Note(1):I have the habit of making notes from my reading in little Mead memo pads that I always carry in my pocket. I include interesting passages, facts, turns of phrase, and sometimes thoughts of my own. I do this compulsively at times, at times grudgingly, and during some weeks when I am particularly distracted or lazy not at all. Once I fill the notebook (which takes anywhere from a week to a month) I sit down, put on some music, and type it all out.
Why do I do this? Well, I have a terrible memory. I recall that I completed my first notebook in Perugia some years ago. But what was the reason? To discover my original intentions I might do a word search through my master list, where I paste all of these transcriptions once they are complete, in search of that passage I vaguely remember reading, or writing myself, that has something to do with the need to remember, the fervent desire to remember; to not forget. I type in "memory" and come up with the following:
It is the season of rain, and sudden days of sun that appear one morning like a torch lit in a dark room. A season of cold breezes and the smell of flowers and earth, when the shadows of the branches of a tree flutter in the air, knitting their intricate shapes on stone. A season of time and all its weight, when we rise from each our own burden and consider the passage. A season of weight and the rush of trees, and a slanting light that cuts low across the flanks of a valley, casting its light on one side of everything. A season of memory, of friends and lovers, and fallen leaves that lie on a wooden porch and brown and crisp in the sun.
Did I write this? I can't remember. I think so, but can't be sure. At times I am sloppy and forget to write down authors and page numbers. I'll claim it as mine for now and say that it is the reason I do this.
Note (2): I do not proofread these transcriptions carefully. I am sure there are errors everywhere. But I don't think that is the point. Doing them has been, and I hope will remain, the point. Also, formatting may not come through, which is especially a problem with poetry and dialogue.
Notebook Transcription 61
May 8, 2008
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From "The Undertaking"
I'd rather it be February, the month I first became a father in, the month my father died. I want it cold. I want a mess made in te snow so that the earth looks wounded, forced open, an unwilling participant. Forgo the tent, stand openly to the weather. Get the larger equipment out of sight. it's a distraction. But have the sextant, all dirt and indifference, remain at hand. Go to the hole in the ground, stand over it, look into it, wonder, and be cold. But stand until it's over. Until it's done. >Thomas Lynch
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"We stopped before every stove. Asher the diaryman was still living. His beard had turned gray. This man who rode each day to the tram depot to fetch cans of mil was a charitable person, my father's good friend. When we left Warsaw, my father owed him twenty-five rubles. Father went to say goodbye to him and to apologize for his debt, but Asher took fifty German marks from his purse and gave them to father. >Isaac Bashevis Singer "Shosha"
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"Whenever I expect life to remain status quo, something unexpected pops up. World history is made of the same dough as bagels. It must be fresh. This is why democracy and capitalism are going down the drain. They have become stale. This is the reason idolatry was so exciting. You could buy a new god every year. We Jews burdened the nations with an eternal God, and therefore they hate us. Gibbon tried so hard to find the reason for the fall of the Roman empire. It fell only because it was old. I hear there is a passion for newness in the sky also. A star gets tired of being a star and it explodes and becomes a nova. The Milky Way got weary of its sour mil and began to run the devil knows where. Does she have a job? I mean your financee, not the milky way?
"She has no job and cannot have one," I said.
"Is she sick?"
"Yes, sick."
"When the body gets tired of being healthy it becomes sick. When it gets tired of living, it dies. When it has enough of being dead, it reincarnates into a frog or a windmill. The coffee here is the best in the whole of Warsaw. May I order another glass, Miss Slonim?"
"Ten glasses, but please don't call me Miss Slonim -- my name is Betty."
"I drink to much coffee and I smoke too many cigars. How is it possible that one never gets tired of tobacco and coffee? This is really a riddle." >Singer "Shosha" 137
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We Jews keep on wishing ourselves eternal life, or at least immortality of the soul. In fact, eternal life would be a calamity. Imagine some little storekeeper dying and his soul flying around for millions of years still remembering that once it sold chicory, yeast and beans, and that a customer owes it eighteen groschen. Or the soul of an author ten millions years later resenting a bad review he got.
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My bed was in the Cheder room where the children studied by day. The two windows had shutters and they must have faced east, because the sun shone through them in the mornings. What I am speaking of now has no connection with the so-called occult but with a feeling that everything is full of mysteries. I recall once I woke quite early -- my parents, brother, and sister were still asleep. The rising sun shone through the cracks in the shutters, and columns of dust rose from sunbeams. I remember that morning with remarkable clarity. Obviously, I was too young to think in the context of words, but I wondered "what is all this?" "Where does it all come from?" Other children no doubt go through the same thing, but on that morning my feeling was unusually strong, and I knew instinctively that I shouldn't ask about this and that my parents couldn't supply any answers. our ceiling had beams, and a web of sun and shadow played across it. I realized that I myself and and what I was seeing--the walls, the floors, the pillow on which I rested my head--were all one. In later years I read about cosmic consciousness, monism, pantheism, but I never experienced it with such impact. More, it provided me with a reare pleasure. I had merged with eternity and relished it. At times I think it was like the state of passing over from life to what we call death. We may experience it in the final moments or perhaps immediately after. I say this because no matter how many dead people I have seen in my life, they have had the same expression on their faces: "Ah, so that's what it is! What a shame I can't tell the others about it!" Even a dead bird or mouse presents this expression, though not as distinctly as man" > Shosha, 145
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In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead.... I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England.... This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze. >Edmund Burke, speech to parliament about the soon to be rebellious colonies
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A permanent revolution is about as possible as permanent surgery
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History is a book man can read only forward. He cannot turn the pages backward, but everything that had ever been still existed.
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"like you I must play my game until the last minute."
This the baker's daughter who stood on Krochmalna street with a basket of warm bagels.
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Come to me, my sweetheart
Parting the bamboo blinds!
Should my mother ask me
I'll say 'twas but a gust of wind
>from collection of ancient Japanese poetry "Manyoshu" from earliest times to 760.
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This mortal life is brief of span. Let me seek the Way, contemplating the pure hills and streams. > Manyoshu
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The Japanese aesthetic inclination: "anima naturaliter poetica"
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Olives
Sometimes the taste of these strong olives curved slowly in oil,
with cloves of garlic,
bay leaves and chilies and lemon and salt,
conjures a whiff of a bygone age: rocky crannies,
goats, shade and the sound of pipes,
the tune of the breath of primeval times.
The chill of a cave, a hidden cottage in a vineyard,
a lodge in a garden, a slice of barley bread and well water.
You are from there. You have lost your way.
There is exile, Your death will come, and lay a knowing hand on your shoulder.
Come, it's time to go.
>Amos Oz
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Here he has made a list of words: in the word woods there is a vague dread. In the word hills is a world of lust. If you say shack, or wayfarer, rain, compassion, at once he lights up like a miser who has sniffed a rumor of gold. Or if, for instance, the evening paper prints the phrase "New Horizons", at once I am on my way to bathe twice in the same river.
>Oz, "Same Sea" 54
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Naked I come forth from my mother's womb and naked I shall return thither. >Job
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Dita and I went together to the old cemetery in a kibbutz called Ayyelet Hashahar, where you can sometimes hear a short sound that promises you tonight whatever you wan on condition that you don't look back. >Amos Oz, 134 Same Sea
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The sky is dark and empty. A mist flows through a mist. >Oz 189
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"The institutions that used to aggregate citizen values have declined."
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It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. >Atonement
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The Japanese system of mutual obligation
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"How can you win if you have prepared to escape?"
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If you think of saving your own life you had better not go to war at all. >Yoshitsune
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One locus of Japanese concern for effect of actions on future generations is the Buddhist doctrine of Karma "Inga" in Japanese
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"even at the cost of your life and your family, holding to the good, not yielding to the strong...this deep faith is what makes the warrior." >367
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It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it. >"No Country" 64 Cormac McCarthy
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Poetic Justice: a principled defense of a humanistic and multivalued conception of public rationality that is powerfully exemplified in the common law tradition. ie PUBLIC REASONING
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Political economy/education for public rationality
"wherever the public imagination is shaped"
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Aristotle's view is that literary art is "more philosophical" than history because history shows us what happened, whereas literary art shows us things "such as might happen"
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"For any view you put forward the next question simply has to be 'what would the world be like if this idea were actually taken up." >Nussbaum
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"Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter."
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The "bully of humility" name is Bounderby Bounderby
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We invest our lives with an interlacing patter of "complex significances."
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Bentham's central posit of classical utilitarianism is as follows: "each person is to count as one and none as more than one."
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