Winter Spring

A script of trees before the hill
Spells cold, with laden serifs; all the walls
Are battlemented still;
But winter spring is winnowing the air
Of chill, and crawls
Wet-sparkling on the gutters;
Everywhere
Walls wince, and there's the steal of waters.

Now all this proud royaume
Is Veniced. Through the drift's mined dome
One sees the rowdy rusted grass,
And we're amazed as windows stricken bright.
This too-soon spring will pass
Perhaps tonight,
And doubtless it is dangerous to love
This somersault of seasons;
But I am weary of
The winter way of loving things for reasons.

- Richard Wilbur

(Via Minz. But did we ever love things for reasons?)

Pt 2

This is the best expression of different perspectives I've heard:

Imagine if you were an oyster. The public would see you as an infrangible nut, a kind of sea-raid shelter, but you would feel yourself all mother-of-pearly inwardness and vulnerability.

From an incredible Paris Review interview with Seamus Heaney, the kind of interview that makes you not just want to read the author's works (that's not so unusual), but to read other poems, all poems; to pay attention to poems, to hear the joy and the exhilaration and the seriousness and the sense of big voltage under the words.

In memoriam Seamus Heaney

The Singer's House

When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
the frosty echo of saltminers' picks.
I imagined it, chambered and glinting,
a township built of light.

What do we say any more
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept,

and amicable weathers
that bring up the grain of things,
their tang of season and store,
are all the packing we'll get.

So I say to myself Gweebarra
and its music hits off the place
like water hitting off granite.
I see the glittering sound

framed in your windows,
knives and forks set on oilcloth,
and the seals' heads, suddenly outlined,
scanning everything.

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

Litany in which certain things are crossed out

(Clever and poignant and true, but far too hard to format for the internet.)

Tiny Blast

Looking for a new poet/poem I found this:

And now that you're here be brave.
Be everyway alive.

- from Peter Gizzi, "Tiny Blast"

Learned Hand's vision of heaven

Ronald Dworkin quoting Gerald Gunther's biography of Learned Hand in his (Dworkin's) introduction/summary of "Justice for Hedgehogs":

[H]e would say that in the morning there would be a baseball game, with the score 4-1 in favor of the opposing team in the bottom of the ninth. Hand's team then loads the bases, and it is Hand's turn at bat; he promptly hits a home run, clearing the bases and winning the game. In the afternoon, there is a football game between the evenly matched teams, tied in a scoreless match. With a minute left to play, Hand catches a punt, weaves his way down the sidelines, and scores the winning touchdown. The highlight of the day is an evening banquet, with civilization's greatest minds - Socrates, Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire - among the guests. The designated speaker for the evening is Voltaire. After a few words from him, the audience shouts, "Shut up Voltaire, and sit down. WE WANT HAND!"

Neighbourly books

Interviewer:  How do you organize your library?

Calasso:  A proper answer would imply writing an autobiography. It reminds me of a delightful work by a seventeenth-century French scholar, Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque. For me there are several criteria—practical, aesthetic, capricious. The essential thing is to obey what Aby Warburg called the “law of the good neighbor.” When looking for a book, you may discover that you were in fact looking for the book next to it. It’s the principle on which the marvelous Warburg Library in London is based. And of course the positions of books change in the course of time. They become like a geologic system of layers. In my case, alas, the books are in different places—around twenty thousand in the basement of the publishing house, and more yet in another apartment.

From the Paris Review interview with Roberto Calasso. I want to go to the Warburg Library.

Why functionalist arguments are not historical arguments

It is a fact that in Scotland landed property acquired a new value by the development of English industry. This industry opened up new outlets for wool. In order to produce wool on a large scale, arable land had to be transformed into pasturage. To effect this transformation, the estates had to be concentrated. To concentrate the estates, small holdings had first to be abolished, thousands of tenants had to be driven from their native soil and a few shepherds in charge of millions of sheep to be installed in their place. Thus, by successive transformations, landed property in Scotland has resulted in the driving out of men by sheep. Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential history.

- Marx, "Poverty of Philosophy"

the cost of hats

“Diminish the cost of production of hats, and their price will ultimately fall to their own new natural price, although the demand should be doubled, trebled, or quadrupled. Diminish the cost of subsistence of men, by diminishing the natural price of food and clothing, by which life is sustained, and wages will ultimately fall, notwithstanding the demand for labourers may very greatly increase.” (Ricardo, Vol. II, p. 253)

Doubtless, Ricardo’s language is as cynical as can be. To put the cost of manufacture of hats and the cost of maintenance of men on the same plane is to turn men into hats. But do not make an outcry at the cynicism of it. The cynicism is in the facts and not in the words which express the facts.

- Marx, "Poverty of Philosophy"

the twopence coloured

Reposting from Minz, for easier retrieval:

Oddly it might seem, in view of my romantic disposition, I was beginning to prefer Aristotle to Plato. Which is perhaps not so odd after all. It was Shelley, the most Platonising of our poets, who wrote:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Whereas people like myself must always prefer the twopence coloured to even the pound plain. For all his famous dryness, Aristotle, being among other things a zoologist, never let transcendental radiance destroy the shapes of the creatures or impose a white-out on everything.

- From the Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice.

Automatons, trees

Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery – by automatons in human form – it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

- J. S. Mill, On Liberty

Colin McGinn on Shakespeare

From a slightly terrible interview by 3:AM, but this was funny:

3:AM: Can you say something about how studying Shakespeare has impacted on your philosophical outlook? Are there positions you argue now that you doubt you would have argued had you not read Shakespeare?

McGinn: Shakespeare has had no impact on my philosophical life, except to make it seem less worthwhile.

Random thoughts on the marathon and after

1. The courage of the spectators and the runners who ran to the aid of those injured - who tied tourniquets and carried them out to the ambulance - who ran on to give blood - and of the first responders and the police, the doctors and the nurses. Thank you.

2. Do the injured have health insurance? How will they pay for all their medical bills and all they'll need after? Will the One Fund help with things like prosthetics and counselling and retrofitting their homes? The six-year-old will need different prosthetics as she grows up. (My god six! How will her parents explain it to her? And tell her of her brother's death?) Would it be better to donate to the Fund directly or buy a t-shirt?

3. I didn't get the sense - from my fb feed anyway - that the city shut down from fear, but rather to give the police a free hand in finding and capturing the suspect, to bring things to an end that day. (Admittedly my fb feed is full of graduate students. In my case, the only difference was that I checked twitter rather more frequently throughout the day.)

4. Was it worth the loss of a day's profit? Should we be counting in those terms? It's hard to escape that kind of cost-benefit analysis. And hard to escape utilitarianism altogether, when thinking about public policy.

5. Should the suspect be treated as an enemy combatant? As if he had put himself in a state of nature - a state of war - against, well, the state.

6. My god the poverty of political theory to think about these things.

7. He  lived here longer than he had in Krygyzstan (or wherever); he spent most of his school years here; he was a naturalized citizen. Claim him as an American. I don't mean that it's America's fault, or anything like that - I think that whether or not it was his brother's fault it was his own doing too - the things you learn in moral theory 101; how anemic they are - but claim him as an American. And that means: claim him as a Bostonian, too. (I suppose: Cantabrigian?)

8. It probably took someone living here to think of bombing the Boston marathon. That is a betrayal.

9. Group psychology can be a little - odd, I suppose. (a) It can be induced through the media. (In my case, anyway.) (b) The memorials, the candlelight vigils, the wishes on twitter, a moment's silence before the London marathon, the Yankees playing Sweet Caroline, people singing the national anthem at the Bruins game - does it help the victims and their families? Perhaps it does to know that the city, and the world, too, grieves for them and honours them. But more than that it seems to be about the participants themselves - the participants in these rituals? I mean - our need not just to grieve for the victims, but to grieve for them collectively, and to grieve for people we only knew as fellow members of this city (or even: people who happened to be in this city at the time). This goes beyond normal horror at the bombing, and sympathy for the victims. The city grieves, the Globe says. The city is beginning to heal. Where does this need come from? Does it have to do with the nature of the attack? Or just human nature? Goodness knows I'm not immune to it - witness this post I guess - but it's - interesting? (Academia screws up your normal instincts, I suppose is what I'm saying.)

10. I am so, so sorry for the injured.

my god, boston

I guess it is my city, after all.

Istvan Hont

There will be others who will talk about his scholarship and his unrelenting intelligence; he knew everything, had read everything, was willing to think deeply and seriously about everything he read and wrote about. So this will be a far more self-centred tribute.

He was a good teacher. He tried to teach by example, to show us how it was done. What it meant to read these texts and excavate the layers of meanings in them, with care and attention and humility, and to think about what it might mean for us today. Because history was here with us, could show us what we had forgotten in our headlong rush towards a future. Writing papers under his supervision taught me more about research than these two years of classes and papers have. I still read texts with his lessons in mind, trying to read them - not as he would, but as close as I can get to that. I was ecstatic when he thought an idea was not terrible; I saved up every vaguely approving comment he gave me.

And he was kind to me, far beyond what I deserved. I arrived in Cambridge with no idea what I was doing there and only a vague memory of political philosophy classes yay many years ago. He was - terrifying, and awkward, and immensely generous with his time and knowledge and patience. I remember his tiny broom-closet of an office; later I realized there was a larger room annexed to it, completely filled with books. I remember him trying to beat away a bird (or perhaps this is embellished in my mind). I remember his Adam Smith seminar - still the most intimidating and instructive seminar I have taken - and his lectures. Later, when we were a little more used to one another, he talked to me a little about the English, mocked them a little, gently. We were both foreigners in this land and among these people that fascinated us. I wouldn't be, couldn't be, here without his help. I wish I had kept in touch more. I meant to write, when I had something to write about, to show him what I had done. I hadn't written to him in over a year, and I hadn't known him in his personal life, and so I don't feel I have a right to grief, but I do feel strangely bereft. I hope he died as Hume did, in good cheer towards the end, clear in his mind and strong in his own, irreligious faith. Rest in peace.

Inside the dream

Then, he busied himself with his dream. I'm at the center of the world, he thought. And, looking out at the skyscrapers, he sat and waited for the sensations of enthusiasm, of emotion, of fulfillment, of happiness. It became clear that the wait, however, was just a wait, nothing more. A straightforward wait, with no surprises. The more he looked at the skyscrapers in search of a certain kind of intensity, the clearer it became that he wasn't going to feel any special sensation whatsoever. Everything in his life was still the same, nothing was happening that might seem different or intense. He found himself inside his own dream, and at the same time the dream was real. But that was all. 

- Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

Via even*cleveland.

Things to be grateful for #n

I could have been a stair racer.

Still, the stair racers don’t experience architecture so much as stairwells. I assumed their races are characterized by a mind-numbing sameness, but Walsham assured me I was wrong. “Some stairwells turn to the left,” she said. “Some turn to the right. Sometimes the stairs are shallow, sometimes they’re steep. And the number of floors always varies.”

Cards, chunks

And the future of the book:

Around that time, Holliday’s company came out with a publishing platform called Citia, which breaks up a book into modules, pared down, CliffsNotes-style, “without so many illustrative examples,” she said. Citia has two book-chunk collections on the market now—“What Technology Wants” and “Predictably Irrational”—with a few more in the works. Speaking on the panel, Holliday threw up her hands, wishing to dispel “the myth that a book is a straight line, or a string of pages,” as publishers see it. “Nonfiction is a constellation of ideas that you have to string into a straight line,” she said. Holliday envisions a Pinterest-type board, where readers could post their favorite cards. “They might read pieces of hundreds of thousands of books, and not one whole book,” she said. “Is that so bad?”

Good lord. And, yes.

Pratchett as ethical advice

Eskarina Smith to Tiffany: "I said you weren't born with a talent for witchcraft: it didn't come easily; you worked hard at it because you wanted it. You forced the world to give it to you, no matter the price, and the price is and will always be high."
- From I Shall Wear Midnight

States, parsons, gold and silver armies

A couple of things on tangential comments by Daniel Dennett in his Edge interview:

(1) On "systematic hypocrisy". He talked about a project he and Linda LaScola did, interviewing pastors who didn't believe or no longer believed in what their parishioners believed, but still had churches. How it could happen: pastors don't want to shake the beliefs of their parishioners. So they employ a kind of "doubletalk" in their sermons, so that those parishioners who believe in the literal truth of the Bible can hear something in the sermon for them, and those who think that the Bible should be taken more metaphorically or symbolically (reminds me of Pratchett here and things which are symbolic, full stop) can hear something for them. And eventually the pastor loses track of what it means to tell the truth, and/or comes to think that are many different kinds of truth, and lapses into a lazy relativism, the kind Dennnett thinks was sanctioned by post-modernism. This "systematic hypocrisy" could have started in the seminary, where students learned that there was what you could talk about in the seminary, and what you could say from the pulpit, and those were different things. And it's this hypocrisy that's "the structural problem in religion today". 

It reminds me of the government. I suppose any large organization has some kind of doubletalk, to some extent; stuff you only say behind closed doors, and stuff you say to the public. It's entirely understandable. As is the likely reaction - the kind of lazy relativism Dennett talks about, which could easily accompany a lazy cynicism (lazy in the sense that cynicism is called the wisdom of the mediocre), or a growing belief in one's own propaganda. Either way, it's hard to remain in two minds, or hard to live with cognitive dissonance, depending on your preferred vocabulary. 

(2) Dennett goes on to give a hypothetical example of the problem:

Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here's two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I'll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They're all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it's as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.

Which army do you want on the front lines? It's very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you're saying is we'll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It's extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’—or philosophers’—sort of thinking, since it might lead to them to think: am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they're doing the right thing? What if I'm clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It's a dilemma that I don't know what to do about, although I think we should confront it at least.

This seems to me to be the space in which political theory operates. More specifically, the space between his two extremes is the space of liberal political theory of some kind - any theory that acknowledges a plurality of opinions and interests and beliefs and looks for some kind of public accommodation for them (some kind of public sphere, public reason, institutional structures that can accommodate a pluralistic political culture, etc). We do confront this problem, every day (well quite frequently anyway), in our public lives, though arguably we might not be confronting it very well (look at the arguments over guns here).

Elsewhere in the interview Dennett mentions Plato's analogy between the city and the soul. Plato also thought that just about everyone should be indoctrinated with certain myths designed to explain and reconcile them to their position in the social and political structure and corresponding duties. I suppose most people and most nations operate on myths of some kind, implicit or explicit, but I agree with Dennett here - the idea that we should indoctrinate people against thinking is repulsive, as is the arrogance behind the idea (in the thought that only some people are capable of thinking clearly and still acting in socially good ways).

Lines for Winter

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

- Mark Strand

One of those moments

Michael Ignatieff on Isaiah Berlin's first serious romantic encounter: "he had reached one of those moments where cleverness and a way with words was not enough. As he ruefully confessed to a friend, he was no longer 'the observer and Figaro of situations' but 'an active agent', forced at last to declare himself." (From Ignatieff's Life of Berlin)

Happy New Year!

Something like a sky

Something in us has suddenly cleared.
Like a sky.
Like a still-life, alive.
Behind us, our footsteps and voices.
Beyond the walls, a wide silence.
The air is white and open, ready for snow.

- Robin Fulton