return of "people I tend to get mixed up"

Previous installments in the series.

And here's the current batch:

• Germaine de Staël, George Sand and George Elliot.
• Joachim of Fiore and Cola di Rienzi.

powder is for cheaters

Happy the blest ages that knew not the dread fury of those devilish engines of artillery, whose inventor I am persuaded is in hell receiving the reward of his diabolical invention, by which he made it easy for a base and cowardly arm to take the life of a gallant gentleman; and that, when he knows not how or whence, in the height of the ardour and enthusiasm that fire and animate brave hearts, there should come some random bullet, discharged perhaps by one who fled in terror at the flash when he fired off his accursed machine, which in an instant puts an end to the projects and cuts off the life of one who deserved to live for ages to come. And thus when I reflect on this, I am almost tempted to say that in my heart I repent of having adopted this profession of knight-errant in so detestable an age as we live in now; for though no peril can make me fear, still it gives me some uneasiness to think that powder and lead may rob me of the opportunity of making myself famous and renowned throughout the known earth by the might of my arm and the edge of my sword.

—Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote.

the early introduction of firearms did its part in making war a democratic pursuit, not only because the strongest castles were unable to withstand a bombardment, but because the skill of the engineer, of the gunfounder, and of the artillerist—men belonging to another class than the nobility—was now of the first importance in a campaign. It was felt, with regret, that the value of the individual, which had been the soul of the small and admirably organized bands of mercenaries, would suffer from these novel means of destruction, which did their work at a distance; and there were Condottieri who opposed to the utmost the introduction at least of the musket, which had lately been invented in Germany. We read that Paolo Vitelli, while recognizing and himself adopting the cannon, put out the eyes and cut off the hands of the captured 'schioppettieri' (arquebusiers) because he held it unworthy that a gallant, and it might be noble, knight should be wounded and laid low by a common, despised foot soldier.

—Jacob Burckhardt: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.

(later)

Would to heaven that this accursed engine [the arquebus] had never been invented, I had not then received those wounds which I now languish under, neither had so many valiant men been slain for the most part by the most pitiful fellows and the greatest cowards...

—Blaise de Montluc.

reading while walking

Even if you subscribe to all the usual pieties about the benefits of reading, you have to admit that the physical act of reading, when considered by itself, is stultifying. There you are, sedentary and immobile, your attention fixated into a hinged accretion of quadrangular paper layers, straining your eyes while your muscles turn into mush. If you indulge in the habit for too long, you end up resembling one of H. G. Wells' martians: a pale, big-headed monstrosity with atrophied limbs.

It would be much better to read while performing some physical activity that plunged you back into the world, like walking... a nice blend of mental and physical exertion, a compromise between engaging the text and engaging your actual surroundings. It would involve some dangers, though, like not being able to concentrate enough on the book, or concentrating too much and wandering in front of a moving truck.

But, why not just turn to audiobooks instead, one might ask. Well, audiobooks are great, but listening to them is not exactly reading. If you want random access, or simply to find and re-read some previous passage, they are cumbersome. Plus, when wandering through noisy environments you would have to either cram up the volume—damaging your ears—or isolate yourself from external sounds—which, of course, is another way of not engaging with the world.

I, for one, have convinced myself! I will presently take a walk around the port of A Coruña, a pocket French grammar in hand. If I do not post again, assume I fell off the pier while rehearsing the irregular verbs.

placing into the abyss

R. A. Lafferty, commenting on a portrait of Stilicho (which I haven't been able to track down):

[the painting] It's in several of the old history books, and apparently dates from a century or more after the life of Stilicho. [...] He holds in one hand what appears to be a cucumber; but is probably a small fasces—the buldle of rods, the symbol of authority. In his other hand he holds a scepter with an eagle in the laterna part. On top of the scepter is a replica of himself in the same position, holding the same scepter, on which again is an expressive smudge which would be a still smaller replica of himself holding a still smaller scepter. The box within the box within the box trick is very old.

—R. A. Lafferty: The Fall of Rome.

The french have a wonderful name for this type of recursion in art, heraldry and literature: mise en abyme ("placing into the abyss"). Has Lafferty ever used this technique in his own work? Well... he does like to quote imaginary authorities, and to have the characters tell stories to each other (like in the "Liar's Paradise" episode of "The Devil is Dead"). Some of these may be commentary on the frame story, but I would have to reread them to be sure.

take a walk then write a letter

Two interesting bibliographies:

• Travel and Landscape.
• Secondary Studies of Epistolary Literature.

a copy of me is me

Pharyngula criticizes Ray Kurtzweil's intellectual sloppiness. But the real meat is to be found in the comments section, where one can find a lively discussion about the nature of personal identity.

Speech Acts

I'm trying to digest this essay on the Searle-Derrida controversy over the nature of parasitic speech acts. It is very interesting, and it mentions Humpty-Dumpty. There's glory for you!

The fact that Derrida disagrees with Searle has endeared the former to me as a philosopher. After all, is Searle manages to be so unflinchingly wrong on the subject of philosophy of the mind, he'll likely be wrong about philosophy of language too!

Not being very familiar with this latter field, I'm getting a bit lost. I wonder if the debate over speech acts is somehow related to Quine's indeterminacy of translation.

The Repugnant Conclusion (again)

In 2007 I made a post linking Derek Parfit's concept of the Repugnant Conclusion with the Neolithic Revolution. Here's a more recent post by none other than Matthew Yglesias which draws the same connection.

Inoculating Culture

In one apologetic work by Jaime Balmes, the following grim, Ecclesiastes-like passage can be found:

Man advances in nothing without painful toil; he never reaches the point he desires without many wanderings, which fatige him; in everything it is realised that the earth, instead of fruit, gives him briars and thistles. Has he to discover a truth? He shall not come at it except after many extravagant errors. Has he to bring an art to perfection? Hundreds and hundreds of useless attempts will fatige those who occupy themselves with it, and it is fortunate if the grandchildren reap the fruit of what their grandfathers sowed. Has the social and political organisation of a State to be improved? Bloody revolutions precede the desired regeneration; and the unfortunate country, after prolonged sufferings, is frequently left in a worse state than it groaned in before. Has the civilisation and culture of one people to be communicated to another? The inoculation must be effected with fire and sword; entire generations are sacrificed to obtain a result which but very distant ones shall see.

I was struck by the use of the word "inoculation". It seems oddly... technical, clinical. Incongruous in its context. Mark Twain experienced a similar reaction to clerical language (chapter XXVIII of The Innocents Abroad) when a Capuchin monk gave him a tour of an ossuary, all the while explaining the sad stories behind such-and-such bone:

This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the heart by laying the several fragments of the lover before us and naming them, was as grotesque a performance, and as ghastly, as any I ever witnessed. I hardly knew whether to smile or shudder. There are nerves and muscles in our frames whose functions and whose methods of working it seems a sort of sacrilege to describe by cold physiological names and surgical technicalities, and the monk's talk suggested to me something of this kind. Fancy a surgeon, with his nippers lifting tendons, muscles and such things into view, out of the complex machinery of a corpse, and observing, "Now this little nerve quivers--the vibration is imparted to this muscle--from here it is passed to this fibrous substance; here its ingredients are separated by the chemical action of the blood--one part goes to the heart and thrills it with what is popularly termed emotion, another part follows this nerve to the brain and communicates intelligence of a startling character--the third part glides along this passage and touches the spring connected with the fluid receptacles that lie in the rear of the eye. Thus, by this simple and beautiful process, the party is informed that his mother is dead, and he weeps." Horrible!

That passage by Twain reminds me in turn of Socrates' stated distaste in the Phaedo for Anaxagoras' philosophy, which he considers too mechanistic:

What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture: that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence

We resent when the coldness of scientific terminology intrudes in our lamentations. We dislike being reminded that we are but machines of flesh, sinew and bone.

(later) Apparently, inoculate also means "to imbue (a person), as with ideas". Maybe that's the meaning Balmes intended.

On the other hand, the book was written in the first half of the nineteenth century (couldn't find the exact date), and around that time there had already been vaccination campaigns against smallpox in Spain and the colonies. Perhaps the vaccination/conquest metaphor was suggested by the memory of the Balmis Expedition of 1803...

"sales engineer"

I haven't looked much into that job description but, on the face of it, it seems like an oxymoron.

Salespeople have emotional intelligence to spare; they go around shaking hands, smiling, and making eye contact. Meanwhile, engineers are barely funcional autists who toil away in their cubicles, happily employed in designing some contraption, disturbed only by the perspective of having to engage from time to time in dreaded human contact.

I conclude therefore that the "sales engineer" is the chimera of the IT world, a fictional creature whose hold on our imaginations is explained by the the shocking dissimilarity of its component parts.

Being Alone

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone. I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she'll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?

(William Deresiwwicz: The End of Solitude)

There was no concept of solitarieness among the Pacific islanders I traveled among that did not also imply misery or mental decline. Book-reading as a recreation was not indulged in much on these islands either—for that same reason, because you did it alone. Illiteracy had nothing to do with it, and there were plenty of schools. They knew from experience that a person who cut himself off, who was frequently seen alone—reading books, away from the hut, walking on the beach, on his own—was sunk in deep musu, and was contemplating either murder or suicide, probably both. Now and then people would mention that a place had a much higher suicide rate than I could possibly imagine, and in truth I was usually rather surprised to hear the figures. Then they would describe the method—nearly always taking a dive off the top of a palm tree.

(Paul Theroux: The Happy Isles of Oceania)

Reasons to Read Less

One fearfully cold afternoon not many weeks ago, I found myself at the bus stop, reading "The Mysteries of Udolpho" while waiting for my red, even-numbered conveyance to arrive. So enthralled was I by the eerie happenings narrated in the novel that I missed the bus when it at last came. Miffed, and unwilling to wait for the next one, I set out for home on foot, braving the the inclemency of the icy hiemal weather. The result? A bout -fortunately not too severe- of pneumonia. As you see, books can be dangerous to your health.

The worst thing is that, to tell the truth, I didn't even enjoy Ann Radcliffe's novel that much.

Another reason to read less is that during coffee break at work books are seldom discussed. Instead, conversation frequently drifts to the topic of noteworthy recent series on TV, none of which I have seen. (Mad Men does sound interesting).

Knowledge of soccer jargon would also improve my coffe break chit-chat prowess. In fact, not knowing how to talk about soccer games is considered a severe disability here in Spain, at least for the male citizen. There should exist publicly-funded academies where people not versed in soccer hermeneutics could learn the rudiments of the discipline.

Profundas observaciones sobre Madrid, con motivo de una visita

• En Madrid los bares suelen tener dos máquinas tragaperras, en Coruña tan sólo una.
• Hay una sala X activa en el centro de la ciudad, y eso que pensaba que Internet y el DVD habían acabado con todas. El título de la película en cartel era "Lozanas o veteranas".
• Más gente parece leer en el metro de Madrid que en los buses de A Coruña. No sé si se debe a una mayor afición a la lectura entre los usuarios madrileños de transporte público, o simplemente a que la vistas al exterior que ofrece un vagon de metro no son nada entretenidas.
• La catedral de Santiago le da mil vueltas a la de la Almudena.

Emma Bovary was a slut

"Sir," they say flatly, "she's a slut." (The women tend to be harder on Emma than the men are.) Subsequent class periods get even uglier. Many of the men admit that they're fearful of marrying and then having their stay-at-home wives cheat on them. For that reason, they say, "you've got to get her pregnant before you deploy." Emma is their worst nightmare. Emma should have been faithful to Charles! He loved her! He was a good provider! What more does she want?

—Bruce Fleming at The Chronicle Review: Leaving Literature Behind.

That is a pretty cogent analysis of Madame Bovary, except for one thing: Emma's pregnancy didn't do much to curtail her infidelities.

The hanging legs of the disappearing Christ

In the promotional leaflet of a certain publisher, I spotted the following:

I think it comes from Isabella of Castile's Book of Hours.

It seemed a little odd, this image of Christ during the Ascension, his upper body covered with a cloud, only his legs visible. More often, he is depicted with his full body in sight.

Then I remembered that I had read about this kind of iconography before. Apparently, it originated in eleventh-century England, and its motivation lies in biblical exegesis. They wanted to emphasize the idea that Christ ascended to heaven by his own means. Were he to be represented standing in the cloud, or enthroned in a mandorla carried away by angels, the misleading impression could be given that he needed some external help. Hence the hanging legs!

Here's an earlier example. The classic study of this iconography is Meyer Schapiro's "The Image of the Disappearing Christ: The Ascension in English Art around the Year 1000".

the drumming up of tradition

The traditional transmission of beliefs and knowledge is not one that is sought [...] The “search for a usable past” is something quite different [...] The drumming up of tradition [...] or the recommending of the observance of traditions which were no longer being generally received, represents an ideological transformation of tradition. It is certainly quite remote from the process of traditional transmission.

—Tradition and Liberty: Antinomy and Interdependence, by Edward Shils

For mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt. The mummers themselves were not afflicted with any such feeling for their art, though at the same time they were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction.

—Thomas Hardy: The return of the native.

Gotta read Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition one of these days.

a universal conspiracy for hiding sadness

Cheerful thoughts to be found in Amiel's Journal:

I gazed into the great implacable abyss in which are swallowed up all those phantoms which call themselves living beings. I saw that the living are but apparitions hovering for a moment over the earth, made out of the ashes of the dead, and swiftly re-absorbed by eternal night, as the will-o'-the-wisp sinks into the marsh. The nothingness of our joys, the emptiness of our existence, and the futility of our ambitions, filled me with a quiet disgust. From regret to disenchantment I floated on to Buddhism, to universal weariness. Ah, the hope of a blessed immortality would be better worth having !

With what different eyes one looks at life at ten, at twenty, at thirty, at sixty ! Those who live alone are specially conscious of this psychological metamorphosis. Another thing, too, astonishes them ; it is the universal conspiracy which exists for hiding the sadness of the world, for making men forget suffering, sickness, and death, for smothering the wails and sobs which issue from every house, for painting and beautifying the hideous face of reality.

Is it out of tenderness for childhood and youth, or is it simply from fear, that we are thus careful to veil the sinister truth ? Or is it from a sense of equity ? and does life contain as much good as evil -perhaps more ? However it may be, men feed themselves rather upon illusion than upon truth. Each one unwinds his own special reel of hope, and as soon as he has come to the end of it he sits him down to die, and lets his sons and his grandsons begin the same experience over again. We all pursue happiness, and happiness escapes the pursuit of all.

no jam (or miracles) today

The Toynbee convector has posted a delightful extract from the diaries of a nineteenth-century noblewoman, recounting her presence at the miracle of the liquefaction of St. Januarius' blood.

Having read a number of Protestant writers from that time, their skeptical and derisive attitude towards popish superstition seems redolent of the White Queen's policy regarding jam. There will be miracles tomorrow, when the Lord comes. There were miracles yesterday. But no miracles today!

Internet Archive find of the day

Vol II of Pascual de Gayangos' translation of Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari's History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain.

P.S. Also this online book: Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain.

P.P.S. More in this earlier post.

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.