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Reflections on Life

Alan L. T. Paterson

Professor of Mathematics (retired)

E-mail address: apat1erson@gmail.com

Note: for information (including recent papers) in Mathematics and Hegelian/Mathematical philosophy, the reader is referred to my web site:

http://sites.google.com/site/apat1erson/

Overview

That in the end

I may find

Something not sold for a penny

In the slums of Mind.

That I may break

With these hands

The bread of wisdom that grows

In the other lands.

For this, for this

Do I wear

The rags of hunger and climb

The unending stair. [Ascetic, Patrick Kavanagh]

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. [J. G. Hamann]

Few live for the sake of eternity

But if the passing moment makes you anxious

Your lot is terror and your house precarious! [Osip Mandelshtam, 1912, in: Osip Mandelshtam: Selected Poems, trans. James Greene]

Small doubt, small enlightenment; big doubt, big enlightenment. [Zen koan]

... no one is satisfied with something that only appears good for him, but wants something that really is, and has no use here for appearances. [Plato, Republic, 6.505e, trans. H. D. P. Lee]

[the deceptive appearance of the really good] But we have not yet learned to accommodate in our understanding of such figures [e.g. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi] what the ancient seers, Sophocles and the King David chronicler and Shakespeare and Cervantes, knew – that while evil can wear the most civil and sensible and respectably rectitudinous demeanor, good can seem blunderous and uncertain, shockingly wayward, woefully flawed, like one of Graham Greene’s dissolute, shabby, God-haunted saints. [Martin Luther King, Jr. (A Life), Marshall Frady, p.10]

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance. [Japanese Proverb]

[Similar theme] What one fool could understand, another can. [R. P. Feynman]

[On chamber pots and what a person really is] We praise a horse because it is vigorous and skillful ... not for his harness ... Why do we not likewise judge a man by what is his own? He has a great retinue, a beautiful palace, so much influence, so much income: all that is around him, not in him. You don't buy a cat in a bag. If you are bargaining for a horse, you take off the trappings, you see him bare and uncovered. ... Why in judging a man do you judge him all wrapped up in a package? He displays to us only parts that are not at all his own. ... You must judge him by himself, not by his finery. ... As one of the ancients [Seneca] says very comically: ``Do you know why you think him tall? You are counting the height of his heels.'' ... The flatterers of Alexander the Great were getting him to believe he was the son of Jupiter. One day, being wounded and watching the blood flow from his wound, he said: ``Well what do you say to this? Isn't this blood crimson and purely human? It is not the sort that Homer makes to flow from the wounds of the gods.'' ... Hermodorus the poet had composed some verses in honor of Antigonus, in which he called him son of the sun. Antigonus contradicted him, saying: ``The man who empties my chamber pot knows very well that I am nothing of the sort.'' [Michel de Montaigne, Of the inequality that is between us, p.229f. of: The Complete Works, trans. D. M. Frame, Everyman's Library, Vol. 259, 1943]

[Against the culture of glamour] Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them. [Abraham Lincoln]

... the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits ... by TV stupor and by intolerable music. [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]

[Unofficial diseases?] But Greed, Ambition, and Lust really are species of madness, even though they are not numbered among the diseases. [Spinoza, Ethics, IV]

My own firm conviction is that film is an industry and not an art ... [Dmitri Shostakovich in: Testimony, the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related and edited by Solomon Volkov, Harper and Row, 1979, p.149]

P.B.I. [World War 1 British acronym for poor bloody infantry]

... atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. (They made a wasteland and called it peace.) [Tacitus, Annales]

[On relevancy] After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, U.S. Col. Harry Summers remarked to his North Vietnamese counterpart, "You know you never defeated us on the battlefield." After a moment, the North Vietnamese officer replied: "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant." [Andrew Wiest]

[The difference between waging a war and running a country] Yes, we defeated the United States. But now we are plagued by problems. We do not have enough to eat. We are a poor, underdeveloped nation. Waging war is simple, but running a country is very difficult.

[Pham Van Dong (1906 – 2000), Prime Minister of North Vietnam (1955-1976) and of the reunified Vietnam (1976-1987)]

If you're going through hell, keep on going. [Winston Churchill]

A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is not a meditation upon death but upon life. [Spinoza, Ethics, Part 4, Proposition 67]

[Sad thought by the author of Tristes Tropiques] There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like. [Claude Lévi-Strauss, age 100]

[Mathematics is not about making money]

A figure and a stepping stone, not a figure and three obols.

[Pythagorean proverb]

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion. [Winston Churchill]

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. [Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays (1949)]

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!! [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Keep your work and your self-esteem separate. [I. M. Gelfand]

It is wrong to think that the truth is going to sound fantastic and beautiful, like a flute solo. The truth is actually like a thunderbolt. It wakes you up and makes you think twice whether you should stay in the rain or move into the house. [Trungpa Rinpoche]

Our first question about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance? ... Almost always, the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed; the ``specialist'' emerges somewhere - his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back. ... No, my scholarly friends, I bless you for your hunched backs. And for despising, as I do, the ``men of letters'' and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft ... with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuoso-like, demagogical ... [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 366]

I’m nobody! Who are you? [Emily Dickinson]

I tried Prozac and Paxil and Wellbutrin, I studied religions and philosophies...but cheerfulness kept breaking through. [Leonard Cohen]

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. [Martin Luther King, Jr.]

Ego tanquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentie partes; tu autem non sic. (I am like the center of a circle equidistant from all points on the circumference; you, however, are not.) [Said, in a dream of the great Italian mediaeval poet, Dante (1265-1321), by a thoughtful young man in white, after the poet had fallen asleep in tears, ``like a little boy crying from a spanking’’, heartbroken because his beloved Beatrice refused to greet him. (Dante, Vita Nuova, XII, trans. Mark Musa)]

The man of God [the dervish] is a palace in a ruin. [Shams of Tabriz (great Sufi mystic) in: Awakening, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, p.169]

[On huge egos] Just look how big I am!

Jove up there in the sky

... he can't be any bigger. [Ovid, Metamorphoses]

...Oh to be wise

As Respectability that knows the price of all things

And marks God's truth in pounds and pence and farthings. [Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger]

H

Come to the orchard in Spring.

There is light and wine and sweethearts

in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.

If you do come, these do not matter.

[Rumi, trans. Coleman Bark]

On prophets and poets

[On prophets and moral hypocrisy - Joseph Brodsky’s comment on the furious reaction of the Moscow intelligentsia to the publication of the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelshtam (which, among other things, charged them with virtual complicity with the Stalinist regime).] There is something in the consciousness of literati that cannot stand the notion of someone’s moral authority. They resign themselves to the existence of a First Party Secretary or a Führer, as to a necessary evil, but they would eagerly question a prophet. This is so, presumably, because being told that you are a slave is less disheartening news than being told that morally you are a zero. After all, a fallen dog shouldn't be kicked. However, a prophet kicks the fallen dog not to finish it off but to get it back on its feet. The resistance to those kicks, the questioning of a writer’s assertions and charges, come not from the desire for truth but from the intellectual smugness of slavery...

[Excerpts from: Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899-1980) – an obituary, by Joseph Brodsky]

[The agonizing, quiet death of prophecy, with graffiti as the remains]

And the sign said, ``The words of the prophets

Are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls.’’

And whisper'd in the sounds of silence.

[The Sound of Silence, Paul Simon]

The thing about poetry is that once somebody swallows a substitute he will feel poisoned for ever. [Anna Akhmatova]

Once there were the prophets whom we couldn’t shut up, lacerating us with their relentless ``Thus saith the Lord’’; then there were the poets, whose pitiless probings exposed our hollowness, and who didn’t seem to care in the least about hurting our feelings in the process; but now there are the public relations experts with their antidepressant grins, seemingly affirming, in their ``mission statements’’, a saintly ``dedication’’ to our welfare, soothing our worries with cliché’s, sensitive about our ``comfort level’’, assuring us that we are like ``family’’ (pronounced with a long ``ah’’) and easing themselves into the parent role, smilingly trading their placebos for money and tenderly ``nurturing'', for the next time, the growth of our emptiness as if it were a young plant.

Come, my friend, let us turn aside from our agitated grazing in this future-driven world of trickery, material plenty and spiritual vacuity, and feed instead on the astringent, genuine sustenance of the ignored poets.

[On the hatred shown to poets in their lifetime, and their adoration when they are dead] When the dog is dead, rabies are at an end.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. [T. S. Eliot]

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. [William Carlos Williams]

Look around — there’s only one thing of danger for you here — poetry. [comment made by the 20th century Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, terminally ill with cancer, while his house and grounds were being searched by the armed forces of the Chilean general and dictator, Augusto Pinochet]

[The poet – the surviving, modern form of the prophet – has, like the latter, a disturbing, irritating, often disrespectable, quality about him or her, and a disposition that ``doesn’t fit in’’. A good example, I think, of such a poet is Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967), who during his life, was more likely to be found in a Dublin pub than in Saint Patrick's Cathedral. He was the son of a shoemaker and, for the first half of his life, an Irish peasant farmer at Inniskeen, County Monaghan. His masterpiece, The Great Hunger, of 1942, describes uncompromisingly (but with humor) the existence of an Irish peasant farmer,``poor Paddy Maguire’’ with his ``fourteen-hour day’’, in a state of grinding poverty, barked at by

His mother tall hard as a Protestant spire

with her ``venomous drawl’’,

``Did you let the hens out, you?’’.

For Paddy in his earlier years, the sight of a young woman walking along the road carrying a basket, has, superimposed on it in his mind, another vision, that of

Sin written in letters larger than John Bunyan dreamt of.

But sadly, as Paddy (and his sister Mary Anne) find out,

For the strangled impulse there is no redemption.

He ``gives himself another year’’ at the farming but is still at it the next year. The years drift by, and on the death of his mother, he realizes that now there is no escape:

Who bent the coin of my destiny

That it stuck in the slot? ....

I am locked in a stable with the pigs and cows for ever.

Despite his social status:

His face set like an old judge’s pose:

Respectability and righteousness,

Stand for no nonsense.

and his ``holy rise’’, envied by the neighbours - that of holding the collecting-box in the chapel door during all the Sundays of May - at the end,

He will hardly remember that life happened to him,

although he

... is not afraid of death, the Church will light him a candle

To see his way through the vaults and he’ll understand the

Quality of the clay that dribbles over his coffin.

All copies of the poem were seized by the Irish police on the order of the Minister for Justice because the work was considered an overt attack on the sexual and religious oppression of the Catholic Church on rural Ireland, and labelled as obscene.

The following is not from The Great Hunger. Rather, in it, Kavanagh describes what is involved in being a ``true’’ poet and - in present day terms - how little in common the ``calling’’ has with comfortable, academic ``creative writing’’, criticism and coming up with a ``best seller’’. It consists of excerpts from the Author’s Note to Kavanagh’s Collected Works, and in particular, refers to his experience with the police over the matter of The Great Hunger.]

I have never been much considered by the English critics. I suppose I shouldn’t say this. But for many years I have learned not to care, and I have also learned that the basis of literary criticism is usually the ephemeral.... I am always shy of calling myself a poet and I wonder much at those young men and sometimes those old men who boldly declare their poeticality. If you ask them what they are, they say: Poet.

There is, of course, a poetic movement which sees poetry materialistically. The writers of this school see no transcendent nature in the poet; they are practical chaps, excellent technicians. But somehow or other I have a belief in poetry as a mystical thing, and a dangerous thing. ... For reasons that I have never been able to explain, the making of verses has changed the course of one man’s destiny. I could have been as happily unhappy as the ordinary countryman in Ireland. I might have stayed at the same moral age all my life. Instead of that, poetry made me a sort of outcast. And I was abnormally normal...

Looking back, I see that the big tragedy for the poet is poverty .... On many occasions I literally starved in Dublin. I often borrowed a `shilling for the gas’ when in fact I wanted the coin to buy a chop. During the war, in Dublin, I did a column of gossip for a newspaper at four guineas a week...

In 1942, I wrote The Great Hunger. Shortly after it was published a couple of hefty lads came to my lonely shieling on Pembroke Road. One of them had a copy of the poem behind his back. He brought it to the front and he asked me, `Did you write that?’ He was a policeman. It may seem shocking to the devotee of liberalism if I say that the police were right. For a poet in his true detachment is impervious to policemen ... The Great Hunger is concerned with the woes of the poor. A true poet is selfish and implacable. A poet merely states the position and does not care whether his words change anything or not. The Great Hunger is tragedy and Tragedy is underdeveloped Comedy, not fully born. Had I stuck to the tragic thing in The Great Hunger I would have found many powerful friends.

But I lost my messianic compulsion. [After an operation for lung cancer] I sat on the bank of the Grand Canal in the summer of 1955 and let the water lap idly on the shores of my mind. My purpose in life was to have no purpose....

[Author’s Note to: Collected Poems, Patrick Kavanagh, London, 1964]

On abuse of power and ``fitting in''

I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty. [Montaigne]

[Freudian realism - on the illusion of ``loving your neighbor'']

[An ideal demand of civilized society] runs: ``Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself''. It is known throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim. Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall not be unable to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? ... My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. ... [If someone] is a stranger to me ... it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. ... What is the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable? On closer inspection, I find still further difficulties. Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him good he has no hesitation in injuring me ... indeed, if he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and showing his superior power ... There is a second commandment which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is ``Love thine enemies''. If I think it over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it is the same thing....

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. ... Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War - anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view.

The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature.... I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the [communist] system is based are an untenable illusion.... Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery ...

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.... [So] it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other - like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. ... In this respect, the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately, all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows. When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence. To the Romans, who had not founded their communal life as a State on love, religious intolerance was something foreign, although with them religion was a concern of the State and the State was permeated by religion. Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for anti-semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois. [Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1931, trans. James Strachey, excerpts from Chapter 5]

[Freud's concern about what the Soviets would do when they ran short of their ``bourgeois'' was tragically answered by Stalin's labor camps. Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938) was a Russian poet who protested against Stalin. He died on the way to a labor camp in Eastern Siberia. His brave wife Nadezhda managed to evade capture by the NKVD, and preserved her husband’s work by memorizing it, the written word being dangerous (through the possibility of being ``passed on''). Here is Osip’s bitter poem on Stalin which caused his first arrest. The ``mountaineer’’ metaphor evokes the image of Stalin’s climbing to power over piled up bodies, and, rather than caring for the welfare of the people, the terrifying, thrilling, enjoyment that the tyrant, his ``leaders'', and their ``sidekicks'' further down the chain of command, ``their backs covered'', always get from crushing people.]

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

But where there's so much as half a conversation

Then the Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention.

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer,

And his boot tops gleam.

And around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders –

fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine

As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung

Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat

For the broad-chested Ossete.

[Osip Mandelshtam, Ode to Stalin, trans. Max Hayward.]

[Warning about uncritical, passionate embracing of (apparently) attractive causes: in 1951, the Mexican poet and diplomat, Octavio Paz, published in an Argentinian magazine an article on the horrors of the Soviet labor camps. It was greeted by his fellow Latin-American ``radicals'' with public silence and private abuse.] When I consider Aragon, Eluard, Neruda, and other famous Stalinist writers and poets, I feel the gooseflesh that I get from reading certain passages in the Inferno. No doubt they began in good faith. How could they have shut their eyes to the horrors of capitalism and the disaster of imperialism in Asia, Africa and our part of America? They experienced a generous surge of indignation and of solidarity with the victims. But insensibly, commitment by commitment, they saw themselves become tangled in a mesh of lies, falsehoods, deceits and perjuries, until they lost their souls. They became, literally, soulless. This may seem exaggerated: Dante and his punishments for some wrongheaded political views? Who nowadays, anyway, believes in the soul? I will add that our opinions on this subject have not been mere errors or flaws in our faculty of judgment. They have been a sin in the old religious sense of that word: something that affects the whole being. Very few of us could look a Solzhenitsyn, or a Nadejda Mandelshtam, in the eye. That sin has stained us and, fatally, has stained our writings as well. I say this with sadness, and with humility. [Considering Solzhenitsyn: Dust after Mud, Octavio Paz (essay in: On Poets and Others, 1986)]

[academic hypocrisy - Günter Grass on the ``pseudoradical frivolity’’ of German intellectuals in the period of the Weimar Republic.] While there was democracy in Germany, they never ceased to scoff at it as an illusion and a bourgeois plot, but when, fatally, Hitler came, they fled – not to Moscow but to New York, doubtless to pursue there with increased ardor their critique of bourgeois society. [In: Octavio Paz, Considering Solzhenitsyn]

[On how to keep your job and ``lose your soul'']

In good King Charles's golden times

When loyalty no harm meant,

A furious High Church man was I

And so I gained preferment.

Unto my flock I daily preached

"Kings are by God appointed,

And damned are those who dare resist Or touch the Lord's anointed".

[Chorus] This is the law that I'll maintain

Until my dying day, sir,

That whatsoever king shall reign

I'll still be Vicar of Bray, sir.

When Cromwell seized the reins of power

And the crown went in the dust, sir.

My service well to him I swore

I will because I must, sir.

I used my wits in all I said

And so I got my way, sir.

And that is how I saved my head

My head and the parish of Bray, Sir. (Chorus)

When Royal James possessed the crown

And Popery grew in fashion,

The penal law I shouted down

And read the declaration,

The Church of Rome I found would fit

Full well my constitution,

And I had been a Jesuit

But for the Revolution. (Chorus)

When William our deliverer came

To heal the nation's grievance,

I turned my face around again

And swore to him allegiance.

Old principles I did revoke

Set conscience at a distance.

Passive obedience is a joke

A jest is non-resistance. (Chorus) ....

When George in pudding time came o'er

And moderate men looked big, sir,

My principles I changed once more

And so became a Whig, sir.

And thus preferment I procured

From our faith's great defender,

And almost every day abjured

The Pope, and the Pretender. (Chorus)

The illustrious House of Hanover

And Protestant succession,

To these I lustily will swear

Whilst they can keep possession.

For in my faith and loyalty

I never once will falter,

And George my lawful king shall be -

Until the times should alter.

This is the law that I'll maintain

Until my dying day, sir,

That whatsoever king shall reign

I'll still be Vicar of Bray, sir.

[The Vicar of Bray, 18th century English song, author unknown. (Second verse as sung by Stanley Holloway, 1937).]

[The self-pity of those (like the preceding Vicar) who do "fit in" and actually lose their jobs – Lyudmila Putina, who with her husband Valdimir Putin was working at that time for Soviet intelligence in East Germany, on the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989]

It [Eastern Germany] was a harshly totalitarian country, similar to the Soviet Union 30 years earlier. And the tragedy is that many people sincerely believed in all those Communist ideals. ... Of course we had begun to suspect that the regime would not last long. Perestroika had already begun in our country [USSR] – many closed subjects were now being discussed openly. But in the GDR, that sort of talk was totally taboo – they were trying to totally preserve their society. Families had been torn apart. Some relatives lived on one side of the Wall, some on the other. Everyone was followed. ... [and after an angry crowd surrounded the MGB building in which she worked she] explained to them that this was a Soviet military organization. And someone shouted from the crowd: “Then why do you have cars with German license plates in the parking lot? What are you doing here, anyway?” ... The people were in an aggressive mood. I called our group of forces and explained the situation. And I was told: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.” ... After a few hours our military people did finally get there. And the crowd dispersed. But that business of “Moscow is silent” – I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared. It was clear that the Union was ailing. And it had a terminal disease without a cure – a paralysis of power.

I saw what happened to my neighbors when all those revolutionary events started in the GDR. My neighbor, who was my friend, cried for a week. She cried for her lost ideals, for the collapse of everything that she had believed in her whole life. For them, it was the collapse of everything – their lives, their careers. They were all left without jobs. There was a ban on their profession. ... [From Part 5 of: First Person, Vladimir Putin et al, PublicAffairs, 2000]

[academic integrity] George Norlin (1871–1942) was president of the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1919 until he retired in 1939. The University Library is named after him. He resisted the Klu Klux Klan governor and legislature of Colorado, who offered him legislative support in return for the firing of Jewish and Catholic faculty. The Klan had taken control of the Colorado legislature in about 1922, but Norlin defended the University against it until 1926 when the Klan lost control of both the legislature and governorship. During that period the University subsisted on a millage built into the state constitution; its budget was cut to zero. Norlin led the University through the difficult years of the Depression and openly defended academic excellence and freedom. He criticized the Scopes "Monkey" trial, and after spending a year in Germany as lecturer on American Civilization at Berlin University in 1933, gave speeches and wrote articles warning of the dangers of Nazism and anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, few listened to Norlin's warnings ... [Based on an article on the web-site of the University of Colorado, Boulder]

[The ``peak of fame'' as the peak of shame. (The climbing metaphor evokes the ``Kremlin mountaineer'' above, but to varying degrees, has, I believe, a much wider significance.)]

``Well, step aside, old man!

We are young, which means, right ...’’

``Where are you going, youngsters?’’

``To the peak of fame ...’’

``Hold on! I too clambered up there,

gouging out steps with an ice ax,

till I became a sculpture of ice,

glorified, but unloved. And is this my peak?

No smoke, no flame, neither a kind word, nor a sprig of green,

... It's not true, that upward means ahead.

Even when palaced with gold, to hell with the top,

where tin cans and condoms freeze in the ice.

On the peak of fame

there’s a faint smell of murder ....

When, half hidden in clouds,

murderers ascend to power,

dismembered corpses

are concealed in their rucksacks...’'

``Trying to spoil our mood, old man?!’’

``For your general enlightenment.

The peak of fame easily changes to a peak of shame....

There are colossuses on the peak of shame,

so icy, only made of clay –

plasticine kings wretchedly disintegrating.

There, like frozen spittle,

decorations and medals,

those sordid throwaways,

are given to cowards with contempt.

In its graveyard of rusted crowns –

both of Ancient Rome and Russian empires,

there are piles of names and banners,

eaten by the moth of infamy.

It’s dangerous when fog deceives the eyes

to confuse labels foolishly,

shamefully calling a peak of decay a peak of blossoms.

When will we rid ourselves of all this clambering and sweating

of our infamous degradations, and squalid false summits?''

``Old man, are there really no true summits?’’

``There are. Young people, they’re ahead of you.

But together we’ll accomplish more.

I’m going with you, with the young.’’

[From The Peak of Shame, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Collected Poems, 1952-1990]

[Capitulation to tyranny and the rise of sycophancy] It was characteristic of those [the Stalinist] years that all such concepts [e.g. ``honor’’, ``conscience’’, ``freedom’’] were treated as pure abstractions, divorced from the actual social and human framework which alone gave them substance. This made it all the easier to dismiss them out of hand: nothing was simpler, for example, than to show that nowhere in the world is there such a thing as absolute freedom of the press, and then to conclude that instead of making do with the wretched substitutes fobbed off on us by liberals, it was better to face up to the situation like a man and abandon all this hankering after ``Freedom’’ ... Psychological factors that worked out in favor of capitulation were the fear of being left out in the cold, of not moving with the times ... But the main thing was that those who surrendered had nothing of their own to offer. This extraordinary emptiness is perhaps best expressed by Shklovski in his Zoo, that sorry book in which he tearfully implores the victors to take him under their wing ... the fact is that the desire to be looked after and protected like a child was enormously strong ... it is not so simple to go against everybody and against the times. ... we all had the temptation to rush after everyone else, to join the crowd that knew where it was going. The power of the ``general will’’ is enormous – to resist it is much harder than people think ... The chorus of true believers in the new religion and the new State used the language of revolution in their ritual observances, but they had no time for a new ``upstart intellectual’’ with his doubts and hesitations. For the true believers and ``Fellow Travelers’’ everything was quite clear already ... The State encouraged people to behave like the boyars in medieval Russia who fought each other over their place at the Czar’s table, always reserving to itself the final decision as to who should sit ``at the top’’.

[Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope, pp.165, 175, 178, 350]

The lesson we learn from history is that we cannot keep our liberty secure by relying alone on the good faith of men with great power. [Walter Mondale]

[Bad learners] Rulers, statesmen and nations are told that they ought to learn from the experience of history. Yet what experience and history teaches us is this: Nations and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted in accordance with the lessons to be derived from it. [Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History]

[Reaction to the US 2016 election]

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. [Goethe]

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. [from "The Masque of Pandora", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow].

ROMA [acronym for Radix omnium malorum avaritia]

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment ... Thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in his cause ... Keep thee far from a false matter ... And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous. [Exodus, Chapter 23]

What is hateful to you, don’t do to your fellow man – that’s the whole Torah and the rest is just commentary. Go then and learn it. [Response of Rabbi Hillel when asked if he could summarize the whole Torah while standing on one foot]

The darksome statesman, hung with weights and woe,

Like a thick midnight-fog, mov'd there so slow,

He did nor stay, nor go;

Condemning thoughts — like sad eclipses — scowl

Upon his soul,

And clouds of crying witnesses without

Pursued him with one shout.

Yet digg'd the mole, and lest his ways be found,

Work'd under ground,

Where he did clutch his prey; ....

[Excerpt from: The World, Thomas Vaughan, 1622-1695]

Power is corrosive. [George W. Bush]

[Contrast to the tyrant – Goethe on public opinion and ``the good prince'']

I do not know that I ever joined in any way against the people; but it is now settled [in public opinion], once for all, that I am no friend to the people. I am, indeed, no friend to the revolutionary mob: whose object is robbery, murder and destruction; and who, behind the mask of public welfare, have their eyes only upon the meanest egotistical aims. I am no friend to such people, any more than I am a friend of Louis XV. I hate every violent overthrow, because as much good is destroyed as is gained by it. But am I therefore no friend to the people? ....

It is further said that I am a servant, a slave to princes; as if that were saying anything. Do I then serve a tyrant – a despot? Do I serve one who lives at the cost of the people, only for his own pleasures? ... I have been intimately connected with the Grand Duke [Charles Augustus] for half a century, and during half a century have striven and worked with him; but I should lie if I were to say that I have known a single day in which the Grand Duke has not thought of doing something tending to benefit the land to improve the condition of the people. What has he from his princely station, but toil and trouble? ... Only go into our seaport towns, and you will find the kitchen and cellar of any considerable merchant better appointed than his. ... this government of his – what has it been but a servitude to the welfare of the people? ...

[Goethe, Eckermann]

[On the ambivalence of the ``kindness'' of the nobility (and, I believe, its modern form in the ``benevolence'' of Corporate America) with its ``We serve'' mentality - in his profound description of his life (A la recherche du temps perdu, trans. Remembrance of things past, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, The Guermantes Way, p.1025), Marcel Proust recounts how he was bewildered, while at a party, by the unexpected friendliness of a lady whom he did not know and who turned out to be royalty, the Princess of Parma. Here are his reflections on this event.]

Her friendliness sprang from two causes. The first and more general was the education which this daughter of Kings had received. Her mother (not merely allied by blood to all the royal families of Europe but furthermore - in contrast to the Ducal House of Parma - richer than any reigning Princess) had instilled into her from her earliest childhood the arrogantly humble precepts of an evangelical snobbery; and today, every line of the daughter's face, the curve of her shoulders, the movements of her arms seemed to repeat the lesson: ``Remember that if God has caused you to be born on the steps of a throne you ought not to make that a reason for looking down upon those to whom Divine Providence has willed (wherefore his Name be praised) that you should be superior by birth and fortune. On the contrary, you must suffer the little ones. Your ancestors were Princes of Treves and Juliers from the year 647: God has decreed in His bounty that you should hold practically all the shares in the Suez Canal and three times as many Royal Dutch as Edmond de Rothschild; your pedigree in direct line has been established by genealogists from the year 63 of the Christian Era; you have as sisters-in-law two Empresses. Therefore never seem, in your speech, to be recalling these great privileges, not that they are precarious (for nothing can alter antiquity of race, while the world will always need petrol), but because it is useless to point out that you are better born than other people or that your investments are all gilt-edged, since everyone knows these facts already. Be helpful to the needy. Furnish to all those whom the bounty of Heaven has done you the favor of placing beneath you as much as you can give them without forfeiture of your rank, that is to say help in the form of money, even your personal service by their sickbeds, but never (bear well in mind) invite them to your parties, which would do them no possible good and, by weakening your own position, would diminish the efficacy of your benevolent activities.''

[Machiavellian realism - and it is relevant not just to Renaissance Italian princes (and popes) but to all power structures past and present. (This is true even when the power focus is sometimes less explicit, as, for example, in the USA - a place not favorably disposed to regal authority - but where, over and above the official power, that authority transformed is still alive and well, quietly breaking up and regrouping behind the scenes - at first sight, you wouldn't know there were any ``princes'' around - in the activities of those darkly referred to as the ``movers and shakers'', leading to a way of life where the internal pushing and shoving cancels out at the boundary, giving a state stabilized through perpetual agitation.)]

Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word. You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man.... A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves.

... Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer. If men were entirely good this precept would not hold, but because they are bad, and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them. Nor will there ever be wanting to a prince legitimate reasons to excuse this non-observance. Of this endless modern examples could be given, showing how many treaties and engagements have been made void and of no effect through the faithlessness of princes; and he who has known best how to employ the fox has succeeded best. But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived....

Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated [of being merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious] but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite..... it is necessary for him to have a mind ready to turn itself accordingly as the winds and variations of fortune force it, yet, as I have said above, not to diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so, but, if compelled, then to know how to set about it.

For this reason a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities . . There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality [religion] inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Every one sees what you appear to be [but] few really know what you are …. and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result. For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody; because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.

[Nicolo Machiavelli, Chapter 18, The Prince, Chapter 18 (``Concerning the way in which princes should keep faith''), trans. W. K. Marriot.]

[On the difference between good people and bad people] [Psychoanalysis confirms] Plato's old saying that the good are those who are content to dream of what the others, the bad, really do. [Freud]

We must envy no one; for the good do not deserve envy and as for the bad, the more they prosper, the more they ruin it for themselves. [Epicurus]

[Aristotle on friendship and the bad man (or bad woman)] And wicked men seek for people with whom to spend their days, and shun themselves; for they remember many a grievous deed, and anticipate others like them, when they are by themselves, but when they are with others they forget. And having nothing lovable in them they have no feeling of love to themselves. Therefore also such men do not rejoice or grieve with themselves; for their soul is rent by faction, and one element in it by reason of its wickedness grieves when it abstains from certain acts, while the other part is pleased, and one draws them this way and the other that, as if they were pulling them in pieces. If a man cannot at the same time be pained and pleased, at all events after a short time he is pained because he was pleased, and he could have wished that these things had not been pleasant to him; for bad men are laden with regrets.

Therefore, the bad man does not seem to be amicably disposed even to himself, because there is nothing in him to love; so that if to be thus is the height of wretchedness, we should strain every nerve to avoid wickedness and should endeavor to be good; for so one may be both friendly to oneself and a friend to another. [Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9, 1166b, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes]

How the people will cry out against me! I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without a pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other. [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile.]

Silence and Speaking

I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, having no good things to say, and my sorrow was stirred. [Psalm 39]

[On the crushing of individuality]

Song, song of the South

Sweet potato pie and shut ma mouth. [from: Alabama, Song of the South]

[Silence before royalty! – earlier (in the First World War), Bertrand Russell had been jailed because of his pacifist sympathies.] When he [Russell] was given the Order of Merit, King George VI was affable but slightly embarrassed at decorating a former jailbird, saying that "You have sometimes behaved in a manner that would not do if otherwise adopted." Russell merely smiled, but afterwards claimed that the reply "That's right, just like your brother" immediately came to mind, but he did not say it.

[A deeper kind of silence]

The radiant one inside me has never said a word.

[Response of the great 13th century Sufi poet Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi), when asked why, since he valued silence so much, he produced such a volume of language.]

Silence Feeds Oppression. [Francois Mitterand]

[Wrong silence]

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, When the Nazis came for the communists

habe ich geschwiegen; I remained silent;

ich war ja kein Kommunist. I was, after all, no communist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, When they locked up the social democrats,

habe ich geschwiegen; I remained silent;

ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. I was, after all, no social democrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, When they came for the trade unionists,

habe ich nicht protestiert; I did not protest;

ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. I was, after all, no trade unionist.

Als sie die Juden holten, When they came for the Jews, habe ich geschwiegen; I remained silent;

ich war ja kein Jude. I was, after all, no Jew.

Als sie mich holten, When they came for me,

gab es keinen mehr, there was no one left

der protestieren konnte. who could protest.

[The 1976 version of Niemöller’s famous poem]

[Brave speaking] I would rather burn my church to the ground, than preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil’. [Martin Niemöller]

[Keep crying out]

One night, a man was crying,

Allah! Allah!

His lips grew sweet with the praising,

until a cynic said,

``So! I have heard you calling out,

but have you ever gotten any response?’’

The man had no answer to that.

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,

in a thick green foliage.

``Why did you stop praising?’’

``Because I’ve never heard anything back.’’

``This longing you express is the return message.’’

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master

That whining is the connection ...

[The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne, p.155]

[Silence or screaming?] ... I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isn’t it better to face one’s tormentors in a stance of satanic pride, answering them with contemptuous silence. I decided that it is better to scream. This pitiful sound ... is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. By his screams, he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity. [Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope, p.42]

[Kabbalistic silence] The lips of the wise move but they say nothing lest they bring down punishment on themselves. [Zohar, 1,1588, (Mantua): trans. from the Aramaic and Hebrew by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, The Soncino Press, 1984]

On genius and the lack thereof

While you’re alive it’s shameful to put yourself into

the Calendar of Saints.

Disbelief in yourself is more saintly.

It takes real talent not to dread being terrified

by your own agonizing lack of talent.

.... Indispensable amid babbling boredom

are the deadly fear of uttering the right words, ...

[Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Disbelief in Yourself Is Indispensable]

[That creativity emerges from the outside] One does not compose; composing is a passive state. [Mahler]

On kindness

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades.

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

[Phillip Larkin, Collected Poems]

[Hegel and professorial kindness]

... This [Hegel's] budget he continued in his own hand until he died. From the calendar entries of the Berlin years we can see among other things how often he returned to the students the cash they had paid to hear his lectures.

[p.266 of: K. Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Leben, Berlin, 1844, trans. Walter Kaufmann]

[The kindness of (so-called) ordinary people - after Osip’s second and final arrest, Nadezhda Mandelshtam took refuge in a small town called Strunino on the railway line between Moscow and Siberia.]

I never hid the fact that I am Jewish, and I must say that among the ordinary people I have yet to encounter any anti-Semitism ... I made day trips to Moscow from Strunino to hand in parcels for M., and my meager resources – I had to sell off M.’s books – soon gave out. My hosts saw that I had nothing to eat, and they shared their tiuria and murstsovka [country dishes made with bread, eggs and onions] with me. They referred to radishes as “Stalin’s lard’’. They made me drink fresh milk to keep my strength up – though they had little to spare, because they had to sell a good deal of what their cow gave to buy hay for it. In return I used to bring them wild berries from the woods. ... That autumn I came completely to the end of my means and I had to think of work. My host worked in the local textile factory, and his wife’s family were also textile workers. ... I worked on the spinning machines – each woman worker had to look after twelve of them. ... To rest from the machines the women took refuge in the washroom, which was a sort of club for us. They would stop talking and look vacant whenever some Komsomol girl [member of the youth wing of the Soviet Communist Party] intent on making a career came running in briskly. “Be careful of her’’ they would warn me. ... they [the workers in the factory] were all very kind to me – particularly the older men. Sometimes they would come into the spinning shop and offer me an apple or a piece of pie (“Eat some of this, my wife baked it yesterday’’). In the factory cafeteria during the meal break they always kept a place for me and made me take some soup to “keep my strength up.’’ ... [And after being discovered by the secret police] some [of the workers] said that I should go away at once, and put money on the window-sill for me. My landlady packed my things, and her husband and two neighbors took me to the station and put me on one of the early-morning trains. In this way I escaped a new disaster, thanks to these people who had still not learned to be indifferent. ...

[Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope, p.349]

DIALOGUE POEM

Where others’ husbands ride on horseback

Along the Yamashiro road,

You, my husband, trudge on foot.

Every time I see you there I weep,

To think of it my heart aches.

My husband, take on your back

My shining mirror, my mother’s keepsake,

Together with the scarf thin as the dragon-fly’s wing,

And barter them for a horse,

I pray you, my husband.

ENVOIS

Deep is the ford of the Izumi.

Your travelling clothes, I fear,

Will be drenched, my husband.

What worth to me my shining mirror,

When I see you, my husband,

Trudging on your weary way!

BY HER HUSBAND

If I get a horse, my beloved,

You must go on foot;

Though we tread the rocks,

Let’s walk, the two of us, together.

[From: The Manyoshu, The Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai Translation of 1,000 Poems, 871–874 (XXIII.3314–3317) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965)]

Nature

Within the woodlands, flowery gladed, By the oak tree's mossy moot, The shining grass-blades, timber-shaded, Now do quiver under foot; And birds do whistle overhead, And water's bubbling in its bed, And there for me the apple tree Do lean down low in Linden Lea. When leaves that lately were a-springing Now do fade within the copse, And painted birds do hush their singing Up upon the timber tops; And brown-leaved fruit's a-turning red, In cloudless sunshine, overhead, With fruit for me, the apple tree Do lean down low in Linden Lea. Let other folk make money faster In the air of dark-roomed towns, I don't dread a peevish master; Though no man do heed my frowns, I be free to go abroad, Or take again my homeward road To where, for me, the apple tree Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

[Linden Lea, William Barnes (set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams)]

... Knowing that Nature never did betray

The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,

Through all the years of this our life, to lead

From joy to joy: for she can so inform

The mind that is within us, so impress

With quietness and beauty, and so feed

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,

Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life,

Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold

Is full of blessings. ... [William Wordsworth, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey]

[Miss Emily’s Sunday Service]

Some keep the Sabbath going to church;

I keep it staying at home,

With a bobolink for a chorister,

And an orchard for a dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;

I just wear my wings,

And instead of tolling the bell for church,

Our little sexton sings.

God preaches – a noted clergyman, –

And the sermon is never long;

So instead of getting to heaven at last,

I’m going all along!

[A Service of Song, Emily Dickinson]

How I envy the birds, especially when they are building their nests nicely and quietly. [Comment by a young woman, Mignon, in: Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, trans. E. A. Blackall and V. Lange, p.323]

[The Southern garden, old age and leaving – in Eudora Welty’s: The Golden Apples, Virgie Rainey lives with her widowed mother Katie in the (fictitious) town of Morgana in the (fictitious) county of MacLain in the (real) state of Mississippi. Miss Katie is in bad health after a stroke; as a result, she tends to want things done at ``set times’’, and when she came out of doors, her carefully dressed and carefully held head was as silver-looking as a new mail-box. The Raineys are left alone by the rest of the town (though they will all manage to turn up, with lots of food, at Miss Katie’s funeral, talkative, as if they had really cared, with ``appropriate’’ comments such as hoping that ``she left her recipes to the Methodist Church’’ and asserting that ``she was a living saint’’).

Virgie is past forty and (according to her mother) ``too dressed up’’. Miss Katie, ``in her dress the hard blue of a morning-glory’’, stands anxiously outside in the front yard in the afternoon, propped up by her old thornstick. Near her is the old chair where she used to ``set out’’ and sell her muscadines, plums, blackberries, dewberries and the peanuts you boil, ``under the borrowed shade of the chinaberry tree across the road’’. She feels the world tremble as the loggers with their chain saws go by fast in their riding trucks, ``depleting the woods’’. Miss Katie frets over why Virgie is so late coming home from work: there are the two Jersey cows to be driven home, milked and fed, then the milk has to be delivered and four little quails full of shot on the kitchen table to be dressed. When Virgie, in her high heels and flowered voile dress, eventually arrives, her mother reminds her of what needs to be done:

I been by myself all day.

Virgie kisses her mother, takes her into the house, sets her mind at ease and then attends to the cows, the milking and the quails.

On the Sunday that she died, Miss Katie is lying in bed while Virgie is dress-making in another room. She remembers Virgie saying that she aimed ``to get married on my bulb money’’. She calls on Virgie to stop her dress-making and come through and fan her. Virgie comes into the bed-room, pins in her mouth and her thumb marked green from the scissors, and fans Katie with her copy of theMarket Bulletin.]

Purple althea cuttings, true box, four colors of cannas for 15 cents, moonvine seed by teaspoonful, green and purple jew. Roses: big white rose, little thorn rose, beauty-red sister rose, pink monthly, old-fashioned red summer rose, very fragrant, baby rose. Five colors of verbena, candlestick lilies, milk and wine lilies, blackberry lilies, lemon lilies, angel lilies, apostle lilies. Angel trumpet seed. The red amaryllis.

Faster and faster. Mrs Rainey thought: Red salvia, four-o’clock, pink Jacob’s ladder, sweet geranium cuttings, sword fern and fortune grass, century plants, vase palm, watermelon pink and white crape myrtle, Christmas cactus, golden bell. White Star Jessamine. Snowball. Hyacinthus. Pink fairy lilies. White. The fairy white.

``Fan me. If you stop fanning me, it’s worse than if you had never started.’’

And when Mama is gone, almost gone now, she [Virgie] meditated, I can tack on to my ad: the quilts! For sale, Double Muscadine Hulls, Road to Dublin, Starry Sky, Strange Spider Web, Hands All Around, Double Wedding Ring. Mama’s rich in quilts, child.

Miss Katie lay there, carelessly on the counterpane, thinking, Crochet tablecloth, Sunburst design, very lacy. She knew Virgie stood over her, fanning her in rhythmic sweeps. Presently Miss Katie’s lips shut tight... She put her hand up and never knew what happened to it, her protest.

Virgie knelt, crouched there. She held her head, her mouth opened, and one by one the pins fell out on the floor ...

[The Wanderers in: The Golden Apples, Eudora Welty - Virgie, after the funeral, sells or gives away or has stolen from her the contents of the house and her cows, and leaves Morgana in her old coupe, the world beating in her ears through the ``magical percussion’’ of October rain on Mississippi fields.]

[Man's inhumanity to himself and the other animals, and Bentham's hope] Other animals, which, on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things. ... The day has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated ... upon the same footing as ... animals are still. ... The day may come when the non-human part of the animal creation will acquire the rights that never could have been withheld from them except by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the whims of a tormentor. Perhaps it will some day be recognised that the number of legs, the hairiness of the skin, or the possession of a tail are equally insufficient reasons for abandoning to the same fate a creature that can feel? What else could be used to draw the line? Is it the faculty of reason or the possession of language? But a full-grown horse or dog is incomparably more rational and conversable than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. Even if that were not so, what difference would that make?

The question is not Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?

[Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham, 1789]

OLIM LACUS CLUERAM ONCE I DWELT IN THE LAKE

Olim lacus clueram, Once I lived in the lake

olim pulcher extiteram, Once I existed, beautiful,

dum cignus ego fueram. while I was a swan.

Miser, miser! misery, misery!

modo niger Now I am black

et ustus fortiter! And roasted just right!

Girat, regirat garcifer; The cook turns me, and turns again,

me rogus urit fortiter: the fire burns fiercely:

propinat me nunc dapifer, preparing me for the feast.

Nunc in scutella iaceo, Now in a serving dish I lie,

et volitare nequeo, And can no longer fly,

dentes fredentes video ... Gnashing teeth confront me ...

[From Carmina Burana, set to music by Carl Orff]

A Mathematical Theorem

[Comments on the Atiyah-Singer index theorem] The Atiyah-Singer index theorem is one of the truly great theorems of all time. It was proved by the English mathematician, Sir Michael Atiyah, and the United States mathematician, Isadore Singer, in the 1960’s. (One should also mention the pioneering work of Friedrich Hirzebruch and Raoul Bott.)

There are, I think, three criteria for judging the greatness of a mathematical theorem. The first is the range of ideas that are involved: it should not be concerned with just one area of mathematics but arise out of the interplay of a number of important fields of mathematics, showing that it is genuinely fundamental to mathematics as a whole. The Atiyah-Singer theorem in this respect is remarkable: it involves areas such as algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, functional analysis, operator algebras, partial differential equations, differential geometry, the representation theory of Lie groups and number theory. A second criterion is that, in some way, the great mathematics arises out of the real world which provides its rationale and expresses itself in the mathematics, stops it from relapsing into mere subjective preference, ``fun stuff’’, for the practitioner. The Atiyah-Singer theorem is impressive in this respect as well: part of its background (ref.(1)) lies in Hodge theory which was strongly motivated by Maxwell’s equations in Physics. Further, one of the most remarkable of the achievements of Atiyah and Singer (ref.(3)) – their construction of the Dirac operator in the context of Riemannian geometry and spin manifolds – first arose in Minkowski space in Dirac’s relativistic theory of the electron (in particular, in his discovery of a square root of the relativistic Laplacian). The Dirac operator of Atiyah and Singer has surprisingly continued to prove fundamental in modern particle physics and cosmology - ``The theorem has had innumerable applications, first within mathematics and then, beginning in the late 70s, in theoretical physics: gauge theory, instantons, monopoles, string theory, the theory of anomalies’’ (Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters on the occasion of the award of the Abel prize to Atiyah and Singer.

In this respect, the theorem also satisfies a third criterion for mathematical greatness, that it should be not an end but rather the beginning of a flood of new insights and results, through the developing and extending of the deep insights that it embodies. Reinforcing this are the new developments in noncommutative geometry (Alain Connes), including (among many other things) the development of K-theoretic techniques in C*-algebra theory, in particular, the bivariant Kasparov KK-theory and E-theory.

[Statement of the theorem - not its most general form]

Let M be a smooth compact manifold of dimension n, E and F be smooth complex vector bundles over M, and D be an elliptic partial differential operator from the space of smooth sections of E to the space of smooth sections of F. Since D is elliptic, the kernel ker(D) and the cokernel coker(D) of D are finite-dimensional vector spaces. The index ind(D) is defined by:

ind(D)=dim(ker(D)) – dim(coker(D))

Next, the symbol σ(D) of D determines an element [σ(D)] of the K-theory group K(T*M) (K-theory with compact supports) where T*M is the cotangent bundle of M. The index theorem gives a formula that calculates the index of D using the topological and differential geometric data present, and integrating over the orientable manifold T*M; the formula is:

ind(D)= (nth power of -1) x integral{ch([σ(D)])Td}

where ch is the Chern character (that takes you from K-theory to cohomology) and Td is the Todd class of the complexified cotangent bundle.

[Some references: (1) Michael Atiyah, ``Collected Works’’, (2) Patrick Shanahan, ``The Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem’’, (3) H. B. Lawson and M. Michelsohn, ``Spin Geometry’’, (4) N. Higson and J. Roe, ``Analytic K-Homology’’, (5) B. Boos and D. D. Bleecker, ``The Atiyah-Singer index formula and Gauge-Theoretic Physics’’, (6) J. Rognes, ``On the Atiyah-Singer index theorem’’, written on the occasion of the award of the Abel prize to M. Atiyah and I. M Singer, 2004.]

On Children

Abends wenn ich schlafen geh,

Vierzehn Engel bei mir stehn,

Zwei zu meiner Rechten

Zwei zu meiner Linken

Zwei zu meiner Häupten

Zwei zu meiner Füssen

Zwei die mich decken

Zwei die mich wecken

Zwei die mich weisen

In das himmlische Paradeischen.

[From Des Knaben Wunderhorn.]

[Popular poem by the children’s poet, Walter Wingate, about the kindly Scottish dominie [school master] removing a skelf (``needling a splinter’’) from the sair [sore] finger of a little school-boy, John, and wrapping it (``rowing it’’) in a little hankie as a bandage. The hankie does not go unnoticed.]

THE SAIR FINGER

You’ve hurt your finger? Puir wee man!

Your pinkie? Deary me!

Noo, juist you haud it that wey till

I get my specs and see!

My, so it is - and there's the skelf!

Noo, dinna greet nae mair.

See there - my needle's gotten't out!

I'm sure that wasna sair?

And noo, to make it hale the morn,

Put on a wee bit saw,

And tie a Bonnie hankie roun't

Noo, there na - rin awa'!

Your finger sair ana'? Ye rogue,

You're only lettin' on.

Weel, weel, then - see noo, there ye are,

Row'd up the same as John!

[Walter Wingate]

[Mathematics and the childlike] Really, Leonhard, the most childish person in this house is you.

[Comment made by Katharina Euler, wife of the great Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, to her husband, who, on one occasion, while playing with the children and grandchildren, took her baking whisk to whip up the bubbles in the bathtub. (At a more scientific level in fluid dynamics, Euler’s equations determine compressible, inviscid flow in terms of velocity, pressure, density and energy.)]

[``Unless you become like little children’’: in 1944, the film maker Alexei Kapler, and Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, fell in love, which resulted in Kapler being imprisoned for 10 years.]

[After the death of Stalin] while his henchmen [Beria, Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Khrushchev] were destroying each other, people in dirty padded jackets drifted over the expanses of Stalin's empire. The great deliverance from the camps was under way. Alexei Kapler, whom his daughter once loved was one of those freed. Many years later he told me about it. `I went into a little park and stared stupidly at the children playing. One little boy ran past me, laughing - I saw his skinny, defenseless childish legs. And something happened to me. I burst into tears. I sobbed and sobbed shamelessly - enjoying it, like I used to in my childhood. I wept and wept . . . forgiving them ... forgiving everybody.'

[Edvard Radzinsky, STALIN, Trans. H.T. Willetts, 1996.]

Lying to the young is wrong. Proving to them that lies are true is wrong. Telling them that God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world is wrong. They know what you mean. They are people too. ... Say obstacles exist they must encounter, sorrow comes, hardship happens. ... Who never knew the price of happiness will not be happy. Forgive no error you recognize, it will repeat itself, a hundredfold and afterward our pupils will not forgive in us what we forgave. [Lies, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Collected Poems, 1952-1990]

[On educating children] Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle's principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured.

For doubting pleases me no less than knowing. DANTE

For if he embraces Xenophon's and Plato's opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing.

We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom [Seneca].

Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later.

[Michel de Montaigne, Of the education of children (1579-80), written for Madame Diane de Foix, Comtesse de Gurson, p.135 in: The Complete Works, trans. D. M. Frame, Everyman's Library, Vol. 259, London, 2003]

[``Like father, like son'']

My child arrived just the other way,

He came to the world in the usual way,

But there were planes to catch and bills to pay,

He learned to walk while I was away,

And he was talkin' 'fore I knew it, and as he grew,

He'd say "I'm gonna be like you dad.

You know I'm gonna be like you."

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon,

Little boy blue and the man in the moon,

When you comin' home dad?

I don't know when, but we'll get together then, son.

You know we'll have a good time then.

My son turned ten just the other day

He said, "Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on, let's play,

Can you teach me to throw", I said "Not today.

I got a lot to do", he said, "That's OK."

And he walked away but his smile never dimmed

And said, "I'm gonna be like him, yeah,

You know I'm gonna be like him." ...

Well, he came home from college just the other day,

So much like a man I just had to say,

"Son, I'm proud of you, can you sit for a while?"

He shook his head and said with a smile,

"What I'd really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys,

See you later, can I have them please?"

I've long since retired, my son's moved away,

I called him up just the other day,

I said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind",

He said, "I'd love to, Dad, if I can find the time,

You see my new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu,

But it's sure nice talking to you, Dad,

It's been sure nice talking to you."

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me

He'd grown up just like me

My boy was just like me.

[Harry Chapin, The cat’s in the cradle, 1974]

O children, open your arms to me,

Let your hair fall over my eyes;

Let me sleep a moment - and then awake

In your Gardens of sweet Surprise!

For the grown up folk

Are a wearisome folk,

And they laugh all my fancies to scorn ...

O children, open your eyes to me,

And tell me your visions too;

Who squeezes the sponge when the salt tears flow

To dim their magical blue?

Who draws up the blinds when the sun peeps in?

Who fastens them down at night?

Who brushes the fringe of their lace-veined lids?

Who trims their innocent light?

Then, children, I beg you, sing low to me,

And cover my eyes with your hands.

O kiss me again till I sleep and dream

That I'm lost in your Fairylands;

For the grown up folk

Are a troublesome folk,

And the book of their childhood is torn!

Is blotted, and crumpled, and torn!

[Algernon Blackwood, A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913) set to music by Elgar in: To the Children in The Starlight Express]

The struggle against poverty and injustice

I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.

Yes I would.

If I could,

I surely would.

[Simon and Garfunkel]

Some people say a man is made out of mud

A poor man's made out of muscle and blood

Muscle and blood, skin and bones

A mind that's weak and a back that's strong

(Chorus) You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store

I was born one mornin' and the sun didn't shine

I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine

I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal And the straw boss said, "Well bless my soul!" (Chorus)

I was born one mornin' it was drizzlin' rain

Fightin' and trouble are my middle name

I was raised in a cane-brake by an old mama lion

Can't no high-toned woman make me walk no line. (Chorus)

If you see me comin', better step aside

A lot of men didn't, a lot of men died

One fist of iron, the other of steel

If the right one don't get you, then the left one will.

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store.

[Merle Travis song, based on his father’s experiences in the coal mines of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Debt bondage and the truck system meant, among other things, that the coal miners were not paid in cash but with unexchangeable credit vouchers for goods at the company store. FBI agents advised a Chicago radio station not to play Travis's records, because they falsely considered him a "communist sympathizer".]

Die wit man moet altyd baas wees.

[``The white man must always remain boss’’ – the horrifying dogma of the Nationalist Party in South Africa, who, with the Dutch Reform church, stood for apartheid]

[Hidden message]

A - couldn’t hear nobody pray

O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O way down yonder by myself

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O way down yonder by myself

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

In the valley

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

On my knees

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

With my burden

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

And my Jesus

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O way down yonder by myself

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

Chilly waters

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

In the desert

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

Crossing over

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

Into Canaan

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O way down yonder by myself Couldn’t hear nobody pray

Hallelujah!

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

Troubles over

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

In the Kingdom

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

With my Savior

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O Lord

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

O way down yonder by myself

Couldn’t hear nobody pray

[Negro Spiritual and (surely) signal song – when an escaping slave could no longer hear the praying, he was far enough away for it to encourage his hopes of reaching the North (the “Kingdom’’) - as sung by The Southern Quartet, 1921]

[Black American caution]

If you ask a Negro where he’s been, he’ll tell you where he is going.

[Maya Angelou, I know why the caged bird sings, p.188]

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise....

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops.

Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise....

I rise

I rise

I rise.

[From: Still I Rise, Maya Angelou]

[A ``bitter twisted lie’’]

They had to dig deep in the garbage for this one.

[Reaction of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI in 1963 to Martin Luther King Jr. after Time named King its ``Man of the Year’’ – later, in 1965, Hoover sent King a package with a tape, obtained from wiretaps, recording some of King’s sexual encounters in hotel rooms, accompanied by an anonymous letter telling him to take his own life. (Martin Luther King Jr., Marshall Frady, Penguin Books, 2006 pp. 131, 158-159)]

[The greatness of Martin Luther King] ... they [the people around King] all considered that Martin Luther King was going too slow.... so calm, mild-mannered, soft-spoken, extremely logical and analytical about everything, that almost everybody would get constantly upset – everybody thought they could one-up him, manipulate him, co-opt him for their own purposes. And he’d never fight back. It was almost as though he felt he had to let us do all that, and somehow in this neurotic mix he could find the final formula for continuing the movement. [Andrew Young, on the group of people surrounding Martin Luther King, continuously warring with one another, chronically threatening to resign, a more or less running ``free-for-all’’ of egos (cf. Frady, ibid., pp.70-71).]

[On Karl Marx]

... But with Marx the economic motive is not only final, it is final in a particular way. “The only durable source of faction,” said Madison, “is property”, and, for Marx, the emergence of private property in history is the beginning of the class struggle. Immediately society can be divided into those who do, and those who do not, possess private property, a power is released which explains the changes of history. For the class which possesses property moulds the civilization of that society in the service of its own interests. It controls the government, it makes the laws, it builds the social institutions of the commonwealth in accordance with its own desires. Slave and free man, master and servant, these have been the eternal antitheses of history. With the advent of capitalism the struggle is at once simplified, and made more intense. Thenceforward, the final stage of the class-war, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, emerges. And just as each social order of the past has secreted within its womb the germ of its successor, as for example, feudalism produced capitalism, so does the latter contain within itself the germ of its communist successor. “Capitalism,” said Marx, “produces its own gravedigger.” The conflict, in his view, was an inevitable and a bitter one, and it was bound to result in the victory of the proletariat. “The bourgeoisie”, he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “is incapable of continuing in power because it is incapable of securing a bare subsistence to its slaves”; and the result is a growing sense of revolt in the worker who ultimately, by a revolutionary act, assumes the reins of power.

No one can doubt the very large measure of truth in this outlook. No one can write the history of English Puritanism, of the struggle for toleration, or of the American Revolution, without making the defence of an economic incentive fundamental to their explanation. But it is equally clear that the insistence upon an economic background as the whole explanation is radically false. No economic motive can explain the suicidal nationalism of the Balkans. The war of 1914 may have been largely due to conflicting commercial imperialisms; but there was also a competition of national ideas which was at no point economic. Historically, too, the part played by religion in the determination of social outlook was, until at least the peace of Westphalia, as important as that played by material conditions. Luther represents something more than a protest against the financial exactions of Rome. The impulses of men, in fact, are never referable to any single source. The love of power, herd-instinct, rivalry, the desire of display, all these are hardly less vital than the acquisitiveness which explains the strength of material environment. ...

Nor can we expect that a peaceful revolution is possible. While Marx had certain doubts about England, on the whole he was certain that a violent struggle was inevitable. The workers might capture Parliament at the polls; but political power of that kind is in any case a shadow, and were it used for an assault upon property, it would inevitably provoke an armed resistance. Marx indeed, went further and was openly contemptuous of democracy. It was a bourgeois invention unrelated to the real, and used only to deceive the people. Again and again the proletariat is betrayed; and throughout Marx’s writings there is the assumption that reliance must be placed upon a class-conscious minority. For in his view there is no place in history for the majority principle; the record of States is the clash between determined minorities, contending for the seat of power. To introduce considerations of consent, to wait on in the belief that the obvious rightness of communist doctrine will ultimately persuade men to its acceptance, is entirely to ignore reality. The mass of men will always acquiesce in, or be indifferent to, whatever solutions are afforded. Communists must proceed upon the assumption that nothing matters save the enforcement of their will.

The period of consolidation, moreover, must be a period of iron dictatorship. Marx had no illusions about the possibility of a democratic governance in such an hour. The ideals of freedom were impossible to maintain until the ground so conquered had been made secure. Revolution provokes counter-revolution; and a victorious proletariat must be on its guard against reaction. Revolution, in fact, demands of the revolutionary class that it secure its purpose by every method at its disposal. It has neither time nor opportunity for compassion or remorse. Its business is to terrorize its opponents into acquiescence. It must disarm antagonism by execution, imprisonment, forced labour, control of the press. For as it cannot allow any effort at the violent overthrow of what it has established, so must it stamp out such criticism as might be the prelude to further attack. Revolution is war, and war is founded upon terror. The methods of capitalism must be used for the extinction of capitalism. For as capitalism has made of life itself the cheapest of commodities, there need be no repining at its sacrifice, and the result, in any case, is worth the cost, since it destroys the possibility of future sale. It would have been a wanton betrayal of trust, said Marx of the Paris Commune, to observe the traditional forms of liberalism. The end, in fact, is too great to be nice about the means employed.

Upon Marx’s theory of value it is not necessary to spend much time. It has not stood the test of criticism; it is out of harmony with the facts, and it is far from self-consistent. It represents essentially a narrow interpretation of some loose sentences of Ricardo. The latter had argued, with certain qualifications, that the value of any commodity is to be measured by the quantity of labour which goes to its production. Marx, however, ignored the qualifications, and the proof he offered of the thesis is essentially different from that of Ricardo. Exchange value, he argued, is not the singular quality of the commodity in which it inheres. Exchange value is the quality which it possesses alike with all other qualities for which it can be exchanged. Since human labour is the only quality which all commodities possess in common, human labour must be the measure of exchange value. And, be it noted, by human labour is meant “undifferentiated human labour,” it is a quantitative and not a qualitative equation. It is a measure simply of effort in time and not of effort in result or quality of result. Labour is paid differently simply in relation to the different amount of labour “congealed ” in any given commodity produced. That which will suffice to produce the necessaries of life for the labourer is therefore the price of labour power. ... But the worker produces in a day more than suffices for his necessaries of life. If we assume that by working six hours each day the worker can produce his necessaries, while his working day is eight hours long, then the value of what he produces is as eight hours is to six, is, that is to say, one-third greater. Marx termed this extra-production surplus-value, and he assumed that the capitalist, taking his surplus as his profit, robbed the worker of it. For by buying labour-power at its market price, the capitalist at once grows rich and exploits his workers. And in any capitalistic society, especially where there is free competition, this is bound to be the case; from which it of course follows that only by the abolition of capitalism can we stop the exploitation of labour.

It is unnecessary to dwell at any length upon the fallacies implicit in this analysis. As a matter of logic, Marx had no right to assume that the quantity of labour is, other differences being subtracted, the common basis of measurement. Nor did he mention that in addition to labour, all commodities to have value must have this at least in common, that they satisfy some need. Utility, in other words, is a necessary factor in value; it would be impossible to produce aeroplanes except upon the assumption that some people wanted to fly in them. Nor can "undifferentiated human labour" be taken as a measure of value. It is an economic platitude that differences in wages are not merely due to differences in the effort in time of production. It costs no less to produce a bad carpenter than a good one, but the quality of a good carpenter’s work has a value quite apart from cost as effort ... It is outside the evidence of the facts to argue that the task of directing business, the work of the entrepreneur, is not to count as labour and does not create value.

In such a general background, the Marxian theory of value seems clearly untenable not less on theoretic grounds than from an analysis of the facts of business. But it is equally undeniable that Marx's view has obtained the assent of a whole class of society to its truth; and it is, therefore, worth while for a moment to inquire exactly what magic it possesses ... Men like Ricardo and Nassau Senior saw a natural distinction in source of origin which manufacturers like Bright embodied in the legitimate earnings of a hardworking mill-owner, whatever his wealth, and the illegitimate because unearned income of a land-owning duke. They saw it the more clearly when, as in the period of Marx's own maturity, [manufacturers like Bright] were struggling to free their businesses from the environment of a hostile squirearchy. But to the labourer, as Marx clearly saw, such a distinction was for practical purposes irrelevant. The world was divided for him into those who lived by wages and those who did not. Those who lived by wages were poor, those who did not live by wages were rich. Assume, as Marx assumed, that the surplus theory of value is true, and the riches of those who do not live by wages are due to the poverty of those who do. The worker was able to see that he was poor; he saw also that he produced more than he could consume, and that his surplus production was divided among a relatively small class of rich, and often idle, men. A theory such as Marx's inevitably appealed to him as the natural explanation of his oppressed condition. He clung to it, not by virtue of any logical estimation of its theoretic adequacy, but because it summarized the most poignant experience he knew. ...

The Marxian law of wages, moreover, will, from its very nature, win new adherents at every period of commercial depression. At any moment when there is a decline in the effective demand for commodities, or when the strength of trade union resistance is at a low ebb, the impact of capitalism upon the wage-earner will closely resemble what Marx insisted is its normal relation; for few business men have imagination enough to realize that there are other ways to the rehabilitation of markets than the reduction of price by means of lower wages. ...

Marx's London period is, creatively, the most important part of his career; but it was a difficult and tragic struggle for existence ... For the first ten years, the family was hardly over the verge of starvation, and Marx had even to pawn his clothes for necessary expenses. ... Yet, with all their penury, these were not unhappy years. His wife seems to have had a real genius for deriving contentment from misfortune; judges like Heine and Paul Lafargue paid her the tribute of profound admiration. His children were growing up, and Marx was passionately fond of his children. Their nurse, Helene Demuth, was a source of infinite help and comfort, and there was always the sure knowledge of the inevitable triumph of the revolutionary cause. For Marx did not share in the sense of depression which fell upon Liberals after the failure of [the French revolution of] 1848. He shut himself in the British Museum and, sometimes working sixteen hours a day, set himself to the composition of a socialist economics.

Yet it must be counted to his great credit in these [London] years that he is in no small degree responsible for the sympathy shown to the North by the working class during the American Civil War. It was Marx who advised the union of the labour leaders with Cobden and Bright to arouse the enthusiasm of the trade unions; and it was Marx who proposed in the General Council of the International, that a vote of congratulation be sent to Lincoln, on his re-election as President of the United States. Marx played some part also in arousing the trade unions to protest against the brutal suppression by Russia of the Polish revolt of 1863.

... it is essentially by the qualities of the prophet that he [Marx] is distinguished. He was unmoved by oracles other than his own. Impatient of difference; as with Proudhon and Bakunin, contemptuous, as his correspondence with Engels shows, of all who did not think exactly in his fashion, he never learned the essential art of colleagueship. He was too prone to regard a hostile view as proof of moral crime. ... With Marx, to enter a movement was to dominate it; and he was incapable of taking the second place. “Hatred,” wrote Mazzini of him, “outweighs love in his heart, which is not right even if the hatred may in itself have foundation.” ... Marx’s absorption in the wrongs of the disinherited undoubtedly blinded him to the universality of human nature. He had brooded so long over the method of their redress, that he became incapable of weighing the value of alternative channels. He never realized how partial and incomplete were the views upon which he based his conclusions; and vast and patient as were the researches he undertook, he was not always exact in his measurement of evidence.

He is, in fact, a noble, but not an attractive figure. That there was a Marx eminently lovable in himself, the testimony of friends makes certain; but it was not the Marx of public life. There is something unhealthy in the venom with which he assails early friends like Bruno Bauer, or not less ardent seekers after light like Proudhon. His accusations against Proudhon even when the temptation to destroy is remembered were singularly ungenerous. Learned, courageous, capable of profound sympathy with the mass of men, he was never able to grasp the secret of dealing with individuals. Much is to be pardoned to an exile who never enjoyed comfort, and had often risked his personal safety but Mazzini was able to emerge from trials not less difficult with a sweetness unembittered. Nor could Marx accustom himself to the necessary compromises of political life. One is tempted to feel that Marx ... never attempted that sober examination of self which is often the beginning of political wisdom. [An Essay on Karl Marx, by Harold Laski, 1922, The Fabian Society, London, minor changes]

Sincerity and Insincerity

[Truth and classical political philosophy] The central theme of classical political philosophy is virtue, or human excellence. The questions that typically preoccupy Socrates and his followers are: What is virtue? Can it be taught, and if so, how? What is the education that makes a full citizen and human being? What is a virtuous statesman and citizen? What political regime best promotes virtue or excellence? What is a true friend? Who or what is worthy of passionate love?

Now this kind of questioning and preoccupation immediately appears to characterize Socrates and his rationalism as far removed from, not to say alien to, the sophistication which tends to predominate in our contemporary culture. To know, as we are sure we do, that morals and principles of justice are values, is to know that Socrates’ questions are deeply misconceived ... Values are individual preferences, or subjective commitments, or cultural creations, or historical dispensations. Once this truth – this absolute and unquestionable truth – is recognized, the sophisticated response is one that turns its back on sustained argument over the ``truth’’ of values and instead proceeds to ``self-expression’’ and search for ``community’’ ... This quest is to be regulated only by the absolute moral principle that we ought to express ourselves and seek community and values-clarification only in such ways as respect the equal right of all others to express themselves...

It is not very difficult to unmask the incoherence in this pseudo-sophistication: the denial of the possibility of absolute or universal truth rests on the asssertion of an absolute or universal truth and is said to entail the assertion of universally valid moral imperatives or prohibitions – of human rights that transcend race, color, creed or ethnic and historical background. It is more important to observe that no human being can actually live according to this pseudo-sophistication. This basis for loyalty to democracy and equality contradicts and thus undermines itself at every moment, in action as well as logic. For as soon as one turns from the silly abstractions about values and relativism back to real life – back to elections, jury duty, hiring decisions, the forming of friendships, the choice of a spouse, the raising of children, the communion with one’s own conscience – one sees the inescapable need and obligation to evaluate and judge the characters of other people at every turn. So long as we live, we cannot help but feel the urgency of our need to know what Socrates sought to know ... Just beneath the sophisticated veneer that distorts our moral experience there is to be found, then, overwhelming evidence of the primordial and permanent power of the concerns or questions that are the Socratic starting point.

[Thomas L. Pangle, Introduction to: The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, by Leo Strauss]

[In Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, the king of Denmark, has been murdered by his own brother, Claudius, and his own wife, Gertrude. Claudius and Gertrude then married and Claudius became the new king of Denmark. In the first passage, Hamlet expresses his admiration for Horatio, a poor, honest, faithful soldier. As background to the second, Hamlet’s strange, distressed behavior has caused the king and queen to be uneasy, and they assign two polished, witty courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, former friends of Hamlet, as spies to ``sound him out’’ and report back. The ``pipe’’ referred to is the musical instrument, the recorder.]

HAMLET [to Horatio]

Nay, do not think I flatter,

For what advancement may I hope from thee

That no revenue hast but thy good spirits

To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter’d?

No, let candied tongue lick absurd pomp,

And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee

Where thrift [profit] may follow fawning.

..... for thou hast been

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,

A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards

Hath ta’en with equal thanks; and blest are those

Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled,

That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger

To sound what stop she please. .......

*****

HAMLET

... Will you play upon this pipe?

GUILDENSTERN

My lord, I cannot.

HAMLET

I pray you.

GUILDENSTERN

Believe me, I cannot.

HAMLET

I do beseech you.

GUILDENSTERN

I know no touch of it, my lord.

HAMLET

'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most excellent music. Look you, these are the stops.

GUILDENSTERN

But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.

HAMLET

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. [William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2]

To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him. [Goethe]

[Marcel Proust on the same theme]

We answer readily enough for other people when, setting our mental stage with the little puppets that represent them, we manipulate these to suite our fancy. No doubt even then we take into account the difficulties due to another person's nature being different from our own, and we do not fail to have recourse to some plan of action likely to influence that nature, an appeal to his material interest, persuasion, the rousing of emotion, which will neutralise contrary tendencies on his part. But these differences from our own nature, it is still our own nature that is imagining them, these difficulties, it is we that are raising them; these compelling motives, it is we that are applying them. And so with the actions which before our mind's eye we have made the other person rehearse, and which make him act as we choose; when we wish to see him perform them in real life, the case is altered, we come up against unseen resistances which may prove insuperable. [Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way), trans. in: Remembrances of Things Past, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Vol. 1, p.816]

[Goethe on back-biters and national hatred] I know very well that I am an eyesore to many; that they would willingly get rid of me; and that, since they cannot touch my talent, they aim at my character. Now, it is said, I am proud; and now, without love for my native country, and my own dear Germans. ... A German author is a German martyr! Yes, my friend, you will not find it otherwise. And I myself can scarcely complain; none of the others have fared better - most have fared worse; and in England and France it is quite the same as with us. What did Molière not suffer? What Rousseau and Voltaire? Byron was driven from England by evil tongues ... And if it were only the narrow-minded masses that persecute noble men! But no! - one gifted man and one talent persecutes another; Platen scandalizes Heine and Heine Platen, and each seeks to make the other hateful; ... To write military songs, and sit in a room! That ... was my duty! To have written them in the bivouac, when the horses at the enemy’s outposts are heard neighing at night would have been well enough ... But to me, who am not of a warlike nature ... war-songs would have been a mask fitting my face very badly. ... I have only composed love-songs when I have loved. How could I write songs of hatred without hating! And between ourselves, I did not hate the French, though I thanked God that we were free of them. How could I ... hate a nation that is among the most cultured of the earth, to which I owe so great a part of my own culture? Altogether ... national hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture. But there is a degree where it vanishes altogether, and where a person stands to a certain extent above nations, and feels the good or bad fortune of a neighbouring people as if it had happened to his own....

[Conversations of Goethe, Eckermann, minor changes in translation]

[Against present day popular music] Well, you know a man [like Mahler] in love does use his art to express some of his passion, it’s true of everyone I suppose. Thank God he [Mahler] was capable of love; being able to offer love is a gift that is not given to everyone. You have to have passion and so many people, especially in today’s world, are born without passion. They are walking laptops, wearing earmuffs, or plugging in a pop tune or whatever. You look around and you really sometimes wonder, are these people still people? The human race is gradually being so corrupted by this noise and this dreadful stuff out there that passes itself off as music. It’s really pitiful.

[Lorin Maazel in an interview about Mahler]

Sad Thoughts

[In the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, Nowhere Man joyfully pirouettes – Whee!! - round and round in concentric circles, which, to his increasing anxiety, contract down to the center, leaving him eventually stopped there, alone and in tears.]

He's a real Nowhere Man,

Sitting in his Nowhere Land,

Making all his Nowhere plans for nobody...

He's as blind as he can be,

Just sees what he wants to see,

Nowhere Man can you see me at all?

... Doesn't have a point of view,

Knows not where he's going to,

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

[Nowhere Man, from: Yellow Submarine, The Beatles]

[Paul near the end]

Do your best to join me soon; for Demas has deserted me because his heart was set on this world; he has gone to Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia; I have no one with me but Luke. ... At the first hearing of my case no one came into court to support me; they all left me in the lurch ... When you come, bring the cloak I left with Carpus at Troas ... Do try to get here before winter.

[2 Timothy, Chapter 4, New English Bible (order slightly changed)]

What can women know except the philosophy of the kitchen? [bitter comment by Sor Juana 1648-1695 (great Mexican nun, poet and intellectual, defender of women's biblical and theological rights to an education, attacked by the Archbishop of Mexico for her secular learning - she was eventually silenced, renounced her books, and died of the plague shortly after the uprisings of 1692)]

[The destruction of the Mayan culture]

Ahan Katun: the blond-bearded strangers arrived, the sons of the sun, the pale-colored men. Ah, how sad we were when they arrived! ... The white man’s stick will fall, will descend from on high, will strike everywhere ... The words of Hunab-Ku, our one god, will be words of sorrow when the words of the God of Heaven spread out over the earth ... The hangings will begin, and lightning will flash from the white man’s hands ... The hardships of battle will fall upon the Brothers, and tribute will be demanded after the grand entrance of Christianity, and the Seven Sacraments will be established, and travail and misery will rule this land.

[from: Chilam Balam de Chumayel (a sacred book of the Yucatán Mayans, written in the colonial period, which remarkably has survived (at least in photographic form) despite auto-da-fé)]

[The torments of Nietsche] No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness: headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat – a gruesome circle. In addition, there are his `three-quarters blind eyes’, which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears, and grant the intellectual worker only `an hour and half of vision a day’. But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches ... at night when his body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates. But even greater quantitites are needed (in two months, Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase a handful of sleep); then the stomach refuse to pay so high a price and rebels. And now – vicious circle – spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game. Never a point of rest ....

[Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, trans. W. Kauffman]

[Kavanagh on his drinking problem]

... There are people in the streets who steer by my star.

There was nothing they could do but view me while I threw

Back large whiskeys in the corner of a smoky bar

And if only I would get drunk it wouldn’t be so bad

With a pain in my stomach I wasn’t even comic

Swallowing every digestive pill to be had.

Some of my friends stayed faithful but quite a handful

Looked upon it as the end; I could quite safely be

Dismissed a dead loss in the final up toss.

He’s finished and that’s definitely.

[The Same Again, Patrick Kavanagh]

They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, "No, no, no"

Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know

I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine

He's tried to make me go to rehab, I won’t go, go, go

I'd rather be at home with Ray

I ain't got seventy days

Cause there's nothing

There's nothing you can teach me

That I can't learn from Mr Hathaway

I didn’t get a lot in class

But I know we don’t come in a shot glass ...

The man said 'why do you think you here'

I said 'I got no idea

I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose my baby

so I always keep a bottle near'...

I’m not gonna spend ten weeks

Have everyone think I’m on the mend

And it’s not just my pride

It’s just ‘til these tears have dried...

They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, "No, no, no"

Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know

I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine

He's tried to make me go to rehab, I won’t go, go, go ...

[Rehab, Amy Winehouse - Amy Winehouse died on July 23, 2011]

Drüben hintern Dorfe Over there beyond the village

Steht ein Leiermann Stands an organ-grinder

Und mit starren Fingern And with frozen fingers

Dreht er was er kann Grinds away as best he can

Barfuß auf dem Eise Barefoot on the ice

Wankt er hin und her He staggers here and there

Und sein kleiner Teller And his little plate

Bleibt ihm immer leer Remains always empty

Keiner mag ihn hören No one wants to hear him

Keiner sieht ihn an No one looks at him

Und die Hunde knurren And the dogs growl

Um den alten Mann Around the old man

Und er läßt es gehen And he lets it all go

Alles wie es will Come what may

Dreht, und seine Leier Plays, and his hurdy-gurdy

Steht ihm nimmer still never stays still

Wunderlicher Alter! Strange old man!

Soll ich mit dir geh'n? Shall I go with you?

Willst zu meinen Liedern Will you play your organ

Deine Leier dreh'n? To my songs?

[Der Leiermann from the poem Winterreise (Winter Journey) by Wilhelm Müller, set to music in Schubert's great song cycle of that name (memorably sung by Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau accompanied by Maurizio Pollini). The poem records the tormented reflections of a young man, rejected by his Liebchen, slipping out the door on a winter's night - closing it softly behind him so as not to disturb her - to wander about in the ice and snow on a journey from which there is no return. The old man may well have been a veteran.]

[Romantic adverts]

Pretty 45 y/o w/f, 140-lbs, salt and pepper hair, one-man woman, Christian, looking for country gentleman 37-42, no big men, no druggies, no beaters or cheaters (men of many faces), no gold diggers. I’m not high maintenance but want to be treated like a lady, no mind games, tired of being hurt, it is said that there is someone special for everyone, just haven't found him yet, don't smoke but don't mind if you do, light social drinking. Looking for my soul mate, not a one night stand. I have been told that I am very young looking for my age. Please send letter, photo, address. I will answer all replies.

*****

SWM, 5’1’’, 220 lbs, 46 y/o, live on my farm, just me and the cows, financially secure, no children that I know of, good man looking for SWF with a whole lot of love, I know that you are out there, ``life is not measured by our breaths but by the things that take our breaths away’’, loves to cuddle and be cuddled, I believe in looking within to find true beauty, not judging by the outside, ride 4 wheelers, I love to make people laugh but am not a clown, not looking for a mother figure. Please send name, phone number and address. If you have a photo, that would be nice.

********

A great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. [German saying]

********

We're tenting tonight on the old Camp ground,

Give us a song to cheer

Our weary hearts, a song of home,

And friends we love so dear.

[Chorus]

Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,

Wishing for the war to cease;

Many are the hearts that are looking for the right

To see the dawn of peace.

Tenting tonight, tenting tonight,

Tenting on the old Camp ground.....

We've been fighting today on the old Camp ground,

Many are lying near;

Some are dead, and some are dying,

Many are in tears.

Many are the hearts who are weary tonight,

Wishing for the war to cease;

Many are the hearts that are looking for the right

To see the dawn of peace.

Dying tonight, dying tonight,

Dying on the old Camp ground.

[Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground, United States Civil War song, Walter Kittredge (1834-1905)]

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. [Dwight D. Eisenhower]

[War and the suffering of civilians: an account, written by the great Chinese poet, Du Fu, of the journey made by him and his family in 756 AD when they fled north from Chang’an to avoid the armies led by An Lushan in the rebellion against the emperor Tang Xuanzong.]

Ballad of Pengya

I remember when we first fled the rebels, hurrying north over dangerous trails; night deepened on Pengya Road, the moon shone over White-Water Hills. A whole family endlessly trudging, begging without shame from the people we met: valley birds sang, a jangle of soft voices; we didn’t see a single traveler returning. The baby girl in her hunger bit me; fearful that tigers or wolves would hear her cries, I hugged her to my chest, muffling her mouth, but she squirmed and wailed louder than before. The little boy pretended he knew what was happening; importantly he searched for sour plums to eat. Ten days, half in rain and thunder, through mud and slime we pulled each other on. There was no escaping the rain, trails slick, clothes wet and clammy; getting past the hardest places, a whole day advanced us no more than three or four li. [1 li=500 meters] Mountain fruits served for rations, low-hung branches were our rafter and roof. Mornings we traveled by rock-bedded streams, evenings camped in mists that closed in the sky. We stopped a little while at the marsh of Tongjia, thinking to go out by Luzi Pass; an old friend there, Sun Zai, ......

[Translated by Burton Watson: p.49, The Selected Poems of Du Fu, Columbia University Press, 2002.]

[National ingratitude – the homecoming recollection of a Vietnam soldier] On returning from Vietnam, minus my right arm, I was accosted twice ... by individuals who inquired, ``Where did you lose your arm? Vietnam?’’ I replied, ``Yes’’. The response was, ``Good. Serves you right.’’

[The crushing of humanity: Barge Haulers [Burlaki] on the Volga, from a picture painted by Ilya Repin, 1870-73, downloaded from the web page: myweb.rollins.edu, commemorated in the Volga Boatmen song, as sung by the Red Army Choir with Leonid Kharitonov]

[An ill Shostakovich at the end of his Testimony, evaluating his life and looking to the future]

No, I can't go on describing my unhappy life, and I'm sure that no one can doubt now that it is unhappy. There were no particularly happy moments in my life, no great joys. It was gray and dull and it makes me sad to think about it. It saddens me to admit it, but it's the truth, the unhappy truth .... They've come up with a tentative diagnosis: something like chronic poliomyelitis. ... When I'm in Moscow, I feel worst of all. I keep thinking that I'll fall and break a leg. At home I can even play the piano. But I'm afraid to go out. I'm terrified to be seen, I feel fragile, breakable. ... I thought I would find distraction reminiscing about my friends and acquaintances. ... But even this undertaking has turned out to be a sad one. ... when I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances, I was horrified. Not one of them had an easy or a happy life. Some came to a terrible end, some died in terrible suffering, and the lives of many of them could easily be called more miserable than mine. And that made me even sadder. I was remembering my friends and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses. I'm not exaggerating, I mean mountains. And the picture filled me with a horrible depression. I'm sad, I'm grieving all the time. ... But for many reasons I went on [talking about his life to Solomon Volkov (who would edit his Memoirs in the West after his death in 1975)] . ... I reasoned this way: I've described many unpleasant and even tragic events, as well as several sinister and repulsive figures. My relations with them brought me much sorrow and suffering. And I thought perhaps my experience in this regard could also be of some use to people younger than I. Perhaps they wouldn't have the horrible disillusionment that I had to face, and would go through life better prepared, more hardened, than I was. And perhaps their lives would be free of the bitterness that has colored my life gray.

[Shostakovich, Testimony, pp.275-276]

[Excerpt from Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte [Introduction to the Philosophy of History], trans. J. Sibtree (revised)]

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action - the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind - benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings. We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over people than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality. When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the human mind ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption.

... As a consequence, one can, without rhetorical exaggeration and in simple truth, [say that] the combination of the miseries, from which the greatest of nations – and forms of state and private, virtuous individuals – have suffered, raises up the most terrible picture and excites emotions of the profoundest and most helpless sadness, counter-balanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defense or escape, while we think: that is just the way it was; it is fate; nothing can be changed. And at last we draw back from the tedium, which reflection on the heartbreak can cause, into our [own individual]experience of life, into our aims and interests of the present time, in short, retreat into the selfishness which stands on the peaceful shore and from there, at a safe distance, enjoys the sight of the confused masses of rubble [left by History].

But even regarding History as the slaughterbench [Schlachtbank] on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed - the question necessarily arises - to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered ...

[and, to answer this question, Hegel investigates the emergence of Reason an und für sich through the evolution of History]

On cheering up

chazak ve'ematz Be strong, and of a good courage ...

[This Hebrew phrase appears in, for example, Deuteronomy 31:6. It was the slogan with which the leader Mordechai Anielewicz (1920-1943), and other members of the Zionist-Israeli movement, led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis in 1943, fighting to the end, uncompromisingly, in the shelters and from house to house, armed only with hand revolvers.]

Om Mani Padmé Hung The jewel is in the lotus

[The Chenresig mantra – the national mantra of Tibet and of the Dalai Lama: just as the lotus flower arises magnificently out of the watery mud, so, given perseverance, what one is seeking at the deepest level – the ``jewel’’ - will eventually emerge in surprising beauty out of one’s life, despite the latter’s apparent sordidness and failure.]

I called through your door,

``The mystics are gathering

in the street. Come out!’’

``Leave me alone.

I’m sick.’’

``I don’t care if you’re dead!

Jesus is here, and he wants

to resurrect somebody!’’

[Rumi]

[Resolute acceptance of the nature of the world, and its character as Love through the two kinds of fire]

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire ...

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires ...

*****

The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

[T. S. Eliot, excerpts from East Coker and Little Gidding]

[More on Love and the ``purgatorial fires’’ – in Dante’s Purgatorio, Cantos XXV and XXVI, Dante reaches the last terrace high on the mountain of Purgatory. The terrace is concerned with the purification of the spirits of the Lustful (the other six of the seven deadly sins having been dealt with further down the mountain). To Dante’s terror, he is confronted with a wall of flames flashing out horizontally from the inside of the terrace but bent back upwards by a blast of air shooting up the side of the cliff, leaving only a narrow, dangerous, ledge on the outside for Dante and his guides, Virgil and Statius, to negotiate. Walking within the flames are those who in their lives allowed lust (in its various forms) to overwhelm them, and who are now ``healing their wounds’’ by purification in the burning, singing hymns and praising chastity, virtue and those married pairs who have been faithful to their vows. (So this is a very different kind of burning from that of Hell out of which, earlier, Dante had staggered, white faced and stupefied.) In Canto XXVII, an ``angel of joy’’ then confronts them and invites them to enter the flames, but the terrified poet, numbed with fear, stops. Only his love for Beatrice eventually drags him into the fire.]

10 Poscia «Più non si va, se pria non morde, Then holy souls no further can you go 11 anime sante, il foco: intrate in esso, without first suffering fire. So, enter now, 12 e al cantar di là non siate sorde», and be not deaf to what is sung beyond.

13 ci disse come noi li fummo presso; he said to us as we came up to him.

14 per ch'io divenni tal, quando lo 'ntesi, I, when I heard these words, felt like a man

15 qual è colui che ne la fossa è messo. who is about to be entombed alive.

16 In su le man commesse mi protesi, Gripping my hands together, I leaned forward

17 guardando il foco e imaginando forte and, staring at the fire, I recalled

18 umani corpi già veduti accesi. what human bodies look like burned to death.

19 Volsersi verso me le buone scorte; Both of my friendly guides turned toward me then

20 e Virgilio mi disse: «Figliuol mio, and Virgil said to me:``Oh my dear son,

21 qui può esser tormento, ma non morte.. there may be pain here, but there is no death.

25 Credi per certo che se dentro a l'alvo Believe me when I say that if you spent

26 di questa fiamma stessi ben mille anni, a thousand years within the fire’s heart,

27 non ti potrebbe far d'un capel calvo.... it would not singe a single hair of yours;

31 Pon giù omai, pon giù ogni temenza; It’s time, high time, to put away your fears;

32 volgiti in qua e vieni: entra sicuro! Turn towards me, come, and enter without

fear!’’

33 E io pur fermo e contra coscienza. But I stood there, immobile – and ashamed.

34 Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro, He said, somewhat annoyed to see me fixed

35 turbato un poco disse: «Or vedi, figlio: and stubborn there, ``Now, don’t you see, my

son

36 tra Beatrice e te è questo muro».... only this wall keeps you from Beatrice.’’

40 così, la mia durezza fatta solla, Just so, my stubbornness melted away;

41 mi volsi al savio duca, udendo il nome hearing the name which blooms eternally

42 che ne la mente sempre mi rampolla. within my mind, I turned to my wise guide.

43 Ond'ei crollò la fronte e disse: «Come! He shook his head and smiled, as at a child

44 volenci star di qua?»; indi sorrise won over by an apple, as he said:

45 come al fanciul si fa ch'è vinto al pome...``Well then, what are we doing on this side?’’

49 Sì com'fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro Once in the fire, I would have gladly jumped

50 gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi, into the depths of boiling glass to find

51 tant'era ivi lo 'ncendio sanza metro. relief from that intensity of heat.

52 Lo dolce padre mio, per confortarmi, My loving father tried to comfort me,

53 pur di Beatrice ragionando andava, talking of Beatrice as we moved:

54 dicendo: «Li occhi suoi già veder parmi». ``Already I can see her eyes, it seems!’’

55 Guidavaci una voce che cantava From somewhere else there came to us a voice

56 di là; e noi, attenti pur a lei, singing to guide us; listening to this,

57 venimmo fuor là ove si montava. we emerged at last where ascent begins.

[and Virgil informs the purified Dante that his will is now upright, wholesome and free, and ``crowns’’ and ``miters’’ him lord of himself. Dante is at last fit to regain and enter the Garden of Eden, originally lost to humanity through the Fall. (Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVII, trans. Mark Musa, 1984).]

[The two kinds of Hallelujah and their identity (and difference)]

I've heard there was a secret chord

that David played to please the Lord,

but you don't really care for music, do you?

It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth

the minor fall, the major lift;

the baffled king composing Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof.

You saw her bathing on the roof;

her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you ...

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain;

I don't even know the name.

But if I did, well, really, what's it to you?

There's a blaze of light in every word;

it doesn't matter which you heard,

the holy, or the broken Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best; it wasn't much.

I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch.

I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.

And even though it all went wrong,

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

[From the song: Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen (Stranger Music (1993))]

[Zarathustra and the dancing god]

You say to me, ``Life is hard to bear.’’... Life is hard to bear; but do not act so tenderly! We are all of us fair beasts of burden, male and female asses. What do we have in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew lies on it?

True, we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

And to me too, as I am well disposed toward life, butterflies and soap bubbles and whatever among men is of their kind seem to know most about happiness. Seeing these light, foolish, delicate, mobile little souls flutter – that seduces Zarathustra to tears and songs.

I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity – through him, all things fall.

Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

[Friedrich Nietszche, On Reading and Writing, Zarathustra, Part 1]

[On seeing the positive side] Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die, so, let us all be thankful. [Buddhist Quote]

Come Philip, let us sing the forty-sixth Psalm. [said by Martin Luther to Phillip Melancthon at a time when the Reformation appeared doomed.]

[Luther’s great Reformation hymn (Psalm 46, 1)]

Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, A safe stronghold our God is still,

Ein' gute Wehr und Waffen; A trusty shield and weapon;

Er hilft uns frei aus aller Not, He’ll help us clear from all the ill

Die uns jetzt hat betroffen. That hath us now o’ertaken.

Der alt' böse Feind, The ancient prince of hell

Mit Ernst er's jetzt meint, Hath risen with purpose fell;

Groß' Macht und viel List Strong mail of craft and power

Sein' grausam' Rüstung ist, He weareth in this hour;

Auf Erd' ist nicht seins Gleichen On earth is not his fellow.

.... ....

Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn God’s Word, for all their craft and force Und kein'n Dank dazu haben; One moment will not linger,

Er ist bei uns wohl auf dem Plan But, spite of hell, shall have its Course

Mit seinem Geist und Gaben. ’Tis written by His finger.

Nehmen sie dein Leib, And though they take our life,

Gut, Ehr', Kind und Weib: Goods, honor, children, wife,

Lass fahren dahin, Yet is their profit small;

Sie haben's kein'n Gewinn, These things shall vanish all:

Das Reich muss uns doch bleiben. The City of God remaineth!

[English translation by Thomas Carlyle]

[On meditation and extracting the poison out of bitter thoughts] Meditation is contemplation done with great mental concentration. When a person meditates, her (or his) concentrated thought, like a laser beam, penetrates through the inner layers of her mind and arrives at the bottom where the samskāras [impressions of past thoughts at the subconscious level] are. The concentrated thought, like an underwater probe, starts disturbing the accumulated samskāras. As a result, they gradually get dislodged and rise one by one to the conscious level ... The meditator should watch the rejuvenated thoughts like a disinterested observer and must not act on them. The old thoughts, once they have risen to the conscious level, burst like so many air bubbles and disappear. This is how, through the practice of meditation, one can purify one’s mind by gradually getting rid of old impressions or samskāras. If, however, the meditator acts upon those rejuvenated thoughts, she will create new samskāras and her mind will not be cleansed. [The Essentials of Hinduism, Swami Bhaskarananda, p.126, minor changes]

[The therapy of exercise] I have always believed that exercise in not only the key to physical health but to peace of mind. Many times in the old days I unleashed my anger and frustration on a punching bag rather than taking it out on a comrade or even a policeman. Exercise dissipates tension, and tension is the enemy of serenity. [Nelson Mandela, The Long Walk To Freedom, p.319]

[On keeping going (and uncomfortable seating) – advice of the great 11th century Tibetan yogi Milarepa to his student, the physician monk, Gampopa, when the latter had to leave him in the Himalayas and asked for one final teaching.] ... as Gampopa started on his way ... Milarepa shouted out. ``Hey, Doctor-Monk, I have one very profound secret instruction. It is too precious to give away to just anyone.’’ As Gampopa joyfully looked back to receive this last teaching ... Milarepa turned round and bent over, pulling up his flimsy cotton robe. Milarepa’s buttocks were as callused and pockmarked as a horse’s hoof, toughened from all those hours and years spent in seated meditation on hard rock. Then Milarepa shouted, ``That is my final teaching, my heart-son. Just do it!’’ [from:Awakening The Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das, 1998, p.273]

[Christmas thoughts]

Ring out ye Crystall sphears!

Once bless our human ears

(If ye have power to touch our senses so)

And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time,

And let the Bass of Heav'ns deep Organ blow;

And with your ninefold harmony

Make up full consort to th'Angelike symphony.

For if such holy Song

Enwrap our fancy long,

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,

And speckl’d vanity

Will sicken soon and die,

And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould;

And Hell itself will pass away,

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea Truth and Justice then

Will down return to men,

Th'enameld Arras of the Rainbow wearing,

And Mercy set between,

Thron'd in Celestiall sheen,

With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing,

And Heav'n as at som festivall,

Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

[Verses from: On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, John Milton, December 1629]

Small mindedness

[The poet and his neighbor struggle with the boulders, repairing the stone wall separating their lots.]

... We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each. ...

He only says, `Good fences make good neighbors.’ Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

`Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense,

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say `Elves' to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed....

He will not go behind his father’s saying.

And he likes having thought of it so well.

He says again, `Good fences make good neighbors.’

[Mending Wall, Robert Frost]

Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited road-houses. [Rumi]

[god with a small g – the poet, Heinrich Heine, reminiscing about a conversation with Hegel]

One beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of twenty-two who had just eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the blessed. But the master [Hegel] grumbled to himself: ``The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.’’ For God’s sake, I shouted, then there is no happy locality up there to reward virtue after death? But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said cuttingly: ``So you want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your dear brother?’’ – Saying that, he looked around anxiously, but he immediately seemed reassured when he saw that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to play whist ...

[in Hegel: a reinterpretation, by Walter Kauffman]

Miscellanea

Art is never finished, only abandoned. [Lenardo da Vinci]

Only one man has understood me, and he did not understand me either. [attributed to J. G. Fichte]

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. [Bertrand Russell]

Vice is, on principle, the love of failure. [Jean-Paul Sartre]

[Making the best of circumstances] I was cut off from the world and forced to become original. [Haydn on having to spend his working life away from Vienna]

[Be careful what you ask for ...] Every report of the success of the Seventh or Eighth [symphony] made me ill. A new success meant a new coffin nail ... [Dmitri Shostakovich]

You are as likely to find a real philosopher in a philosophy department as you are to discover a Picasso in the department of fine arts. [Leo Strauss]

[A real philosopher - Antonio Caso (1883 – 1946) was the rector of the Universidad Nacional de México and opponent of the dominant ideologies in Mexico of Catholicism and Positivism] But if Caso’s ideas did not exercise any influence on those of the [Mexican] Revolution, his unfailing love for knowledge – which caused him to go on with his classes even while opposing factions were shooting each other in the street – made him a splendid example of what philosophy means: a love that nothing can buy and that nothing can pervert. [Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, pp.140-141]

There exists a very dangerous tendency to identify the good man with the good sport, the cooperative fellow, the ``regular guy’’, i.e. an overemphasis on a certain part of social virtue and a corresponding neglect of those virtues which mature, if they do not flourish, in privacy, not to say in solitude: by educating people to cooperate with each other in a friendly spirit, one does not yet educate nonconformists, people who are prepared to stand alone, to fight alone ... Democracy has not yet found a defense against the creeping conformism and the ever-increasing invasion of privacy that it fosters.

[Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?]

Nothing good ever happens after midnight.

Have a nice day, unless you have other plans.

[The trouble with proofs?]

To prove that I am right would be to recognize that I can be wrong. [Suzanne in The Marriage of Figaro]

Forget respect. Respect doesn't produce great work. [Samuel Beckett]

[On what you can learn by visiting the zoo]

A peacock without feathers is like a very unappealing, big chicken - there are a lot of people like that. [Rabbi Steinsaltz (Translator of the Talmud into modern Hebrew)]

[Really?]

Will kein Gott auf Erden sein, If there is no God upon the earth

Sind wir selber Götter! Then we ourselves are Gods!

[Familiar 19th century theme (e.g. Feuerbach, Heine, Nietzsche), two lines from Wilhelm Müller, Winterreise, Mut]

[The resurrection of shorthand? - nU fonetics, txting & lngwij]

R U wurEd dat d eng lngwij wil bcum cor^ted & unrEdabl, dat kds wont no how 2 spL? olds got ^set rEsntlE wen a 13-yr-old :o)3 in w scotl& rOt a skul SA in txt. she sed it wz EZer thn writN all d borN lng wrds. it Bgan: “my smmr hols wr a CWOT. B4, we Usd 2go2 NY toC my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY, it iz a gr8 plc.” d Tcha sed he c% dnt BlEv it, it wz fulla hIrOglifs he c% dnt transl8. :o PU. PSOS, CWYL.

[The Economist, Mar. 6th, 2003, minor changes]

[What makes a good physician? – the great Harvard mathematician Raoul Bott, after being demobilized from the Canadian infantry in 1945 and obtaining an Engineering degree, decided against Engineering as a career and struggled with determining his vocation in life. He thought about trying medicine. In a sermon that he gave thirty years later, he recounted how the issue was resolved through the advice of a wise man, whose role in his life he compared to that of the Biblical Eli’s role in Samuel’s life.]

I well remember my Eli. He was the Dean of the Medical School at McGill and I approached him for help in entering the medical school there ... The Dean greeted me very cordially and assured me that there was a great need for technically trained doctors. ``But'', he said, seating me next to him, ``first tell me a little about yourself. Did you ever have any interest in botany, say, or biology?'' ``Well, not really'', I had to admit. ``How about chemistry?'' - ``Oh, I hated that course.'' And so it went. After a while he said, ``Well, is it maybe that you want to do good for humanity?'' And then, while I was coughing in embarrassment, he went on, ``Because they make the worst doctors.'' I thanked him, and as I walked out of his door, I knew that I would start afresh, and with God's grace try and become a mathematician.

[Raoul Bott, from a sermon delivered by him at Harvard's Memorial Chapel - in Loring W. Tu’s: The Life and Works of Raoul Bott.]

[More on the preceding theme - in 1988, Nelson Mandela, who was living in a damp cell at the time, became ill, and was taken to a hospital in Cape Town] ... I was looked at by a young and amiable doctor who was also a professor at the university medical school. He inspected my throat, tapped my chest, took some cultures, and in no time pronounced me fit. “There is nothing wrong with you,’’ he said with a smile. “We should be able to release you tomorrow.’’ ... I spent the night in the empty ward under heavy guard. The first thing the next morning, even before I had breakfast, I was visited by an older doctor who was head of internal medicine at the hospital. He was a no-nonsense fellow and had far less of a bedside manner than the cordial young physician of the night before. Without any preliminaries, he tapped me roughly on my chest and then said gruffly, “There is water in your lung.’’ I told him that the previous doctor had done tests and said I was fine. With a hint of annoyance, he said, “Mandela, take a look at your chest.’’ He pointed out that one side of my chest was actually larger than the other, and said that it was probably filled with water. He asked a nurse to bring him a syringe, and without further ado he poked it into my chest and drew out some brownish liquid ... [and after an operation, two liters of water were removed from his chest, and a tuberculosis germ discovered. p.375, Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom]

It is knowledge that can transform our bodies, give energy in old age, joy in suffering, and insight into the guile of people. [Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan]

To understand, the intelligence must get itself dirty. [Henri Michaux]

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. [William Blake]

Routine is the sign of a well-run prison. [Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom]

Ce qui limite le vrai, ce n'est pas le faux, c'est l'insignificant. [``What limits the true is not the false, it is the insignificant.''] [Réné Thom.]

[On belief]

One day Mara, the Evil One, was travelling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up with wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara's attendant asked what that was and Mara replied, "A piece of truth." "Doesn't this bother you when someone finds a piece of truth, O Evil One?" his attendant asked. "No," Mara replied. "Right after this, they usually make a belief out of it."

[From : Benny Liow, 108 Treasures for the Heart: A Guide for Daily Living]

On resisting the ``mob'', and the price it exacts

[Advice from Zarathustra to the ``great souls’’ concerning ``the new idol’’ (the state and political power) , ``the market place'' (the ``rat race'') and shooing flies.]

Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brothers: here there are states. .... State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies also; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." That is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. ... "On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the regulating finger of God" - thus roars the monster. And not only the long-eared and short-sighted fall upon their knees! Ah! even in your ears, you great souls, it whispers its gloomy lies!

.... Just look at these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money - these impotent ones! See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss. Towards the throne they all strive: that is their madness - as if happiness sat on the throne! Often sits filth on the throne - and often also the throne on filth. Badly smells their idol, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters. Escape from the bad smell!

Full of solemn jesters is the market place ... and from you they want a Yes or No ... Flee into your solitude! ... Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great ... You have lived too close to the small and the miserable. Flee their invisible revenge! Against you they are nothing but revenge. ... Numberless are these small and miserable creatures; and many a proud building has perished of raindrops and weeds. ... I see you wearied by poisonous flies, bloody in a hundred places; and your pride refuses even to be angry. ... Their bloodless souls crave blood, and so they sting in all innocence. ... They hum around you in their praise too: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want the proximity of your skin and your blood. ... Often they affect charm. But that has always been the cleverness of cowards ... They think a lot about you with their petty souls – you always seem problematic to them. ... Even when you are gentle to them they still feel despised by you: and they return your benefaction with hidden malefactions. Your silent pride always runs counter to their taste ... Before you they feel small, and their baseness glimmers and glows in invisible revenge. Have you not noticed how often they became mute when you stepped among them ...? Indeed, my friend, you are the bad conscience of your neighbors ... They hate you, therefore ...

A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty! Empty are still many seats for the lonesome ... fanned by the fragrance of tranquil seas. Flee, my friend, into your solitude and where the air is raw and strong. It is not your job to shoo flies.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

[Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Part 1, translated by Walter Kaufman]

[A more positive view of the state] The state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom; and it is an absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual. ... The basis of the state is the power of reason actualizing itself as will. ... But since it is easier to find defects than to understand the affirmative, we may readily fall into the mistake of looking at isolated aspects of the state and so forgetting its inward organic life. The state is no ideal work of art; it stands on earth and so in the sphere of caprice, chance, and error, and bad behaviour may disfigure it in many respects. But the ugliest of men, or a criminal ... is still always a living man. The affirmative, life, subsists despite his defects ... We are confident that the state must subsist and that in it alone can particular interests be secured. But habit blinds us to that on which our whole existence depends. When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses.

[G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Zusätze, translated by T. M. Knox]

It is a notorious fact that the morality of a society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this. Hence every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility. ...... The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity (Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri). Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. ...... The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers, as can easily be proved by an analysis of his unconscious, even though he himself is not in the least disturbed by it. ..... So obvious does it seem to us that a man should drown in his own dignity, so utterly incomprehensible that he should seek anything other than what the mob wants, and that he should vanish permanently from view in this other. [Carl G. Jung, Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious]

... but with the advance of age, when they are no longer fit for political or military service, then at last they should be given `free range of the pasture' and do nothing but philosophize, except incidentally, if they are to live happily ...the philosopher remains quiet, minds his own business, and, as it were, standing aside under the shelter of a wall in a storm and blast of dust and hail, and seeing others full of lawlessness, is content if in any way he may keep himself free from wickedness and wrong in this life and take his departure with good hope, serene and cheerful when the end comes. [Plato, The Republic, 7.498c, 7.496d]

[Piotr Franzevich Lesgaft, Professor of Physiological Anatomy at the Kazan University, was fired in 1871 for a statement made against ``arbitrariness'' on the part of the professorate and authorities of the university.]

... A person who has allowed himself to act in such a manner ... should not be tolerated in Education Service [A note in the St. Petersburg Gazette by the Minister for Enlightenment, D. A. Tolstoy, in connection with an earlier article written by P. F. Lesgaft]

Every arbitrary act is very sad, but it is still sadder, and more distressing, when there is no defense against arbitrary administration and unlawful action, when people refuse, not only to understand, but even to listen to what is going on ... [P. F. Lesgaft - the following is an excerpt from the poem Lesgaft by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, where the poet ``discusses’’ the matter with Lesgaft.]

``Why have you, dearest Piotr Franzevich,

got involved in seditious affairs?

Your love for liberal phrases

has led you into foolishness....

When you have such talent for anatomy,

to spoil a career in one moment!

Why, explain to me?’’ ``Is that necessary?

After all, your conscience is only rudimentary.’’

``That means I am a scoundrel?’’ ``Not completely,

That you are a complete coward is true, ...’’

``But subtle strategy also exists.

Sometimes it is wiser to retreat.

Posterity glorifies only the one who knows how to retreat.

Stubborn rashness is senseless...’’

``But often when we rationalize,

the beautiful word strategy

is only a pseudonym for cowardice ... ’’

``Aren’t you tired of writing protests?’’ ``A bit ...’’

``The wall will not crumble, because you shout ...’’

``If it only totters, that is enough.

Social protest is the discovery of oneself for oneself...

... What is all this rotten regime?

A malignant growth!...

Only surgical intervention

can possibly save Russia!’’

``To slash living tissue? Can’t you see the danger?’’

``Of course I can, I’m sober.

But one should make a decisive cut

with the scalpel of publicity ..’’

``But where are you living, poor Piotr Franzevich? ...

To talk in Russia about equality and fraternity?!

That’s asking for the whip!

Should censorship soften even slightly

what will be printed? ...

All shops will be looted in a second.

and your downtrodden brother, barking at you furiously –

because your spectacles aren’t the right kind –

will knock you down with an axle,

as a symbol of `fraternity’....

But tell me, Piotr Franzevich,

how do you see our future?’’

``I see a different Russia:

a Russia ruled neither by the whip

nor by axles used as clubs,

both are alien to me.

She will be ruled ... by the best people of the nation.’’

``You are naïve ... Neither now nor in the future,

can power be in the hands of the people.

The people are beasts of burden, Piotr Franzevich,

and if, at times, the people,

disgruntled shake their yoke,

it’s not at all because they thirst for freedom.

It’s better fodder they would like

It’s cleaner sties they’re after ...

The educated need freedom,

but the illiterate: fodder.

What need has he of your call to protest?’’

``The struggle for freedom is a great education in itself ...’’

``Or perhaps only a change of yoke?’’...

``I side with the optimists.

Wide vistas will yet be flung open,

and the real Truth, as queen, will yet ascend

the Russian throne....

We are the seed. We will yet bear fruit. ....’’

``Would you permit me an indiscreet question?

It seems you have been expelled from the faculty,

but are still carrying on regardless?

Forgive this ticklish question,

But I am curious, it’s one of my faults.’’

``I am a citizen.

From this faculty one can never be expelled.’’ [Excerpts from:Lesgaft, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Collected Poems, 1952-1990]

[The emotional cost of resisting the mob – Nadezhda’s cry]

That winter [1937] I began shouting in my sleep at night. It was an awful, inhuman cry, as if an animal or a bird were having its neck wrung. Shklovski, who heard it when I slept in their apartment, teased me that while most people shouted ``Mama’’ in their sleep, with me it was ``Osia’’ [Osip]. I still frighten people with this terrible cry at night. That same year, much to the alarm of my friends, the palms of my hands started turning bright red at moments of stress – and still do.

[Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope against Hope, p.355]

[Nelson Mandela in his book comments: Many men in prison were able to handle anything the authorities did to them, but the thought of the state doing the same thing to their families was almost impossible to bear. This was particularly true in his own life especially with regards to his mother, wife and children.]

When your life is a struggle, as mine was, there is little room left for family. That has always been my greatest regret, and the most painful aspect of the choice I made. ... It was as simple and yet as incomprehensible as the moment a small child asks her father, “Why can you not be with us?’’ And the father must utter the terrible words: “There are other children like you, a great many of them ...’’ and then one’s voice trails off. [Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom, p.458.]

De Profundis

So long as the world moves along accustomed paths, so long as there are no wild catastrophes, man can find sufficient substance for his life by contemplating surface events, theories, and movements of society. He can acquire his inner richnesses from this external kind of ``property’’. But this is not the case when life encounters fiery forces of evil and chaos. Then the ``revealed’’ world begins to totter. Then the man who tries to sustain himself only from the surface aspects of existence will suffer terrible impoverishment, begin to stagger ... then he will feel welling up within himself a burning thirst for that inner substance and vision which transcends the obvious surfaces of existence and remains unaffected by the world’s catastrophes. From such inner sources he will seek the waters of joy which can quicken the dry outer skeleton of existence. [Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook]

I believe, with perfect faith In the coming of the Messiah,

And even if he delays, nevertheless, I believe.

In your lifetime, and in your days,

And in the life of the household of all Israel,

Speedily, Soon.

And say you - ``Amen’’.

[sung by the Hasidic Jews at Auschwitz, based on words by Moses Maimonides]

[The Bardo Thodol (by Padma Sambhava, 8th or 9th century, AD), often called The Tibetan Book of the Dead, gives detailed guidance for the deceased concerning liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth (samsara) and how to choose a ``good womb'' for the next incarnation if liberation is not achieved. (I am using the translation by Robert Thurman.) Four and one half days after her death, the deceased becomes aware of her loved ones left behind; she sees them weeping and wailing, her place at the table is no longer there, her bed is broken, her clothes stripped, she hears them speak but they cannot hear her. She must depart distraught, faint with fear and terror. On the following days, the Buddhist mild deities, images of her own awareness, appear from their different worlds to guide her towards liberation. On the second day after this:]

from the blue eastern pure land of Abhirati, ... the blue Lord Vajrasattva Akshobhya arises before you seated on an elephant, in union with his consort Buddhalochana, attended by the male Boddhisattvas Kshitigarbha and Maitreya and the female Bodhisattvas Lasya and Pushpa - a group of six Archetype Deities. The white light of the Mirror wisdom ... white and piercing, bright and clear, shines from the heart of the Vajrasattva couple before you, penetrating, unbearable to your eyes. At the same time, the soft smoky light of the hells shines before you in parallel with the wisdom light. At that time, under the influence of hate you panic, terrified by that brilliant white light, and you flee from it. You feel a liking for that soft smoky light of the hells and you approach it. But now you must fearlessly recognize that brilliant white, piercing, dazzling, clear light as wisdom. ... Pray and increase your love for it, thinking, ``It is the light of the compassion of Lord Vajrasattva! I take refuge in it!'' It is Lord Vajrasattva's shining upon you to escort you through the terrors of the between. It is the tractor-beam of the light of the compassion of Vajrasattva - have faith in it! Don't be enticed by that soft smoky light of hell! ... That is the path of destruction from the sins you have accumulated by your strong hatred! ... Don't look upon it! Abandon all hate! Don't cling to it! Don't long for it! Have faith in that dazzlingly bright white light! .....

Know what is in front of your face and what is hidden from you will be disclosed. [Gospel of Thomas]

[Rumi on the merits of fasting and its own peculiar kind of communion]

There’s a hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.

We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox

Is stuffed full of anything, no music....

When you fast,

good habits gather like friends who want to help.

Fasting is Soloman’s ring. Don’t give it

to some illusion and lose your power, but even if you have, if you've lost all will and control, they come back when you fast ...

A table descends to your tents,

Jesus’s table.

Expect to see it, when you fast, this table

spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages. [The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne, p.69]

It is difficult to speak the truth, for although there is only one truth, it is alive and therefore has a live and changing face.[Franz Kafka]

The Feminine Spirit

... Surely my God is feminine, for Heaven Is the generous impulse, is contented With feeding praise to the good And all of these that I have known have come from women. While men the poet's tragic light resented, The spirit that is Woman caressed his soul.

[God is Woman, Patrick Kavanagh]

[The role of the feminine was much stronger in gnostic Christianity than it was in the orthodox Christianity that eventually crushed it. Of particular importance was the divine female figure of Sophia (Wisdom) (or Barbelo) who, in Gnosticism, is the ``first power’’ or forethought of the Father (who ``himself’’ is thought of as a kind of NeoPlatonic One). She is (ultimately) the source of the creation of the world (through her ``gloomy’’, ``misshapen’’ son Yaldabaoth), the ``divine spark’’ within us and the salvation of the world. The amazing, paradoxical, gnostic poem Thunder, a small part of which is given below, asserts the ``eternal feminine’’ in its universality, revelling in the contradictions and antitheses of the real world through which it triumphs.]

I am the first and the last.

I am the honored and the scorned....

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am the mother and the daughter....

I am the midwife and do not give birth.

I am the solace of my labor pains.

I am the bride and the groom ...

I am a silence incomprehensible

and an idea remembered often....

Why do you who hate me love me

and hate those who love me?...

You who tell the truth about me lie about me,

and you who lie tell the truth....

I am knowledge and ignorance.

I am shame and fearlessness.

I am shameless and ashamed.

I am strength and fear.

I am war and peace....

Consider my poverty and wealth.

Don’t be arrogant when I am cast down on the earth,

and you will find me in those who are to come.

Don’t stare at me lying on a dung heap.

Don’t run off and cast me away.

Don’t stare when I am cast with the disgraced

in the most sordid places

or laugh at me....

I am compassionate and cruel....

Be careful....

I am a woman existing in every fear

and in my strength when I tremble....

I am senseless and wise....

I am hated everywhere and loved everywhere.

I am called life [ζωή, Eve] and you have called me death....

I am unlettered and you learn from me....

I am perfect mind and rest ...

I am the knowledge of my search,

the finding of those who look for me,

the command of those who ask about me,

the power of powers...

and of spirits of all who exist with me

and of women who live in me.

[Thunder, from The Gnostic Bible, edited by W. Barnstone and M. Meyer]

[Maternal love: Octavio Paz’s tender comment on his mother, an uneducated Mexican-Spanish lady, for whom he had a deep affection]

[She was] a love letter with errors in the grammar.

[on protecting progeny] ... the French noble Madeleine d’Auvermont assured her son’s succession by her claim that she had become pregnant when her husband was away, just by thinking about him. In 1637, she gave birth to a healthy son, and was brought to trial, since her husband had spent the last four years abroad. She was aquitted by claiming that ``she had thought about her departed spouse and dreamed about him at night, and the child had been conceived by the power of her imagination''.

[Maternal cruelty – often, the will to power realizes itself in a woman through domination of her children, evoking images of a large woman, bending forward from the waist, towering over and transfixing with her glaring eyes a terrified small child, gorgon-like, her harsh voice in full spate, deluging the child with words that cut like razor blades, calling for a switch. Here is Maya Angelou’s wistful account of the separation in San Francisco between her mother and Maya’s sixteen year old brother, Bailey.] Mother and Bailey were entangled in the Oedipal skein. Neither could do without or do with the other; yet the constrictions of conscience and society, morality and ethos dictated a separation. On some flimsy excuse, Mother ordered Bailey out of the house. On an equally flimsy excuse he complied. Bailey was sixteen, small for his age, bright for any and hopelessly in love with Mother Dear. Her heroes were her friends and her friends were big men in the rackets. They wore two-hundred-dollar Chesterfield coats, Busch shoes at fifty dollars a pair, and Knox hats. Their shirts were monogrammed and their fingernails manicured. How could a sixteen-year-old boy hope to compete with such overshadowing rivals? He did what he had to do. He acquired a withered white prostitute, a diamond ring on his little finger and a Harris tweed coat with raglan sleeves....

From the wings I heard and watched the pavane of tragedy move steadily toward its climax. ... The record player on the first floor volumed up Lonnie Johnson singing, ``Tomorrow night, will you remember what you said tonight?’’ ... A party was shimmering below and Bailey defied Mother’s eleven o’clock curfew... If he made it in before midnight, she might be satisfied with slapping him across the face a few times with her lashing words. Twelve o’clock came and went at once, and I sat up in bed and laid my cards out for the first of many games of solitaire.

[And at one o’clock]

``Bailey!’’

``Yes, Mother Dear?’’ En garde. His voice thrust sweet and sour, and he accented the ``dear’’. ...

``Is it eleven o’clock, Bailey?’’ That was a feint, designed to catch the opponent offguard.

``It’s after one o’clock, Mother Dear.’’ He had opened up the game, and the strokes from then on would have to be direct.

``Clidell is the only man in this house, and if you think you’re so much of a man ...’’ Her voice popped like a razor on a strap.

``I’m leaving now, Mother Dear.’’ The deferential tone heightened the content of his announcement. In a bloodless coup, he had thrust beneath her visor. Now laid open, she had no recourse, but to hurry along the tunnel of her anger, headlong. ``Then Goddammit, get your heels to clicking.’’ And her heels were clicking down the linoleum hall as Bailey tap-danced up the stairs to his room....

I went to his room, against my judgement, and found him throwing his carefully tended clothes into a pillow-case. His maturity embarassed me. In his little face, balled up like a fist, I found no vestige of my brother, and when, not knowing what to say, I asked if I could help, he answered, ``Leave me the shit alone. ... She wants me out, does she? Well, I’ll get out of here so fast I’ll leave the air on fire... She won’t miss me, and I sure as hell won’t miss her. To hell with her and everybody else.’’ ... ``Maya, you can have my books.’’

My tears were not for Bailey or Mother or even myself but for the helplessness of mortals who live on the sufferance of Life. In order to avoid this bitter end, we would all have to be born again, and born with the knowledge of alternatives. Even then? ... Mother’s eyes were red, and her face puffy, the next morning, but she smiled her “everything is everything’’ smile and turned in tight little moons, making breakfast, talking business and brightening the corner where she was....

[And after tracking down Bailey the next day] “Nice room, isn’t it?’’ [he said] “You know its very hard to find rooms now. Betty lives here [she was the white prostitute] and she got this place for me ... Maya, you know, it’s better this way ... I mean, I’m a man, and I have to be on my own ...’’ His room smelled of cooked grease, Lysol and age, ... and I had no heart nor art to drag him back to the reeking reality of our life and times. Whores were lying down first and getting up last in the room next door. Chicken suppers and gambling games were rioting on a twenty-four-hour basis downstairs. Sailors and soldiers on their doom-lined road to war cracked windows and broke locks for blocks around, hoping to leave their imprint on a building or in the memory of a victim. ... Bailey sat wrapped in his decision and anesthetized by youth....

[Maya Angelou, I know why the caged bird sings, pp.250-256, 1969]

[Paternal domination] Next to God was Papa. [Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]

[On staying at home] If you think going to the moon is hard, try staying at home. [Comment by Barbara Cernan Butler, former wife of the astronaut Eugene Cernan]

[Cruel feminine talk]

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said —

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said,

and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be alright,

but I’ve never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner,

to get the beauty of it hot —

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

[The pub scene at closing time from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land]

[On earning a living ...]

I work at the palace ballroom

But gee, that palace is cheap

When I get back to my chilly hallroom

I'm much too tired to sleep

I'm one of those lady teachers

A beautiful hostess you know

One that the palace features

At exactly a dime a throw

Ten cents a dance

That's what they pay me

Gosh, how they weigh me down

Ten cents a dance

Pansies and rough guys

Tough guys who tear my gown

Seven to midnight I hear drums

Loudly the saxophone blows

Trumpets are tearing my ear drums

Customers crush my toes

Sometimes I think, I've found my hero

But it's a queer romance

All that you need is a ticket

Come on, big boy

Ten cents a dance

Fighters and sailors and bow-legged tailors

Can pay for their tickets and rent me

Butchers and barbers and rats from the harbors

Are sweethearts my good luck has sent me

Though I've a chorus of elderly beaus

Stockings are porous with holes at the toes

I'm here till closing time

Dance and be merry, it's only a dime

Sometimes I think, I've found my hero

But it's a queer romance

All that you need is a ticket

Come on, come on big boy

Ten cents a dance

[Rodgers and Hart song, sung by Ella Fitzgerald, 1956]

[On being a woman in a man's world - reflections by Iona Brown, violinist and conductor] There have been many occasions with various orchestras when I thought: I wish I was a man - because, if I was, those particular rehearsals would have been very different. The man will be called 'strong and charismatic', whereas the woman is 'neurotic and difficult'. [The Independent, 1997]

[Against male arrogance – in his work Tadhkirat al-Awliya ["Recollections of the Saints"] the 13^th century Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar defends his inclusion in the work of an account of the life of the great Islamic holy woman, Rabiʻa of Basra (died c. 800CE)]

If anyone asks “Why have you included Rabiʻa in the rank of men?” my answer is that the Prophet himself said, “God does not regard your outward forms.” The root of the matter is not form, but intention, as the Prophet said, “Mankind will be raised up according to their intentions.” Moreover, if it is proper to derive two-thirds of our religion [Islam] from Aisha [wife of the Prophet Muhammad, whose reports formed the basis of the Prophetic tradition (or Sunnah) of Islam, and complements the Qurʻan] surely it is permissible to take religious instruction from a handmaiden of Aisha ... [p.40 of: Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-Awliya ("Memorials of the Saints"), Farid al-Din Attar, trans. A. J. Arberry, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966]

Miscellanea

The best mind-altering drug is truth. [Lily Tomlin]

Live unnoticed. [Pythagoras]

When a man has finally reached the point where he does not think he knows it better than others, that is when he has become indifferent to what they have done badly and he is interested only in what they have done right, then peace and affirmation have come to him. [Hegel]

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome. [T. S. Eliot]

Sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, and disregard of the rules. [George Orwell]

[For College athletics] Mens sana in corpore sano.

[Against ``big’’ College athletics] Nine out of 10 teams are cheating, the other is in last place. [Jerry Tarkanian]

[More on the preceding - the corruption of academics by athletics]

Those inside the sport [College Athletics] will tell you that cheating never has been so widespread, yet the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] hasn’t busted a single big-time men’s basketball program in nearly two years. It hasn’t nailed a major football program in nearly 15 months. It’s the longest stretch of compliance for the once iron-fisted organization in 46 years and the second longest ever according to an analysis of the NCAA’s major infractions database. ... Welcome to the golden era of college cheating – no one gets convicted for anything anymore....

In 2006, Auburn sociology professor Jim Gundlach detailed a case of academic fraud to The New York Times. Athletes, mostly football players, were flocking to a “directed-reading” program run by a professor notorious for handing out A’s while requiring little to no class work. The NCAA once considered academic fraud a most egregious act, one that violated its core principle of educating student-athletes. “We (had) people who couldn’t put together complete sentences going out there saying they had a sociology degree from Auburn University,” Gundlach said....

This time, the NCAA went by the letter of the law. All those football players taking the easy class were considered a coincidence. Receiving A’s while doing no work merely was a secondary violation. The NCAA turned out easier to pass than sociology.... Some say the problem is the infractions committee, which makes the rulings and sets the punishments. Seven of its 10 members are administrators at NCAA schools or conferences. College athletics is a small world. It’s easy to have personal ties or professional aspirations at a defendant school. The implication of corruption is enough to cast doubts.... Which leads, of course, to the money. To slam Auburn with sanctions is to go in the face of the SEC’s [South East Conference] recent television deals with CBS and ESPN that are worth reportedly more than $3 billion combined. ... While the corruption gets bigger and bigger the number of schools in trouble gets smaller and smaller....

“I had this notion that the NCAA did care about athletes being students, too,” Gundlach said. “That’s a myth. They only care about money. (The enforcement process) is primarily used as PR to maintain the tax-exempt status of big-time college athletics.” For blowing the whistle Gundlach said he was “harassed” within the department and community. It caused him to retire early and after the NCAA’s empty decision, he wishes he never tried to take on Auburn football. “It’s just impossible for a single individual (to fight).” Recently a professor at a different school uncovered similar academic fraud on his campus. He called Gundlach and asked whether he should step forward. “Unless you’re ready to retire,” Gundlach told him, “just let it slide.”

[Excerpts from: Dan Wetzel, NCAA naps during golden age of cheating, Yahoo! Sports, September 4, 2008]

Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan - spoiled! [Israel Zangwill]

Not he who rejects the gods of the crowd is impious, but he who embraces the crowd’s opinion of the gods. [Epicurus]

What cannot be satisfied is not a man's stomach, as most men think, but rather the false opinion that the stomach requires unlimited filling. [Epicurus]

[Against laziness - Nelson Mandela speaking to his supporters before the 1994 election that ended white minority rule in South Africa]

“Do not expect to be driving a Mercedes the day after the election or swimming in your own backyard pool. Life will not change dramatically, except that you will have increased self-esteem and become a citizen in your own land. You must have patience. You might have to wait five years for results to show.’’ ... I did not patronize them. “If you want to continue living in poverty without clothes and food then go and drink in the shebeens. But if you want better things, you must work hard. We cannot do it all for you; you must do it yourselves.’’

[Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom, p.447]

[On belief]

One day Mara, the Evil One, was travelling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up in wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara's attendant asked what that was and Mara replied, "A piece of truth." "Doesn't this bother you when someone finds a piece of truth, O Evil One?" his attendant asked. "No," Mara replied. "Right after this, they usually make a belief out of it." [From ``108 Treasures for the Heart: A Guide for Daily Living’’ by Benny Liow]

[Six-Word Love Story] Met in leftist group; felt right. [Taken from New York Times]

[The victimization of Spinoza] The council has long had notice of the evil opinions and actions of Baruch d'Espinosa, and these are daily increasing in spite of efforts to reclaim him. In particular, he teaches and proclaims dreadful heresy, of which credible witnesses are present, who have made their depositions in presence of the accused. [Part of the excommunication sentence pronounced on Spinoza by the Jewish religious leaders in Amsterdam. ``The usual curses were pronounced upon him in presence of scrolls of the Law, and finally the council forbade anyone to have intercourse with him, verbally or by writing, to do him any service, to abide under the same roof with him, or to come within the space of four cubits' distance from him, or to read his writings. Contrary to wont, the ban against Spinoza was stringently enforced, to keep young people from his heresies.’’ (Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Vol. V, 1895)]

[Hume against Spinoza – Hume opposing the ``theologians’’ by pairing them with ``that famous atheist’’] The doctrine of a thinking substance that is immaterial, simple and indivisible is a true atheism. From it we can infer all the atheistic views for which Spinoza is so universally infamous ... The fundamental principle of Spinoza’s atheism is the doctrine of the simplicity of the universe ... Without our having to enter further into these gloomy and obscure regions, I shall be able to show that this hideous hypothesis of Spinoza’s is almost the same as the doctrine of the immateriality of the soul, which has become so popular ... After this [Spinoza’s claim (according to Hume) that the sun, moon, etc are only qualities inhering in a simple substance] I consider the other system of beings, namely the universe of thought, or of my impressions and ideas. ... When I ask about these, theologians present themselves and tell me that these also are qualities, and indeed qualities of one simple, uncompounded, and indivisible substance [the soul]. ... Then I am deafened by the noise of a hundred voices that treat Spinoza’s hypothesis with detestation and scorn, and the theologians’ view with applause and veneration! [David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, iv.5]

[Spinoza an “atheist’’?] To the question of his landlady at the Hague as to whether she could be saved by the religion to which she belonged, he answered her that her religion was good, that she should seek for no other, and that she would certainly be saved by it if she led a quiet and pious life. [p.299 of: A History of Modern Philosophy, Volume 1, by Harald Höffding, 1955]

[Against racism] The picture [from our wide knowledge of human genetics on which modern medicine is based] is quite different from that supported by those who believe mankind to be divided into distinct races. Man, it transpires, is the most boring of mammals, varying scarcely from place to place. The trends in physical appearance are not accompanied by those in other genes. ... Imagine that the whole world could be measured for the diversity that it contains. .... The analysis, which is based on hundreds of genes in scores of populations, shows that around eight tenths of total diversity, world wide, comes from the difference between the people of the same country: two Englishmen, say, or two Nigerians. ... The overall genetic differences between “races” (Africans and Europeans, for example) is not much greater than that between different countries in Europe or within Africa. DNA bears a simple message: the individuals are the repository of the most variation. A race, as defined by skin colour, is no more an entity than is a nation, whose personality depends only on a brief shared history. The notion that humanity is divided up into a series of distinct groups is wrong. ... If after a global disaster, just one group, the Albanians, the Papuans or the Senegalese, were to survive, most human diversity would be preserved. Humans are uniform creatures, because they evolved so recently. ... Humans have to accept that they belong to a tediously homogeneous species.

People from different parts of the world may differ but the idea of pure races is a myth. Much of the story of the genetics of race, a field promoted by some of the most eminent scientists of their day, was prejudice dressed up as science; a classic example of the way that biology should not be used to help us understand ourselves. Most of today’s biologists feel that the moral issues raised by our own biology - racism, sexual stereotypes, and claims that selfishness, spite and nationalism are driven by genes - are issues of ethics rather than science and that science has nothing to do with how we perceive our fellows. Although it may comfort the liberal conscience to find that genetics reveals few differences among the people of the world, this is irrelevant to the issue of racism, which is a moral and political one.

As a result, those determined to dislike one race or another are not much impressed by scientific arguments. I once gave a lecture on race when I was teaching in Botswana. The class was delighted to learn that they were almost the same as the white South Africans who so despised them. At the end of the lecture there was just one question. Surely, a student asked, what you are saying can’t be true of the Bushmen; they are obviously different from us.

I admit to a certain despair at that; but it was a useful reminder that although biology may tell us a lot about where we come from it says nothing about what we are. The dismal history of racial genetics strengthens that belief.

[pp.310-315 of: The Language of the Genes, by Steve Jones, Revised Edition, Harper Press, 2000]

[On the same theme] Cultural diversity is the true evolutionary hallmark of humans, and it serves the purpose (among many others) of telling us who we are, of identifying ourselves in the social universe. Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are indistinguishable genetically, but they know who they are, and who they’re not, by virtue of their cultural differences. Any place on earth where there is civil unrest almost inevitably involves people who are genetically and physically very similar and culturally different. The fascinating thing about cultural differences is that they are more important to us, for example, in creating life-and-death situations than biological variation is. Where there are biological differences between hostile populations, they can easily be recruited to mark the enemy. But group hostilities inevitably lie in the social, political, and economic realms, not in the biological. [Jonathan Marks, What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, University of California Press, 2002, Chapter 4]

Tongue-in-cheek (?)

BAD MORNING

Here I sit

With my shoes mismated.

Lawdy-mercy!

I's frustrated!

[Langston Hughes]

[Doric was (and is) the dialect of the North East of Scotland. Traditionally, it was the language of the large body of migrant farm workers in the area, the creators of the ``Bothy Ballads’’. The name ``Doric’’ seems to have been given to the dialect by analogy with the Doric of ancient Greece, the language of Sparta, the relation between Spartan Doric and the Attic of Athens corresponding to that between the North East dialect and the ``posher’’, more ``educated’’, speech of Edinburgh (the ``Athens of the North’’). The dialect has a driving, direct, down-to-earth nature combined with ironic humor. Here are two Doric poems. The first, Gin I was God (If I was God), is by Charles Murray (1864-1941) of Alford, Aberdeenshire, a veteran of the second Boer and the first world wars, and gives God some advice on how to deal with this sorry world. The second, more homiletic, I once saw on a public bus in Aberdeen. (I do not know the author of the poem.)]

Gin I was God, sittin' up there abeen,

Weariet nae doot noo a' my darg was deen,

Deaved wi' the harps an' hymns oonendin' ringin',

Tired o' the flockin' angels hairse wi' singin',

To some clood-edge I'd daunder furth an', feth,

Look ower an' watch hoo things were gyaun aneth.

Syne, gin I saw hoo men I'd made mysel'

Had startit in to pooshan, sheet an' fell,

To reive an' rape, an' fairly mak' a hell

O' my braw birlin' Earth, - a hale week's wark - I'd cast my coat again, rowe up my sark,

An' or they'd time to lench a second ark,

Tak' back my word an' sen' anither spate,

Droon oot the hale hypothec, dicht the sklate,

Own my mistak', an, aince I cleared the brod,

Start a'thing ower again, gin I was God.

*****

So dinna fash or greet aboot oorsels.

God’s licht disnae dee! – the lampie is aye foo.

Oor laird if in oor herts gies muckle joy.

His kist gies us meat and ale, we nivver wint.

His werdies, cam fit mae, they will aye wyes ding,

Fit e’er a warld o’ doot or fear dirls in oor lugs.

Politicians are like diapers. They should both be changed frequently and for the same reason. [author unknown]

[On Yoga class and ``appropriate’’ apparel]

The longer I do yoga, the worse I get at it. I can’t tell you what a relief it is...

Never wear a short skirt to a class with the word ‘contemplative’ in its name. [Claire Dederer]

[An error of Aristotle] Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made. [History of Animals, Book II, 501b20]

[Advice for Aristotle on the preceding error] Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. [Bertrand Russell]

[On allergies, being dirty and listening to Mozart] Hay fever was not recognized as a distinct illness until 1819, when it (and its relatives asthma and eczema) were seen as afflictions of the rich. Now about half the people of the western world are, or claim to be, allergic to one substance or another. In Britain, one child in four has asthma. The lung becomes inflamed and its muscles sensitive to the slightest irritation. The unfortunate patient wheezes and coughs, and may suffer permanent damage and, sometimes, even sudden death. The illness involves an over-reaction by the immune system to external stimulus. House-dust mites are one culprit, cats another, pollen a third. They were around before 1819, but, for some reason, caused few problems.

Part of the reason lies in the modern world, with its obsession with cleanliness. This may have abolished many infectious diseases, but allows others, once rare, to reveal our inborn weaknesses. Asthma [today] is a disease of the middle class; more common in those well fed as children, in infants dosed with antibiotics, and in Western rather than Eastern Europe. The children of farmers and of those with dogs have less chance of the illness than vegetarians in a pet-free home. It is an affliction of Thrushcross Grange rather than of Wuthering Heights.

Emily Bronte knew the answer. Cathy, when she returns clean and demure after her convalescence at Thrushcross Grange is faced by Heathcliff's: "I shall be as dirty as I please; and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty!" Filth is the key. Infants born into clean households are deprived of an essential learning experience. Not their brain but their immune system lacks stimulation. Middle class homes lack the grime with which humankind evolved. The immune system, like the brain itself, must be trained to deal with the challenges that it will face later in life. Each needs stimulation; but the immune system demands tapeworms rather than Mozart. [pp. 126-127 of: The Language of the Genes, by Steve Jones. (Jones also emphasizes the inherited component of asthma and its relatives - for example the distant, inbred island of Tristan da Cunha, in which many of the people share the same genes, has an epidemic of asthma.)]

[Goethe at age 81 on spectacles]

``It may be a mere whim of mine,’’ said he [Goethe] on various occasions, ``but I cannot overcome it. Whenever a stranger steps up to me with spectacles on his nose, a discordant feeling comes over me, which I cannot master. It annoys me so much, that ... it takes away a great part of my benevolence, and so spoils my thoughts, ... as if with their armed glances they would penetrate my most secret thoughts and spy out every wrinkle of my old face ...’’

[Conversations of Goethe, Eckermann]

[In Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, Dr. Faust, profoundly disillusioned by 10 years of academic life - the ``emptiness'' of what he teaches, and leading his pupils ``by the nose'' - takes up ``the abyss'' of necromancy. This leads to him agreeing to sell his soul to the devil (``the Prince of Lies’’) in exchange for an (apparently) thrilling life of pleasure to be provided by the devil's ``servant’’ Mephistopheles, and which will eventually lead to Faust’s heartbreak and ruin. Mephistopheles points out that ``all theory, my friend, is gray, but green is life's glad golden tree''. Faust is concerned that ``bearded and gray'' he lacks the ``sprightliness'' needed for the attack on the thrills that lie ahead, and that he gets embarrassed sometimes in front of people. Mephistopheles assures him that he will soon ``learn the art of living''. While Faust is absent from his office preparing for the new life, a freshman student - whose research, later in the work, will result in the "creation" of an alchemical homunculus - knocks on the door looking for academic advice, which Mephistopheles, dressed in Faust’s cap and gown, gives, with devilish wit. The student first asks Mephistopheles on how to choose a faculty.]

MEPHISTOPHELES.

.... I counsel first the depths you plumb

Of our Collegium Logicum.

Its rigor will confine your mind

Like Inquisition boots, you’ll find,

And teach it hence to walk with reason,

Smoothly trained to thoughts in season,

... The web of thought, I’d have you know,

Is like a weaver’s masterpiece:

The restless shuttles never cease

... And so philosophers step in

To weave a proof that things begin,

Past question, with an origin.

...The method scholars praise, and keenly clutch;

As weavers, though, they don’t amount to much. ....

STUDENT

O Sir, I feel so dazed at what you’ve said;

It goes round like a mill-wheel in my head.

MEPHISTOPHELES

Next, most important thing of all,

To metaphysics you must fall,

And see with deep discernment plain,

What things won’t fit the human brain;

But, fit or not, why vex your head? -

You use a sounding phrase instead. ...

Five lectures are your daily plan –

And show yourself a punctual man.

For your professor, pray, prepare;

No paragraph, Sir, overlook!

And then you soon will be aware

He never deviates from the book.

But write it down, Sir, every bit,

As if the Holy Ghost dictated it. ...

STUDENT

I doubt if I’d be happy taking Laws.

MEPHISTOPHELES

A hesitation that I comprehend.

Knowing the subject, I myself would pause.

They’ve statues, clauses, rights in such a smother

As spreads from place to place the legal taint,

And ties one generation to another

Worse than a slow inherited complaint.

And grandsons learn to curse the lawyers’ usance. ...

STUDENT

... Perhaps theology has claims more strong?

MEPHISTOPHELES

Sir, I should grieve to see you going wrong.

The aspirants who choose that learned field

May fail to see the pitfalls, oversure;

And zealotry has virus so concealed

It’s hard to tell the poison from the cure!

So stick to one professor all your days,

And swear by every word the Master says.

In short, you pin your faith on words, my friend,

Make words your safeguard, so that you ascend

To certainty’s high temple in the end.

STUDENT

But, Sir, concede

That words must have some meaning underlying.

MEPHISTOPHELES

Why yes, agreed,

But never fear to find that mortifying,

For if your meaning’s threatened with stagnation,

Then words come in, to save the situation:

They’ll fight your battles well if you enlist them

Or furnish you a universal system.

Thus words will serve us grandly for a creed,

Where every syllable is guaranteed.

[J. W. von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by Phillip Wayne]

******

[[The real devil]

I call'd the devil, and he came, And with wonder his form did I closely scan; He is not ugly, and is not lame, But really a handsome and charming man. A man in the prime of life is the devil, Obliging, a man of the world, and civil; A diplomatist too, well skill'd in debate, He talks quite glibly of church and state. [Heine, Pictures of Travels (unknown translator)]

[The work is never done! - 1920 cartoon by Mikhail Cheremnykh and Viktor Deni depicting "comrade Lenin" ``cleansing the earth of filth’’, i.e. monarchs, capitalists and clerics]

[Hell the more comfortable alternative?] The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that.... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed.... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving...shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C. [From Applied Optics, vol. 11, A14, 1972]

[Scientific narrow-mindedness] All science is either physics or stamp collecting. [Lord Rutherford]

[On the same theme] A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. [Max Planck]

[A bachelor's view of marriage?] Sexual union in accordance with principle is marriage [matrimonium], that is, the union of two persons of different sexes for lifelong possession of each other's sexual attributes. [Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, article 24]

[On obesity, cats and excuses] Nature has plenty instances of use and disuse. Blacksmiths have thicker arms than bank clerks, but migratory birds put both of them in the shade. Some birds double in size before their journeys ... Such characters are not themselves passed to the next generation. The young are heirs to an ability to grow large organs, rather than to the structures themselves. Fat parents have fat children, in the main, not because stoutness is in the genes, but because they feed their offspring with a diet like their own. Fat people have fat cats, too, but nobody blames that on DNA. [From: Darwin's Ghost by Steve Jones, 2000, p.104]

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.[Katharine Hepburn]

Men perspire ... ladies glisten.

[On being ``brought down to earth'' - account of an experience of the physicist Leon Lederman on a Chicago train] I was sitting on a crowded commuter train coming out of Chicago when a nurse boarded, leading a group of patients from the local mental hospital. They arranged themselves round me as the nurse began counting: "One, two, three -- " She looked at me. "Who are you?" "I'm Leon Lederman," I answered, "Nobel Prize winner and director of Fermilab." She pointed at me and sadly continued: "Yes, four, five, six . . ." [p.383, Leon Lederman (with Dick Teresi), The God Particle, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1993.]

[What indeed!]

``WHAT’’

MOTHER’S BOY:-

WHAT WILL MOTHER SAY?

WHAT WILL MOTHER SAY?

ALTHOUGH I KNOW IT’S VERY NICE.

WHEN SHE KNOWS YOU’VE KISSED ME TWICE

OH DEAR, ‘TWILL FILL HER WITH DISMAY

I WONDER, WONDER, WONDER, WONDER

WHAT WILL MOTHER SAY?

[Taken from a Victorian seaside postcard]

***********

[on originality]

An original something, dear maid, you would wish me to write;

But how shall I begin? For I'm sure I have not original in me,

Excepting Original Sin.

[Thomas Campbell 1777-1844, Scottish poet]

***********

We and They

Father and Mother, and Me,

Sister and Auntie say

All the people like us are We,

And every one else is They.

And They live over the sea,

While We live over the way,

But - would you believe it? - They look upon We

As only a sort of They!

We eat pork and beef

With cow-horn-handled knives.

They who gobble Their rice off a leaf,

Are horrified out of Their lives;

While they who live up a tree,

And feast on grubs and clay,

(Isn't it scandalous? ) look upon We

As a simply disgusting They!

We shoot birds with a gun.

They stick lions with spears.

Their full-dress is un-.

We dress up to Our ears.

They like Their friends for tea.

We like Our friends to stay;

And, after all that, They look upon We

As an utterly ignorant They!

We eat kitcheny food.

We have doors that latch.

They drink milk or blood,

Under an open thatch.

We have Doctors to fee.

They have Wizards to pay.

And (impudent heathen!) They look upon We

As a quite impossible They!

All good people agree,

And all good people say,

All nice people, like Us, are We

And every one else is They:

But if you cross over the sea,

Instead of over the way,

You may end by (think of it!) looking on We

As only a sort of They!

[Rudyard Kipling, We and They, A Friend of the Family, from: Debits and Credits (1919-1923)]

*******

[Inebriated indecision?]

SIMON, THE CELLARER

Old Simon, the cellarer, keeps a rare store

Of Malmsey and Malvoisie,

And Cyprus, and who can say how many more?

For a chary old soul is he,

A chary old soul is he.

Of Sack and Canary he never doth fail.

And all the year 'round there is brewing of ale;

Yet he never aileth, he quaintly doth say,

While he keeps to his sober six flagons a day.

But, oh! oh! oh! his nose doth show

How oft the Black Jack to his lips doth go;

But, oh! oh! oh! his nose doth show

How oft the Black Jack to his lips doth go.

Dame Margery sits in her own still room,

A matron sage is she;

From thence oft, at Curfew, is wafted a fume,

She says it is Rosemarie,

She says it is Rosemarie.

But there's a small cupboard behind the back stair,

And the maids say they often see Margery there;

Now Margery says that she grows very old,

And must take a something to keep out the cold.

But, oh! oh! oh! old Simon doth know

Where many a flask of his best doth go;

But, oh! oh! oh! old Simon doth know

Where many a flask of his best doth go.

Old Simon reclines in his high-backed chair,

And oft talks about taking a wife;

And Margery is often heard to declare,

She ought to be settled in life!

She ought to be settled in life!

But Margery has (so the maids say) a tongue,

And she's not very handsome and not very young;

So somehow it ends with a shake of the head,

And Simon he brews him a tankard instead.

While, oh! oh! oh! he will chuckle and crow.

What! marry old Margery? no! no! no!

While, oh! oh! oh! he will chuckle and crow.

What! marry old Margery? no! no! no!

[Popular Victorian song (c. 1850), music composed by J. L Hatton to words by W. H. Bellamy, as sung, for example, by Sir Charles Santley]

You should examine yourself daily. If you find faults, you should correct them. When you find none, you should try even harder. [Israel Zangwill]

[The England of the future?] [I hope that] fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs ... and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist'. [Comments by John Major in 1993]

[Reincarnation?] King George III. [Nickname given to George Steinbrenner III, past owner of the New York Yankees]

[The dialectic of Wall Street?] If everybody bought at the bottom and sold at the top, the bottom would be the top and the top would be the bottom.

[author unknown]

[That bigger is not necessarily better] There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less. [Betrand Russell]

[A more positive view of the hippopotamus - T. S. Eliot’s comparative analysis of the life styles and future prospects of the Church and the hippopotamus]

THE HIPPOPOTAMUS

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,

Susceptible to nervous shock;

While the True Church can never fail

For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err

In compassing material ends,

While the True Church need never stir

To gather in its dividends...

At mating time the hippo’s voice

Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,

But every week we hear rejoice