1. 16 August 2007

    Labyrinths

    Jorge Luis Borges

    418 days ago

    Selected Short Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges.

    History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. 43

    Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right: I am all other men, any man is all men. 70

    From that imagination I went on to others, even more extravagant. I thought that our perceptions were the same, but that he combined them in another way and made other objects of them; I thought that perhaps there were no objects for him, only a vertiginous and continuous plat of extremely brief impressions. I thought of a world without memory, without time; I considered the possibility of a language without nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable epithets. 112

    He argued with the men on whose judgement his fate depended and committed the extreme ineptitude of doing so with wit and irony. On the 26th of October, after a discussion lasting three days and three nights, he was sentenced to die at the stake. 125

    Tennyson once said that if we could understand a single flower, we should know what we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no fact, however insignificant, that does not involve universal history and the infinite concatenation of cause and effect. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit in every phenomenon, just as the will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit in every subject. The Cabalists pretend that man is a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe; according to Tennyson, everything would be. 163

    There occurred the union with the divinity, with the universe (I do not know whether these words differ in meaning). Ecstasy does not repeat its symbols; God has been seen in a blazing light, din a sword or in the circles of a rose. I saw an exceedingly high Wheel, which was not before my eyes, nor behind me, nor to the sides, but every place at one time.

    The Fearful Sphere of Pascal, 189, I’d link it up but can’t find it.

    For one man, Giordano Bruno, the rupture of the stellar vaults was a liberation. He proclaimed, in the Cena de la ceneri, that the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause, and that divinity is close by, “for it is within us even more than we ourselves are within ourselves.” He searched for words to tell men of Copernican space, and on one famous page he inscribed: “We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, o that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” 191

    Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and one nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers and spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written. 196

    The world is an interminable chain of causes and each cause is also an effect. Each state derives from a previous one and determines the following, but the whole series could have not existed, since its terms are conditional, i.e., fortuitous. However, the world does exist; from this we may infer a non-contingent first cause, which would be the Divinity. Such is the cosmological proof; it is prefigured by Aristotle and Plato, later Leibniz rediscovers it.
    Hermann Lotze has recourse to the regressus in order not to understand that an alteration of objet A can roduce an alteration of object B. He reasons that if A and B are independent, to postulate an influence of A on B is to postulate a third element C, an element which in order to affect B will require a fourth element D, which cannot work its effect without F… In order to elude this multiplication of chimeras, he resolves that in the world there is one sole object: an infinite and absolute substance, comparable to the God of Spinoza. Transitive causes are reduced to immanent causes; phenomena to manifestations or modalities of the cosmic substance2. 205
    fn2. I follow the exposition by James (A Pluralistic Universe, 1909, pages 55-60).

    “The greatest magician (Novalis himself has memorably written) would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false. 208

    The Mirror of Enigmas, another that I marked for itself and not its subquotes. 209

    The universe, the sum of all things, is a collection no less ideal than that of all the horses Shakespeare dreamt of – one, many, none? – between 1592 and 1594. I add: if time is a mental process, how can thousands of men – or even two different men – share it? 223

    Via the dialectics of Berkeley and Hume I have arrived at Schopenhauer’s dictum: “The form of the phenomenon of will… is really only the present, not the future nor the past. The latter are only in the conception, exist only in the connection of knowledge, so far as it follows the principle of sufficient reason. No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it… We might compare time to a constantly revolving sphere; the half that was always sinking would be the past, that which was always rising would be the future; but the indivisible point at the top, where the tangent touches, would be the extensionless present. As the tangent does not revolve with the sphere, neither does the present, the point of contact of the obect, the form of which is time, with the subject, which has no form, because it does not belong to the knowable, but is the condition of all that is knowable.” 233

    Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. 234

    History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: “I who have been so many men in cain want to be one and myself.” The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.” 249

  2. 02 June 2007

    The Mezzanine

    Nicholson Baker

    493 days ago

    A day in the life of a young man working in a nameless corporate office, full of wonderful minutiae and digression. Not even a day actually, more like a lunch hour.

  3. 30 January 2007

    The System of the World

    Neal Stephenson

    616 days ago

    Stephenson wraps up his Baroque Cycle in high style. Read it.

    And man do I wish Stephenson would’ve told what happened to precipitate Jack’s crowd-surfing episode.

  4. 24 December 2006

    Odalisque

    653 days ago

    Stephenson continues with his epic, 3rd book of 8. Reccommended.

  5. 17 December 2006

    In Patagonia

    660 days ago

    A travelogue through guess where. Makes me want to travel somewhere.

  6. 14 December 2006

    King of the Vagabonds

    Neal Stephenson

    663 days ago

    Another Stephenson, supremely good stuff. The book ends in a real rut, can’t wait to get at the next one.

  7. 04 December 2006

    The Time Machine

    673 days ago

    “I thought the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now come the reaction of the altered conditions.” 27

    “When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances.” 46

    He [...] thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. 76

  8. 02 September 2006

    Alaska

    766 days ago

    A good read, though long. I started this a month+ ago, I pulled it off the shelf looking for something to read for the car ride to montana and back. Got 700 pages into it then; but just couldn’t quite finish the last 400. Interesting fictional look at Alaska (but based off real history), somewhere I really want to go.

    While reading it, a prof at my school managed to take a trip there, and I felt great injustice sitting around reading about it as he put up his photos.

    ...neat in his ways, and content to remain aloof. 464

    ...the kind of flight that can re-order a man’s perceptions. 812

    Whitepass Railroad 856

    The Worst Journey in the World 1025

  9. 21 April 2006

    900 days ago

    Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths

    This is why I like design, because we can look at all these crazy things and float off into wildly abstracted spaces, but in the end it has to come down to stuff, and the stuff I really like is the everyday. That

    via Kjell Olsen900 days ago

  10. 18 July 2005

    Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

    J.K. Rowling

    1177 days ago

    I can’t say the book was disappointing. I wasn’t anticipating it highly, but when my parents brought a copy of it home the other day and I didn’t have anything else to read, what do you expect me to do?

    Potter just has a magical quality to it, delightfully easy to read. No doubt Potter is still aimed to a younger audience, but I was just at the ripe age for this kind of fiction back when the first book came out, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

  11. 26 February 2005

    1319 days ago

    Calvin and Hobbes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    What a great series, and quite a pleasantry to stumble upon this after just finishing reading Le Petit Prince. Two whimsical and incredible pieces of work – go read them1 over and over.

    1 Calvin and Hobbes can be had here until it’s hammered by some legality, while le petit prince seems to be under some sort of copyright, and is better in print with the pictures anyway.

    via Kjell Olsen1319 days ago

  12. Also somewhat recently

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