1. 16 August 2007

    Labyrinths

    Jorge Luis Borges

    511 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. 09 June 2006

    944 days ago

    Three Weeks, Issue 1

    THREE WEEKS is a small publication, and we concede that our immediate effect will be proportional. But, whether naive or prescient, we also enjoy thinking that some small flame will be set by our actions now, and one day when our children, or their children, are despicable perversions of the ideal we represent, that flame will spread and incinerate human ignorance, petty fears, and this species’ unforgivable herd-like obsession with being fashionable.

    We shall elucidate trivia and minutiae in every branch of human knowledge, simply for the reason that it will be a revelation to the common mind. We shall frame ordinary thoughts with exquisite words, and dress the finest inspirations of human intelligence in monosyllabic dreck so that it can be grasped by the unfit. We shall soften the focus of the typical daily’s analysis, while yet seeing more sharply than the glossy monthlies of America’s doctor’s offices, or the dainty quarterlies of its coffee shops. We shall oppose prejudices and superstitions, and we shall assume a stance of provocation and skepticism.

    Kjell Olsen944 days ago

  3. 14 December 2005

    1122 days ago

    The Hyperbole Towers

    Corporate speak at it’s best, from Ben Mathis-Lilley.

    via Kjell Olsen1122 days ago

  4. 01 December 2005

    1135 days ago

    Was Ivan the Terrible Really "Terrible"? (or, Why We Should Build a Memory Archive)

    You are born, you live a full life, you gather a head full of memories, and then

    via Kjell Olsen1135 days ago

  5. 31 October 2005

    1166 days ago

    Teach a man to replicate

    Cory Doctorow’s newest is being serialized with Salon, and it’s really an excellent read.

    via Kjell Olsen1166 days ago

  6. 1166 days ago

    the Oxford/Harvard/Donovan comma

    I’ve always preferred the oxford comma, but wondered about it. It seems so wrong not to, but it’s so often omitted.

    red, white and blue
    red, white, and blue

    Why wouldn’t you precede the and with a comma? The comma indicates a pause, I don’t know the grammatical term for it. But it reminds me of an array, leaving the comma out makes for a two term array while the harvard correctly implies three.

    via Kjell Olsen1166 days ago

  7. 09 September 2005

    1218 days ago

    Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme

    Just the other day I started a facebook group evangelizing anthropomorphics. I’m not kidding! And Gruber comes along with this bit of genius.

    Kjell Olsen1218 days ago

  8. 02 February 2005

    Therapy Writing

    1436 days ago

    So, being this blhag is underused (if you use IE I’m sorry – I’ve meant not to make it look so shitty, really) I decided to post a little on whats been going on recently.

  9. 18 January 2005

    1452 days ago

    Learn to speak Danish

    I’m jumping into a second semester Danish course at the U today, and jesus I don’t know danish! But heres a nice juicy ten lesson tutorial with nice flash quizzes and listening that can help me brush up.

    via Kjell Olsen1452 days ago

  10. Also somewhat recently

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