinary countryman in Ireland. I might have stayed at the same moral age all my life. Instead of that, poetry made me a sort of outcast. And I was abnormally normal...
Looking back, I see that the big tragedy for the poet is poverty .... On many occasions I literally starved in Dublin. I often borrowed a `shilling for the gas’ when in fact I wanted the coin to buy a chop. During the war, in Dublin, I did a column of gossip for a newspaper at four guineas a week...
In 1942, I wrote The Great Hunger. Shortly after it was published a couple of hefty lads came to my lonely shieling on Pembroke Road. One of them had a copy of the poem behind his back. He brought it to the front and he asked me, `Did you write that?’ He was a policeman. It may seem shocking to the devotee of liberalism if I say that the police were right. For a poet in his true detachment is impervious to policemen ... The Great Hunger is concerned with the woes of the poor. A true poet is selfish and implacable. A poet merely states the position and does not care whether his words change anything or not. The Great Hunger is tragedy and Tragedy is underdeveloped Comedy, not fully born. Had I stuck to the tragic thing in The Great Hunger I would have found many powerful friends.
But I lost my messianic compulsion. [After an operation for lung cancer] I sat on the bank of the Grand Canal in the summer of 1955 and let the water lap idly on the shores of my mind. My purpose in life was to have no purpose....
[Author’s Note to: Collected Poems, Patrick Kavanagh, London, 1964]
Abuse of Power
I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty. [Montaigne]
[Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938) was a Russian poet who protested against Stalin. He died on the way to a labor camp in Eastern Siberia. His brave wife Nadezhda managed to evade capture by the NKVD, and preserved her husband’s work by memorizing it, the written word being dangerous and vulnerable. Here is Osip’s bitter poem on Stalin which caused his first arrest. The ``mountaineer’’ metaphor evokes the image of Stalin’s climbing to power over piled up bodies, and, rather than caring for the welfare of the people, the terrifying, thrilling, enjoyment that the tyrant, his ``leaders'', and their equivalents further down the chain of command, always get from crushing people.]
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
But where there's so much as half a conversation
Then the Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer,
And his boot tops gleam.
And around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders – fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.
[Osip Mandelshtam, Ode to Stalin, trans. Max Hayward.]
[Warning about uncritical, passionate embracing of (apparently) attractive causes: in 1951, the Mexican poet and diplomat, Octavio Paz, published in an Argentinian magazine an article on the horrors of the Soviet labor camps. It was greeted by his fellow Latin-American ``radicals'' with public silence and private abuse.] When I consider Aragon, Eluard, Neruda, and other famous Stalinist writers and poets, I feel the gooseflesh that I get from reading certain passages in the Inferno. No doubt they began in good faith. How could they have shut their eyes to the horrors of capitalism and the disaster of imperialism in Asia, Africa and our part of America? They experienced a generous surge of indignation and of solidarity with the victims. But insensibly, commitment by commitment, they saw themselves become tangled in a mesh of lies, falsehoods, deceits and perjuries, until they lost their souls. They became, literally, soulless. This may seem exaggerated: Dante and his punishments for some wrongheaded political views? Who nowadays, anyway, believes in the soul? I will add that our opinions on this subject have not been mere errors or flaws in our faculty of judgment. They have been a sin in the old religious sense of that word: something that affects the whole being. Very few of us could look a Solzhenitsyn, or a Nadejda Mandelshtam, in the eye. That sin has stained us and, fatally, has stained our writings as well. I say this with sadness, and with humility. [Considering Solzhenitsyn: Dust after Mud, Octavio Paz (essay in: On Poets and Others, 1986)]
[academic hypocrisy - Günter Grass on the ``pseudoradical frivolity’’ of German intellectuals in the period of the Weimar Republic.]
While there was democracy in Germany, they never ceased to scoff at it as an illusion and a bourgeois plot, but when, fatally, Hitler came, they fled – not to Moscow but to New York, doubtless to pursue there with increased ardor their critique of bourgeois society.
[Octavio Paz, Considering Solzehenitsyn]
[academic integrity]
George Norlin (1871–1942) was president of
the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1919 until he retired in 1939.
The University Library is named after him. He resisted the Ku Klux Klan
governor and legislature of Colorado, who offered him legislative
support in return for the firing of Jewish and Catholic faculty. The
Klan had taken control of the Colorado legislature in about 1922, but
Norlin defended the University against it until 1926 when the Klan lost
control of both the legislature and governorship. During that period
the University subsisted on a millage built into the state
constitution; its budget was cut to zero. Norlin led the University
through the difficult years of the Depression and openly defended
academic excellence and freedom. He criticized the Scopes "Monkey"
trial, and after spending a year in Germany as lecturer on American
Civilization at Berlin University in 1933, gave speeches and wrote
articles warning of the dangers of Nazism and anti-Semitism.
Unfortunately, few listened to Norlin's warnings ...
[Based on an article on the web-site of the University of Colorado, Boulder]
[The ``peak of fame'' as the peak of shame. (The climbing metaphor evokes the ``Kremlin mountaineer'' above, but to varying degrees, has, I believe, a much wider significance.)]
``Well, step aside, old man!
We are young, which means, right ...’’
``Where are you going, youngsters?’’
``To the peak of fame ...’’
``Hold on! I too clambered up there,
gouging out steps with an ice ax,
till I became a sculpture of ice,
glorified, but unloved. And is this my peak? No smoke, no flame, neither a kind word, nor a sprig of green,...
It's not true, that upward means ahead. Even when palaced with gold,
to hell with the top,
where tin cans and condoms freeze in the ice.
On the peak of fame
there’s a faint smell of murder ....
When, half hidden in clouds,
murderers ascend to power,
dismembered corpses
are concealed in their rucksacks...’’
``Trying to spoil our mood, old man?!’’
``For your general enlightenment.
The peak of fame easily changes to a peak of shame....
There are colossuses on the peak of shame,
so icy, only made of clay –
plasticine kings wretchedly disintegrating.
There, like frozen spittle,
decorations and medals,
those sordid throwaways,
are given to cowards with contempt.
In its graveyard of rusted crowns –
both of Ancient Rome and Russian empires,
there are piles of names and banners,
eaten by the moth of infamy.
It’s dangerous when fog deceives the eyes
to confuse labels foolishly,
shamefully calling a peak of decay a peak of blossoms.
When will we rid ourselves of all this clambering and sweating of our infamous degradations, and squalid false summits?''
``Old man, are there really no true summits?’’
``There are. Young people, they’re ahead of you.
But together we’ll accomplish more.
I’m going with you, with the young.’’
[From The Peak of Shame, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Collected Poems, 1952-1990]
[Capitulation to tyranny and the rise of sycophancy] It was characteristic of those [the Stalinist] years that all such concepts [e.g. ``honor’’, ``conscience’’, ``freedom’’] were treated as pure abstractions, divorced from the actual social and human framework which alone gave them substance. This made it all the easier to dismiss them out of hand: nothing was simpler, for example, than to show that nowhere in the world is there such a thing as absolute freedom of the press, and then to conclude that instead of making do with the wretched substitutes fobbed off on us by liberals, it was better to face up to the situation like a man and abandon all this hankering after ``Freedom’’ ... Psychological factors that worked out in favor of capitulation were the fear of being left out in the cold, of not moving with the times ... But the main thing was that those who surrendered had nothing of their own to offer. This extraordinary emptiness is perhaps best expressed by Shklovski in his Zoo, that sorry book in which he tearfully implores the victors to take him under their wing ... the fact is that the desire to be looked after and protected like a child was enormously strong ... it is not so simple to go against everybody and against the times. ... we all had the temptation to rush after everyone else, to join the crowd that knew where it was going. The power of the ``general will’’ is enormous – to resist it is much harder than people think ... The chorus of true believers in the new religion and the new State used the language of revolution in their ritual observances, but they had no time for a new ``upstart intellectual’’ with his doubts and hesitations. For the true believers and ``Fellow Travelers’’ everything was quite clear already ... The State encouraged people to behave like the boyars in medieval Russia who fought each other over their place at the Czar’s table, always reserving to itself the final decision as to who should sit ``at the top’’.
[Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope, pp.165, 175, 178, 350]
The lesson we learn from history is that we cannot keep our liberty secure by relying alone on the good faith of men with great power. [Walter Mondale]
ROMA [acronym for Radix omnium malorum avaritia]
Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment ... Thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in his cause ... Keep thee far from a false matter ... And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous. [Exodus, Chapter 23]
What is hateful to you, don’t do to your fellow man – that’s the whole Torah and the rest is just commentary. Go then and learn it. [Response of Rabbi Hillel when asked if he could summarize the whole Torah while standing on one foot]
The darksome statesman, hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight-fog, mov'd there so slow,
He did nor stay, nor go;
Condemning thoughts — like sad eclipses — scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digg'd the mole, and lest his ways be found,
Work'd under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; ....
[Excerpt from: The World, Thomas Vaughan, 1622-1695]
[Contrast to the tyrant – Goethe on public opinion and the good prince]
I do not know that I ever joined in any way against the people; but it is now settled [in public opinion], once for all, that I am no friend to the people. I am, indeed, no friend to the revolutionary mob: whose object is robbery, murder and destruction; and who, behind the mask of public welfare, have their eyes only upon the meanest egotistical aims. I am no friend to such people, any more than I am a friend of Louis XV. I hate every violent overthrow, because as much good is destroyed as is gained by it. But am I therefore no friend to the people? ....
It is further said that I am a servant, a slave to princes; as if that were saying anything. Do I then serve a tyrant – a despot? Do I serve one who lives at the cost of the people, only for his own pleasures? ... I have been intimately connected with the Grand Duke [Charles Augustus] for half a century, and during half a century have striven and worked with him; but I should lie if I were to say that I have known a single day in which the Grand Duke has not thought of doing something tending to benefit the land to improve the condition of the people. What has he from his princely station, but toil and trouble? ... Only go into our seaport towns, and you will find the kitchen and cellar of any considerable merchant better appointed than his. ... this government of his – what has it been but a servitude to the welfare of the people? ...
[Goethe, Eckermann]
[Aristotle on friendship and the bad man (or bad woman)] And wicked men seek for people with whom to spend their days, and shun themselves; for they remember many a grievous deed, and anticipate others like them, when they are by themselves, but when they are with others they forget. And having nothing lovable in them they have no feeling of love to themselves. Therefore also such men do not rejoice or grieve with themselves; for their soul is rent by faction, and one element in it by reason of its wickedness grieves when it abstains from certain acts, while the other part is pleased, and one draws them this way and the other that, as if they were pulling them in pieces. If a man cannot at the same time be pained and pleased, at all events after a short time he is pained because he was pleased, and he could have wished that these things had not been pleasant to him; for bad men are laden with regrets.
Therefore, the bad man does not seem to be amicably disposed even to himself, because there is nothing in him to love; so that if to be thus is the height of wretchedness, we should strain every nerve to avoid wickedness and should endeavor to be good; for so one may be both friendly to oneself and a friend to another. [Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9, 1166b, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes] How the people will cry out against me! I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without a pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other. [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile.]
Silence and Speaking
I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, having no good things to say, and my sorrow was stirred. [Psalm 39]
[Silence before royalty! – earlier (in the First World War), Bertrand Russell had been jailed because of his pacifist sympathies.] When he [Russell] was given the Order of Merit, King George VI was affable but slightly embarrassed at decorating a former jailbird, saying that "You have sometimes behaved in a manner that would not do if otherwise adopted." Russell merely smiled, but afterwards claimed that the reply "That's right, just like your brother" immediately came to mind, but he did not say it.
[A deeper kind of silence]
The radiant one inside me has never said a word.
[Response of the great 13th century Sufi poet Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi), when asked why, since he valued silence so much, he produced such a volume of language.]
[Wrong silence]
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, When the Nazis came for the communists
habe ich geschwiegen; I remained silent;
ich war ja kein Kommunist. I was, after all, no communist.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, When they locked up the social democrats,
habe ich geschwiegen; I remained silent;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. I was, after all, no social democrat.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, When they came for the trade unionists,
habe ich nicht protestiert; I did not protest;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. I was, after all, no trade unionist.
Als sie die Juden holten, When they came for the Jews,
habe ich geschwiegen; I remained silent;
ich war ja kein Jude. I was, after all, no Jew.
Als sie mich holten, When they came for me,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte. there was no one left who could protest.
[The 1976 version of Niemöller’s famous poem]
[Brave speaking] I would rather burn my church to the ground, than preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil’. [Martin Niemöller]
[Keep crying out]
One night, a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
``So! I have heard you calling out,
but have you ever gotten any response?’’
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick green foliage.
``Why did you stop praising?’’
``Because I’ve never heard anything back.’’
``This longing
you express is the return message.’’
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master
That whining is the connection ...
[The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne, p.155]
[Silence or screaming?] ... I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isn’t it better to face one’s tormentors in a stance of satanic pride, answering them with contemptuous silence. I decided that it is better to scream. This pitiful sound ... is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. By his screams, he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity. [Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope, p.42]
[Kabbalistic silence] The lips of the wise move but they say nothing lest they bring down punishment on themselves. [Zohar, 1, 1588, (Mantua): trans. from the Aramaic and Hebrew by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, The Soncino Press, 1984]
Nature
... Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. ... [William Wordsworth, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey]
[Miss Emily’s Sunday Service]
Some keep the Sabbath going to church;
I keep it staying at home,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.
Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;
I just wear my wings,
And instead of tolling the bell for church,
Our little sexton sings.
God preaches – a noted clergyman, –
And the sermon is never long;
So instead of getting to heaven at last,
I’m going all along!
[A Service of Song, Emily Dickinson]
How I envy the birds, especially when they are building their nests nicely and quietly. [Comment by a young woman, Mignon, in: Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, trans. E. A. Blackall and V. Lange, p.323]
[The Southern garden, old age and leaving – in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, Virgie Rainey lives with her widowed mother Katie in the (fictitious) town of Morgana in the (fictitious) county of MacLain in the state of Mississippi. Miss Katie is in bad health after a stroke; as a result, she tends to want things done at ``set times’’, and when she came out of doors, her carefully dressed and carefully held head was as silver-looking as a new mail-box.
The Raineys are left alone by the rest of the town (though they will all manage to turn up, with lots of food, at Miss Katie’s funeral, talkative, as if they had really cared, with ``appropriate’’ comments such as hoping that ``she left her recipes to the Methodist Church’’ and asserting that ``she was a living saint’’).
Virgie is past forty and (according to her mother) ``too dressed up’’. Miss Katie, ``in her dress the hard blue of a morning-glory’’, stands anxiously outside in the front yard in the afternoon, propped up by her old thornstick. Near her is the old chair where she used to ``set out’’ and sell her muscadines, plums, blackberries, dewberries and the peanuts you boil, ``under the borrowed shade of the chinaberry tree across the road’’. She feels the world tremble as the loggers with their chain saws go by fast in their riding trucks, ``depleting the woods’’. Miss Katie frets over why Virgie is so late coming home from work: there are the two Jersey cows to be driven home, milked and fed, then the milk has to be delivered and four little quails full of shot on the kitchen table to be dressed. When Virgie, in her high heels and flowered voile dress, eventually arrives, her mother reminds her of what needs to be done:
I been by myself all day.
Virgie kisses her mother, takes her into the house, sets her mind at ease and then attends to the cows, the milking and the quails.
On the Sunday that she died, Miss Katie is lying in bed while Virgie is dress-making in another room. She remembers Virgie saying that she aimed ``to get married on my bulb money’’ and calls on Virgie to stop her dress-making and come through and fan her for a minute, while she goes over the list of her garden plants one more time. Virgie comes into the bed-room, pins in her mouth and her thumb marked green from the scissors, and fans Katie with the Market Bulletin.]
Purple althea cuttings, true box, four colors of cannas for 15 cents, moonvine seed by teaspoonful, green and purple jew. Roses: big white rose, little thorn rose, beauty-red sister rose, pink monthly, old-fashioned red summer rose, very fragrant, baby rose. Five colors of verbena, candlestick lilies, milk and wine lilies, blackberry lilies, lemon lilies, angel lilies, apostle lilies. Angel trumpet seed. The red amaryllis.
Faster and faster. Mrs Rainey thought: Red salvia, four-o’clock, pink Jacob’s ladder, sweet geranium cuttings, sword fern and fortune grass, century plants, vase palm, watermelon pink and white crape myrtle, Christmas cactus, golden bell. White Star Jessamine. Snowball. Hyacinthus. Pink fairy lilies. White. The fairy white.
``Fan me. If you stop fanning me, it’s worse than if you had never started.’’
And when Mama is gone, almost gone now, she [Virgie] meditated, I can tack on to my ad: the quilts! For sale, Double Muscadine Hulls, Road to Dublin, Starry Sky, Strange Spider Web, Hands All Around, Double Wedding Ring. Mama’s rich in quilts, child.
Miss Katie lay there, carelessly on the counterpane, thinking, Crochet tablecloth, Sunburst design, very lacy. She knew Virgie stood over her, fanning her in rhythmic sweeps. Presently Miss Katie’s lips shut tight... She put her hand up and never knew what happened to it, her protest.
Virgie knelt, crouched there. She held her head, her mouth opened, and one by one the pins fell out on the floor ...
[The Wanderers in: The Golden Apples, Eudora Welty - Virgie, after the funeral, sells or gives away or has stolen from her the contents of the house and her cows, and leaves Morgana in her old coupe, the world beating in her ears through the ``magical percussion’’ of October rain on Mississippi fields.]
A Mathematical Theorem
[Comments on the Atiyah-Singer index theorem] The Atiyah-Singer index theorem is one of the truly great theorems of all time. It was proved by the English mathematician, Sir Michael Atiyah, and the United States mathematician, Isadore Singer, in the 1960’s. (One should also mention the pioneering work of Friedrich Hirzebruch and Raoul Bott.) There are, I think, three criteria for judging the greatness of a mathematical theorem. The first is the range of ideas that are involved: it should not be concerned with just one area of mathematics but arise out of the interplay of a number of important fields of mathematics, showing that it is genuinely fundamental to mathematics as a whole. The Atiyah-Singer theorem in this respect is remarkable: it involves areas such as algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, functional analysis, operator algebras, partial differential equations, differential geometry, the representation theory of Lie groups and number theory. A second criterion is that, in some way, the great mathematics arises out of the real world which provides its rationale and expresses itself in the mathematics, stops it from relapsing into mere subjective preference, ``fun stuff’’, for the practitioner. The Atiyah-Singer theorem is impressive in this respect as well: part of its background (ref. 1) lies in Hodge theory which was strongly motivated by Maxwell’s equations in Physics. Further, one of the most remarkable of the achievements of Atiyah and Singer (ref. 3) – their construction of the Dirac operator in the context of Riemannian geometry and spin manifolds – first arose in Minkowski space in Dirac’s relativistic theory of the electron (in particular, in his discovery of a square root of the relativistic Laplacian). The Dirac operator of Atiyah and Singer has surprisingly continued to prove fundamental in modern particle physics and cosmology - ``The theorem has had innumerable applications, first within mathematics and then, beginning in the late 70s, in theoretical physics: gauge theory, instantons, monopoles, string theory, the theory of anomalies’’ (Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters on the occasion of the award of the Abel prize to Atiyah and Singer. In this respect, the theorem also satisfies a third criterion for mathematical greatness, that it should be not an end but rather the beginning of a flood of new insights and results, through the developing and extending of the deep insights that it embodies. Reinforcing this are the new developments in noncommutative geometry (Alain Connes), including (among many other things) the development of K-theoretic techniques in C*-algebra theory, in particular, the bivariant Kasparov KK-theory and E-theory.
[Statement of the theorem - not its most general form]
Let M be a smooth compact manifold of dimension n, E and F be smooth complex vector bundles over M, and D be an elliptic partial differential operator from the space of smooth sections of E to the space of smooth sections of F. Since D is elliptic, the kernel ker(D) and the cokernel coker(D) of D are finite-dimensional vector spaces. The index ind(D) is defined by:
ind(D)=dim(ker(D)) – dim(coker(D))
Next, the symbol σ(D) of D determines an element [σ(D)] of the K-theory group K(T*M) (K-theory with compact supports) where T*M is the cotangent bundle of M. The index theorem gives a formula that calculates the index of D using the topological and differential geometric data present, and integrating over the orientable manifold T*M; the formula is:
ind(D)= (nth power of -1) x integral{ch([σ(D)])Td}
where ch is the Chern character (that takes you from K-theory to cohomology) and Td is the Todd class of the complexified cotangent bundle.
[Some references: (1) Michael Atiyah, ``Collected Works’’, (2) Patrick
Shanahan, ``The Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem’’, (3) H. B. Lawson and M.
Michelsohn, ``Spin Geometry’’, (4) N. Higson and J. Roe, ``Analytic
K-Homology’’, (5) B. Boos and D. D. Bleecker, ``The Atiyah-Singer index
formula and Gauge-Theoretic Physics’’, (5) J. Rognes, ``On the
Atiyah-Singer index theorem’’, written on the occasion of the award of
the Abel prize to M. Atiyah and I. M Singer, 2004.]
On Children
[Popular poem by the children’s poet, Walter Wingate, about the kindly Scottish dominie [school master] removing a skelf (``needling a splinter’’) from the sair [sore] finger of a little school-boy, John, and wrapping it (``rowing it’’) in a little hankie as a bandage. The hankie does not go unnoticed.] THE SAIR FINGER You've hurt your finger? Puir wee man!
Your pinkie? Deary me!
Noo, juist you haud it that wey till
I get my specs and see!
My, so it is - and there's the skelf!
Noo, dinna greet nae mair.
See there - my needle's gotten't out!
I'm sure that wasna sair?
And noo, to make it hale the morn,
Put on a wee bit saw,
And tie a Bonnie hankie roun't
Noo, there na - rin awa'!
Your finger sair ana'? Ye rogue,
You're only lettin' on.
Weel, weel, then - see noo, there ye are,
Row'd up the same as John!
[Walter Wingate]
[Mathematics and the childlike] Really, Leonhard, the most childish person in this house is you.
[Comment made by Katharina Euler, wife of the great Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, to her husband, who, on one occasion, while playing with the children and grandchildren, stole her baking whisk to whip up the bubbles in the bathtub. (At a more scientific level in fluid dynamics, Euler’s equations determine compressible, inviscid flow in terms of velocity, pressure, density and energy.)]
[``Unless you become like little children’’: in 1944, the film maker Alexei Kapler, and Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, fell in love, which resulted in Kapler being imprisoned for 10 years.]
[After the death of Stalin] while his henchmen [Beria, Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Khrushchev] were destroying each other, people in dirty padded jackets drifted over the expanses of Stalin's empire. The great deliverance from the camps was under way. Alexei Kapler, whom his daughter once loved was one of those freed. Many years later he told me about it. `I went into a little park and stared stupidly at the children playing. One little boy ran past me, laughing - I saw his skinny, defenseless childish legs. And something happened to me. I burst into tears. I sobbed and sobbed shamelessly - enjoying it, like I used to in my childhood. I wept and wept . . . forgiving them ... forgiving everybody.'
[Edvard Radzinsky, STALIN, Trans. H.T. Willetts, 1996.]
The struggle against poverty and injustice
I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
Yes I would.
If I could,
I surely would.
[Simon and Garfunkel]
Some people say a man is made out of mud
A poor man's made out of muscle and blood
Muscle and blood, skin and bones A mind that's weak and a back that's strong
(Chorus) You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
I was born one mornin' and the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal And the straw boss said, "well bless my soul!" (Chorus)
I was born one mornin' it was drizzlin' rain
fightin' and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in a cane-brake by an old mama lion
can't no high-toned woman make me walk no line. (Chorus)
If you see me comin', better step aside
A lot of men didn't, a lot of men died
One fist of iron, the other of steel
If the right one don't get you, then the left one will.
You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store.
[Merle Travis song, based on his father’s experiences in the coal mines of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Debt bondage and the truck system meant, among other things, that the coal miners were not paid in cash but with unexchangeable credit vouchers for goods at the company store. FBI agents advised a Chicago radio station not to play Travis's records, because they falsely considered him a "communist sympathizer".]
Die wit man moet altyd baas wees.
[``The white man must always remain boss’’ – the horrifying dogma of the Nationalist Party in South Africa, who, with the Dutch Reform church, stood for apartheid]
[Black American caution]
If you ask a Negro where he’s been, he’ll tell you where he is going.
[Maya Angelou, I know why the caged bird sings, p.188]
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise....
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise....
I rise
I rise
I rise.
[From: Still I Rise, Maya Angelou]
[A ``bitter twisted lie’’]
They had to dig deep in the garbage for this one.
[Reaction of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI in 1963 to Martin Luther King Jr. after Time named King its ``Man of the Year’’ – later, in 1965, Hoover sent King a package with a tape, obtained from wiretaps, recording some of King’s sexual encounters in hotel rooms, accompanied by an anonymous letter telling him to take his own life. (Martin Luther King Jr., Marshall Frady, Penguin Books, 2006 pp. 131, 158-159)]
[The greatness of Martin Luther King, Jr.] ... they [the people around King] all considered that Martin Luther King was going too slow.... so calm, mild-mannered, soft-spoken, extremely logical and analytical about everything, that almost everybody would get constantly upset – everybody thought they could one-up him, manipulate him, co-opt him for their own purposes. And he’d never fight back. It was almost as though he felt he had to let us do all that, and somehow in this neurotic mix he could find the final formula for continuing the movement. [Andrew Young, on the group of people surrounding Martin Luther King, continuously warring with one another, chronically threatening to resign, a more or less running ``free-for-all’’ of egos (cf. Frady, ibid., pp.70-71)]
Sincerity and Insincerity
[Truth and classical political philosophy] The central theme of
classical political philosophy is virtue, or human excellence. The
questions that typically preoccupy Socrates and his followers are: What
is virtue? Can it be taught, and if so, how? What is the education
that makes a full citizen and human being? What is a virtuous
statesman and citizen? What political regime best promotes virtue or
excellence? What is a true friend? Who or what is worthy of
passionate love?
Now this kind of questioning and
preoccupation immediately appears to characterize Socrates and his
rationalism as far removed from, not to say alien to, the
sophistication which tends to predominate in our contemporary culture.
To know, as we are sure we do, that morals and principles of justice
are values, is to know that Socrates’ questions are deeply misconceived
... Values are individual preferences, or subjective commitments, or
cultural creations, or historical dispensations. Once this truth – this
absolute and unquestionable truth – is recognized, the sophisticated
response is one that turns its back on sustained argument over the
``truth’’ of values and instead proceeds to ``self-expression’’ and
search for ``community’’ ... This quest is to be regulated only by the
absolute moral principle that we ought to express ourselves and seek
community and values-clarification only in such ways as respect the
equal right of all others to express themselves...
It is not very difficult to unmask the incoherence in this pseudo-sophistication: the denial of the possibility of absolute or universal truth rests on the asssertion of an absolute or universal truth and is said to entail the assertion of universally valid moral imperatives or prohibitions – of human rights that transcend race, color, creed or ethnic and historical background. It is more important to observe that no human being can actually live according to this pseudo-sophistication. This basis for loyalty to democracy and equality contradicts and thus undermines itself at every moment, in action as well as logic. For as soon as one turns from the silly abstractions about values and relativism back to real life – back to elections, jury duty, hiring decisions, the forming of friendships, the choice of a spouse, the raising of children, the communion with one’s own conscience – one sees the inescapable need and obligation to evaluate and judge the characters of other people at every turn. So long as we live, we cannot help but feel the urgency of our need to know what Socrates sought to know ... Just beneath the sophisticated veneer that distorts our moral experience there is to be found, then, overwhelming evidence of the primordial and permanent power of the concerns or questions that are the Socratic starting point.
[Thomas L. Pangle, Introduction to: The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, by Leo Strauss]
[In Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, the king of Denmark, has been murdered by his own brother, Claudius, and his own wife, Gertrude. Claudius and Gertrude then married and Claudius became the new king of Denmark. In the first passage, Hamlet expresses his admiration for Horatio, a poor, honest, faithful soldier. As background to the second, Hamlet’s strange, distressed behavior has caused the king and queen to be uneasy, and they assign two polished, witty courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, former friends of Hamlet, as spies to ``sound him out’’ and report back. The ``pipe’’ referred to is the musical instrument, the recorder.]
HAMLET [to Horatio]
Nay, do not think I flatter,
For what advancement may I hope from thee
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter’d?
No, let candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift [profit] may follow fawning.
..... for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hath ta’en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. .......
*****
HAMLET
... Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN
My lord, I cannot.
HAMLET
I pray you.
GUILDENSTERN
Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET
I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN
I know no touch of it, my lord.
HAMLET
'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most excellent music. Look you, these are the stops.
GUILDENSTERN
But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.
HAMLET
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. [William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2]
To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him. [Goethe]
[Goethe on back-biters and national hatred]
I know very well that I am an eyesore to many; that they would willingly get rid of me; and that, since they cannot touch my talent, they aim at my character. Now, it is said, I am proud; and now, without love for my native country, and my own dear Germans. ... A German author is a German martyr! Yes, my friend, you will not find it otherwise. And I myself can scarcely complain; none of the others have fared better - most have fared worse; and in England and France it is quite the same as with us. What did Molière not suffer? What Rousseau and Voltaire? Byron was driven from England by evil tongues ... And if it were only the narrow-minded masses that persecute noble men! But no! - one gifted man and one talent persecutes another; Platen scandalizes Heine and Heine Platen, and each seeks to make the other hateful; ... To write military songs, and sit in a room! That ... was my duty! To have written them in the bivouac, when the horses at the enemy’s outposts are heard neighing at night would have been well enough ... But to me, who am not of a warlike nature ... war-songs would have been a mask fitting my face very badly. ... I have only composed love-songs when I have loved. How could I write songs of hatred without hating! And between ourselves, I did not hate the French, though I thanked God that we were free of them. How could I ... hate a nation that is among the most cultivated of the earth, to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation? Altogether ... national hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture. But there is a degree where it vanishes altogether, and where a person stands to a certain extent above nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighbouring people as if it had happened to his own....
[Conversations of Goethe, Eckermann]
On personal inadequacy
While you’re alive it’s shameful to put yourself into
the Calendar of Saints.
Disbelief in yourself is more saintly.
It takes real talent not to dread being terrified
by your own agonizing lack of talent.
.... Indispensable amid babbling boredom
are the deadly fear of uttering the right words, ...
[Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Disbelief in Yourself Is Indispensable]
Sad Thoughts
[In the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, Nowhere Man joyfully pirouettes – Whee!! - round and round in concentric circles, which, to his increasing anxiety, contract down to the center, leaving him eventually stopped there, alone and in tears.]
He's a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his Nowhere plans for nobody...
He's as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all?
... Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me?
[Nowhere Man, from Yellow Submarine, The Beatles]
[Paul near the end]
Do your best to join me soon; for Demas has deserted me because his heart was set on this world; he has gone to Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia; I have no one with me but Luke. ... At the first hearing of my case no one came into court to support me; they all left me in the lurch ... When you come, bring the cloak I left with Carpus at Troas ... Do try to get here before winter.
[2 Timothy, Chapter 4, New English Bible (order slightly changed)]
What can women know except the philosophy of the kitchen? [bitter comment by Sor Juana 1648-1695 (great Mexican nun, poet and intellectual, defender of women's biblical and theological rights to an education, attacked by the Archbishop of Mexico for her secular learning - she was eventually silenced, renounced her books, and died of the plague shortly after the uprisings of 1692)]
[The destruction of the Mayan culture]
Ahan Katun: the blond-bearded strangers arrived, the sons of the sun, the pale-colored men. Ah, how sad we were when they arrived! ... The white man’s stick will fall, will descend from on high, will strike everywhere ... The words of Hunab-Ku, our one god, will be words of sorrow when the words of the God of Heaven spread out over the earth ... The hangings will begin, and lightning will flash from the white man’s hands ... The hardships of battle will fall upon the Brothers, and tribute will be demanded after the grand entrance of Christianity, and the Seven Sacraments will be established, and travail and misery will rule this land.
[from: Chilam Balam de Chumayel (a sacred book of the Yucatán Mayans, written in the colonial period, which remarkably has survived (at least in photographic form) despite auto-da-fé)]
[The torments of Nietsche] No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness: headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat – a gruesome circle. In addition, there are his `three-quarters blind eyes’, which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears, and grant the intellectual worker only `an hour and half of vision a day’. But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches ... at night when his body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates. But even greater quantitites are needed (in two months, Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase a handful of sleep); then the stomach refuse to pay so high a price and rebels. And now – vicious circle – spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game. Never a point of rest ....
[Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, trans. W. Kauffman]
[Kavanagh on his drinking problem]
... There are people in the streets who steer by my star.
There was nothing they could do but view me while I threw
Back large whiskeys in the corner of a smoky bar
And if only I would get drunk it wouldn’t be so bad
With a pain in my stomach I wasn’t even comic
Swallowing every digestive pill to be had.
Some of my friends stayed faithful but quite a handful
Looked upon it as the end; I could quite safely be
Dismissed a dead loss in the final up toss.
He’s finished and that’s definitely.
[The Same Again, Patrick Kavanagh]
They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, "No, no, no"
Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know
I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine
He's tried to make me go to rehab, I won’t go, go, go
I'd rather be at home with Ray
I ain't got seventy days
Cause there's nothing
There's nothing you can teach me
That I can't learn from Mr Hathaway
I didn’t get a lot in class
But I know we don’t come in a shot glass ...
The man said 'why do you think you here'
I said 'I got no idea
I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose my baby
so I always keep a bottle near'...
I’m not gonna spend ten weeks
Have everyone think I’m on the mend
And it’s not just my pride
It’s just ‘til these tears have dried...
They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, "No, no, no"
Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know
I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine
He's tried to make me go to rehab, I won’t go, go, go ...
[Rehab, Amy Winehouse – Amy Winehouse entered a rehabilitation clinic in January, 2008]
[Romantic adverts]
Pretty 45 y/o w/f, 140-lbs, salt and pepper hair, one-man woman, Christian, looking for country gentleman 37-42, no big men, no druggies, no beaters or cheaters (men of many faces), no gold diggers. I’m not high maintenance but want to be treated like a lady, no mind games, tired of being hurt, it is said that there is someone special for everyone, just haven't found him yet, don't smoke but don't mind if you do, light social drinking. Looking for my soul mate, not a one night stand. I have been told that I am very young looking for my age. Please send letter, photo, address. I will answer all replies.
*****
SWM, 5’1’’, 220 lbs, 46 y/o, live on my farm, just me and the cows, financially secure, no children that I know of, looking for SWF who is looking for a good man with a whole lot of love and good times, loves to cuddle and be cuddled, I know that you are out there, ``life is not measured by our breaths but by the things that take our breath away’’, I believe in looking within to find true beauty, not judging by the outside, ride 4 wheelers, I love to make people laugh but am not a clown, not looking for a mother figure. Please send name, phone number and address. If you have a photo, that would be nice.
***** *****
We're tenting tonight on the old Camp ground,
Give us a song to cheer
Our weary hearts, a song of home,
And friends we love so dear.
[Chorus]
Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts that are looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace.
Tenting tonight, tenting tonight,
Tenting on the old Camp ground.....
We've been fighting today on the old Camp ground,
Many are lying near;
Some are dead, and some are dying,
Many are in tears.
Many are the hearts who are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts that are looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace.
Dying tonight, dying tonight,
Dying on the old Camp ground.
[Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground, United States Civil War song, Walter Kittredge (1834-1905)]
[Excerpt from Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte [Introduction to the Philosophy of History], trans. J. Sibtree (revised)]
The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action - the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind - benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings. We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over people than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality. When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the human mind ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption.
... As a consequence, one can, without rhetorical exaggeration and in simple truth, [say that] the combination of the miseries, from which the greatest of nations – and forms of state and private, virtuous individuals – have suffered, raises up the most terrible picture and excites emotions of the profoundest and most helpless sadness, counter-balanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape, while we think: that is just the way it was; it is fate; nothing can be changed. And at last we draw back from the tedium, which reflection on the heartbreak can cause, into our [own individual] experience of life, into our aims and interests of the present time, in short, retreat into the selfishness which stands on the peaceful shore and from there, at a safe distance, enjoys the sight of the confused masses of rubble [left by History].
But even regarding History as the slaughterbench [Schlachtbank] on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed - the question necessarily arises - to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered
[and, to answer this question, Hegel investigates the emergence of Reason an und für sich through the evolution of History]
On cheering up
Om Mani Padmé Hung ॐ मणि पद ्हूँ, The jewel is in the lotus
[The Chenresig mantra – the national mantra of Tibet and of the Dalai Lama: just as the lotus flower arises magnificently out of the watery mud, so, given perseverance, what one is seeking at the deepest level – the ``jewel’’ - will eventually emerge in surprising beauty out of one’s life, despite the latter’s apparent sordidness and failure]
I called through your door,
``The mystics are gathering
in the street. Come out!’’
``Leave me alone.
I’m sick.’’
``I don’t care if you’re dead!
Jesus is here, and he wants
to resurrect somebody!’’
[Rumi]
[Resolute acceptance of the nature of the world, and its character as Love through the two kinds of fire]
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire ...
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires ...
*****
The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
[T. S. Eliot, excerpts from East Coker and Little Gidding]
[More on Love and the ``purgatorial fires’’ – in Dante’s Purgatorio, Cantos XXV and XXVI, Dante reaches the last terrace high on the mountain of Purgatory. The terrace is concerned with the purification of the spirits of the Lustful (the other six of the seven deadly sins having been dealt with further down the mountain). To Dante’s terror, he is confronted with a wall of flames flashing out horizontally from the inside of the terrace but bent back upwards by a blast of air shooting up the side of the cliff, leaving only a narrow, dangerous, ledge on the outside for Dante and his guides, Virgil and Statius, to negotiate. Walking within the flames are those who in their lives allowed lust (in its various forms) to overwhelm them, and who are now ``healing their wounds’’ by purification in the burning, singing hymns and praising chastity, virtue and those married pairs who have been faithful to their vows. (So this is a very different kind of burning from that of Hell out of which, earlier, Dante had staggered, white faced and stupefied.) In Canto XXVII, an ``angel of joy’’ then confronts them and invites them to enter the flames, but the terrified poet, numbed with fear, stops. Only his love for Beatrice eventually drags him into the fire.]
10 Poscia «Più non si va, se pria non morde, Then ``Holy souls, no further can you go 11 anime sante, il foco: intrate in esso, without first suffering fire. So, enter now,
12 e al cantar di là non siate sorde», and be not deaf to what is sung beyond,’’
13 ci disse come noi li fummo presso; he said to us as we came up to him.
14 per ch'io divenni tal, quando lo 'ntesi, I, when I heard these words, felt like a man
15 qual è colui che ne la fossa è messo. Who is about to be entombed alive.
16 In su le man commesse mi protesi, Gripping my hands together, I leaned forward
17 guardando il foco e imaginando forte And, staring at the fire, I recalled
18 umani corpi già veduti accesi. what human bodies look like burned to death.
19 Volsersi verso me le buone scorte; Both of my friendly guides turned toward me then
20 e Virgilio mi disse: «Figliuol mio, and Virgil said to me:``Oh my dear son,
21 qui può esser tormento, ma non morte.. there may be pain here, but there is no death.
25 Credi per certo che se dentro a l'alvo Believe me when I say that if you spent
26 di questa fiamma stessi ben mille anni, a thousand years within the fire’s heart,
27 non ti potrebbe far d'un capel calvo.... it would not singe a single hair of yours;
31 Pon giù omai, pon giù ogni temenza; It’s time, high time, to put away your fears;
32 volgiti in qua e vieni: entra sicuro! Turn towards me, come, and enter without
fear!’’
33 E io pur fermo e contra coscienza. But I stood there, immobile – and ashamed.
34 Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro, He said, somewhat annoyed to see me fixed
35 turbato un poco disse: «Or vedi, figlio: and stubborn there, ``Now, don’t you see, my
son
36 tra Beatrice e te è questo muro».... only this wall keeps you from Beatrice.’’
40 così, la mia durezza fatta solla, just so, my stubbornness melted away;
41 mi volsi al savio duca, udendo il nome hearing the name which blooms eternally
42 che ne la mente sempre mi rampolla. within my mind, I turned to my wise guide.
43 Ond'ei crollò la fronte e disse: «Come! He shook his head and smiled, as at a child
44 volenci star di qua?»; indi sorrise won over by an apple, as he said:
45 come al fanciul si fa ch'è vinto al pome...``Well then, what are we doing on this
side?’’
49 Sì com'fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro Once in the fire, I would have gladly jumped
50 gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi, into the depths of boiling glass to find
51 tant'era ivi lo 'ncendio sanza metro. relief from that intensity of heat.
52 Lo dolce padre mio, per confortarmi, My loving father tried to comfort me,
53 pur di Beatrice ragionando andava, talking of Beatrice as we moved:
54 dicendo: «Li occhi suoi già veder parmi». ``Already I can see her eyes, it seems!’’
55 Guidavaci una voce che cantava From somewhere else there came to us a voice
56 di là; e noi, attenti pur a lei, singing to guide us; listening to this,
57 venimmo fuor là ove si montava. we emerged at last where ascent begins.
[and Virgil informs the purified Dante that his will is now upright, wholesome and free, and ``crowns’’ and ``miters’’ him lord of himself. Dante is at last fit to regain and enter the Garden of Eden, originally lost to humanity through the Fall. (Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVII, trans. Mark Musa, 1984).]
[The two kinds of Hallelujah and their identity]
I've heard there was a secret chord
that David played to please the Lord,
but you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
the minor fall, the major lift;
the baffled king composing Hallelujah!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof;
her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you ...
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
You say I took the name in vain;
I don't even know the name.
But if I did, well, really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word;
it doesn't matter which you heard,
the holy, or the broken Hallelujah!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
I did my best; it wasn't much.
I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch.
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong,
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
[From the song: Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen (Stranger Music (1993))]
[Zarathustra and the dancing god]
You say to me, ``Life is hard to bear.’’... Life is hard to bear; but do not act so tenderly! We are all of us fair beasts of burden, male and female asses. What do we have in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew lies on it?
True, we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
And to me too, as I am well disposed toward life, butterflies and soap bubbles and whatever among men is of their kind seem to know most about happiness. Seeing these light, foolish, delicate, mobile little souls flutter – that seduces Zarathustra to tears and songs.
I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity – through him, all things fall.
Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!
[Friedrich Nietszche, On Reading and Writing, Zarathustra, Part 1]
Come Philip, let us sing the forty-sixth Psalm. [said by Martin Luther to Phillip Melancthon at a time when the Reformation appeared doomed.]
[Luther’s great Reformation hymn (Psalm 46, 1)]
Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, A safe stronghold our God is still,
Ein' gute Wehr und Waffen; A trusty shield and weapon;
Er hilft uns frei aus aller Not, He’ll help us clear from all the ill
Die uns jetzt hat betroffen. That hath us now o’ertaken.
Der alt' böse Feind, The ancient prince of hell
Mit Ernst er's jetzt meint, Hath risen with purpose fell;
Groß' Macht und viel List Strong mail of craft and power
Sein' grausam' Rüstung ist, He weareth in this hour;
Auf Erd' ist nicht seins Gleichen On earth is not his fellow.
.... ....
Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn God’s Word, for all their craft and force
Und kein'n Dank dazu haben; One moment will not linger,
Er ist bei uns wohl auf dem Plan But, spite of hell, shall have its Course
Mit seinem Geist und Gaben. ’Tis written by His finger.
Nehmen sie dein Leib, And though they take our life,
Gut, Ehr', Kind und Weib: Goods, honor, children, wife,
Lass fahren dahin, Yet is their profit small;
Sie haben's kein'n Gewinn, These things shall vanish all:
Das Reich muss uns doch bleiben. The City of God remaineth!
[English translation by Thomas Carlyle]
[On meditation and extracting the poison out of bitter thoughts] Meditation is contemplation done with great mental concentration. When a person meditates, her (or his) concentrated thought, like a laser beam, penetrates through the inner layers of her mind and arrives at the bottom where the samskāras [impressions of past thoughts at the subconscious level] are. The concentrated thought, like an underwater probe, starts disturbing the accumulated samskāras. As a result, they gradually get dislodged and rise one by one to the conscious level ... The meditator should watch the rejuvenated thoughts like a disinterested observer and must not act on them. The old thoughts, once they have risen to the conscious level, burst like so many air bubbles and disappear. This is how, through the practice of meditation, one can purify one’s mind by gradually getting rid of old impressions or samskāras. If, however, the meditator acts upon those rejuvenated thoughts, she will create new samskāras and her mind will not be cleansed. [The Essentials of Hinduism, Swami Bhaskarananda, p.126, minor changes]
[Christmas thoughts]
Ring out ye Crystall sphears!
Once bless our human ears
(If ye have power to touch our senses so)
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time,
And let the Bass of Heav'ns deep Organ blow;
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th'Angelike symphony.
For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And speckl’d vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould;
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.
Yea Truth and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enameld Arras of the Rainbow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron'd in Celestiall sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing,
And Heav'n as at som festivall,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.
[Verses from: On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, John Milton, December 1629]
Small mindedness
[The poet and his neighbor struggle with the boulders, repairing the stone wall separating their lots.]
... We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each. ...
He only says, `Good fences make good neighbors.’ Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
`Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense,
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say `Elves' to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed....
He will not go behind his father’s saying.
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, `Good fences make good neighbors.’
[Mending Wall, Robert Frost]
Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited road-houses. [Rumi]
[god with a small g – the poet, Heinrich Heine, reminiscing about a conversation with Hegel]
One beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of twenty-two who had just eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the blessed. But the master [Hegel] grumbled to himself: ``The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.’’ For God’s sake, I shouted, then there is no happy locality up there to reward virtue after death? But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said cuttingly: ``So you want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your dear brother?’’ – Saying that, he looked around anxiously, but he immediately seemed reassured when he saw that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to play whist ...
[in Hegel: a reinterpretation, by Walter Kauffman]
Miscellanea
Art is never finished, only abandoned. [Lenardo da Vinci]
Only one man has understood me, and he did not understand me either. [attributed to J. G. Fichte]
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. [Bertrand Russell]
You are as likely to find a real philosopher in a philosophy department as you are to discover a Picasso in the department of fine arts. [Leo Strauss]
[A real philosopher - Antonio Caso (1883 – 1946) was the rector of the Universidad Nacional de México and opponent of the dominant ideologies in Mexico of Catholicism and Positivism] But if Caso’s ideas did not exercise any influence on those of the [Mexican] Revolution, his unfailing love for knowledge – which caused him to go on with his classes even while opposing factions were shooting each other in the street – made him a splendid example of what philosophy means: a love that nothing can buy and that nothing can pervert. [Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, pp.140-141]
There exists a very dangerous tendency to identify the good man with the good sport, the cooperative fellow, the ``regular guy’’, i.e. an overemphasis on a certain part of social virtue and a corresponding neglect of those virtues which mature, if they do not flourish, in privacy, not to say in solitude: by educating people to cooperate with each other in a friendly spirit, one does not yet educate nonconformists, people who are prepared to stand alone, to fight alone ... Democracy has not yet found a defense against the creeping conformism and the ever-increasing invasion of privacy that it fosters.
[Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?]
Nothing good ever happens after midnight. [Mississippi saying]
[What makes a good physician? – the great Harvard mathematician Raoul Bott, after being demobilized from the Canadian infantry in 1945 and obtaining an Engineering degree, decided against Engineering as a career and struggled with determining his vocation in life. He thought about trying medicine. In a sermon that he gave thirty years later, he recounts how the issue was resolved through the advice of a wise man, whose role in his life he compares to that of the Biblical Eli’s role in Samuel’s life.]
I well remember my Eli. He was the Dean of the Medical School at McGill and I approached him for help in entering the medical school there ... The Dean greeted me very cordially and assured me that there was a great need for technically trained doctors. ``But'', he said, seating me next to him, ``first tell me a little about yourself. Did you ever have any interest in botany, say, or biology?'' ``Well, not really'', I had to admit. ``How about chemistry?'' - ``Oh, I hated that course.'' And so it went. After a while he said, ``Well, is it maybe that you want to do good for humanity?'' And then, while I was coughing in embarrassment, he went on, ``Because they make the worst doctors.'' I thanked him, and as I walked out of his door, I knew that I would start afresh, and with God's grace try and become a mathematician.
[Raoul Bott, from a sermon delivered by him at Harvard's Memorial Chapel - in Loring W. Tu’s: The Life and Works of Raoul Bott.]
It is knowledge that can transform our bodies, give energy in old age, joy in suffering, and insight into the guile of people. [Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan]
Routine is the sign of a well-run prison. [Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom]
On resisting the ``mob'', and the price it exacts
[Advice from Zarathustra to the ``great souls’’ concerning ``the new idol’’ (the state and political power) , ``the market place'' (the ``rat race'') and shooing flies.] Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brothers: here there are states. .... State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies also; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." That is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. ... "On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the regulating finger of God" - thus roars the monster. And not only the long-eared and short-sighted fall upon their knees! Ah! even in your ears, you great souls, it whispers its gloomy lies!
.... Just look at these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money - these impotent ones! See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss. Towards the throne they all strive: that is their madness - as if happiness sat on the throne! Often sits filth on the throne - and often also the throne on filth. Badly smells their idol, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters. Escape from the bad smell!
Full of solemn jesters is the market place ... and from you they want a Yes or No ... Flee into your solitude! ... Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great ... You have lived too close to the small and the miserable. Flee their invisible revenge! Against you they are nothing but revenge. ... Numberless are these small and miserable creatures; and many a proud building has perished of raindrops and weeds. ... I see you wearied by poisonous flies, bloody in a hundred places; and your pride refuses even to be angry. ... Their bloodless souls crave blood, and so they sting in all innocence. ... They hum around you in their praise too: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want the proximity of your skin and your blood. ... Often they affect charm. But that has always been the cleverness of cowards ... They think a lot about you with their petty souls – you always seem problematic to them. ... Even when you are gentle to them they still feel despised by you: and they return your benefaction with hidden malefactions. Your silent pride always runs counter to their taste ... Before you they feel small, and their baseness glimmers and glows in invisible revenge. Have you not noticed how often they became mute when you stepped among them ...? Indeed, my friend, you are the bad conscience of your neighbors ... They hate you, therefore ...
A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty! Empty are still many seats for the lonesome ... fanned by the fragrance of tranquil seas. Flee, my friend, into your solitude and where the air is raw and strong. It is not your job to shoo flies.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
[Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Part 1, translated by Walter Kaufman]
[A more positive view of the state] The state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom; and it is an absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual. ... The basis of the state is the power of reason actualizing itself as will. ... But since it is easier to find defects than to understand the affirmative, we may readily fall into the mistake of looking at isolated aspects of the state and so forgetting its inward organic life. The state is no ideal work of art; it stands on earth and so in the sphere of caprice, chance, and error, and bad behaviour may disfigure it in many respects. But the ugliest of men, or a criminal ... is still always a living man. The affirmative, life, subsists despite his defects ... We are confident that the state must subsist and that in it alone can particular interests be secured. But habit blinds us to that on which our whole existence depends. When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses.
[G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Zusätze, translated by T. M. Knox]
It is a notorious fact that the morality of a society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this. Hence every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility. ...... The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity (Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri). Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. ...... The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers, as can easily be proved by an analysis of his unconscious, even though he himself is not in the least disturbed by it. ..... So obvious does it seem to us that a man should drown in his own dignity, so utterly incomprehensible that he should seek anything other than what the mob wants, and that he should vanish permanently from view in this other. [Carl G. Jung, Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious]
... but with the advance of age, when they are no longer fit for political or military service, then at last they should be given `free range of the pasture' and do nothing but philosophize, except incidentally, if they are to live happily ...the philosopher remains quiet, minds his own business, and, as it were, standing aside under the shelter of a wall in a storm and blast of dust and hail, and seeing others full of lawlessness, is content if in any way he may keep himself free from wickedness and wrong in this life and take his departure with good hope, serene and cheerful when the end comes. [Plato, The Republic, 7.498c, 7.496d]
[Piotr Franzevich Lesgaft, Professor of Physiological Anatomy at the Kazan University, was fired in 1871 for a statement made against arbitrariness on the part of the professorate and authorities of the university.]
... A person who has allowed himself to act in such a manner ... should not be tolerated in Education Service ... [A note in the St. Petersburg Gazette by the Minister for Enlightenment, D. A. Tolstoy, in connection with an earlier article written by P. F. Lesgaft]
Every arbitrary act is very sad, but it is still sadder, and more distressing, when there is no defense against arbitrary administration and unlawful action, when people refuse, not only to understand, but even to listen to what is going on ... [P. F. Lesgaft - the following is an excerpt from the poem Lesgaft by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, where the poet ``discusses’’ the matter with Lesgaft.]
``Why have you, dearest Piotr Franzevich,
got involved in seditious affairs?
Your love for liberal phrases
has led you into foolishness....
When you have such talent for anatomy,
to spoil a career in one moment!
Why, explain to me?’’ ``Is that necessary?
After all, your conscience is only rudimentary.’’
``That means I am a scoundrel?’’ ``Not completely,
That you are a complete coward is true, ...’’
``But subtle strategy also exists.
Sometimes it is wiser to retreat.
Posterity glorifies only the one who knows how to retreat.
Stubborn rashness is senseless...’’
``But often when we rationalize,
the beautiful word strategy
is only a pseudonym for cowardice ... ’’
``Aren’t you tired of writing protests?’’ ``A bit ...’’
``The wall will not crumble, because you shout ...’’
``If it only totters, that is enough.
Social protest is the discovery of oneself for oneself...
... What is all this rotten regime?
A malignant growth!...
Only surgical intervention
can possibly save Russia!’’
``To slash living tissue? Can’t you see the danger?’’
``Of course I can, I’m sober.
But one should make a decisive cut
with the scalpel of publicity ..’’
``But where are you living, poor Piotr Franzevich? ...
To talk in Russia about equality and fraternity?!
That’s asking for the whip!
Should censorship soften even slightly
what will be printed? ...
All shops will be looted in a second.
and your downtrodden brother, barking at you furiously –
because your spectacles aren’t the right kind –
will knock you down with an axle,
as a symbol of `fraternity’....
But tell me, Piotr Franzevich,
how do you see our future?’’
``I see a different Russia:
a Russia ruled neither by the whip
nor by axles used as clubs,
both are alien to me.
She will be ruled ... by the best people of the nation.’’
``You are naïve ... Neither now nor in the future,
can power be in the hands of the people.
The people are beasts of burden, Piotr Franzevich,
and if, at times, the people,
disgruntled shake their yoke,
it’s not at all because they thirst for freedom.
It’s better fodder they would like
It’s cleaner sties they’re after ...
The educated need freedom,
but the illiterate: fodder.
What need has he of your call to protest?’’
``The struggle for freedom is a great education in itself ...’’
``Or perhaps only a change of yoke?’’...
``I side with the optimists.
Wide vistas will yet be flung open,
and the real Truth, as queen, will yet ascend
the Russian throne....
We are the seed. We will yet bear fruit. ....’’
``Would you permit me an indiscreet question?
It seems you have been expelled from the faculty,
but are still carrying on regardless?
Forgive this ticklish question,
But I am curious, it’s one of my faults.’’
``I am a citizen.
From this faculty one can never be expelled.’’ [Excerpts from: Lesgaft, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Collected Poems, 1952-1990]
[The emotional cost of resisting the mob – Nadezhda’s cry]
That winter [1937] I began shouting in my sleep at night. It was an awful, inhuman cry, as if an animal or a bird were having its neck wrung. Shklovski, who heard it when I slept in their apartment, teased me that while most people shouted ``Mama’’ in their sleep, with me it was ``Osia’’ [Osip]. I still frighten people with this terrible cry at night. That same year, much to the alarm of my friends, the palms of my hands started turning bright red at moments of stress – and still do.
[Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope, p.355]
De Profundis
So long as the world moves along accustomed paths, so long as there are no wild catastrophes, man can find sufficient substance for his life by contemplating surface events, theories, and movements of society. He can acquire his inner richnesses from this external kind of ``property’’. But this is not the case when life encounters fiery forces of evil and chaos. Then the ``revealed’’ world begins to totter. Then the man who tries to sustain himself only from the surface aspects of existence will suffer terrible impoverishment, begin to stagger ... then he will feel welling up within himself a burning thirst for that inner substance and vision which transcends the obvious surfaces of existence and remains unaffected by the world’s catastrophes. From such inner sources he will seek the waters of joy which can quicken the dry outer skeleton of existence. [Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook]
In the coming of the Messiah,
And even if he delays, nevertheless, I believe.
In your lifetime, and in your days,
And in the life of the household of all Israel,
Speedily, Soon.
And say you - ``Amen’’.
[sung by the Hasidic Jews at Auschwitz, based on words by Moses Maimonides]
[The Bardo Thodol (by Padma Sambhava, 8th or 9th century, AD), often called The Tibetan Book of the Dead, gives detailed guidance for the deceased concerning liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth (samsara) and how to choose a ``good womb'' for the next incarnation if liberation is not achieved. (I am using the translation by Robert Thurman.) Four and one half days after her death, the deceased becomes aware of her loved ones left behind; she sees them weeping and wailing, her place at the table is no longer there, her bed is broken, her clothes stripped, she hears them speak but they cannot hear her. She must depart distraught, faint with fear and terror. On the following days, the Buddhist mild deities, images of her own awareness, appear from their different worlds to guide her towards liberation. On the second day after this:]
from the blue eastern pure land of Abhirati, ... the blue Lord Vajrasattva Akshobhya arises before you seated on an elephant, in union with his consort Buddhalochana, attended by the male Boddhisattvas Kshitigarbha and Maitreya and the female Bodhisattvas Lasya and Pushpa - a group of six Archetype Deities. The white light of the Mirror wisdom ... white and piercing, bright and clear, shines from the heart of the Vajrasattva couple before you, penetrating, unbearable to your eyes. At the same time, the soft smoky light of the hells shines before you in parallel with the wisdom light. At that time, under the influence of hate you panic, terrified by that brilliant white light, and you flee from it. You feel a liking for that soft smoky light of the hells and you approach it. But now you must fearlessly recognize that brilliant white, piercing, dazzling, clear light as wisdom. ... Pray and increase your love for it, thinking, ``It is the light of the compassion of Lord Vajrasattva! I take refuge in it!'' It is Lord Vajrasattva's shining upon you to escort you through the terrors of the between. It is the tractor-beam of the light of the compassion of Vajrasattva - have faith in it! Don't be enticed by that soft smoky light of hell! ... That is the path of destruction from the sins you have accumulated by your strong hatred! ... Don't look upon it! Abandon all hate! Don't cling to it! Don't long for it! Have faith in that dazzlingly bright white light! .....
Know what is in front of your face and what is hidden from you will be disclosed. [Gospel of Thomas]
It is difficult to speak the truth, for although there is only one truth, it is alive and therefore has a live and changing face. [Franz Kafka]
The Feminine Spirit
... Surely my God is feminine, for Heaven
Is the generous impulse, is contented
With feeding praise to the good. And all
Of these that I have known have come from women.
While men the poet’s tragic light resented,
The spirit that is Woman caressed his soul.
[God is Woman, Patrick Kavanagh]
[The role of the feminine was much stronger in gnostic Christianity than it was in the orthodox Christianity that eventually overwhelmed it. Of particular importance was the divine female figure of Sophia (Wisdom) (or Barbelo) who, in Gnosticism, is the ``first power’’ or forethought of the Father (who ``himself’’ is thought of as a kind of NeoPlatonic One). She is (ultimately) the source of the creation of the world (through her ``gloomy’’, ``misshapen’’ son Yaldabaoth), the ``divine spark’’ within us and the salvation of the world. The amazing, paradoxical, gnostic poem Thunder, a small part of which is given below, asserts the ``eternal feminine’’ in its universality, revelling in the contradictions and antitheses of the real world through which it triumphs.]
I am the first and the last.
I am the honored and the scorned....
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter....
I am the midwife and do not give birth.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the groom ...
I am a silence incomprehensible
and an idea remembered often....
Why do you who hate me love me
and hate those who love me?...
You who tell the truth about me lie about me,
and you who lie tell the truth....
I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and fearlessness.
I am shameless and ashamed.
I am strength and fear.
I am war and peace....
Consider my poverty and wealth.
Don’t be arrogant when I am cast down on the earth,
and you will find me in those who are to come.
Don’t stare at me lying on a dung heap.
Don’t run off and cast me away.
Don’t stare when I am cast with the disgraced
in the most sordid places
or laugh at me....
I am compassionate and cruel....
Be careful....
I am a woman existing in every fear
and in my strength when I tremble....
I am senseless and wise....
I am hated everywhere and loved everywhere.
I am called life [ζωή, Eve] and you have called me death....
I am unlettered and you learn from me....
I am perfect mind and rest ...
I am the knowledge of my search,
the finding of those who look for me,
the command of those who ask about me,
the power of powers...
and of spirits of all who exist with me
and of women who live in me.
[Thunder, from The Gnostic Bible, edited by W. Barnstone and M. Meyer]
[Maternal love: Octavio Paz’s tender comment on his mother, an uneducated Mexican-Spanish lady, for whom he had a deep affection]
[She was] a love letter with errors in the grammar.
[Maternal cruelty – often, the will to power realizes itself in a woman through domination of her children, evoking images of a large woman, bending forward from the waist, towering over and transfixing with her glaring eyes a terrified small child, gorgon-like, her harsh voice in full spate, deluging the child with words that cut like razor blades, calling for a switch. Here is Maya Angelou’s wistful account of the separation in San Francisco between her mother and Maya’s sixteen year old brother, Bailey.] Mother and Bailey were entangled in the Oedipal skein. Neither could do without or do with the other; yet the constrictions of conscience and society, morality and ethos dictated a separation. On some flimsy excuse, Mother ordered Bailey out of the house. On an equally flimsy excuse he complied. Bailey was sixteen, small for his age, bright for any and hopelessly in love with Mother Dear. Her heroes were her friends and her friends were big men in the rackets. They wore
two-hundred-dollar Chesterfield coats, Busch shoes at fifty dollars a pair, and Knox hats. Their shirts were monogrammed and their fingernails manicured. How could a sixteen-year-old boy hope to compete with such overshadowing rivals? He did what he had to do. He acquired a withered white prostitute, a diamond ring on his little finger and a Harris tweed coat with raglan sleeves....
From the wings I heard and watched the pavane of tragedy move steadily toward its climax. ... The record player on the first floor volumed up Lonnie Johnson singing, ``Tomorrow night, will you remember what you said tonight?’’ ... A party was shimmering below and Bailey defied Mother’s eleven o’clock curfew... If he made it in before midnight, she might be satisfied with slapping him across the face a few times with her lashing words. Twelve o’clock came and went at once, and I sat up in bed and laid my cards out for the first of many games of solitaire.
[And at one o’clock]
``Bailey!’’
``Yes, Mother Dear?’’ En garde. His voice thrust sweet and sour, and he accented the ``dear’’. ...
``Is it eleven o’clock, Bailey?’’ That was a feint, designed to catch the opponent offguard.
``It’s after one o’clock, Mother Dear.’’ He had opened up the game, and the strokes from then on would have to be direct.
``Clidell is the only man in this house, and if you think you’re so much of a man ...’’ Her voice popped like a razor on a strap.
``I’m leaving now, Mother Dear.’’ The deferential tone heightened the content of his announcement. In a bloodless coup, he had thrust beneath her visor. Now laid open, she had no recourse, but to hurry along the tunnel of her anger, headlong. ``Then Goddammit, get your heels to clicking.’’ And her heels were clicking down the linoleum hall as Bailey tap-danced up the stairs to his room....
I went to his room, against my judgement, and found him throwing his carefully tended clothes into a pillow-case. His maturity embarassed me. In his little face, balled up like a fist, I found no vestige of my brother, and when, not knowing what to say, I asked if I could help, he answered, ``Leave me the shit alone. ... She wants me out, does she? Well, I’ll get out of here so fast I’ll leave the air on fire... She won’t miss me, and I sure as hell won’t miss her. To hell with her and everybody else.’’ ... ``Maya, you can have my books.’’
My tears were not for Bailey or Mother or even myself but for the helplessness of mortals who live on the sufferance of Life. In order to avoid this bitter end, we would all have to be born again, and born with the knowledge of alternatives. Even then? ... Mother’s eyes were red, and her face puffy, the next morning, but she smiled her ``everything is everything’’ smile and turned in tight little moons, making breakfast, talking business and brightening the corner where she was....
[And after tracking down Bailey the next day] ``Nice room, isn’t it?’’ [he said] ``You know its very hard to find rooms now. Betty lives here [she was the white prostitute] and she got this place for me ... Maya, you know, it’s better this way ... I mean, I’m a man, and I have to be on my own ...’’ His room smelled of cooked grease, Lysol and age, ... and I had no heart nor art to drag him back to the reeking reality of our life and times. Whores were lying down first and getting up last in the room next door. Chicken suppers and gambling games were rioting on a twenty-four-hour basis downstairs. Sailors and soldiers on their doom-lined road to war cracked windows and broke locks for blocks around, hoping to leave their imprint on a building or in the memory of a victim. ... Bailey sat wrapped in his decision and anesthetized by youth....
[Maya Angelou, I know why the caged bird sings, pp.250-256, 1969]
[Sweet maternal cruelty (among other things)] The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaption; certain principles, contained in brief formulas, are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it. This sort of conspiracy cannot help but provoke violent individual rebellions. The mask that replaces the dramatic mobility of the human face is benevolent and courteous but empty of emotion, and its set smile is almost lugubrious: it shows the extent to which intimacy can be devastated by the arid victory of principles over instincts. ... they [the North Americans] believe in hygiene, health, work and contentment, but perhaps they have never experienced true joy, which is an intoxication, a whirlwind ... their vitality becomes a fixed smile that denies old age and death but that changes life to motionless stone.
[Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude]
[Cruel feminine talk]
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said —
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot —
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
[The pub scene at closing time from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land]
[MAH - Mothers Against Hypocrisy]
I want to tell you all the story 'bout the Harper Valley widowed wife
Who had a teenage daughter who attended Harper Valley Junior High.
Well, her daughter came home one afternoon and didn't even stop to play
She said, "Mama I got a note here from the Harper Valley PTA."
Well, the note said
"Mrs. Johnson, you're wearing your dresses way too high.
It's reported you've been
Drinking and a running round with men and goin' wild.
And we don't believe you ought to be a
Bringing up your little girl this way.’’
And it was signed by the secretary
Harper Valley PTA.
Well, it happened that the PTA
Was gonna meet that very afternoon.
And they were sure surprised when Mrs. Johnson wore her miniskirt into the room.
And then she walked up to the blackboard.
I can still recall the words she had to say.
She said, "I'd like to address this meeting
Of the Harper Valley PTA.’’
``Well, there's Bobby Taylor sittin' there
And seven times he's asked me for a date.
And Mrs. Taylor sure seems to use
A lotta ice whenever he's away.’’
``And Mr. Baker, can you tell us
Why your secretary had to leave this town?
And shouldn't widow Jones be told to keep
Her window shades all pulled completely down.’’
``Well, Mr. Harper couldn't be here
'Cause he stayed too long at Kelly's Bar again.
And if you’ll smell Shirley Thompson's breath
You'll find she's had a little nip of gin.’’
``And then you have the nerve to tell me
You think that as a mother I'm not fit.
Well, this is just a little Peyton Place
And you're all Harper Valley hypocrites.’’
No, I wouldn't put you on
Because it really did,
It happened just this way,
The day my mama socked it to the
Harper Valley PTA.
The day my mama socked it to the
Harper Valley PTA.
[Tom T. Hall, sung by Jeannie C. Riley]
I believe that, much as our civilization needs equal rights for men and women, it also needs feminization, like the one that courtly love brought about in the outlook of medieval Europe. [The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz]
On kindness
[A number of remarkable songs and hymns have been preserved in the Coptic Manichaean Songbook. This is part of one of those songs, in which the humble ox cries out against his abuse by the human race.]
CRY OF PAMOUN THE OX
Hear an ox. The cry of Pamoun, an ox. Mercy.
I make the worlds weep.
What have the children of the earth given me?
They grabbed two-edged axes
And stuck me in marshes. They felled fat trees
and even thin ones.
They didn’t leave alone. With the fat tree
they cut out a plow.
From the thin one they made a sharp goad.
Then took it to a craftsman who in his own hand fashioned a yoke,
stuck it on my neck,
and hooked the plow hanging behind me.
They used the goad
to pierce my ribs. Then they carried me
to the butcher’s son,
the fattener of oxen; it was the butcher’s
son who chopped me up,
scattered me to foreign tents, hung me
in far markets, ... tossed my bones to stray beasts...
They burn what is inside me, even that.
Don’t beat Pamoun, the ox....
[Cry of Pamoun the Ox, Gnostic Bible, edited by W. Barnstone and M. Meyer]
[In his thoughtful book, Magnus, the Orkney author, George Mackay Brown (a friend of the composer, Peter Maxwell Davies), deals with the treacherous murder of the saintly 12th century earl, Magnus, by his cousin and rival claimant to power, Hakon; the story is loosely based on the account of Magnus’s life given in the Viking Orkneyingja Saga (Saga of the People of Orkney). As related there, Magnus infuriated the Norse King, during a sea battle, by reading the psalms instead of taking up his arms. Inevitably in the circumstances, it had to come to a war between Magnus and Hakon to decide who was to be the Earl of Orkney, with mercenary soldiers on both sides riding and tramping over the islands, terrorising the people. The death of Magnus is interpreted in terms of Christian symbolism, as the giving up of his life for the sake of the peace of the islands. Brown also relates the fate of Magnus to that of another, more recent, saint, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Magnus was canonised in 1135 CE.
In this excerpt from the book, the young Magnus, together with the other boys of his age (including Hakon), are enrolling at the monastery at Birsay for their education (reading, writing, music, Latin, mathematics). The monastery is surrounded by sea but can be accessed on foot depending on the state of the tide. Their kindly, gruff teacher, Brother Colomb, points out to the boys:
Colomb, that means dove. If you don’t attend to your lessons however you’ll find that I’m anything but a dove.
Brother Colomb then notices that one of the boys is missing from the class-room – the boy is Magnus who is outside on the rocks. Brother Colomb leans out of the tall arched window and shouts to Magnus.]
`Boy’, he called, `come here. I need to speak to you. I know who you are. You are wasting my time and the time of the school.’
There was silence outside. They heard the rattle of feet on pebbles. The wind surged and fell away. They heard a whisper of feet across the salty grass. 'It's too dark in there,' said the voice. 'I won't come inside today. There's a seal hurt, down at the rock. Didn't you hear him crying out? I'm trying to reach him, but I can't till it ebbs a bit more.'
'Tell me your name,' said Brother Colomb quietly, leaning out.
There was a silence. Then the hidden mouth said, 'Names are wrong. Men are imprisoned in their names. Angels and animals don't need names. I do not like my name. It means ``great, powerful’’. I don't want to be great and powerful. The world is sick because of people wanting to be great and powerful.'...
Brother Colomb sent another appeal into the wind and the sun. `Won’t you come in, great and powerful one, and meet your fellow pupils?’
`Not till the seal is well,’ said the boy. `Somebody has hit him with an axe. ...’
[George Mackay Brown, Magnus, pp.37ff.]
Miscellanea
[Lily Tomlin] The best mind-altering drug is truth.
Live unnoticed. [Pythagoras]
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome. [T. S. Eliot]
[For College athletics] Mens sana in corpore sano.
[Against ``big’’ College athletics] Nine out of 10 teams are cheating, the other is in last place. [Jerry Tarkanian]
[More on the preceding - the corruption of academics by athletics]
Those inside the sport [College Athletics] will tell you that cheating never has been so widespread, yet the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] hasn’t busted a single big-time men’s basketball program in nearly two years. It hasn’t nailed a major football program in nearly 15 months. It’s the longest stretch of compliance for the once iron-fisted organization in 46 years and the second longest ever according to an analysis of the NCAA’s major infractions database. ... Welcome to the golden era of college cheating – no one gets convicted for anything anymore....
In 2006, Auburn sociology professor Jim Gundlach detailed a case of academic fraud to The New York Times. Athletes, mostly football players, were flocking to a “directed-reading” program run by a professor notorious for handing out A’s while requiring little to no class work. The NCAA once considered academic fraud a most egregious act, one that violated its core principle of educating student-athletes. “We (had) people who couldn’t put together complete sentences going out there saying they had a sociology degree from Auburn University,” Gundlach said....
This time, the NCAA went by the letter of the law. All those football players taking the easy class were considered a coincidence. Receiving A’s while doing no work merely was a secondary violation. The NCAA turned out easier to pass than sociology.... Some say the problem is the infractions committee, which makes the rulings and sets the punishments. Seven of its 10 members are administrators at NCAA schools or conferences. College athletics is a small world. It’s easy to have personal ties or professional aspirations at a defendant school. The implication of corruption is enough to cast doubts.... Which leads, of course, to the money. To slam Auburn with sanctions is to go in the face of the SEC’s [South East Conference] recent television deals with CBS and ESPN that are worth reportedly more than $3 billion combined. ... While the corruption gets bigger and bigger the number of schools in trouble gets smaller and smaller....
“I had this notion that the NCAA did care about athletes being students, too,” Gundlach said. “That’s a myth. They only care about money. (The enforcement process) is primarily used as PR to maintain the tax-exempt status of big-time college athletics.” For blowing the whistle Gundlach said he was “harassed” within the department and community. It caused him to retire early and after the NCAA’s empty decision, he wishes he never tried to take on Auburn football. “It’s just impossible for a single individual (to fight).” Recently a professor at a different school uncovered similar academic fraud on his campus. He called Gundlach and asked whether he should step forward. “Unless you’re ready to retire,” Gundlach told him, “just let it slide.”
[Excerpts from: Dan Wetzel, NCAA naps during golden age of cheating, Yahoo! Sports, September 4, 2008]
Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan - spoiled! [Israel Zangwill]
Not he who rejects the gods of the crowd is impious, but he who embraces the crowd’s opinion of the gods. [Epicurus]
What cannot be satisfied is not a man's stomach, as most men think, but rather the false opinion that the stomach requires unlimited filling. [Epicurus]
Tongue-in-cheek (?)
BAD MORNING
Here I sit
With my shoes mismated.
Lawdy-mercy!
I's frustrated!
[Langston Hughes]
[Doric was (and is) the dialect of the North East of Scotland. Traditionally, it was the language of the large body of migrant farm workers in the area, the creators of the ``Bothy Ballads’’. The name ``Doric’’ seems to have been given to the dialect by analogy with the Doric of ancient Greece, the language of Sparta, the relation between Spartan Doric and the Attic of Athens corresponding to that between the North East dialect and the ``posher’’, more ``educated’’, speech of Edinburgh (the ``Athens of the North’’). The dialect has a driving, direct, down-to-earth nature combined with ironic humor. Here are two Doric poems. The first, Gin I was God (If I was God), is by Charles Murray (1864-1941) of Alford, Aberdeenshire, a veteran of the second Boer and the first world wars, and gives God some advice on how to deal with this sorry world. The second, more homiletic, I once saw on a public bus in Aberdeen.]
Gin I was God
Gin I was God, sittin' up there abeen,
Weariet nae doot noo a' my darg was deen,
Deaved wi' the harps an' hymns oonendin' ringin',
Tired o' the flockin' angels hairse wi' singin',
To some clood-edge I'd daunder furth an', feth,
Look ower an' watch hoo things were gyaun aneth.
Syne, gin I saw hoo men I'd made mysel'
Had startit in to pooshan, sheet an' fell,
To reive an' rape, an' fairly mak' a hell
O' my braw birlin' Earth, - a hale week's wark - I'd cast my coat again, rowe up my sark,
An' or they'd time to lench a second ark,
Tak' back my word an' sen' anither spate,
Droon oot the hale hypothec, dicht the sklate,
Own my mistak', an, aince I cleared the brod,
Start a'thing ower again, gin I was God.
*****
So dinna fash or greet aboot oorsels.
God’s licht disnae dee! – the lampie is aye foo.
Oor laird if in oor herts gies muckle joy.
His kist gies us meat and ale, we nivver wint.
His werdies, cam fit mae, they will aye wyes ding,
Fit e’er a warld o’ doot or fear dirls in oor lugs.
[An error of Aristotle] Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made. [History of Animals, Book II, 501b20]
[Advice for Aristotle on the preceding error] Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. [Bertrand Russell]
[Goethe at age 81 on spectacles]
``It may be a mere whim of mine,’’ said he [Goethe] on various occasions, ``but I cannot overcome it. Whenever a stranger steps up to me with spectacles on his nose, a discordant feeling comes over me, which I cannot master. It annoys me so much, that ... it takes away a great part of my benevolence, and so spoils my thoughts, ... as if with their armed glances they would penetrate my most secret thoughts and spy out every wrinkle of my old face ...’’
[Conversations of Goethe, Eckermann]
[In Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, Dr. Faust, profoundly disillusioned by 10 years of academic life - the ``emptiness'' of what he teaches, and leading his pupils ``by the nose'' - takes up ``the abyss'' of necromancy. This leads to him agreeing to sell his soul to the devil (``the Prince of Lies’’) in exchange for an (apparently) thrilling life of pleasure to be provided by the devil's ``servant’’ Mephistopheles, and which will eventually lead to Faust’s heartbreak and ruin. Mephistopheles points out that ``all theory, my friend, is gray, but green is life's glad golden tree''. Faust is concerned that ``bearded and gray'' he lacks the ``sprightliness'' needed for the attack on the thrills that lie ahead, and that he gets embarrassed sometimes in front of people. Mephistopheles assures him that he will soon ``learn the art of living''. While Faust is absent from his office preparing for the new life, a student knocks on the door looking for academic advice, which Mephistopheles, dressed in Faust’s cap and gown, gives, with devilish wit. The student first asks Mephistopheles on how to choose a faculty.]
MEPHISTOPHELES.
.... I counsel first the depths you plumb
Of our Collegium Logicum.
Its rigor will confine your mind
Like Inquisition boots, you’ll find,
And teach it hence to walk with reason,
Smoothly trained to thoughts in season,
... The web of thought, I’d have you know,
Is like a weaver’s masterpiece:
The restless shuttles never cease
... And so philosophers step in
To weave a proof that things begin,
Past question, with an origin.
...The method scholars praise, and keenly clutch;
As weavers, though, they don’t amount to much. ....
STUDENT
O Sir, I feel so dazed at what you’ve said;
It goes round like a mill-wheel in my head.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Next, most important thing of all,
To metaphysics you must fall,
And see with deep discernment plain,
What things won’t fit the human brain;
But, fit or not, why vex your head? -
You use a sounding phrase instead. ...
Five lectures are your daily plan –
And show yourself a punctual man.
For your professor, pray, prepare;
No paragraph, Sir, overlook!
And then you soon will be aware
He never deviates from the book.
But write it down, Sir, every bit,
As if the Holy Ghost dictated it. ...
STUDENT
I doubt if I’d be happy taking Laws.
MEPHISTOPHELES
A hesitation that I comprehend.
Knowing the subject, I myself would pause.
They’ve statues, clauses, rights in such a smother
As spreads from place to place the legal taint,
And ties one generation to another
Worse than a slow inherited complaint.
And grandsons learn to curse the lawyers’ usance. ...
STUDENT
... Perhaps theology has claims more strong?
MEPHISTOPHELES
Sir, I should grieve to see you going wrong.
The aspirants who choose that learned field
May fail to see the pitfalls, oversure;
And zealotry has virus so concealed
It’s hard to tell the poison from the cure!
So stick to one professor all your days,
And swear by every word the Master says.
In short, you pin your faith on words, my friend,
Make words your safeguard, so that you ascend
To certainty’s high temple in the end.
STUDENT
But, Sir, concede
That words must have some meaning underlying.
MEPHISTOPHELES
Why yes, agreed,
But never fear to find that mortifying,
For if your meaning’s threatened with stagnation,
Then words come in, to save the situation:
They’ll fight your battles well if you enlist them
Or furnish you a universal system.
Thus words will serve us grandly for a creed,
Where every syllable is guaranteed.
[J. W. von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by Phillip Wayne]
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then. [Katharine Hepburn]
Men perspire ... ladies glisten.
You should examine yourself daily. If you find faults, you should correct them. When you find none, you should try even harder. [Israel Zangwill]
[That bigger is not necessarily better] There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less. [Betrand Russell]
[A more positive view of the hippopotamus - T. S. Eliot’s comparative analysis of the life styles and future prospects of the Church and the hippopotamus]
THE HIPPOPOTAMUS
The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.
The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends...
At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.
The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way —
The Church can sleep and feed at once.
I saw the ’potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.
He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
[T. S. Eliot]
On old age
Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumble on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed
I might have been his son.
And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London,
He too set me the riddle.
Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me:
`I was once your father.’
[Memory of my father, Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems]
Philosophical themes
[Spinoza on the infinite, non-quantitative character of the concept of quantity]
However, if you ask why we have such a strong natural tendency to divide extended substance, I answer that we conceive quantity in two ways: abstractly, or superficially, as we have it in the imagination with the help of the senses; or as substance apprehended solely by means of the intellect. If we have regard to quantity as it exists in the imagination (and this is what we most frequently and readily do), it is found to be divisible, finite, composed of parts, and multiplex. But if we have regard to it as it is in the intellect and apprehend the thing as it is in itself (and this is very difficult), then it is found to be infinite, indivisible, and one alone ... [Benedict de Spinoza, letter to Ludwig Meyer, 1663, trans. Samuel Shirley]
[Russell's vicious circle principle rules out set theoretic
paradoxes by excluding totalities with members definable only in terms
of the totality, resulting in a constructivistic, type theoretic
approach to set theory, in which sets are built from the bottom up,
starting with individuals, the more complicated in terms of the
simpler. (So, for example, it is illegitimate to refer to ``the set of
all sets'' since that set has itself as a member which is defined in
terms of the whole totality.) Also impredicative propositions
(a proposition involving arguments that are defined in terms of the
proposition) are excluded. Unfortunately, among other problems with
the principle, it also ruled out the construction of the reals from the
rationals (to prove the existence of least upper bounds requires an
impredicative proposition) and much of modern Mathematics. Gödel
argues that the principle is false, and that concepts can legitimately
refer to themselves, i.e. be self-reflexive.] Since concepts are
supposed to exist objectively, there seems to be objection neither to
speaking of all of them ... nor to describing some of them by reference
to all .... But, one may ask, isn't this view refutable also for
concepts because it leads to the ``absurdity'' that there will exist
properties φ such that φ(a) consists in a certain state of affairs
involving all properties (including φ itself and properties defined in
terms of φ), which would mean that the vicious circle principle does
not hold . . . . for concepts or propositions? There is no doubt that
the totality of all properties . . . . does lead to situations of this
kind, but I don't think they contain any absurdity. It is true that
such properties φ . . . . will have to contain themselves as
constituents of their content . . . . but this only makes it impossible
to construct their meaning . . . . which is no objection for one
who takes the realistic standpoint. Nor is it self-contradictory that
a proper part should be identical (not merely equal) to the whole, as
is seen in the case of structures in the abstract sense. The structure
of the series of integers , e.g., contains itself as a proper part and
it is easily seen that there exist also structures containing
infinitely many different parts, each containing the whole structure as
a part. In addition, there exist, even within the domain of
constructivistic logic, certain approximations to this self-reflexivity
of impredicative properties, namely propositions which contain as parts
of their meaning not themselves but their own formal demonstrability. [Kurt Gödel, Russell's Mathematical Logic]
[Gödel and philosophy] He [Gödel] attended seriously, as well, to the history of philosophy, devoting endless hours to the study of Leibniz and acquiring a profound understanding of Kant. His grasp of Hegel astonished the logician and philosopher Georg Kreisel, a man not easy to impress. Looking over the set of quotations from Hegel that Gödel had assembled, Kreisel remarked that ``the publication of such an anthology is likely to produce a minor revolution in philosophy.'' He also studied Plato and Aristotle .... he put his grasp of the history of philosophy to creative use, enlisting his knowledge of Kant to help him comprehend the philosophical significance of the theory of relativity, and turning to Husserl's phenomenology for assistance in developing an epistemology adequate to the Platonist ontology he espoused for mathematics. He believed that the history of philosophy could help free us from prejudice. ``Even science,'' he said, ``is very heavily prejudiced in one direction. Knowledge in everyday life is also prejudiced. Two methods to transcend such prejudices are: (1) phenomenology; (2) going back to other ages.'' [p.182 of: Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time - The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.]
[Against the reduction of thought to language]
Thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words. [Schopenhauer]
Reflections related to the United States
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries . . . into the crucible with you all! God is making the American . . . the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the crucible, I tell you — he will be the fusion of all the races. [Israel Zangwill]
The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner's manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world's most unruly, passionate and energetic people safe, prosperous and free. [P. J. O'Rourke]
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
[George Washington, letter to the congregation of Touro Synagogue, Newport, Rhode Island, August, 1790.]
[George Washington and communion] With respect to the inquiry you make, I can only state the following facts: that as pastor of the Episcopal Church, observing that, on sacramental Sundays George Washington, immediately after the desk and pulpit services, went out with the greater part of the congregation - always leaving Mrs. Washington with the other communicants, she invariably being one - I considered it my duty, in a sermon on public worship, to state the unhappy tendency of example, particularly of those in elevated stations, who uniformly turned their backs on the Lord's Supper. I acknowledge the remark was intended for the President; and as such he received it. A few days after, in conversation, I believe, with a Senator of the United States, he told me he had dined the day before with the President, who, in the course of conversation at the table, said that, on the previous Sunday, he had received a very just rebuke from the pulpit for always leaving the church before the administration of the sacrament; that he honored the preacher for his integrity and candor; that he had never sufficiently considered the influence of his example, and that he would not again give cause for the repetition of the reproof; and that, as he had never been a communicant, were he to become one then, it would be imputed to an ostentatious display of religious zeal, arising altogether from his elevated station. Accordingly, he never afterwards came on the morning of sacrament Sunday, though at other times he was a constant attendant in the morning. [The Reverend Doctor James Abercrombie in a letter to a friend in 1833]
[Aside: Rumi on the merits of fasting and its own peculiar kind of communion]
There’s a hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.
We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox
Is stuffed full of anything, no music....
When you fast,
good habits gather like friends who want to help.
Fasting is Soloman’s ring. Don’t give it
to some illusion and lose your power, but even if you have, if you've lost all will and control, they come back when you fast ... A table descends to your tents,
Jesus’s table.
Expect to see it, when you fast, this table
spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages. [The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne, p.69]
[The bitter political party polemics between the Federalists and the Republicans in the early 1800’s in the United States led to a split between John and Abigail Adams on the one hand and Thomas Jefferson on the other. Correspondence between Abigail and Jefferson (who was then president) restarted in May, 1804 when Abigail sent a sympathy letter to Jefferson on the death of his daughter, Martha Randolph, whom Abigail had cared for when Martha Randolph was a child in France, and to whom she was deeply attached. In a later letter (August 18) to Jefferson, Abigail laments ``the rageing fury of party animosity''. (The ``late instance'' that she refers to is no doubt the duel on July 11 between Hamilton and Burr in which Hamilton was killed.)] In no Country has calumny falshood, and revileing stalked abroad more licentiously, than in this. No political Character has been secure from its attacks, no reputation so fair, as not to be wounded by it, untill truth and falshood lie in one undistinguished heap. If there are no checks to be resorted to in the Laws of the Land, and no reparation to be made to the injured, will not Man become the judge and avenger of his own wrongs, and as in a late instance, the sword and pistol decide the contest? All the Christian and social virtues will be banished from the Land. All that makes Life desirable, and softens the ferocious passions of Man will assume a savage deportment, and like Cain of old, every Mans hand will be against his Neighbour. Party spirit is blind malevolent uncandid, ungenerous, unjust and unforgiving. It is equally so under federal as under democratic Banners, yet upon both sides are Characters, who possess honest views, and act from honorable motives, who disdain to be led blindfold, and who tho entertaining different opinions, have for their object the public welfare and happiness. .... Party hatred by its deadly poison blinds the Eyes and envenoms the heart. It is fatal to the integrity of the moral Character. It sees not that wisdom dwells with moderation, and that firmness of conduct is seldom united with outrageous voilence of sentiment. Thus blame is too often liberally bestowed upon actions, which if fully understood, and candidly judged would merit praise instead of censure. [From The Adams-Jefferson Letters, edited by Lester J. Cappon]
Thoughts on Mathematics
[A research mathematician's life can be discouraging] A colleague of mine once said ``We work for the grudging approbation of a few friends''. It is true that since the research work is of a rather solitary nature we need badly that approbation in one way or another, but quite frankly don't expect much .... In fact there is no way to fool around with the only real judge which is oneself, and caring too much about the opinion of others is a waste of time: so far no theorem has been proved as a result of a vote. As Feynman put it ``why do you care what other people think''! [Alain Connes, Advice to the beginner]
[That the great mathematics comes from physics:] Not this short lived novelty which can too often influence the mathematician left to his own devices, but this infinitely fecund novelty which springs from the nature of things. [Hadamard]
Quantum field theory is a very rich subject for mathematics as well as for physics. But its development in the last seventy years has been mainly by physicists, and it is still largely out of reach as a rigorous mathematical theory . . . So most of its impact on mathematics has not yet been felt. Yet in many active areas of mathematics, problems are studied that actually have their most natural setting in quantum field theory . . . their natural home in quantum field theory is not now part of the mathematical theory. To make a rough analogy, one has here a vast mountain range, most of which is still covered with fog. Only the loftiest peaks, which reach above the clouds, are seen in the mathematical theories of today and these splendid peaks are studied in isolation . . . Still lost in the mist is the body of the range, with its quantum field theory bedrock and the great bulk of the mathematical treasures. [Edward Witten, Magic, Mystery and Matrix, Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture, 1998.]
A milestone for mathematics. Connes has created a theory that embraces most aspects of `classical' mathematics and sets us out on a long and exciting voyage into the world of noncommutative mathematics. [Vaughan F. R. Jones commenting on Alain Connes's book: Noncommutative Geometry.]
Hegelian ideas
[Hegel’s disapproval of overemphasizing arithmetic calculation practice in education] Number is a non-sensuous object, and occupation with it and its combinations is a non-sensuous business; in it, mind is held to communing with itself and to an inner abstract labor, a matter of great though one-sided importance .... such occupation is an unthinking, mechanical one. The effort consists mainly in holding fast what is devoid of the Concept and in combining it purely mechanically
.... the substantial content of moral and spiritual life in its various forms .... is to be supplanted by the blank one or unit .... the only possible outcome must be to dull the mind and to empty it of both form and substance .... it has been possible to construct machines which perform arithmetical operations with complete accuracy. A knowledge of just this one fact about the nature of calculation is sufficient for an appraisal of the idea of making calculation the principal means for educating the mind and stretching it on a rack in order to perfect it as a machine. [G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (The Science of Logic), translated by A. V. Miller]
One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the Concept, which is also history's inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva first starts its flight with the setting in of twilight. [G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right, Preface), translated by T. M. Knox (slight changes)]
To speak of the absolute idea may suggest the conception that we are at length reaching the right thing and the sum of the whole matter. .... But its true content is only the whole system of which we have been hitherto studying the development.... The absolute idea may in this respect be compared to the old man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime. Even if the child understands the truths of religion, he cannot but imagine them to be something outside of which lies the whole of life and the whole of the world. The same may be said to be the case with human life as a whole ... All work is directed only to the aim or end; and when it is attained, people are surprised to find nothing else but just the very thing which they wished for. The interest lies in the whole development... So, too, the content of the absolute idea is the whole breadth of ground which has passed under our view up to this point. Last of all comes the discovery that the whole evolution is what constitutes the content and interest. [G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie (Encyclopedia Logic, section 237, Zusatz, translated by William Wallace.)]
[From an account of a visit by Christoph Theodor Schwab to the great
German poet Hölderlin shortly before the latter's death in 1843.
Hölderlin had been insane since 1806, and was a close friend of
Hegel's in their early years.] He
[Schwab] asked him [Hölderlin] whether he had thought of Hegel.
Hölderlin answered that of course he had, muttered something
incomprehensible, and then noted simply, ``The Absolute.'' [Taken from p.665 of ``Hegel - A Biography'', by Terry Pinkard.]