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