financial musings of an aesthete

A passage in Henri-Frédéric Amiel's journal, quoted from here:

April 14, 1866

Panic, collapse, a general rout at the Bourse in Paris. My poor remaining funds are dropping, dropping! In our epoch of individualism and “every man for himself and God for all”, the trepidations of the public funds resemble the palpitations of the heart. One feels an obligatory sympathy, somewhat suggesting the patriotism of one’s compulsory taxes; one is constrained to keep an eye out on the follies of Prussia and America, one feels engaged, compromised in all the world’s affairs, and so one has to take an interest, in spite of oneself, in the terrible machine whose wheels may at any instant crush us.

Credit gives birth to an unstable society, whose trembling base and artificial structure perpetually menace its security. It sometimes forgets that it is dancing on top of a volcano. But the least rumour of war pitilessly brings this back to mind. Houses built of cards are easily ruined.

This anxiety is unbearable for humble little bondholders like myself, who, renouncing the pursuit of riches, would at least have liked to attend to their modest labours in peace. But no; the world is there, and like a brutal tyrant, it cried to us: Peace, peace, there is no peace; I mean you to suffer, laugh and skip about with me. And when one reflects that five or six crowned rascals, or merely gold-braided rascals, hold in their hands the tranquillity of the world, and are able to martyr at their caprice the destiny of several millions of their fellows, one feels a little irritated.

This passage is comparatively flavorless in Mary Augusta Ward's translation, which I'm reading right now. For example, the sentence "My poor remaining funds are dropping, dropping!" is omitted.

Wikipedia has scant information on the Panic of 1866. The Internet Archive has an contemporary account.

See also: a real estate boom.

second draft manuscript

A second draft manuscript of Suldrun's Garden:

From the webpage of Tim Stretton. First spotted at the Jack Vance Message Board.

I wish authors employed some kind of version control software, so that we could trace the development of novels in minute detail, starting from when pen is first put to paper, through subsequent growth and revisions, until the final version.

However, version control may have too much granularity. It would not distinguish between authors who write their sentences in spurts only to revise them later, and those who meditate obsessively on every word before committing it to the page. ¿How about a keylogger, then?

a profusion of days, a waste of longevity

When one reflects on the state of this strange being [a tortoise], it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two-thirds of its existence in a joyless stupor, and be lost to all sensation for months together in the profoundest of slumbers.

—Rev. Gilbert White: The Natural History of Selborne.

To one of middle age the countenance was that of a young man, though a youth might hardly have seen any necessity for the term of immaturity. But it was really one of those faces which convey less the idea of so many years as its age than of so much experience as its store. The number of their years may have adequately summed up Jared, Mahalaleel, and the rest of the antediluvians, but the age of a modern man is to be measured by the intensity of his history.

—Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native.

It would be neat if lifespan were not determined by biological age, but instead by "intensity of history". That is, people who drive Ferraris, hunt elephants and lions in the savannah, and routinely bed beautiful women, would consume their lives faster than those who spend their weekends alone at home, watching TV and eating pizza. At the time of their deaths, all persons would have had the same total amount of fun. This is the only equality that counts, really.

But two assumptions are neccessary for it to work. First, that eating pizza in solitude conveys a positive amount of fun -however small- and not a negative one. Second, that there exists a number N (possibly very high) such as that, when N or more pizzas are ingested throughout a series of solitary weekends, they convey an accumulated pleasure equal or superior to the one involved in bedding a beautiful woman during a one-night-stand. (It may well be that sexual pleasure is measured in real numbers, while pizza pleasure is measured in infinitesimals.)

if bonfires are stars

The following passage from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native caught my attention:

The bonfire was by this time beginning to sink low, for the fuel had not been of that substantial sort which can support a blaze long. Most of the other fires within the wide horizon were also dwindling weak. Attentive observation of their brightness, colour, and length of existence would have revealed the quality of the material burnt, and through that, to some extent the natural produce of the district in which each bonfire was situate.

If you take the bonfires as representing stars, the passage works as a metaphor for astronomical spectroscopy. Did such discipline even exist when Hardy wrote the novel?

I have a problem with names

I have a problem with names. I forget which belongs to whom; I inflict the wrong ones on unsuspecting persons, to their chagrin and mine.

This happens with people I meet on a day-to-day basis, and also with the more remote personages one finds in Wikipedia. Here's a trio I tend to get mixed up:

• Jean Baudrillard, the guy who directed the Matrix trilogy of films and followed the Iraq war on CNN.
• Roland Barthes, the guy who killed all the authors.
• John Barth, a guy who sets out to write Henry James novels but always ends up with a new John Barth tome instead.

After having taken the effort of writing those names, I suspect I have put an end to the confusion. The three names were fluttering around in my head like unruly butterflies, but now they all have been captured and neatly pinned down on their proper referents.

quarrelsome congregations

Entering the building [the Church of the Sepulchre] through the midst of the usual assemblage of beggars, one sees on his left a few Turkish guards - for Christians of different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, also, in this sacred place, if allowed to do it.

—Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad.

All sects of Christians (except Protestants) have chapels under the roof of the Church of the Sepulchre, and each must keep to itself and not venture upon another's ground. It has been proven conclusively that they can not worship together around the grave of the leader of the World in peace.

—Ibid.

Priests of any of the chapels and denominations in the Church of the Sepulchre can visit this sacred grotto to weep and pray and worship the gentle Redeemer. Two different congregations are not allowed to enter at the same time, however, because they always fight.

—Ibid.

It's almost... comforting to know that fights at the Church of the Sepulchre are business as usual. I mean, at least things are not getting worse.

a cultural analogue to Darwin's finches

Not only birds differentiate across the islands of an archipielago, headwear does, too!

Here and there in the doorways we saw women with fashionable Portuguese hoods on. This hood is of thick blue cloth, attached to a cloak of the same stuff, and is a marvel of ugliness. [...] The general style of the capote is the same in all the islands, and will remain so for the next ten thousand years, but each island shapes its capotes just enough differently from the others to enable an observer to tell at a glance what particular island a lady hails from.

—Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, chapter V.

The Voyage of the Beagle predates the one narrated by Twain in The Innocents Abroad by about thirty-three years.

See also: Darwin's finches and this paper about them.

Death at Yale

Initiatives like MIT's OpenCourseWare and Yale's Open Courses are truly wonderful. Yay for the Internet! Some of the courses I try to follow when I find a spare hour here and there:

• PHIL 176 - Death, Spring 2007 (Yale).
• ECON 159 - Game Theory, Fall 2007 (Yale).
• ECON 252 - Financial Markets, Spring 2008 (Yale).
• Differential Equations Spring 2006 (MIT).

I'm finding the last one a most welcome refresher, since my knowledge of calculus had become exceedingly rusty.

P.S. This blog seems to be a good resource for finding this kind of material.