Two Visions of History

A professor muses on the students he is teaching in the late 1960s and their notion that we are entering the Age of Aquarius, and realizes that Virgil had also referenced the procession of the equinoxes in his praise of imperial Rome:

Redeunt Saturnia Regna: the old gold age that once was is come again. Walking home through the illuminated streets, in bed with Julie, at breakfast, standing abstracted before his students, Pierce came to feel often, like a clutch in his throat or a hum in his ears, that sense of collision he had first felt at Earl's; as though he had come upon some kind of crossroads, no, as though he were himself a crossroads, a place where caravans met, freighted with heavy goods, come from far places, colliding there with others come from far places, headed elsewhere: pack-trains, merchants carrying jewels sewn into their clothing, dark nomads from nowhere carrying nothing, imperial couriers, spies, lost children. The history he thought he knew, the path called History that he walked every walking day, that path that led backwards through a maze of battles, migrations, conquests, bankruptcies, revolutions, one damn thing after another, men and women doing and saying, dreaming and playing, till it coiled finally and unknowably upon itself at the side of a cold campfire on some vast and silent veldt —from that path, it seemed, there forked another, just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, in him as to others, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. 

Down that road, the past did not grow darker with distance, but brighter; that way lay the morning lands, wise forefathers, who knew what we have forgotten, radiant cities built by arts now lost.

Nor did that road go curling off to an ending lost amid the beasts: no, though far shorter than the road Pierce called History, it was infinite, because just as its furthest age rolled back to its first days, the whole road completed a circle; the serpent took in its mouth the fast-dwindling tip of its tail. Nowadays history is made of time; but once it was made of something else.

Now that would be a story to tell his kids, wouldn't it, he thought. The story of that history not made of time; that history which is as different from History yet as symmetrical to it as dream is to waking.

As dream is to waking.

He pulled himself from his new armchair with some difficulty and went to the window; he turned out his lights and stood looking out into the never dark city.

There had been a morning once, when he was a child, when he had awakened from frightening dreams, labyrinthine pursuit and loss, and his mother had tried to explain to him the nature of dreams, and why it is that, though you seem in them to be in mortal danger, you can't be hurt, not really. Dreams, she said, are only stories: except they aren't stories outside, like the ones in books. Dreams are your own stories, inside. 

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of.

–John Crowley, The Solitudes

The Faith of an Intellectual

For me, thinking is thanking. 

– Byung-Chul Han 

Americana

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

– Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

The People We Meet

Karl Owe Knausgaard:

The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realize how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. . . . But what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on.

Post-Liberalism

But supposing the world has been "filled up," so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

– Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992

Bertrand Russell on Marx, Dogmatism, and Kindness

Fascinating old video clip.

Question: For those of us who reject Marx, can you offer any positive philosophy to help us toward a more hopeful future?

Russell: Well as to that, you see, I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other, and I think all of these matters are full of doubt. The rational man will not be too sure that he is right. I think that we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. Not even mine! No, I think we should accept our philosophies with a measure of doubt. 

What I do think is this: that if a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Now, Marx is not inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proleteriat. What he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois. And it was because of that negative element, because of that hate element, that his philosophy produced disaster. A philosophy that is to do good must be inspired by kindly feeling, not by unkindly feeling.

Doubt

Great doubt, great awakening. Little doubt, little awakening. No doubt, no awakening. 

–Zen saying

What to Strive For

Socrates:

Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know—that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.

Plato, Meno, Benjamin Jowett translation 

A Note about Marriage

Dorothea Casaubon, seeing her husband distressed and perhaps wroth with her, tries to comfort him:

His glance in reply to hers was so chill that she felt her timidity increased; yet she turned and passed her hand through his arm.

Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness—calling their denial knowledge.

George Eliot, Middlemarch, chapter 42

Nietzsche, Against History

Only to the extent that history serves life will we serve it.

Quotations from Camus' "Sisyphus"

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation.

I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

What counts is not the best living but the most living.

There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.

Integrity has no need of rules... 'Everything is permitted,' is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgement of a fact.

If the world made sense, art would not exist.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.  

Never Satisfied

Augustus the Strong (1670-1733) was the Elector of Saxony, a nice enough position, effectively the independent ruler of a pleasant little kingdom. But it was not enough for him, so he accepted the throne of Poland-Lithuania. This embroiled him in no end of trouble. A French noble woman commented,

That the Elector of Saxony could not be satisifed with being an Elector only goes to show what I have long observed, that no one can be really happy in this world and everyone foolishly sets about throwing away his happiness, for this Elector would have been a thousand times happier if he had gone on enjoying a quiet and peaceful life as Elector of Saxony instead of becoming King of such a fractious nation. 

Via Larry Wolff in the TLS, November 1, 2024 

The Obscene Bird of Night

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

― Henry James Sr., letter to his sons Henry and William

Augustine on Friendship

Augustine will never be alone. When he returned to Thagaste, he formed a core of abiding friendships. Boys who had grown up with him as fellow-students now rallied to him. They were a singularly intelligent and priggish group of young men. . . . Augustine, who had lapsed into monogamy, was a rarity among these celibates. They thought that music was a divine gift; they would discuss together the nature of beauty; they felt themselves above the circus. Augustine knew to perfection how to keep such friendships "on the boil from the heat of shared enthusiasms." "All kinds of things rejoiced my soul in their company – to talk and to laugh, and to do each other kindnesses; to read pleasant books together; to pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again; to differ without rancour, as a man might differ with himself, and when, most rarely, dissension arose, to find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; to teach each other and to learn from each other; to be impatient for the return of the absent, and to welcome them with joy on their homecoming; these, and such-like things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and by a thousand other pleasing ways, kindled a flame which fused our very souls together, and, of many, made us one."

–Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo. Quotations are from The Confessions.

Robert Oppenheimer on Communism

From his very interesting Reith Lecture on the BBC, 20 December 1953

It is a cruel and humourless sort of pun that so powerful a present form of modern tyranny should call itself by the very name of a belief in community, by a word 'communism' which in other times evoked memories of villages and village inns and of artisans concerting their skills, and of men of learning content with anonymity. But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual. This is not man's fate; this is not his path.

RIP Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (1929-2023) was a Czech writer and dissident whose life under Stalinism turned him against not just totalitarian politics but politics in general. His books explored freedom as a deeply personal experience, something found more in art, friendship or sex than in the public realm. Here is a passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being that I transcribed into my commonplace book many years ago:

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.

Thought

In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing.

– Kwame Anthony Appiah

How Writers Work

The things we lack the courage to do are transformed into stories.

–Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

The World is Not a Mirror

Volodymyr Zelenskyy:

When Russia started this aggression, they looked at the world as if they were looking at themselves in a mirror. They thought that everyone in the world was cynical and despised people in the same way as the owners of Russia do. But the world is different – the world helps us protect life. And anyone who goes against the world will become marginal. Russia will gain nothing and lose everything. Glory to all who defend our state! Glory to all who help!

Bouncing Checks

Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov on politics and history:

In a recent interview pegged to the International Booker Prize, Gospodinov said Time Shelter looked beyond his country’s borders and was inspired by the global turn toward populism. “I come from a system that sold a ‘bright future’ under communism,” he said. “Now the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a ‘bright past.’ 

 “I know via my own skin that both checks bounce,” Gospodinov added. “They are backed by nothing.”