Works and Days

Because I was (and read: should be) reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics along with some fragments of Heraclitus, the following tabs are now open in my browser.

• That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
• Hopkins: Poetry and Philosophy
• Is Hopkins’s Imagery Physical or Metaphysical?
• Contemporary Issues in Bioethics: A Catholic perspective
• Footnotes to Metaphysics V.8
• SEP: John Duns Scotus
• Catholic Encylopedia: John Duns Scotus
• Wikipedia: Duns Scotus
• The Thomistic Method
• Wikipedia: Haecceity
• Medieval Theories of Haecceity
• Wikipedia: Quiddity
• Quia and Propter Quid

Pontem perpetui mansuram in saecula mundi.

Caius Julius Lacer, engineer of the Puente Romano de Alcantara.

1870— Joseph B. Strauss—1938
“The Man who Built the Bridge.”
Here at the Golden Gate is the
Eternal Rainbow that he conceived
And set to form, a promise indeed
That the race of man shall
Endure unto the Ages.

Chief Engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge 1929-1937

Inscription below the statue of Joseph Strauss near the Golden Gate bridge.

The true “Mesopota’mia” ring (London Review)—i.e. something high-sounding and pleasing, but wholly past comprehension. The allusion is to the story of an old woman who told her pastor that she “found great support in that comfortable word Mesopotamia.”

E. Cobham Brewer 1810–1897. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898.

Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? …we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

–Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)

 The Joy of Boredom

Dwelling in Possibilities

(Via Arts and Letters Daily.)

Whatever happened to the Nietzsche Family Circus? Anyway, here’s Garfield minus Garfield.

Edit: and here’s Garfield plus Jack Chick.

Mornington suspected his Christianity of being the inevitable result of having moved for some time as a youth of eighteen in circles which were, in a rather detached and superior way, opposed to it; but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist. It was because the Vicar, a hard-worked practical priest, had been driven by stress of experience to some similar standpoint that the two occasionally found one another congenial.

–Charles Williams, War In Heaven

When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be. Both these statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations. An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and nothing wrong. For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself. It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl, “An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet.” I am not sure that this is not the best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it. For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road.

–Chesterton, Orthodoxy

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.

“All Things Considered.”

What is ultimately questioned is the other even as a subject, a “guarantor” authorizing the relationship; the possibility for believing subjects is articulated on the existence of the subject. This question takes the form of what we must suppose. It plays on the relationship between a necessity and a supposition. Embodied in the necessary fictions that are the fiction of the other, this relationship is the vanishing point towards which belief tends in a society that has repressed the question of subject or which at least has isolated it from the practices cast in the form of objective techniques. By a series of referrals which multiply its initial deferred, belief continually carried forward towards the still other the unpossessable limit at which its status of possibility can be fixed.

–Michel De Certeau

Excerpt from Southey’s Common-place Book: page 643, under “Miscellaneous anecdotes and gleanings”. Comments in brackets are my own.

“Est enim nescio quid natura’ insitum nationibus aliis longe a’ nostris moribus ingeniisque alienum; atque ut Falerni vini sapor alius est quam Taracinensis, ita michi videntur homines ab ipsa’ in qua’ nascuntur terra’, saporem, ut ita dixerim, naturae ingeniorumque traxisse.” — Leon. Aretine, Epist. tom. 2, p. 101

[Roughly translated] For there is something (I know not what) foreign implanted by nature to other nations distant from our customs and characters; and as the flavor of Falernian wine is different than Taracinian, just so men seem to me (michi) to have drawn out from that very land in which they are born a flavor, as I have said, of nature and of characters.

Editor J.W.W. (Southey’s son-in-law John Wood Warter, B.D.) comments:

I am under the impression that in the word michi here, Southey thought he had a similar word to “miching”, see supra, p. 329, and in turning to his copy of Leon. Aretines’s “Letters” before me, I find his well-known mark against the word. I suspect he had in his mind the word Micha, on which see Du Cange in v. The word michi, however, is here simply the pedantic form of mihi. I give the following from Noltini, as the work may not be in everyone’s hands. [Indeed.]

“Absurda etiam est consuetudo pronunciantium H per CH, ut miCHi pro mihi, niCHil pro nihil; id quod ab Leonardo Aretino profectum est, qui consonantis C adjectionem in ejusmodi vocabulis serio defendere est adnixus, L. 8. Ep. 2. ad Antonium Grammaticum. Voss. Art. Gr. 149. A quo quidem tempore monachi ita non solum pronunciarunt, sed etiam scripserunt, ut codices complures manibus ipsorum exarati satis testantur, qui michi, nichil scriptum exhibent.” Lexicon Lat. Ling. Anibarbarum, H. p. 70. Ed, 1780. –J.W.W.

[Translated] Also absurd is the custom of pronouncing H as CH, for example “michi” for “mihi”, nichil for nihil; this was started by Leonardo Aretino, who earnestly took pains to defend the addition of the consonant C in such words… from which time indeed monks not only pronounced it thus, but also wrote it, as not a few manuscripts written by their hands give ample witness, which show “michi, nichil” written.

The Leon. Aretino mentioned seems to be on Leonardo Aretino, alias Bruni, 1369-1444. For “miching”, v. Southey 329, where he quotes from Dryden’s comedy The Wild Gallant: “a raw miching boy.” J.W.W. comments: “TODD in Johnson says that “micher” is used in the Western countries for a truant boy. the words of Hamlet naturally occur, “Marry this is miching malicho; it means mischief.” Act iii, sc. 2.”

I am not sure how exactly the mihi > michi shift is be explained given the otherwise general disappearance (in pronunciation, if not spelling) of h in post-classical Latin. Mihi and nihil sometimes appear as mi and nil (as expected, and even in classical Latin), but it may be that the appearance of ch was an overcompensatory attempt to keep h in those words while it was being lost elsewhere. The spelling “ch” presumably reflected the prevalent pronunciation, though Aretino seems to have been a conscious advocate of the practice.

Noltini also notes that with the loss in pronunciation of h it was also often inserted in spelling where it did not belong, particulary after “c” (after the pattern of loan-words from Greek with “chi”?): “ut Hionius pro Ionius, simulacrum pro simulacrum, cHorona, CHenturio, cHommoda, pro corona, Centurio, commoda; coHerceo pro coerceo.” (Johann Friedrich Nolte, Lexicon Latinae Linguae antibarbarum).

Am I to understand from J.W.W.’s commentary that Southey interpreted michi as meaning that the people of other countries were truant as well as flavorful?

That didn’t answer your question.