September 2025
meh, fugaces etc.
1 September 2025, around 4.05.
Taking the dog out in the morning, the air has started to smell of rain and cold: not the usual comforting smell of ice, with its promise of winter, but an earthier, damper scent – a hint of the autumnal without any of its assurances.
book-life
2 September 2025, around 4.43.
It is comforting to think that there can be a simple guide for how to read a book (i.e., the ‘X-ray method’). Obviously, the essay mentioned in the previous sentence is not about how to read all books, because one reads books for different purposes, but it is a fairly personable account of how to read academic books (generally in the humanities/social sciences) – well, not so much ‘how to read’ such books as ‘how to extract value’ (where value is taken to mean ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ or ‘padding for one’s bibliography’ or ‘the appearance of familiarity with the contents’)1 from them. I was thinking about it this morning as I was reading my daily dose of Marsha M. Linehan’s DBT Skills Training Manual, which I am only reading because it was mentioned in passing in Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow.2 It is, however, turning out to be as suggestive as a novel, with its allusions to group dynamics and leadership struggles between pairs of skills trainers, or the trainer who is urged by her co-trainer to drink a soda before an evening session to boost her flagging energy (in itself a modeling of the sort of anecdote a trainer should share with the participants to seem approachable and make the skills seem applicable). Perhaps part of what helps make the book interesting (or that makes it possible for me to be interested in it) is being able to read it without purpose, to be aimless in my attention; no one will test me on it, question me about it, or ask me to apply the information in any way. I am accountable to no one but myself for what I take away from it – but then I have always been fond of the novel method of reading.
- Cf. the amusing but also fairly stupid How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. (Naturally the book isn’t stupid as such, but it wears the mask of stupidity and there comes a point [great shades of the happy hypocrite] when the face beneath comes to resemble the mask, as it were.) [↩]
- Would the reader instructed in book–life balance have chosen Linehan’s manual as a follow-up to Li’s memoir? Perhaps. Although it is also safe to say that the X-ray approach is not aimed at primary texts, and only time and faith (and perhaps a fevered imagination) can transform secondary literature into a real text, like the rabbit in the story. The sighthound, however, will pursue even the suggestion of prey. [↩]
thrift
3 September 2025, around 16.11.
The local thrift store has been a surprisingly fruitful source of reading material this past year. The shop in town has produced d’Alembert and multiple volumes of Quine, while the shop at the mountain has yielded treasures such as a lightly pruned edition of John Dundas Cochrane’s A pedestrian journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary, to the frontiers of China, the Frozen Sea, and Kamtchatka, as well as other extracts from the Folio Society and several mass market murder mysteries. Of course most of these volumes do not fit in my current reading plans (given the haphazard nature of the thrift store selection and the equally haphazard nature of my reading projects), but I jam them onto the shelves, preserving them in the library of the moment, and hope to remember them eventually.
I got there with d’Alembert, after all, so there is some hope for the little grey cells.
tragedy of the commonplaces
4 September 2025, around 11.07.
It’s the season when academics seek to snatch inspiration from the jaws of administrative despair by posting online the more promising tasks they intend to assign their students, and one that sparked my interest was keeping a physical commonplace book (giving credit while appropriating [the modifications seem too few to call it adapting] an assignment developed by another instructor). Although I am more fond of the capacious approach to the commonplace mentioned by Alan Jacobs in his brief notes (archived) on the subject, which mention Ann Blair’s very enjoyable book on scholarship and collections of quotations (among other things), I thought it would not be amiss to collect a few extracts from my morning books in the spirit of this assignment just, you know, for fun.
I sincerely wish that it may be as clearly foreseen by every good citizen […] America will have reason to exclaim, in the words of the poet: “FAREWELL! A LONG FAREWELL TO ALL MY GREATNESS.”
Naturally, this stood out to me not necessarily for what it meant to Jay and co., but for its contemporary resonance. Surprisingly, though, it appears to be the first instance of a recurring bit part for Cardinal Wolsey in the Federalist Papers, which I was not at all expecting. I was not, I should say, expecting much from the essays except a bit of rage bait. 1
…a knowledge of the proper rules of calculation is not the same thing as exercise in the everyday practical calculations of the trader, and in his turnover calculations Marx became confused, with the result that, apart from being incomplete, they contain many errors and contradictions.
To pair the founding fathers with Marx is amusing and the choice of Engels to interrupt the body of the text to make a snide remark perhaps inspires the envy of editors everywhere. The things that are said by the way are so often a direct route to the intended meaning.
The greatest men are apt to go wrong and lose their way, even on the best roads.
To close with Bayle, in search of an enlightened approach, could be considered fitting. I consider it lazy. It is probably also lazy to note that this extract and its placement should be felt to cast some doubt about the sincerity of my earlier observations and selections. But mostly I just liked it and felt that it captured the spirit of, if not Bayle’s entire dictionary, at least Popkin’s selections from it.
- See ‘contemporary resonance’. [↩]
settling
5 September 2025, around 10.16.
…our reason is only suitable for making everything perplexing and for raising doubts about everything. No sooner has it built something than it provides the means for destroying it. Reason is a veritable Penelope, unraveling during the night what she had been weaving during the day.
According to the weather report, today is supposed to be the last warm day before the autumnal weather begins in earnest, but the air was nearly cold when I took the dog out for her morning walk, and it rained a bit, although the forecast only called for rain and thunderstorms this weekend, not today. The weather, too, is ready for the weekend.
oneirocrite
6 September 2025, around 11.40.
Zareh Vorpouni’s novel The Candidate (meant in the academic rather than the political sense) is a somewhat messy book. Set in the Armenian refugee community in Paris in, perhaps, the 1920s (it could be somewhat later), it outlines the fallout of what the US government was, until quite recently, content to call ‘the unfortunate events of 1915’. 1 It is tempting to take the use of the word ‘fallout’ here for the lazy shorthand that it to often is (‘the fallout of a relationship gone sour’), but the main characters of Vorpouni’s story – Minas, Vahakn, Apkar – do seem like particles flung through space by a cataclysm beyond their control or ken, who are driven to act by their inner brokenness, rather than essential character. It is an unpleasant book, about people who have, in general, been made unpleasant by chance and are trying, fairly unsuccessfully, to cope with that fact.
This would be (and has been) sufficient material for a novel, but Vorpouni goes a step further and attempts to add another layer of artifice, as Minas Yerazian, the focal point of the novel (although not, I think, the main character), is a poet, and his rather flat observations on the difficulties of choosing the right word, of addressing a letter in the right way, punctuate and attempt to twist the narrative into something cleverer and weaker than it could be. Interestingly, the introduction and afterword, as they advocate for the depth and meaning of the book, never mention that the root of Yerazian’s name, yeraz– (երազ), means ‘dream’; this sort of blindness (or willful refusal of the obvious) sits uneasily in a narrative warped by dreams and nightmares (explicit and implicit). Note that I do not count myself exempt from this willfulness.
I am not speaking clearly. I did not like the book, because it focused too much on the erotic/death nexus and is contemptuous of its female characters, who are all sexual predators (which makes sense as a relic of the sexual assault of one of the main characters, but is, well, unpleasant) or pewling baggages (or both). The book tries to accommodate these dogmatisms through structural acrobatics (letters, shifting timelines, shifting points of view), but the narratorial hangups (one hesitates, perhaps unwisely, to identify them too much with the author’s own hangups) provide their own structural illogic. A different reader would find it a powerful and evocative reading experience. I am but an indifferent reader, however, so I did not. 2
- Acknowledging genocide is difficult, you see, if there are political stakes for doing so. [↩]
- Reading Sinan Antoon’s Collateral Damage at the same time, which covers some of the same ground (in a different context), certainly did not increase my sympathy for The Candidate. [↩]
momentous
7 September 2025, around 16.07.
Waiting for the dog to finish her dinner and listening to the sound of her eating, and then to the click of her claws as she wanders toward the back of the apartment in search of praise or reassurance or perhaps another round of dinner. The dishwasher needs to be emptied, and although it is Sunday, I am doing a bit of work that I was too tired to do on Friday. There are a few chores to be done around the house; these are small tasks, mostly, and ones that I have put off for a while (much like I have put off reading the stacks of books that I would like to read and that grow ever-larger with each trip to the bookstore or library). I think about the phrase ‘vulgar economist’ and the tender, affectionate contempt with which Marx writes of ‘our Adam’, who is not old Adam, but rather Adam Smith, a different vector of (economic and logical) sin. It is distraction and being at once, and suffices.
no dog unturned
8 September 2025, around 14.11.
If a dog differs from a stone, it is not because the dog is composed of a body and a soul, and the stone of a body only. It is solely because the dog is composed of parts so put together that they make a machine, which the arrangement of the parts of a stone do not. This is Descartes’ view.
haphazard
9 September 2025, around 15.17.
A while ago I was reading a book that, for reasons unclear, kept trying to link everything to Peter Pan, which, if one is not a child (and even if one is), is a rather creepy text, with rather creepy details. A passage that has stuck with me and was unearthed from the further reaches of my memory by this book I cannot, unfortunately, identify: ‘He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was a grown-up, he gnashed the little pearls at her.’ The combination of ‘ooze’, ‘entrancing’, ‘first teeth’, and ‘gnash’ is eldritch and unsettling and elicits, at least from me, a low buzz of anxiety and nausea. Curiously, any time I happen to look at the news, I find myself thinking: ‘so many foolish lost boys, gnashing at the teats of the nanny state with their vicious milk teeth.’
to hastening ILL(s) a prey
10 September 2025, around 17.15.
One of the nice things about David Braund’s Greek Religion and Cults in the Black Sea Region: Goddesses in the Bosporan Kingdom from the Archaic Period to the Byzantine Era is that it mentioned Ellis H. Minns’s Scythians and Greeks: A Survey of Ancient History and Archaeology on the North Coast of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus (Cambridge UP, 1913), which I accordingly requested as an inter-library loan (ILL). It just arrived today. You will forgive me, I am sure, for disappearing for a while to explore the Scythian Square and the other treasures this thick volume contains.
planavorel
11 September 2025, around 17.12.
It might have happened. I might have reached the stage of having too many reading projects. I say this because, as I worked through my morning books before starting the work day, nothing seemed like it was part of or in service of anything. While I was mildly amused by some of the books, a fat biography of Spinoza or a slim history of Hapsburgs looked more appealing than Bayle and the Federalists; even Marx was at his most tedious, with department I and department II and hardly any imprecations against Adam Smith and Ricardo to be found (poor old Say hasn’t shown up for pages). Then, sitting back, I recalled that I was (am) reading selections of Bayle for context on his entry on Spinoza; that the Federalists are part of a broader look at Enlightenment thought (as the carbohydrate layer of a triple-decker philosophical sandwich, but one cannot blame Madison for being starchy); and that Marx, well, does sometimes like to pretend an acquaintance with mathematics, when he is better at polemics. 1 Having managed to enmesh myself in the tangle of my projects once again, I read on with equanimity, if not quite with pleasure.
- The current volume of history is background information to further background information on the Napoleon wars that I wanted to read before finally getting back on track with Tolstoy (I have been planning to read his works chronologically, which I might have mentioned, but I have reached War and Peace (or would have reached it, probably more than a year ago) and wanted more background, even if it is a historical novel and even if Tolstoy is not particularly bothered by questions of historical accuracy) as well as for Marx, but I wanted to know more about the Holy Roman Empire and so had to read a book about that first. [↩]
fraxinus
12 September 2025, around 12.26.
I have noticed a passage in Euripides in which Jupiter is invoked without actually knowing what he is. It is admitted that he governs all things justly by occult methods, but he is found extremely difficult to know, and one cannot tell if he is the necessity of nature or human intelligence. What a faith! A Spinozist would just about agree to this.
airs, waters, places
13 September 2025, around 17.28.
Crossed the river into a nearby state to receive the usual seasonal vaccinations, because the vacillations of the local authorities, who must balance the ires of urban and rural, held little hope of remediation. Spent the afternoon reading a book on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy that provides a fairly clear explanation (perhaps too clear) of neo-Galenic medical thought, but which cites classical sources (e.g., Galen and Hippocrates) based on the dates of modern editions rather than standard abbreviated names or other conventional terms. This strikes me as odd, because I do not find ‘Hippocrates 1995’ to be a particularly helpful reference, especially if it does not appear in the reference list. 1 The publisher does not have an errata slip for the volume, and it seems a stupid thing to send an email about, as it is unlikely, given book prices and inter-library loan limits, that I will try to find the book in question. Given that the reference will remain intangible, I am content, for the moment, to let it be imaginary as well.
- Giving the benefit of the doubt (and applying a smattering of common sense), it is probably a typo for ‘Hippocrates 1990’, but that, too, obscures more than it illuminates. [↩]
briars and brambles
14 September 2025, around 17.17.
No equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than that of the farmer. Not only his labouring servants, but his labouring cattle, are productive labourers. In agriculture, too, Nature labours along with man; and though her labour costs no expense, its produce has its value, as well as that of the most expensive workmen. The most important operations of agriculture seem intended, not so much to increase, though they do that too, as to direct the fertility of Nature towards the production of the plants most profitable to man. A field overgrown with briars and brambles, may frequently produce as great a quantity of vegetables as the best cultivated vineyard or corn field. Planting and tillage frequently regulate more than they animate the active fertility of Nature; and after all their labour, a great part of the work always remains to be done by her. The labourers and labouring cattle, therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner’s profits, but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer, and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of Nature, the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller, according to the supposed extent of those powers, or, in other words, according to the supposed natural or improved fertility of the land. It is the work of Nature which remains, after deducting or compensating every thing which can be regarded as the work of man.
- I was going to point out my amusement with this passage from Marx, except it turned out to be a passage from Adam Smith, which I suppose makes it, from my vantage, even more amusing. Our dear Adam and Karl always do seem to be at cross purposes, making different assumptions about the same things. [↩]
paltry
15 September 2025, around 10.00.
But I forbear to dwell any longer on a matter which has hitherto worn too loose a garb to admit even of an accurate inspection of its real shape or tendency.
Not quite the first frost, although there was a fine layer of mist on all the parked cars when I took the dog out this morning. She sniffed everything amicably and tried to hide from the roving trash trucks; in short, all is apparently normal in the details of the day. I try to check off items on my to-do list: cleaning a shelf and dusting books, reorganizing the books by my desk to reflect (hopefully) the books I am reading and the books I am planning to read in the immediate future. Trying to clear out the library books, either by reading them or deciding not to read them. Have, in general, decided to read them, which feels a bit unusual, because I am usually content to skim or find out that the book was not what I wanted after all. Moving slowly and deliberately. It feels a bit like I am crashing ponderously through the undergrowth of being, a bit like the dog as she barges along towards the nearest fern, anxious to root out the tiniest fragment of information, the value of which is opaque to the bystander but immeasurable to her.
proceedings
16 September 2025, around 14.53.
Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other adds a fresh embarrassment. The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity, therefore, requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriate to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen that however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be considered, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. And this unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the objects defined. When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.
You taught me language, and my profit on ’t / Is I know how to curse.
aloft
17 September 2025, around 10.01.
The weather is unsettled lately, like a fussy jobseeker before an important interview, trying on one piece of standard dress after another, autumn first, then summer again, then autumn, then back to summer. Taking the dog out in the morning yesterday, the air was balmy, nearly as warm as the high from the day before. One doesn’t quite know what to make of it – stay hydrated, I suppose, and don’t push too hard. I gulp down hot tea in the hopes that it will soothe my resurgent allergies, but it just makes me feel prickly and over-warm. The light this morning, though, promised that the seasons are in fact changing, that the weather might nearly be ready to explore this exciting new opportunity, while remaining flexible as to the start date.
the more fool
18 September 2025, around 16.09.
Those who consider everything in relation to its usefulness for them, and who measure happiness by the possession of the goods of fortune, should remember that they are grasping fragile and unstable goods that are often destructive for those who own them, and that by the movement of one moment their entire happiness and they themselves can be completely overturned.
textilist
19 September 2025, around 7.20.
If you are studying a foreign language, I highly recommend keeping a diary. You might make grammar or spelling mistakes, but try not to worry too much about that and just enjoy writing as much as possible. You might find that you’re able to write freely about things that you might feel too embarrassed to write about in your mother tongue. As you do this every day, your sentences cumulatively begin to weave a new self, rather like a textile. To learn a foreign language is to create a new self, to discover a self that is unknown to you.
asynchronous
20 September 2025, around 18.46.
Two of the my holds at the library had vanished from the holds shelf, although they were supposed to be there until Tuesday. I asked after them, and the library staff was very apologetic and checked the remaining hold shelves and the basement and the secret ‘back room’ for holds, but the small books – one on Jung and one on probability – were nowhere to be found. What are the chances?
a minor delight
21 September 2025, around 14.17.
Between enthusiasm and scientific criticism one could find countless shades of opinion if one followed the history of ornithology. But this is not our subject. Let us note in passing, however, that we have here a controversy over values that often deforms the facts on both sides. And who knows if this fall, not of the eagle, but of the eagle’s nest, does not furnish the author with the minor delight of being disrespectful.
intentional
22 September 2025, around 13.12.
I could have sworn that I had picked up a copy of the old Oxford World Classics hardcover of the complete plays of Christopher Marlowe, one with a nice dust jacket, to replace the an old Everyman’s edition in limp snot-green cloth with creaky hinges. I remember feeling pleased that I had found it in a local bookstore, rather than buying it online. The image of the book was so clear in my mind that I could picture two possible places where I would have set it, for a moment, as a holding spot so I would remember to read it sooner rather than later. Except that I could not find it anywhere at all, and the book I imagined had a teal dust jacket with a Quixotic cavalier, but in all the booksellers’ images, the jacket is clear emerald green. A sad example of mistaking the intention for the deed. 1
- What a peculiar phrase that is. [↩]
hardest hue
23 September 2025, around 14.11.
And it seems like there should be something to write, just like it seems there should be leaves to rake in the yard, but it is not quite time for that; the leaves remain, for the moment, on the trees, and the words to written remain inchoate, unthought.
fulminations of the divine
24 September 2025, around 13.56.
Ainsi Dieu seul est l’unité primitive ou la substance simple originaire, dont toutes les Monades créées ou dérivatives sont des productions, et naissent, pour ainsi dire, par des fulgurations continuelles de la Divinité de moment en moment, bornées par la réceptivité de la créature à laquelle il est essentiel d’être limitée.
Thus God alone is [the primitive simple substance or monad] the primitive unity, or original simple substance, which produces all created or derivative monads, which are born, so to speak, by continual fulgurations of the divinity from moment to moment, limited by the receptivity of their created nature, the essence of which is to be limited.
One of the pleasures of misreading is a perpetual state of bemusement, of being wonderstruck by intuitive flashes of nonsense. So, yes, I misread ‘fulgurations’ as ‘fulminations’. And, yes, it makes sense that the divine would be vituperatively critical, and also that the essence of fulmination is to be limited.
stymied
25 September 2025, around 17.22.
Watching some professionals deal with several overgrown and unhealthy trees, handling unexpected hornets without qualm, one is drawn to reflect on one’s own skills and usefulness in the world. As I edged my way through several thousand words of someone else’s reflections on the state of (one small aspect of) the world – taking out commas, putting them in elsewhere, breaking up sentences that had accumulated more than their fair share of colons and semicolons – I was tempted to make some rather doomy reflections on the usefulness of such work. But it is useful – so long as one remembers to look up from the paper and consider the forest, the trees, the branches pruned, and the angry squirrel, chittering its confusion about the way the world changes.
in the garden
26 September 2025, around 14.47.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Wandering in the garden area, one sees that one’s haphazard approach to irrigation has given the Oregon grape a case of spotted mildew that should be trimmed back and reconsidered, probably around the same time one moves the pots to overwinter the plants. Around the same time, too, that one trims back the geraniums, which have become assertively luxuriant in a not particularly helpful or decorative fashion. One considers the ponderous and already overfull compost bin, which hasn’t been collected since the last holiday season, and one considers that, perhaps, another day’s delay wouldn’t do much harm.
- Cf. Paradise Lost, passim, but, e.g., Book III, 217ff., which rather suggests that angels might not be much to write home about, either, in terms of governance. [↩]
well-heeled
27 September 2025, around 14.09.
Took the dog to the dog park this morning for the first time in a while. Went early because the first rule of taking the dog to the dog park successfully is taking her there when it is unlikely that other dogs will be present. (The purpose of the dog park, for this dog, is to sniff and run, not necessarily in that order.) When we arrived, though, there was a loose blue heeler slinking along the chainlink boundaries of the park, looking a little feral and joyless. There was no other human present, although a security guard had just gone into the nearby building. The lost dog was wearing a fairly nice looking harness and did not look undernourished, but it was not a security dog; it observed us from the safety of the fence, occasionally slinking along the perimeter to get a better look.
The plan for the morning – take the dog to the park, let her off leash to run around, perhaps play fetch for three minutes until we were both bored – was now a non-starter. I do not, generally, recalibrate the trajectory of my activities with any great nimbleness, and I could practically hear the seconds clunk away as the dog watched the heeler and the heeler watched the dog and I tried to watch them both at the same time, along with the fifty or so yards between them. I urged the dog away to sniff, and she did, and we moved slowly to the edge of the park. The lost heeler kept an eye on us, but followed the fence to the other end of the park, well away from the entrance. I urged to the dog out of the park and decided to take her to the other dog park a few streets away.
At the second dog park, another human–dog dyad were already wandering the field. So we stayed near the entrance to see if they would leave, which they showed no disposition to do. I turned around to check the entrance – and there was the lost heeler, which had followed us across a fairly busy street (at, admittedly, a not particularly busy time of day) to the second park. I told the dog to sit, and the dog sat – and so did the heeler. When I checked the heeler for tags or some sort of identification (regrettably absent), the dog of course took the opportunity to suggest that playing would be a suitable way of getting acquainted. We managed to disentangle ourselves, though, and head back to the first dog park, heeler following at a fairly respectful distance. 1
I let the dog head home, and the heeler went back to the park. Later that morning, it was playing with a larger group of dogs. It was gone by the time I passed by again on my way to the library.
- It was too early to call animal control, and as the lost dog posed no danger to anyone but itself, it seemed unkind to call the non-emergency police line. [↩]
middling sort
28 September 2025, around 13.38.
I have been told that several people claim, that I have not understood Spinoza’s theory at all. I have heard this from several quarters, but nobody has been able to tell me what those who make this judgment base it on. Thus, I cannot answer them precisely, or examine if I ought to give in to their arguments since they are unknown to me. I can only justify myself in a general way: and I think that I can say that, if I did not understand the proposition I undertook to refute, it is not my fault. […] No doubt, it would have happened more than once that I did not understand what he intended; and it is improbable that he completely understood himself and could make all the consequences of his hypothesis intelligible in detail.
I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment. […] I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower.
roaring
29 September 2025, around 16.06.
The other day while reading my daily quota of Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, I encountered the entry on Rorarius, and I spent a few minutes rolling that name around, batting it to and fro, and making nonsense of it. The main draw of the entry, I should mention, is the discussion of whether animals have souls and, if so, what sort of soul they might have. Frankly, I did not think much of it, because I am reading Bayle for Spinoza, and because the question of souls is, well, animated rather than illuminating. I expected to forget Rorarius immediately, except for the amusement I felt at his name, and sketchy outlines of the translator’s selection. Then he showed up – indeed, Bayle’s entry on Rorarius showed up – in Leibniz’s Monadology, and now I must reshuffle my mental index cards and sort them afresh and reconsider whether I in fact wish to reconsider at greater length and with greater attention the question of whether animals in fact could possibly have souls. A vexed question.
Adversaria (30)
30 September 2025, around 4.02.
‘Some people were in the park pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 10%)
‘I noted all my findings on index cards. I valued the cards as signifiers of serious scholarship, and boosted my spirits with several packs’ —Michelle de Kretser (Theory & Practice,, p. 33)
‘We always need both freedom and order. We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coordination’ —E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 69)
‘It was the room in the house where he spent most time and it was furnished with the debris of past attitudes. Those attitudes were an unresolvable argument in which he was a very tired chairman’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 9%)
‘She does not like the exclusion of opposition, the idea of the absolute, the positive distinction between mind and matter; she prefers the notions of complementarity, or circulation, influx, of action at a distance, of a model, and the idea of order as an organic totality’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 32)
‘Just as history is not made by the brute facts but by the natural dynamism immanent in them which the historian must seek to grasp by intuition, so the true object of painting does not reside in the concrete representation of the visible but in the apprehension of the metamorphoses of being’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 344)
‘I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.And what is the cost of a reorientation? We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear’ —E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 169)
‘He was a good middleweight before he became two middleweights. But he was never as good as they told him he was. That’s why his brains are omelette. But he’s a good man’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 82%)
‘History is such an interested business that it is tempting to think it has no truth at all’ —Paul Hamilton (‘Byron, Clare, and Poetic Historiography’ in Rethinking British Romantic History, p. 225)
‘The wise man had to be useful to the world and take everyday realities as the starting-point of his reflections, not walk about with his head in the clouds’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 440)