An essay in miniature

To see how the world is seen and noted by some people. In this case Kundera, commenting on Central Europe. The economy of a poet, in very few words a portrait, a sensibility, sharing his deep grasp of an intensely lived history. 

"Central Europe: Seventeenth century: The immense power of the Baroque gave a central unity to this multinational region without a clear center, with moving and indefinable borders. The lingering shadow of Baroque Catholicism extended into the eighteenth century: no Voltaire, no Fielding. In the hierarchy of the arts, it was music that rose to the top. Since Haydn (and until Schoenberg and Bartok), this was the gravitational center for European music. Nineteenth century: some master poets, but no Flaubert; Biedermier: the veil of the idyll thrown over the real. In the twentieth century: revolt. The great minds (Freud, the novelists) revalorized what had been unknown, misunderstood, for centuries: rational, demystifying lucidity; the meaning of the real; the novel. Their revolt was exactly the opposite of French modernism -- it was antirational, antirelaist, lyrical. (This would cause many misunderstandings.) The Mount Rushmore of the greatest Central European novelists includes Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch, and Gombrowicz, who are united in their aversion to Romanticism; their love for the pre-Balzacian novel and for the libertine spirit (Broch interpreted kitsch as a conspiracy of monogamous Puritans against the Enlightenment); their disregard for History and their exaltation of the future; and their modernism that lay outside the illusions of the avant-garde.

The destruction of the empire followed by the cultural marginalization of Austria and the polictical nonexistence of its other countries after 1945 made Central Europe into a premonition, a mirror held up to the possible destiny of Europe, the laboratory of the crepuscule."

Aspiration: to learn, to be able to deeply see and grasp and then in measured words like a poet's lay out the world or like the holographic principle, the surface of the world.

Poor and rich

"There are many more very poor than very rich people (in the world)."

Just something about the shape of our world. 

A little snippet

"Like multiplication is a shortcut for addition & exponents are a shortcut for multiplication, Napier sought the next computational shortcut: a shortcut for exponents.

The basic idea of what logarithms were to achieve is straightforward: to replace the wearisome task of multiplying two numbers by the simpler task of adding together two other numbers...."

From here

Environment, Biosphere, Humanity

"Extinction events are not especially rare in geological time. They have occurred in randomly varying magnitude throughout the history of life. Those that are truly apocalyptic, however, have occreed at only about hundred-million-year intervals. There have been five such peaks of destruction of which we have record, the latest being Chicxulub. Earth required roughly ten million years to recover from each. This is the reason that the peak of destruction that humanity has initiated is often called the Sixth Extinction."

From Half-Earth (Edward O. Wilson)

 

From here

--

Trying to see/unedited notes:

//The age, of flowering of humanity, yet that flowering has degraded the biosphere for not just rest of life forms, but humanity itself. There are a couple of nuances to this - one, the population of humanity in the world is unsustainable (for the way we live or the way of growth and consumption), but that is not for anyone to say. Each human that walks the earth belongs to this biosphere. It (the population) is going to peak somewhere in this century, perhaps then, then it would begin to change. These changes take years and years to reflect in each new generation's outlook on the world. To expect something quickly is sort of delusional. It will take its time for changing the outlook from 'master' to 'steward'. 

The idea is once that change begins to flow through humanity, many problems of today will either resolve or find their solution. But the other nuance is this large population is not the same throughout the world. Many portions of it are fighting for survival, existence before even reaching a decent existence. This aspect of the biosphere is not noted as one of the key things, if at all. As in, this is the biosphere we are born in, some of us are well off enough to think about it, some of us are still struggling to find fresh water to drink and that is life. 

The question requires respect and dignity for the whole of humanity, whatever numbers we are and whatever circumstances we live in. Being human, that becomes primary. So perhaps the first urgent requirements stay ensuring food, water, health to as many people as possible, and that somehow so far is solved through growth. As to consumption, that is the way of market economy and the emptiness of our lives, and that too is the outcome of the same growth that sustains the most basic requirements. It is not a matter of one person or a small group of persons to decide, it is a wave a massive wave on which we are carried, we can create small eddies of reversal, but the wave is humanity, and its primary concerns are survival. 

And that is the reason I take heart in the fact, that in 10 million years perhaps earth can restore itself to new life, to new forms of being. This time of ours becomes the small, really small interval of a beautiful flowering yet a crumbling of the entire biosphere. 

Bleak thoughts at some level but hopeful too. We begin from here. 

// He suggests half -Earth. Yet to read through the book.

// It is my internal debate. Between calling it bleak and 'doing' something about it, or living like one of nature's own and letting nature take care of things. The nuances of the situation and the slow changes to human generational minds. It is not about one person's choices, the question is how does one consider and change humanity's choices. When at some level it is not even a choice, but a matter of survival. One of the difficult things to understand or wrap the head around is that we are the biosphere as well. As in we are not separate from it. We are a kind of flower in Earth's myriad flowering, which, the human flower seems to have worsened the conditions for other life forms as well as for itself. Now the system readjusts, evolves, is my sense of a living system. There are a number of us, for whom the imperative is survival first. Isn't it life blossoming through every instance fighting for existence. And then the appreciation slowly awakens that we are not surviving by ourselves, but as a biosphere. But there is a gap between those two perceptions. The imperative of survival and the slow dawning of appreciation of a need of a healthy biosphere. Of the role of steward of a living system rather than resource exploiter. 

// The important thing to appreciate to make good decisions is that it is humanity's imperative rather than a human being's. Because a lot of energy is spent and the momentum is lost in personal guilt and small decisions about living choices. Or a lot of virtuous feeling is randomly begotten from choices. What I wish to separate is human decision from humanity's decision. Or not even humanity's decision but the way to see the problem or situation afresh. There is no static world. There is no static biosphere. I have an aversion to guilt-ridden religions or to guilt-ridden random thinking...where the human thinks it is larger than what it is. A human is part of a system. A system is adjusted through key levers. Not through its outcome. Or a paradigm shifting thinking needs to begin. 

One of it is appreciating that what we have done, or humanity is still a new kid on the block. Once humanity's bubble is proportionate....like in any new thing, there is a period of adjustment. In epochs or times of earth's biosphere, humanity is still going through its ups and downs of adjusting. We seem to find this generation and ourselves in the bottom of a difficult period, perhaps things are yet to feel the full impact, but by then perhaps there'll be less of us. What I am trying to say is that there is perhaps an adjustment period. (And then there is the Earth's recuperation period of millions of years.)

This is the thing - the number of humans has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 1.6 billion in 1900 to 8.3 billion today. The world is adjusting to it. Nothing we do is as impactful as just perhaps what humanity will do itself, reach its peak in this century...then a natural birth rate decline. A system adjusts itself. Is something for us humans to understand - perhaps one thing that goes towards steward thinking rather than still continuing as masters trying to fix the biosphere. 

And after that, for governments to decide, renewable power systems, recycling, just simple principles of leaving the source better than what you withdraw from it. Of what that has been done, especially the oil and the coal and the fossil fuel, there is no putting it back except for time and the millions of years to do its work. But accepting, that this is the world today. And knowing that after us too the world will restore itself. Millions of years. Perhaps the recuperation would be longer, what with plastics strewn everywhere on the planet. 

A longish detour of trying to fathom and understand. And to see clearly. Our role as well as our place in the system. Humanity is Earth. Guilt and that approach is futile, a sort of demeaning. Humans have done what they know best - survive. And then they have let consumption rule the roost. Which is a need and greed to have more, be more, do more. Now how does one go against the basic nature...how does one evolve systems which appreciates the underlying's nature. Because going against nature requires energy. And if high impact levers can be found in a system which allow nature to flow its course, they are our best bet.

So after government decision points, and the basic tenet of leave the source better than you found it, it is about culture. Our culture of consumption needs to change. Our definitions of prosperity needs to change. One needs food, water, security, good health. And many on the planet struggle towards it, either through scarcity, and some through having too much. 

How does that change?

Meanwhile, the impact is felt everywhere, from changing weather, to rising tides. To fewer species to plastics everywhere. 

Part of me has faith in the Earth to take care of itself. Our small voices are meant to soothe or annoy ourselves. Apart from our goings on, Earth at its core knows, life knows how to heal itself. 

Part of me believes that if we charge consumption for more than resource cost, for the cost of leaving the source cleaner than found, it will automatically adjust, the market rules that way. It is on the govt, and indirectly on us to choose so, to pay for the cost of cleaning, and not just extracting. That is perhaps a lever, which can impact or align consumption itself. As in not changing the need and greed, but just pricing it correctly.

What else? Where else?

The art of copiousness

From The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate:

(While talking about how Shakespeare turns Plutarch's material from the Life of Marcus Antonius to describe the moment when Anthony first sees Cleopatra)

"Our modern conception of genius makes creativity synonymous with originality. In matters artistic, there is no more severe accusation than that of plagiarism. Students are therefore surprised when you share these two passages. They are scandalized that Shakespeare did not make up his own story. The barge and all its accoutrements, the apparel of Cleopatra herself, her gorgeous attendants, the common people running out of the city to gaze upon the exotic queen, imperial Antony left alone on his throne in the market place: each successive detail is lifted straight from the source.

But to the Elizabethans, this prodcedure would have been admirable, not reprehensible. For them, there was no higher mark of artistic excellence than what they called the 'lively turning' of familiar material. This was the art of copiousness which they were taught in school: take a piece of received wisdom (a proverb, a phrase, a historical incident, a story out of ancient myth), 'turn' it on the anvil of your inventiveness and you will give it new life."

Twentieth century and its great war

"In terms of shape, the poem is a collage, somewhat disparate pieces assembled to create in readers the kind of despair that infected much of Western Europe after the Great War. England and America (among other countries) had fed hordes of its young men into that conflict, which wasn't unusual for a war. But the First World War also delivered the blindest, most efficient machine for carnage to date. Sure the Chinese had passed gunpowder along to Marco Polo, and there'd been the remoteness of catapults and cannon fire for centuries, but the First War's air battles and chemical weaponry broadened the bloodbath's scope. Airplanes could fly over and dismantle troops where they stood. Mustard gas could creep across the fields into trenches to scorch lung tissue and other soft membranes. Such slaughter could also now be captured efficiently on film and shipped home. (The first box camera from George Eastman in 1888 had seen myriad improvements by 1914.) Wireless communication also made accurate reportage of distant campaigns transmittable.

...

This wholesale motorized murder was part and parcel of the increasingly mechanized world that had been assembling since the first cotton gins and mills marked the Industrial Revolution. The notion of technological progress heaped lifestyle changes on the Western world more radical, perhaps, than written history ever recorded. Lightbulbs banished night, and instruments of velocity like steamships and airplanes were shrinking the Earth's distances. The first subways opened in London in 1890 to whisk human beings through underground chasms in herds. As cars began to replace buggies, cities ceased to be designed around human traffic and began to be built to accomodate vehicles, often eradicating pedestrian traffic in the process. Buildings ceased to approach human scale and scraped the heavens. You need only compare modern-day Los Angeles with Paris to grasp how those looming, boxlike structures combined with newfound bustle and clanking whatnots to isolate and estrange various urban citizenries."

- Mary Karr on Eliot's The Wasteland.

(To compare, perhaps, one can consider the war in War & Peace. How different was the outlook, scope and means of fighting the battles. The army slowly progressing through unending snow towards a futile-seeming end, is a very different war from the wars, battles and skirmishes of the world since the dawn of twentieth century.)

the center of reality

 "...the center of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of." -  Northrop Frye, quoted by Margaret Atwood in Negotiating with the Dead, A Writer on Writing.

*

// separately, this thought, that one perhaps writes to make sense of the world. 

*

In the same book, she shares her early influences (or her group's early influences). Following:

Rewriting of the theories of matter

"In the second half of the 20th century, a conceptual tsunami swept through physics. The discovery that our world emerges from a microscopic world of molecules, which emerges from an even more microscopic world of subatomic particles (which in turn emerges from even stranger stuff) triggered the rewriting of our theories of matter."

From here

"The Navier-Stokes equations presume that fluids are continuous substances that flow perfectly smoothly, no matter how much you zoom in on a point. But in fact, fluids are amalgamations of molecules and atoms. As you zoom in, you’ll eventually discern tiny blips in the flow due to this grainy nature, blips that the classic fluid equations lop off."

Size of things in the universe is not random...

A chart from the book.

"To ‘see’ something, we need to expose it to light of wavelength similar to its size; thus, small objects require small wavelengths of light, which have high frequencies and energies of vibration; these are most able to perturb the system under investigation. This catch-22 situation is expressed by the famous Uncertainty Principle first discovered by Werner Heisenberg. It states that we cannot simultaneously measure the position and the speed of something to ever-increasing accuracy, no matter how perfect our instruments. A measurement of the position of a small object necessarily results in its position being disturbed by the radiation used in the measurement process. It is this consideration of the disruptive effect of the measurement process that distinguishes what is meant when a physicist says that something is ‘small’ rather than ‘large’. ‘Small’ sounds like a totally relative adjective. ‘Smaller than what?’ is our response to someone telling us that something is small. But the absolute dividing- line between large things and small things is picked out by asking whether the act of observing them with perfect instruments has a negligible, or a significant, impact on their states.

An important lesson from these simple considerations is that the sizes of things in the Universe are not random. They lie in the ranges they occupy because they are manifestations of balances between opposing forces of Nature. Their locations are determined by the inflexible values of the constants of Nature that express the strengths of those forces. This is the explanation for the things that are seen. As for the things that are not seen, the existence of black holes and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle exclude a vast range of mass-size combinations from the view of any observers. The cosmic inventory is neither the result of some process of natural selection, nor of an attrition of the set of all possibilities; and it is not merely haphazard—it is at once a matter of balance and censorship." - John Barrow

Our size is not an accident. It is, within quite narrow bounds, imposed by the invariant strengths of the forces of Nature. But the consequences of our size for our development, our culture, and our abilities are deep and wide. They shed light upon how we have outstripped other living things in controlling natural resources.

The battle between strength and size is displayed by a simpler struggle: that waged between volume and the surface area enclosing it. Watch a rolling snowball as it accretes snow and grows bigger. Its radius increases; so both its volume and surface area grow as well. But, whereas its volume grows according to the cube of its radius, its surface area increases only in proportion to the square of the radius: its surface area cannot keep pace with the growth in its volume. This losing battle that surface area fights with volume as size increases imposes many vital constraints upon the sizes of living things. As your volume increases with growth, so your heat-generating organs increase in volume and energy output. But your ability to keep cool depends upon how much heat can escape from your exposed surface. Small creatures have a relatively large surface area for their volume; large creatures possess a relatively small one. In cold climates small creatures will therefore be at a disadvantage, unable to generate enough heat from eating to keep warm.

it is wrong to believe that all Nature’s solutions to the problems posed by the environment are optimal. They may not need to be. Nor might the range of variations available for natural selection include the optimal case, because of other constraints on what can happen,

(Perhaps the solution is answering to a different objective function and a set of constraints)

Here's something done with AI on top of the above chart to show the key dominant forces on each level:

Followed by some comments by AI

Reading it from the bottom up, the ladder of "who's in charge" goes like this. At the atom, the strong force holds the nucleus and quantum mechanics fixes the electron cloud's size — and just below sits the ℏ wall, where an object's Compton wavelength outgrows the object itself and it stops being localisable. Step up into the long teal stretch and one force — electromagnetism — runs everything, but it wears different costumes at each scale. Around DNA and bacteria, bond energies are only tens of times kT, so thermal jitter jostles molecules constantly (Brownian motion) and, for anything swimming, viscosity so overwhelms inertia that water feels like tar — Purcell's "life at low Reynolds number," where a bacterium coasts less than an atom's width after it stops beating. A little larger, at the insect, the crossover you named arrives precisely: the capillary length of water is about 2.7 mm, so below a few millimetres surface tension beats weight and a strider stands on the pond. Chemistry is still the boss all the way up through us — bone and muscle are electromagnetic bonds, and Galileo's square–cube law (strength ∝ L², weight ∝ L³, so strength-to-weight ∝ 1/L) is what caps the height of trees and the thickness of an elephant's legs.

Then comes the one transition that matters most on the whole diagram, the teal-to-red boundary near the asteroid: gravity overtakes electromagnetism as the force that decides an object's shape. Below roughly 500 km, chemical bonds hold a body in whatever lumpy form it was born with — hence potato-shaped asteroids. Above it, self-gravity crushes the lumps smooth and you get spheres; that's essentially the physical definition of a planet (hydrostatic equilibrium). Push further up the red band and gravity does something even more dramatic — it compresses matter hard enough to ignite the strong force, and a ball of gas becomes a star. 

This is the deep asymmetry of the chart: small things are ruled by contact (electromagnetism), large things by gravity, and the changeover happens right around the asteroid–planet line.

We sit near the top of the electromagnetic stretch, just below the handover — still creatures of chemistry and strength, but the first scale at which gravity begins to be felt as a genuine rival rather than a rounding error. And the galaxy floating off the band, low and to the right, is the coda: it obeys none of this. Its density is a trillion-trillion times below solid matter because nothing touches — it's bound by gravity reaching across near-empty vacuum (with a great deal of dark matter doing the reaching), which is why it falls clean off the line of constant density that organises everything else.

About the Nobel

In time, Prudhomme was joined in the history of dubious literature Nobels by Rudolf Eucken, Paul Heyse, Władysław Reymont, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Verner von Heidenstam, Winston Churchill, Pearl S. Buck, and Dario Fo. The list of non-Nobelists includes Joyce, Proust, Chekhov, Musil, Wharton, Woolf, Kafka, Brecht, Borges, Akhmatova, Rilke, Orwell, Lorca, Twain, Baldwin, Achebe, and Murakami, and stretches on from there.

From the New Yorker/ David Remnick

Human nature is like a tree

 

From here.

Osip Mandelstam on poetry

 

Also known as Osip Mandelshtam

"Poetry is a plough that uproots time so that time’s deeper layers, its ‘black earth’, are on top. But there are epochs such as these when humanity as a whole, not content with today, longs for the deep layers of time, like a ploughman it craves the virgin soil of time. A revolution in art inevitably leads to classicism. Not because David reaps Robespierre’s harvest, but because that is what the earth requires."

Translated by AS Kline ( Here)

"I take a line of Latin as my example, since Rome is clearly perceived by the Russian reader as an allegory of duty; the imperative sounds more clearly in the Roman poets. But this is a property of all poetry, once it is regarded as classical. It is perceived as something that must be, not as something that was once created."

*

Later

"Do not demand from poetry pure corporeality, concreteness, materiality. It partakes of the same revolutionary famine. A doubting Thomas, why do you need to touch it with your fingers? And most importantly, why equate a word with a ‘thing’, with grass, with the object that it denotes?

Is the ‘thing’ the master of the word? The word is Psyche. The living word does not denote objects, but freely chooses, as it were, for its dwelling-place, this or that object of significance, materiality, a sweet body. And around the ‘thing’, the word wanders freely, like the soul around that abandoned but unforgotten body."

*

And further

"The poem is alive inwardly, that resounding shell of form that precedes the written poem. Not a single word exists, and yet the poem is already heard. It echoes like an image, internally; it is this act of being heard that touches the poet’s hearing.

And but a moment of recognition is sweet to us!

There is a phenomenon apparent now, a kind of glossolalia (speaking in tongues). In a sacred frenzy, poets are speaking the language of all times, of all cultures. Nothing is impossible. Just as the dying man's room is open to all, the door of the past is wide open to the crowd. Suddenly, everything has become common property. Go forth, and seize it. Everything is available: all labyrinths, all hidden caches, all secret passages. The word has become not a seven-reeded but a thousand-tubed set of pan-pipes, animated at once by the breath of all the ages. The most striking thing about glossolalia is that the speaker does not know the language he speaks. He speaks a completely unknown language. And it seems to himself and to everyone that he is speaking ancient Greek or Chaldean. A state which is the complete opposite to erudition. Modern poetry, for all its complexity and inner cunning, is naïve."

From Mikhail Sholokhov's Nobel Speech

"Yet it is just the novel that makes possible the most complete comprehension of the world of reality, that permits the projection of one’s attitude to this world, to its burning problems.

One might say that the novel is the genre that most predisposes one to a profound insight into the tremendous life around us, instead of putting forward one’s own tiny ego as the centre of the universe. This genre, by its very nature, affords the very widest scope for a realistic artist."

-

"What, then, is the vocation and what are the tasks of an artist who sees himself, not as an image of a god who is indifferent to the sufferings of mankind, enthroned far above the heat of battle, but as a son of his people, a tiny particle of humanity?

To be honest with the reader, to tell people the truth – which may sometimes be unpleasant but is always fearless. To strengthen men’s hearts in their belief in the future, in the belief in their own ability to build this future. To be a champion of peace throughout the world and with his words breed such champions wherever those words penetrate. To unite people in their natural, noble striving toward progress.

Art possesses a great ability to influence people’s intellects and brains. I believe that anyone has the right to call himself an artist, if he channels this ability into creating someting beautiful in the minds of men, if he benefits humanity."

From Derek Walcott's Nobel Lecture

 

“Poetry, which is perfection’s sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. The dialects of my archipelago seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statue’s forehead, not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble, but the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and salt.”

an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture,

Survival is the triumph of stubborness, and spiritual stubborness, a sublime stupidity, is what makes the occupation of poetry endure, when there are so many things that should make it futile. Those things added together can go under one collective noun: “the world”.

 For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

Joseph Brodsky's booklist

A list of books from here and here that Josph Brodsky recommends to his students:

1.   Bhagavad Gita

2.   Mahabharata

3.   Gilgamesh

4.   The Old Testament

5.   Homer: Iliad, Odyssey

6.   Herodotus: Histories

7.   Sophocles: Plays

8.   Aeschylus: Plays

9.   Euripides: Plays (Hippolytus, The Bachantes, Electra, The Phoenician Women)

10. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War

11. Plato: Dialogues

12. Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Ethics, De Anima

13. Alexandrian Poetry: The Greek Anthology

14. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

15. Plutarch: Lives [presumably Parallel Lives]

16. Virgil: Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics

17. Tacitus: Annals

18. Ovid: Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores

19. The New Testament

20. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars

21. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

22. Catullus: Poems

23. Horace: Poems

24. Epictetus: Discourses

25. Aristophanes: Plays

26. Claudius Aelianus: Historical Miscellany, On the Nature of Animals

27. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica

28. Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers

29. Edward Gibbon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

30. Plotinus: The Enneads

31. Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History

32. Boethius: Consolations of Philosophy

33. Pliny the Younger: Letters

34. Byzantine verse romances

35. Heraclitus: Fragments

36. St. Augustine: Confessions

37. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica

38. St. Francis of Assisi: The Little Flowers

39. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince

40. Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy (Tr. By John Ciardi)

41. Franco Sacchetti: Novelle

42. Icelandic sagas

43. William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V)

44. François Rabelais

45. Francis Bacon

46. Martin Luther: Selected Works

47. John Calvin:  Institutio Christianae religionis

48. Michel de Montaigne: Essays

49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote

50. René Descartes: Discourses

51. Song of Roland

52. Beowulf

53. Benvenuto Cellini

54. Henry Adams: Education of Henry Adams

55. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan

56. Blaise Pascal: Pensées

57. John Milton: Paradise Lost

58. John Donne

59. Andrew Marvell

60. George Herbert

61. Richard Crashaw

62. Baruch Spinoza: Treatises

63. Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Red and Black, The Life of Henry Brulard 

64. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

65. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy

66. Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses

67.  Baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters

68. John Locke: Second Treatise on Government

69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations

70. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics

71. David Hume: Everything

72. The Federalist Papers

73. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason

74. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments

75. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground, The Possessed

76. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

77. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Italian Journey

78. Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

79. Eric Auerbach: Mimesis

80. William H. Prescott: Conquest of Mexico

81. Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Solitude

82. Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies

83. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power

A list full of classics. Perhaps a work of a lifetime reading. I am a slow reader and some of these are difficult, contextual texts. I tried reading Dante's a few times, but I cannot proceed beyond a few cantos. The logic of that whole world escapes me. The logic of submission of human life or death to something as random... but I guess one has to read for poetry. Or perhaps one needs a teacher to introduce to these texts. Another strategy could be to begin from the bottom of the list, and work the way upwards. 

The idea is perhaps to be open to the best thought and poetry, and read it for what it is without judgement. 

A simpler, less aspirational me would just gaze at this list and smile to the variety of world and the aspirations inherent in it. Some of it I'll try to work through but knowing my past attempts, knowing myself, knowing my inclinations, I'll perhaps pick a few accessible titles from the above. Part of me wishes to take up the challenge, part of me knows that some challenges are good as distant mountains to guide your effort along the paths you are, you get there when you get there... the guidance is to the effort, the path in front of you. So to that, and in that spirit, this reading list.

Poets, Critics and Readers

Some fragments from Randall Jarrell's 'Poets, Critics and Readers'

Goethe notes : "All great excellence in life or art, at its first recognition, brings with it a certain pain arising from the strongly felt inferiority of the spectator; only at a later period, when we take it into our own culture, and appropriate as much of it as our capacities allow, do we learn to love and esteem it. Mediocrity, on the other hand, may often give us unqualified pleasure; it does not disturb our self-satisfaction, but rather encourages us with the thought that we are as good as another . .. Properly speaking, we learn only from those books we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticize would have to learn from me.”

--

But this is quite as true of critics and the poems that are their  patients: when one reads as a linguist, a scholar, a New or Old or High  or Low critic, when one reads the poem as a means to an end, one is no longer a pure reader but an applied one. The true reader “listens like a three years’ child: / The Mariner hath his will.” Later on he may write like a sixty-three-year-old sage, but he knows that in the beginning, unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of art. Hofmannsthal says, with awful finality: “The world has lost its innocence, and without innocence  no one creates or enjoys a work of art”; but elsewhere he says more hopefully, with entire and not with partial truth, that each of us lives in an innocence of his own which he never entirely loses.

--

perhaps true criticism is something, like sincerity or magnanimity, that cannot be aimed at, attained, directly; that must always be, in some sense, a by-product, whether of writing or reading, of a private poetry-workshop or a private reading-room.

--

We all realize that writers are inspired, but helpless and fallible beings, who know not what they write; readers, we know from personal experience, are less inspired but no less helpless and fallible beings, who half the time don’t know what they’re reading. Now, a critic is half writer, half reader:

--

For to tell the truth, the first truth, the poem is a love affair between the poet and his subject, and readers come in only a long time later, as witnesses at the wedding...

But what would the ideal witnesses—the ideal public—be? What would an ideal public do? Mainly, essentially, it would just read the poet; read him with a certain willingness and interest; read him imaginatively and perceptively. It needs him, even if it doesn’t know that; he needs it, even if he doesn’t know that. It and he are like people in one army, one prison, one world: their interests are great and common, and deserve a kind of declaration of dependence. ‘The public might treat him very much as it would like him to treat it. It has its faults, he has his; but both “are, after all,” as a man said about women, “the best things that are offered in that line.” The public ought not to demand the same old thing from the poet whenever he writes something very new, nor ought it to complain, The same old thing! whenever he writes something that isn’t very new; and it ought to realize that it is not, unfortunately, in the writer’s power to control what he writes: something else originates and controls it, whether you call that something else the unconscious or Minerva or the Muse. The writer writes what he writes just as the public likes what it likes; he can’t help himself, it can’t help itself, but each of them has to try: most of our morality, most of our culture are in the trying.

We readers can be, or at least can want to be, what the writer himself would want us to be: a public that reads a /ot—that reads widely, joyfully, and naturally; a public whose taste is formed by acquaintance with the good and great writers of many ages, and not simply acquaintance with a few fashionable contemporaries and the fashionable precursors of those; a public with broad general expectations, but without narrow particular demands, that the new work of  art must satisfy; a public that reads with the calm and ease and independence that come from liking things in themselves, for themselves.

This is the kind of public that the poet would like; and if it turned out to be the kind of public that wouldn’t like him, why, surely that is something he could bear. It is not his poems but poetry that he wants people to read; if they will read Rilke’s and Yeats’s and Hardy’s poems, he can bear to have his own poems go unread forever. He knows that their poems are good to read, and that’s something he necessarily can’t know about his own; and he knows, too, that poetry itself is good to read—that if you cannot read poetry easily and naturally and joyfully, you are cut off from much of the great literature  of the past, some of the good literature of the present. Yet the poet could bear to have people cut off from all that, if only they read widely, naturally, joyfully in the rest of literature: much of the greatest  literature, much of the greatest poetry, even, is in prose. If people read this prose—read even a little of it—generously and imaginatively, and felt it as truth and life, as a natural and proper joy, why, that would be enough.

Learning a new language...or a new paradigm

"In order to conquer any foreign language, one needs to open two princiapl doors. The first is comprehension. The second, the spoken language. In between, there are smaller doors, equally relevant: syntax, grammar, vocabulary, nuances of meaning, pronounciation.At this point, one gains relative mastery. In my case, I daed to open a third door: the written language.

Bit by bit, as one studies, the door to comprehension swings open. The spoken language, apart from a foreign accent and some mispronouciations here and there, also opens with relative ease. The written language, certainly the most formidable door, remains ajar. Since I started thinking and writing in Italian only at the age of forty-five, I knocked on this door quite late, and it creaks a little. Although it welcomes me, it keeps odd hours, and is rather unpredictable."

- From Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Translating Myself And Others'

Both an inspiration and an overview of how to tackle a foreign language or for that matter, a shift in skills, paradigms, anything that the mind has never grappled with before. Comprehension, conversation and then owning and writing in it... 

A part of the universe

A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

-ALBERT EINSTEIN

A Tibetan woman

From Sky Burial (Xinran), following about a Tibetan woman. Inspiring!

Saierbao's face was so weathered that it was hard to tell how old she was, but Wen guessed she must be about thirty. She was an extremely calm and dignified woman who seemed to savor all her chores, however tough and exhausting they were. She never shouted or scolded. Even if someone knocked over her freshly made tsampa or spilled her milk tea, she didn't get cross. At most she would purse her lips and smile briefly as if she had seen it coming. Saierbo loved jewelry and draped herself in precious things even on ordinary days: with her necklaces, bracelets, and waist ornaments of agate, jade, gold, and silver, she was like a multicolored wind chime. Wen rarely saw Saierbo rest: her tinkling began the moment the first rays of light sneaked into the tent; at night, the whole family took its cue for sleep when the chimes fell silent. 

Links to share

An education in itself - http://strangebeautiful.com/

Where to begin? Perhaps here 

And then here.

To be revisited time and again when there is a pocket of time to delve into one of the papers there. My first stop perhaps http://strangebeautiful.com/papers/curiel-learning-philosophy.pdf

I found it looking for Schrodinger's What is life?

Proportionate growth of the soul

This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within”, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

Martin Luther King Jr. – Nobel Lecture - NobelPrize.org

 

Shirley Hazzard on submission to art

It is always tempting, of course, to impose one's view rather than to undergo the submission required by art -- a submission akin to that of generosity or love -- that evokes the private response rather than the authorized one. But art is not technology and cannot be "mastered". It is an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of living experience and a way of communing with the dead. An intimacy with truth, through which, however much instruction is provided and absorbed, each of us must pass alone.

There is art, the primary. (I think of books at the moment). Poems and stories, fables and narratives. And then there is the whole set of books responding to the primary. How much of one's reading is primary, how much is secondary or tertiary. It is not all the same. Just something to be mindful about. 

Personally, I feel in the primary too, there is an element of tested by time. Those are the golden books. The current is interesting, but the ones tested by time, with that distance of time and space have more chances of garnering that submission to art that she talks about than the ones where the mind questions and counterpoints to everything since it is too close in time and space. This I feel in my reading. Her words allow the fuzziness about the kind of books one reads to help clear a little. I have always wondered about a good measure of reading. Number of books doesn't really help understand the reading year. Because there are as many that provide dipping pleasures. So perhaps this about the golden primary, and the rest. There is a succour and solace in art once the self is submitted or forgotten. Modern books will provide that for a later age perhaps. For us, the time-honoured. As to the rest, one reads but one now knows when one needs the fount, where to look for it, hopefully. That passing alone - for the intimacy with truth.

From Francis Bacon, some quotes

Choose what is best, and habit will make it pleasant and easy.

*

That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men have enoguh to do with things present and to come: therefore they do but trifle with themselves that labour in past matters.

*

Discourse ought to be as a field, without coming home to any man.

List of books from 'Reading the Seasons'

Germaine Leece & Sonya Tsakalakis are two bibilotherapists and book pen-pals who talk about books. Here's the bookshelf they refer to in their book, 'Reading the Seasons'.

List of books from 'Tolstoy and the Purple Chair' by Nina Sankovitch

The author reads a book a day for a year, and then she writes about them as well. Such an impressive project! Her purpose is to heal from grief, and regenerate. 

Following is the list of books she reads that year, and the other books she draws quotes from in the book.

Copper

"Ever since Thomas Edison’s enterprise laid 80,000 feet of copper wires under streets in Lower Manhattan in 1882, lighting up one square mile, copper has proved its mettle as the metal of electrification. In the century and a half since then, as copper has gone on to wire the world, the staggering growth in consumption has turned it into one of the most important materials of modern civilization."

From Exec Summary, this S&P report here.

Today, the world mines ~23 MMT of copper, and consumes around ~28 MMT (including reuse of scrap) every year. This demand is set to increase to 42 MMT by 2040, driven by Energy, AI and data centres beyond its core uses in economy. 

India, Akbar, and mid-sixteenth century world - a sketch

Excerpt From Rushdie, Salman. “Languages of Truth.”

India, in the mid-sixteenth century. Just thirty-one years have passed since a fierce Timurid warlord, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babar of Ferghana in what we would now call Uzbekistan, a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and possessor of a surprising literary gift, was unhoused from his native land and swept down from the northwest to establish, by force of arms, a new kingdom in Delhi and to write a magnificent autobiography, one of the first ever written in Asia. Just fourteen years have passed since that warlord’s less puissant son Humayun was deposed and fled into ignominious Persian exile, abandoning his infant son to be raised by an Afghan uncle. Just two years have elapsed since the fugitive’s victorious return and the reestablishment of his dynasty, and just one since the returned monarch fell down a flight of steps and died in a moment of bathetic slapstick, leaving his thirteen-year-old son, the son who barely knew him, to ascend his father’s precarious throne. What follows this period of near-perpetual upheaval, almost impossibly, is a time of political stability, economic prosperity, religious tolerance, cultural openness, the rule of law, and an artistic renaissance: the half-century-long reign of one of the most remarkable rulers the world has ever known. Jalaluddin Mohammed, known as “Akbar,” “the Great,” also called jahanpanah, the shelter of the world. In a portrait by one of Emperor Humayun’s Persian master artists, Abdus-Samad, the young Akbar is seen riding confidently in a bullock cart just before he  became king. The kid was about to make quite a mark. 

The second half of the sixteenth century was one of those exceptional periods, not unlike our own, when the whole world seemed to be changing rapidly, a “hinge moment” in history. The sixteenth century, perhaps unlike our own times, was also a hinge moment in the arts. Akbar’s reign coincided almost exactly with that of Queen Elizabeth I of England; he ascended to the throne a year and a bit before her and lived a couple of years longer. In Italy this was the time of the High Renaissance, of Michelangelo and Titian and the poetry of Ariosto. In Spain it was the time of Cervantes and the two parts of Don Quixote, and in Elizabethan England, of course, it was the age of Shakespeare. What else of world-changing note? Yes: Sometime in the 1560s, the graphite pencil was invented and was used, originally, for the marking of British sheep. 

(The New World, I’m sorry to say, lags behind a little; there is not a great deal of what one might call brilliance there at this time. Francis Drake initiated the slave trade with America in 1562, the Roanoke colony was established in 1584 and vanished by 1590. There is not much else to report.) ...

...The West knew very little about the East then.

Vincent Van Gogh

 

Trees and undergrowth

Apples

Still Life with Quinces

Three Pairs of Shoes