Without Lifting A Finger

In any case, here it is: I have never been really able to believe that human affairs were serious matters. I had no idea where the serious might lie, except that it was not in all this I saw around me—which seemed to me merely an amusing game, or tiresome. There are really efforts and convictions I have never been able to understand. I always looked with amazement, and a certain suspicion, on those strange creatures who died for money, fell into despair over the loss of a “position,” or sacrificed themselves with a high and mighty manner for the prosperity of their family. I could better understand that friend who had made up his mind to stop smoking and through sheer will power had succeeded. One morning he opened the paper, read that the first H-bomb had been exploded, learned about its wonderful effects, and hastened to a tobacco shop.

This came to mind because of all the snow in the Midwest (don't know how much, probably not a lot, but if you're pining for SPRING ...). So: this is for all the shut-ins and snowed-ins, longing for spring to come and/or wanting to get back to England's Lake District (I swear I saw a crowd of daffodils off the path to Buttermere -- years ago). This "clip" is brought to you by the Poetry Foundation: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud . *

That is what no man (except those who are not really alive—in other words, wise men) can endure. Spitefulness is the only possible ostentation. People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves. What do you expect? The idea that comes most naturally to man, as if from his very nature, is the idea of his innocence. From this point of view, we are all like that little Frenchman at Buchenwald who insisted on registering a complaint with the clerk, himself a prisoner, who was recording his arrival. A complaint? The clerk and his comrades laughed: “Useless, old man. You don’t lodge a complaint here.” “But you see, sir,” said the little Frenchman, “My case is exceptional. I am innocent!” We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.

Have thought about going there once or twice. Relatively close to Amsterdam. Once it was an island in the Zuiderzee, a causeway now makes it a pennisula. * Doll Village "Clip": A DOLL’S village, isn’t it? No shortage of quaintness here! But I didn’t bring you to this island for quaintness, cher ami. Anyone can show you peasant headdresses, wooden shoes, and ornamented houses with fishermen smoking choice tobacco surrounded by the smell of furniture wax. I am one of the few people, on the other hand, who can show you what really matters here.

That’s the way man is, cher monsieur . He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love. *   They need tragedy, don’t you know; it’s their little transcendence, their apéritif. *   “One doesn’t talk back to one’s father”—you know the expression? In one way it is very odd. To whom should one talk back in this world if not to what one loves? In another way, it is convincing. Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would never be an end to it. Power, on the other hand, settles everything.    

Bloch noticed that each time he mentioned something and talked about it, the two of them countered with a story about their own experiences with the same or a similar thing or with a story they had heard about it. For instance, if Bloch talked about the ribs he had broken while playing, they told him that a few days ago one of the workers at the sawmill had fallen off a lumber pile and broken his ribs; and if Bloch then mentioned that his lips had had to be stitched more than once, they answered by talking about a fight on TV in which a boxer’s eyebrows had been split open; and when Bloch told how once he had slammed into a goalpost during a lunge and split his tongue, they immediately replied that the schoolboy also had a cleft tongue.

Discovered it and her (I didn't know Catherine had a sister) on first day of my self-imposed quarantine. Well, I still go out: long walks and long lines at the grocery. Anyway ... Some of the major players in Cul-de-sac : Francoise Dorleac, Donald Pleasence, Lionel Stander, Jack MacGowran, the Lindisfarne Castle (Holy Island) and a young Jacqueline Bisset ("Jackie" in the credits). *

The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: “Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.” Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its re...

Jumped around a bit before landing on a reread of Borges' Greatest Hits (still reading). Something this week -- I believe it was the Russian Gogol Series, which I couldn't finish -- made me look into Gogol's early Ukrainian tales, and I ended up reading Viy . Not bad, certainly better than the series it inspired.