Two more transcriptions for my commonplace book.
Notebook Transcription 62
May 10, 2008
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The abdicated emperor whispered three times in the ear of his sister's new infant. "Heaven your father, Earth your mother. Take these ninety-nine pieces (coins) as a sign of long life."
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The bell was ringing for the dawn watch
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Change is my theme.
You gods, whose power has wrought
All transformations, aid the poet's thought,
And make my song's unbroken sequence flow
From earth's beginnings to the days we know.
>Ovid
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King Themus rejects the offer of literacy from God Theuth:
"What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder." And "it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance. For by telling them many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows." >Ferris 13
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Things are as they are because they were as they were.
>Physicist Thomas Gold
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"The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance." >Lewis Thomas
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Karl Popper: our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance is infinite. This is the ultimate source of ignorance.
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all metaphors are imperfect said Robert Frost. That is their beauty.
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"Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse." >Sophocles
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"Big Government is not foisted on us by politicians. It has grown upon us because certain things have to be done which no one but the government can do." >Joseph Kennedy
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There was an ancient practice of carrying a burning, smoking biazien? at the head of an army or caravan to indicate the line of march by day and night. ...in Exodus x320 it is the lord, accompanying the people.
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After the Lord drowned Pharaoh's army the Israelites look back on the sea: "Thus the Lord delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians. Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the shore of the sea. And when Israel saw the wondrous power which the Lord had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord. They had faith in the Lord and His servant Moses."
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All earth is mine, but you shall be to me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. > Exodus 19-5.6
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He restricts his vision in order to see more; he limits his world in order to transcend these limitations. >Richie on Ozu
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His Cinema is formal and the formality is that of poetry, the creation of an ordered context that destroys habit and familiarity, returning to each word, to each image, its original freshness and urgency. >111
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"I always tell people that I don't make anything besides tofu and that is because I am strictly a tofu dealer." > Ozu
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Behind every great fortune there is a crime. >Balzac
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"The young secretaries were encouraged to interest themselves in the life of the people among whom they lived. It was even thought rather priggish to attend the Chancery in the afternoon. You were supposed to go to parties and meet your friends or take up the study of some aspects of society -- the theater, the arts, travel, or whatever interested you most. There was plenty of time. The bag left once a month for the foreign office, and there was no point in hurrying to write dispatches until just before sailing time, when you could give the very latest news." >Sir G.S.
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It goes rather slowly, as I will not allow myself to use existing works in English, and have to go to the Japanese sources, which are voluminous and confused, so that a little fact takes a long time to establish.
>Sir George and Japan 38
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It is really a pity that he will only have one life to perform in.
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The poem hung by G. Sansom above his study desk:
Business men boast of their skills and cunning
But in philosophy they are like little children.
Bragging to each other of successful depredations
They neglect to consider the ultimate fate of the body.
What should they know of the Master of Dark Truth
Who saw the wide world in a Jade cup,
By illumined conception got clean of Heaven and earth:
On the chariot of mutual ... [ripped page]
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In retrospect, it was a very strange war. > Atsushi Moriyama, lecturer at U. of Shizouka
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Sansom speaking to pilgrims NY Nov. NY 1935: "Diplomacy, of course, has its important and essential functions; but it cannot move faster than national sentiment. And if collective security is to succeed it must be based on what I may call collective understanding."
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Here we are in the orient, where passionate events occur but the fundamentals seem to remain unchanged.
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American policy, all over the place in partial enthusiasms.
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distress, as a lover watching his mistress losing her mind. >Sansom on the downward spiral, 1938
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he wants to understand things, not merely pontificate.
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Hobbes wrote of the greatest impediment to good governance as "the frequency of insignificant speech."
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mono no aware
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"He wears his clothes well" MacArthur on Hirohito.
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Wabi: the aesthetic sameness, simplicity but complete depth of Ozu and others. Thus: "Breaking a plum branch, I put it in an earthen jar. / Although the blossoms are not yet open, / the soul of spring hovers unseen." > 1495 Hekizan Hichiroku
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Picture on Ozaki it is only trough the ordinary that the spiritual can be revealed.
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Traditions itself cannot constitute a force. It always has a decadent tendency to promote formalization and repetition. What is needed to direct it into creative channels is a fresh energy that repudiates dead forms and prevents living ones from becoming static. It on sense, for a tradition to live it must constantly be destroyed. At the same time, destruction by itself clearly cannot create new cultural forms. There must be some other force which restrains destructive energy and prevents it from reducing all about it to havoc. The dialectical synthesis of tradition and anti-tradition is the structure of true creativeness. >Architect Kenzo Tange
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Don't you people realize that if you were to get into a war with Russia and you should be in any way successful and should advance into that country, you would never find a place to stop? The further you went in, the weaker you would become, and nobody would surrender to you. >Bismark
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"Behold how tragedy comes about. When chance events befall fools." >Stoic view, Epictetus
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We are reminded of Sophocles' description of Philoctetes, with his small sunless cave, his rudimentary ..p, the disfiguring wound that revolted all normal citizens.
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The constitution stands between human beings and unfettered expediency, to the extent that the interests protected in the 14th Amendment are valued so highly that they are protected against expediency arguments as a matter of constitutional principle. >104 Poetic Justice.
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"the asymmetry of positions must be considered." >Posner
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Can there be lasting, true, justice without understanding?
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The judge's imagination and scope thereof is tied to strict institutional constraints.
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I am he, attesting sympathy. >Walt Whitman
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To the poets and teachers:
"Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America? / Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men? / ... Have you considered the organic compact of the first day of the first year of independence, signed by the commissioners, ratified by the states, and read by Washington at the head of the army? Have you possess'd yourself o the Fedearl Constitution? / Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities? / Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls, fierce contentions? Are you very strong? Are you really of the whole people? / Are you not of some coterie? Some school or mere religion? / Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity? for the last-born? little and big? and for the errant? > W.W.
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Of Edmund Wilson and later Malcolm Gladwell: "He gives ideas the quality of action."
end 62
Notebook Transcription 63
May 15, 2008
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The most dangerous power of the the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he things he should get, rather than pikc cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a far chance of pinning at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost everyone...It is in this realm--in which the prosecutor picks some person he dislikes or desires to be embarrassed, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. >AJ Robert H Jackson in Bobby and his Times 383
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known criminals, unknown crimes
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The presidency is the center of American energy
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Burke Marshall(!)L.
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Burke and the crisis of Federalism in dealing w/ civil rights abuses by state justice systems 305-306
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amicus curiae
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Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of al classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth. Tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. >G.K. Chesterton
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Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta">
Friar Barnardine: Though hast committed...
Barabas: Fornication; but that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.
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"An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." >Chesterton
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"If thou gaze too long into the abyss the abyss will gaze into thee." Nietzche
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There are three things which are real: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third. >Ramayana
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"The search for conspiracy only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country...It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason." >Anthony Lewis on JFK's assassination
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All things are to be examined and called into question--there are no limits set to thought. >RFK notes on yellow sheet after assassination
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"Having done what men could, they did what men must." >Thucydides on the Greeks that died in Syracuses' mines
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"men are not made for safe heavens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life...to the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge." >618
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"He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." >Aeschylus in the Agamemnon
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"The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy.../Death at the last, the deliverer./ Not to be born is past all prizing best/ Next best by far when one has seen the light/ Is to go thither swiftly whence he came." >Oedipus Tyrannus
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Greek: "What a pity it had to be this way."
Catholic: "What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise."
The tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility.
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when he shall die
take him out and cut him out in little stars
and he will make the face of heaven so fine
that all the world will be in love with night,
and pay no worship to the garish sun.
> Romeo and Juliet
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"Statement that we will not deal with assassins or murderers make it difficult for the other side to believe that they are being asked to come to the negotiating table for anything other than to surrender." >RFK 738 on Vietnam and US attitude towards talks
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"I thought I could make him more like me, but I've found in the last several months that I am becoming more like him; so I got out." >Myers on LBJ
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those that cling to the present, which is always dying ...for the illusion of security
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"like a meteor, Mr. Kennedy has flashed across the South African sky, and has gone...South Africa remains has it was." >749
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RFK's questions
1. What do you want?
2. How can I help?
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"When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try and reconcile yourself with the world...Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself i you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age." >Emerson, Essays 801
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No one understood practical politics better, "yet the imagining heart was always in the hills, leading some guerrilla army, without speeches or contaminating compromise, fighting to translate the utmost purity of intention into the power to change a nation or the world." >Richard M Goodwin on RFK 802
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"originalists have nothing to trade.' We can't do horse-trading. Our view is what it is, and we write our dissents." >Scalia and his dogmatism ....others: a living constitution
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"an elegant young rough-neck" >Gatsby
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"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please--you can never have both." >Emerson's Commonplace Book
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Is night only your torchlight wards gone black,
White wake on wave,
Pyre set for the fire that fell.
>Robert Lowell on Kennedy
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a deafening silence
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legal originalism Scalia - Bork
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"Jurisprudence of original intention." -- the words of the constitution mean only what the founders thought they meant at the time of writing. "The framers' intentions with respect to freedoms are the sole legitimate premise from which constitutional analysis may proceed." >Bork
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Great advocate of originalism: William Brennan