Without Lifting A Finger

Throughout the trial, Eichmann tried to clarify, mostly without success, this second point in his plea of “not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an innerer Schweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care. This, admittedly, was hard to take. Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal”—“More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude ...

Snuck out without Charlie noticing. Nimbus moon. Xmas trees long gone. A few pics. *

Always figured I'd get around to it. Saw the movie. The phrase, which she apparently regretted, stuck: The Banality of Evil. Anyway, padding off to bed (inspired by News & News), I thought: The timing seems right. Kindle had it, so now I do. The "clips below are from the intro: Introduction THE EXCOMMUNICATION OF HANNAH ARENDT In December 1966, Isaiah Berlin, the prominent philosopher and historian of ideas, was the guest of his friend, Edmund Wilson, the well-known American man of letters. An entry in Wilson’s diary mentions an argument between the two men. Berlin “gets violent, sometimes irrational prejudice against people,” Wilson noted, “for example [against] Hannah Arendt, although he has never read her book about Eichmann.” In a memoir in the Yale Review in 1987, Berlin made exactly the same charge against Wilson and elaborated upon this in a 1991 interview with the editor of Wilson’s diary.1 We don’t know the outcome of this quarrel. One thing we do know: mor...

Official? Unofficial? Symbolic or just a systemic way to get rid of someone's post-Xmas poinsettia's? Either way, I hope they grow.

Oz was OK, but I eventually got tired of it: weaving (and never leaving) a lot of the same material over and over. A short novel but a lot seemed like filler. And the tease between Atalia and Shmuel: OK, I guess, but it too sometimes felt like filler. Now Borges' little "Three Versions of Judas" -- that's a nut to keep returning to (see "clip" below). From Borges Judas: The Ending:      Drunk with sleeplessness and his dizzying dialectics, Nils Runeberg wandered the streets of Malmo, crying out for a blessing -- that he be allowed to share the Inferno with the Redeemer.      He died of a ruptured aneurysm on March 1, 1912. Heresiologists will perhaps remember him: he added to the concept of the Son, which might have been thought long spent, the complexities of misery and evil.  

PHILZ. Finished Oz's Judas and only scratched my next stop: John Hawkes' Travesty . Not sure about the text I only tasted: so-so thus far. But I liked the epigraphic quote from Camus' Fall : You see, a person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden. I'll let you choose the pigeonhole that suits me. *** Fantastic light this morning: rosy highlights in the Heights, downtown awash in the white light of a rising sun.

'The real tragedy of humankind,’ Shealtiel used to say, ‘is not that the persecuted and enslaved crave to be liberated and to hold their heads high. No. The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.’

Franz Nölken  (5 May 1884, Borgeln,  North Rhine-Westphalia [1]  - 4 November 1918, near  La Capelle ) was a German  Expressionist  painter; occasionally associated with  Die Brücke , an artists' society in Dresden. Biography When he was still a small child, his family moved to Hamburg. At the age of sixteen, he began attending the  Johanneum , a liberal arts  gymnasium . On the advice of  Alfred Lichtwark , the Director of the  Hamburger Kunsthalle , he took classes from  Arthur Siebelist , who eschewed the Academic approach and took his students to paint en  plein aire . He joined the  Hamburgischer Künstlerklub  [ de ]  in 1903 and, the following year, had his first exhibition at the prestigious  Galerie Commeter  [ de ]  with fellow students  Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann ,  Fritz Friedrichs ,  Walter Alfred Rosam  and  Walter Voltmer  [ de ] . [1] ...