Notebook Transcription 65
transcribed: 5/5/06 and 7/13/08

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"Interest," argued O'Holbach in his Systeme de la Nature, "is nothing but what each of us considers necessary for his happiness." >distilattion of mid 19th Century Utilitarianism
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"There is always a fashionable taste
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There is always a fashionable taste: a taste for driving the mail--a taste for acting Hamlet--a taste for philosophical lectures--a taste for the marvellous-a taste for the simple--a taste for the brilliant--a taste for the sombre--a taste for the tender--a taste for the grim--a taste for banditti--a taste for ghosts--a taste for the devil--a taste for French dancers and Italian singers, and German whiskers and tragedies--a taste for enjoying the country in November and wintering in London till the end of the dogdays--a taste for shoes--a taste for picturesque tours--a taste for taste itself, or for essays on taste. >The Hon Mrs. Pinmoney in T.L. Peacock, Melincourt (1816)
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It is plainly no accident that the revival or birth of national literate cultures in Germany, Urssia, Poland, Hungry, the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere should coincide with--and indeed should often be the first manifestation of--the assertion of the cultural supremacy of the vernacular language and the native people, against a cosmopolitan aristocratic culture often employing a foreign language. Naturally enough, such nationalism found its most obvious cultural expression in literature and music; both public arts, which could, moreover, draw on the powerful creative heritage of the common people--language and folksong. It is equally understandable that the arts traditionally dependent on commissions from the established ruling classes, courts and governments, architecture and sculpture and to a lesser extent painting, reflected these national revivals less. >Hobsbawm
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Of the Romantics: "The wanderer's song is their signature tune, nostalgia their companion."
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The literary monument of 19th century (from 1848) Romantic disillusionment: "Euducation Sentimental"
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I sit on the shore and wait for the wind" says an old Russian proverb. "What will become of Russia" it has been asked elsewhere.
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French Revolution: July 14 1789, and then Year II
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American Revolution to signing of Constitution: 1776-1783
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Reading and walking and swimming into lucid depths, powerfully -- that's how I put it. And people impend, but can be shelved for the moment. >Woolf, journals
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"That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride...
And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words." >William Faulkner "As I Lay Dying"
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I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, t the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and the funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin. >end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory, Vladamir Nabokov
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We...shook hands; I took off my hat and then held it to my chest, we stepped back as one does whe a train is about to start, as if to show that all is over and one is reconciled to it. But the train did not start yet, and we approached each other again; I was glad of that, she asked after my sisters. All of a sudden thet rain slowly began to move, Frau Klug got her handkerchief ready to wave, called that I must write to her, did I have her address? She was already too far off for me to be able to reply in words; I pointed to Lowy from whom I could get her address, good, she nodded quickly to me and to him and waved her handkerchief, I raised my hat, clumsily at first, with more ease the farther away she was. Later I remembered my impression that the train was not really moving away but only going the short distance through the station to act a scene for us and then disappear. When i was half aslep that same evening Frau Klug appeared to me, unnaturally small, almost without legs, wringing her hands with a despairing expression, as if some great misfortune had befallen her. >From Kafka's journal
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Life is become like a movie. Kafka wrote that, thought it on a tram trying hard to read passing notices through the window.
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delinquency is more a product of social rather than individual pathology.
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It was what happened when a culture excited middle-class aspirations and then maintained barriers--of status, income, education, race--that made these aspirations unattainable for the poor by legitimate means. >410 Schlessinger
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God save us always from the innocent and the good.
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Success will require recognition by the US, Israel, and Palestinians that divisions between Fatah and Hamas are not a prerequisite for a peace deal. They are a debilitating obstacle on the path toward one. >Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, NYRB
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Updike had already been in Venice for 2 weeks, "inspecting Church walls and holy images" (and beginning to grow a little weary of them), when he decided to see what the Biennale had to offer. Tramping from one national pavilion to another, he was confronted by artificial fog, electronic numbers, hundreds of tattoos (from Slovakia), unintelligible whispers and showers of magenta dust (from America), the recorded roar of racing cars, photographs taken by a chimpanzee...you know the kind of thing. The Germans had mounted huge videos of nothing in particular; the French had taken apart the floor of their exhibit hall and were showing fragments of it under a grate, ten feet down. "Everywhere, " in short, "abrasive irony and nihilism"; everywhere a frantic search for "an inch of the void, of disgust, of scorn that hadn't yet been exposed." >John Gross on Updike in "Due Considerations"
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Most famous people are people most people have never heard of. >Garrison Keillor
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Regulated activity is not incompatible with profit.
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"The Middle class were at last moving from their living rooms to the street, from dinner parties into political parties." >William Dalrymple --- A New Deal in Pakistan
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"I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man's opinion. Mr. Lincoln's eloquence was of another type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself." >Horace White
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an eloquent tower of logic
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"With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statues or pronounces decisions." >Lincoln
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"He is blowing out the moral lights around us." >Lincoln on Douglas borrowing from Henry Clay
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"He sees all who go there, hears all they have to say, talks freely with everybody, reads whatever is written to him; but thinks and acts by himself." >Weed on Lincoln-elect in Springfield
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"The South has eyes but does not see, and ears but does not hear."
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"That dear old domestic bird, the Public, was sure she had brooded out an eagle-chick at last." >on the arrival of George McClelan
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"We cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation." >Lincoln
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"I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens." >Lincoln/ 523
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"He who fights the battles of America may claim America as his country--and have that claim respected." >Douglas on why a black man should enlist.
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"The bare sight of 50,000 armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Missippi, would end the rebellion at once." >Lincoln, 549
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felicity of thought trumps felicity of speech
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"He can snake a sophism out of its hole, better than all the trained logicians of all schools." >555
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"It was by ignoring men, and ignoring all small causes, but by closely calculating the tendencies of events and great farces which were producing logical results." >572
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"Lincoln (is) the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles." >John Forney in the Washington Daily Chronicle
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I would rather be dead than live in dread. We must come to all without fear. >Lincoln
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"love one another." >Seward advice on his deathbed to his daughter in-law
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Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn't enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and will be correspondingly less certain of their remedy. Also, until he learns to live with his wealth, he will have a well-observed tendency to put it to the wrong purposes or otherwise to make himself foolish. As with individuals, so with nations. >Galbraith
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illusion is a comprehensive ill
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"The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events." (ie voters decide)
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They call it the "American War" (in Vietnam)
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A university student in Vietnam says her generation is "interested in doing business, not politics" and does not have much respect for those in power.
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Jules Ferry ... "colonial policy is the daughter of industrial policy."
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"The figure of justice has had such a rough voyage from France to Indochina that she has lost everything but her sword. >Ho Chi Minh
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Ho Chi Minh 1946 on a concession to France "Better to sniff a bit of French shit briefly than eat Chinese shit for the rest of our lives."
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"I want to rail against the wind and the tide, kill the whales in the sea, sweep the whole country to save the people from slavery, and I reuse to be abused." Vietnamese Joan of Arc Trieu An who led a revolt that failed in 248 AD
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1946--battle of Hanoi
"A pattern was emerging that was repeated by France and later the United States: negotiations with the Communists could only be pursued if first the Communists capitulated. "
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Dean Acheson, Under Secretary of State had supported America's intervention in WWII
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late 1947 US launches Marshall plan, contrived to curb soviet inroads in Europe
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George Kennan laid out his containment policy in an essay published anonymously in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct."
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The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another. >Kennedy to Schlesigner
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The US information service tabulated the incoming returns of the 1960 election in the window of its Saigon library in an effort to publicize democracy in action. American officials were ecstatic at the turnout--until they learned that the crowd of Vietnamese had assembled solely to lay bets on the numbers appearing on the scoreboard. >255
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CIA's department of dirty tricks
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why they stay in service though they may not agree with policy: "I figured that I could do better by remaining on the inside. Had I quit, the story would have made the front page of the NYT next day--and then I would have been promptly forgotten." >Ball against Viet war 404
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a postwar mission from State determined bombing of Germany during WWII barely dented the German Industry
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George Ball responding to those who said American prestige was on the line: "What we might gain by establishing the steadfastness of our commitments, we could lose by an erosion of confidence in our judgments. >405
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"It is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labor..." >Adam Smith, via Galbraith 26
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"The traders or producers, who find that a rival is offering goods at a lower price than will yield them a good profit, are angered at his intrusion, and complain of being wronged, even though it may be true that those who buy the cheaper goods are in greater need than themselves, and that the energy and resourcefulness of their rival is a social gain." >Marshall..."Principles of Economics"
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Ricardo: income distribution... there is a ceiling to wages-- laborers will always hover around starvation.
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Malthus: increased food supply will be met by expanding populations that will consume the surplus
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We are told it is normal these ups an downs, booms and busts. Natural fluctuations of the market: leads us to an interested observation, about what lies beneath a vaneer of American optimism: "Behind the facade of hope and optimism there remained the haunting fear of poverty, inequality, and insecurity. Partly latent, partly in the suppressed background of conviction, these doubts could easily be aroused by such an occurrence as the Great Depression. >Galbraith, 47
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Herbert Spencer: 1820-1903...top social Darwinist..gave us the phrase "survival of the fittest"...to seek to mitigate misery was to put in abeyance the fundamental arrangements by which nature insured progress.
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Though Spencer was an Englishman, Social Darwinism had much of its greatest success in the United States.
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[In America] Here, if anywhere, the ordinary man had a chance. Perhaps he did, but he also had to face that all economic life was a natural struggle. He might win but he also might lose, and for him to accept the full consequences of loss--hunger, privation, and death--was a social necessity. >62
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Poverty and insecurity thus became inherent in the economic life of even the most favored country. So of course did inequality, and this was firmly sanctified by the fact that those who enjoyed it were better.
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Karl Marx 1818-1883 ... a man of passion and Jovian wrath--"The Ricardian conclusions--the inevitable impoverishment of the masses, the progressive enrichment of those who own the natural means of production, the inevitable conflict between wages and profits and the priority of the latter for progress--could become, in the hands of an angry man, a call to revolution. >64
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Marx's materialistic conception of history: Even where there was some other ostensible cause--love, honor, patriotism, or religion--a more penetrating or cynical view could be expected to discern some economic motive. ... It is something the modern business man accepts as a matter of course.
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Depend on it, when a man knows he is going to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. > Dr. Johnson
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Conservatives argue egalitarian systems prevent capital formation. "But Norway, an even more egalitarian country, has had since the war one of the highest rates of capital formation and of economic growth of any country in the non-communist world. Middle Eastern countries, where inequality is greatest, are among those with the lowest rate of capital formation. All or most gets spent. >81
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In 1194 the crusading knight Henry of Champagne, paid a visit to the headquarters of the Assassins at the castle of al-Kahf on a rugged peak in the Nosairi Mountains. The Assassins, though a fanatical Moslem sect, had, in general, been on good terms with the Christians, to whom they often rendered, by arrangement, the useful service of resolving disputes by eliminating one of the disputants. Henry was sumptuously received. IN on of the most impressive entertainments a succession of the loyal members of the cult, at a word from the sheik, expertly immolated themselves. >89
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The development of modern business enterprise can be understood only as a comprehensive effort to reduce risk. >101