October 2025
impatience with the absolute
1 October 2025, around 10.48.
Were all the translations of a poem into all possible languages to add together their various shades of meaning and, correcting each other by a kind of mutual retouching, to give a more and more faithful image of the poem they translate, they would yet never succeed in rendering the inner meaning of the original. A representation taken from a certain point of view, a translation made with certain symbols, will always remain imperfect in comparison with the object of which a view has been taken, or which the symbols seek to express. But the absolute, which is the object and not its representation, the original and not its translation, is perfect, by being perfectly what it is.
[…] Suppose that I wished to communicate to someone who did not know Greek the extraordinarily simple impression that a passage in Homer makes upon me; I should first give a translation of the lines, I should then comment on my translation, and then develop the commentary; in this way, by piling up explanation on explanation, I might approach nearer and nearer to what I wanted to express; but I should never quite reach it.
datum
8 October 2025, around 9.08.
To recognize creativity in the data of dailiness is no easy task; people continue to do what they understand to be expected of them. But these data test expectations and theories too, shifting them unconsciously to incorporate lived experience. For many today, orthodox interpretations of the world and its workings are baffling because the strategies they provide don’t mesh with what is really happening to us. They don’t explain what seems to be going on, or offer identifying roles that we can accept as suitable to the selves we know. Trying to make a fit between self and role is wearing, expensive of energy that might otherwise be used in the outside world. Meaningless work, contingent connections to others, leave people in a quandary that recalls the confused children who find it so hard to declare a sure identity by saying “I.” […] We see this confusion expressed, I believe, in our tendency to prize sincerity as if it were rare; and to prize it, moreover, without going on to ask what a sincere person is sincere about.
Adversaria (31)
31 October 2025, around 4.16.
‘Ignorance will be the dupe of cunning, and passion the slave of sophistry and declamation.’ —Federalist Papers (No. 58)
‘There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things’ —Gilles Deleuze (Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, p. 2)
‘…the earth is suffering, and we are her symptoms’ —Kat Duff (The Alchemy of Illness, p. 105)
‘If we are steeped in the Apocalypse, it is rather because it inspires ways of living, surviving, and judging in each of us. It is a book for all those who think of themselves as survivors. It is the book of Zombies’ —Gilles Deleuze (Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, p. 37)
‘There is a contagion in example which few men have sufficient force of mind to resist’ —Federalist Papers (No. 61)
‘We get fussy, rigid, and particular about our ways and needs, beg for help while resisting intervention, complain bitterly, and take offense readily, in our wounded vulnerability. The places we cling to, hoarding rather than sharing, are often the places that must give way in the sacrifice: our pocketbooks, privacy, or pride. Doctor’s visits usually take all three’ —Kat Duff (The Alchemy of Illness, p. 139)
‘The schoolmaster’s stress on the root of words had its effect on the literary appreciation of the pupils; they grew fond of etymological puns and quibbles. The university training in logic only increased the appetite for all kinds of wordplay’ —John R. Mulder (The Temple of the Mind, p. 72)
‘The age admired primarily, not originality of ideas, but virtuosity in the manipulation of known materials’ —John R. Mulder (The Temple of the Mind, p. 151)
‘…quitting the dim light of historical research, attaching ourselves purely to the dictates of reason and good sense…’ —Federalist Papers (No. 70)
‘Religious melancholy was a condition in which the human love of God naturally inspired by His beauty had become corrupted. Like other forms of the disease, it manifested itself in a variety of disturbing passions: inordinate fear of divine punishment, anxiety over the decree, and so on. Accordingly, Burton’s most pressing task was to diagnose the causes of such perturbations and seek the means to alleviate them. In effect, this was a reworking for contemporary England of the classical philosophical enterprise to destroy the unnecessary fear generated by superstition’ —Angus Gowland (The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 202)
‘…the terms of Burton’s discussion of the melancholic commonwealth appeared to privilege the eudaimonist concerns found in Greek political philosophy over the goals of fama and gloria more typically found in their Roman counterparts’ —Angus Gowland (The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, pp. 240f.)
‘Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of experience. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response’ —Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 63)
What a strange shelter it is, to be sure! How fragile it seems, this mosaic of individual selves that combine by symbolic gesture and language into a common artifact, a coral reef of social mythology, symbol built out of symbols. But how long it has endured! It is the product of our essential humanity, which can come to fruition only within the structure that it created from our individual identities in order to satisfy our need for connectedness’ —Elizabeth Janeway (Powers of the Weak, p. 27)
‘An individual who is observed to be inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all, is marked at once, by all prudent people, as a speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly. His more friendly neighbors may pity him, but all will decline to connect their fortunes with his; and not a few will seize the opportunity of making their fortunes out of his’ —Federalist Papers (No. 62)