Trade-offs

I just broke my phone contract and switched to a cheaper, no-contract plan on a different provider, because the savings over a year will cover the plastic flip phone (flip phones! remember when?) I had to buy from Walmart, the early termination fee, the acquisition of a smartphone for the budget-minded, and have a little left over for dinners out. Which is the whole point, really. It's only now, with both of us here, that I'm thinking about our finances, and how hard it is to live within our means, which at the moment are slender. It's not the big purchases which are hard to avoid, though I haven't quite avoided them; it's trying the new Indian place down the road, sharing a bottle of wine with dinner, buying a rug or a picture for the apartment, a coffee to see me through this essay, strawberries and bread and flowers from the farmers' market. It's the laptops and the coats and the boots which are a little more expensive, perhaps, but good value for money, good quality. All the small extravagances of grown-up life that you don't really think about until you think about giving them up.

What indeed

From a footnote in the Social Contract:

The name Rome, which presumably comes from Romulus, is Greek, and means force. The name Numa is also Greek, and means law. What is the likelihood that the first two kings of that town would have borne in advance names so clearly related to what they did? 

On examples

I love the Chicago ARTFL project. It gives you searchable digital copies of old French texts (although it doesn't seem to have them in printable format, which is a pity) and contemporary dictionary definitions and examples of usage for any word in the texts. For example, looking up "association" in the 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Academie Francaise gives you the following cheery example: "leur association est rompue, est finie."

Rousseau on his critics

by a misfortune that keeps pursuing my adversaries, they are mistaken even about facts that prove nothing against me.

- In his last reply to his critics on the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

On learning/on losing time

The more [man] knows, the more aware he is of having to acquire knowledge; that is to say that the time he loses only serves to excite him to lose more: only in a very few men of genius does insight into their own ignorance grow as they learn, and they are the only ones for whom study may be good: almost as soon as small minds have learned something, they believe they know everything, and there is no sort of foolishness which this conviction will not make them say or do.

- Rousseau's reply to King Stanislaus's comments (italicized) on his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

This.

I've been reading Maurice Cranston's biography of Rousseau, and this is just perfect. 

Table

I don't particularly like its name, but it's a great-looking table. And functional as it comes: large, long surface to work on, splash of colour, minimal lines, and no drawers and things to get in the way of the legs.