Notebook Transcription 57
transcribed: 11/28/06

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Galileo started modern science by using the pendulum as a tool to make accurate measurements of time. Ancient Greek science was based on geometry, measuring space but not time. Archimedes understood statics but did not understand dynamics. Galileo with his pendulum and his falling weights made the decisive step from a static to a dynamic view of nature. He introduced time as a quantity accessible to mathematical analysis. He said, "Nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." That remark of Galileo was the lever that moved the world into the modern era of scientific understanding. >Freeman Dyson, "Writing Nature's Greatest Book"
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MacArthur assured Hirohito he would defend Japan as if it were California, in one of their 11 meetings after the war.
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Late Meji Japan was an insignificant island nation in the far East which had only just begun to rise from obscurity. >Yoshida
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Schlomo, an old Hasid you will soon meet, exclaimed in despair: "What have I gained by becoming blind, since i continue to see myself." >E. Wiesel
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Fall marked by indescribably serenity and nostalgia
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Fall, in our town, was always marked by indescribable serenity and nostalgia. We liked it better than Spring, which we deemed too arrogant and too eager to impose its rule. Fall, in our town, departed reluctantly, all living things trying to hold it back.
"Dear you hear the wind?" the young patient asked. "It is chasing the Fall away."
>E. Wiesel Beggar in Jerusalem
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A Jew wakes up in a town that was the "most Jewish in the region" and now without a trace. Terrified, he comes to understand, walking amidst its silent mouldering ruins, that he has been left alone here, that the town continues to exist, inaccessible to him, far, and he alone is left outside and away, remembering. >Wiesel
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I am possessed. That's the explanation: the dybuk is the culprit. And I am the one to suffer most from it, my town, with its Jews and its myths, its songs and its holidays, my town goes on existing -- but without me, outside of me: on the other side. >Wiesel
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Her voice, broken and humble, reminds me of my mother's voice. That night, before our separation, she ? name on her lips. Like word. She too had wanted to understand, but there was nothing left to understand. That night names and beings were torn apart from each other. Only later did I perceive the secret of creation: only the unnamable is immortal. >Wiesel
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Since donning his uniform, he could no longer accept the validity of a link between a Talmud two thousand years old and everyday life. And his father explained very gently: "The link my son, is you. You are the bridge between the Babylonian sages and generations t come. Each man must consider himself responsible for both, each man contains all."
"Don't you think father you are placing too heavy a burden on my shoulders?"
"Yes, perhaps. But you won't always have to bear it alone. You'll soon take a wife, you'll raise children, and they will transmit my name and yours so that one day the Messiah himself will hear their voice."
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1979 Zealots armed seize Grand Mosque in Mecca
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She considered it an embarrassing failure to be happy.
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Altamira caves/ Lascaux Caves (cavepainting sights in Europe)
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calls to mind the expulsion, naked and trembling, of our ancestral parents from prelapsarian Eden into a world where choice is obligatory and error inevitable, a blessing and a burden upon themselves and what Milton called, with mixed feelings, their "hapless seed." >Jason Epstein
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a prodigiously creative people
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Those who harbour viceral hatred of liberalism in all its forms, which the y consider a "principle evil."
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Leo Strauss of U of C, who became one of the Gurus of American conservatism, saw in liberalism a diseased, pathetically self-destructive outgrowth of the Enlightenment; Stern saw liberalism as ultimately the only antidote to totalitarianism. Fall of Soviet Union proved him right.
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Vile attack of a vulgar reactionary...Regan said of the Demos: "Liberal, Liberal, Liberal!"
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On Willy Brandt on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto: "the most poignant gesture we have of true political contrition -- of apology as an act of courage." >Frite Stern
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Proust backed his sentences in and out of garages like a first class journalist. >Violet Hunt
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"Three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principle verb, making one wonder, as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tromp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs." >E.M. Forester on Proust's writing style
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One absorbs the new product...with delicious anticipation of the unknown. The heart pounds as it does on one's first meeting with a lover...By what strange paths, up to what peaks and into what unexplored abysses will the omnipotent master lead us? What new series of sensations will we discover on this journey? >Proust on drugs, writing in voice of Bergotte
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monsoon area -- rice cultivation -- landlords enjoy virtual monopoly of economic and political power.
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The great Tuscarora deep off Japan's eastern flank descends more than 5 miles below sea level. Japan's highest peaks are 2 miles above sea level. A range of 7 miles.
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Kamu-Yamato-Iware-Biko (original name of Jinomu Tenno, which is itself a Chinese appellation)
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Sesshu was invited to reside in Yamaguchi at the invitation of Ouchi Masahiro of the powerful Ouchi clan.
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venturing towards ideals
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Through end of T'ang empire and its bustling captial Ch'angan collapse marks dismantling of the heavy-handed oriental cultural sphere. Particularly decline of silk road traffic.
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In his willingness/need to travel Sesshu joins other such wanders as renga (linked-verse) poet Sogi (1421-1502), who lived in the same period, the poet-priest Saigyo, who lived in the 12th Century; and the haiku poet Basho (1644-94) who lived in the Edo period.
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Signature dampness to the tone of the ink
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In an instant, luck changes/ In an instant, children die. >Euripides (Herakles speaking)
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Human nature derives from human limitation
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force moral reasoning to an extreme confrontation with itself.
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tragedy is not connected with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement organized by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of...having been born. >Samuel Beckett Proust
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I was doing my hair, I was binding my hair, staring down into the bottomless lake of my mirror, before I fell into bed -- a scream out the town, a roar swept the street...>chours of Hekabe, on the fall of Troy
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"what cowers behind it begins to seep through." >Beckett
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A shade of the public voice is audible; the intimacy looks beyond itself. (of a diary, written for more than one)
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"suddenly seeing them one stopped astonished and everything including one's breathing for one second also stopped as it does when in a picture gallery you suddenly come face to face with a great Rembrandt or Velasquez." >Leonard Woolf
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mathematically illiterate
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"As the country grows ever more distracted and mesmerized by mass culture...literature, has a function, beyond entertainment, as a form of social opposition."
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the beautiful rolling countryside of Sandzak (small v above the z)
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consciousness is not a part of nature but stands outside of nature observing it.
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the mysterious yearning towards the chasm
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the imagination as demiurgic power
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That man is blessed on who day by day evil does not fall. >Hekabe
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Something new and strange is beginning in the house >Hippolytos
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When asked leaving the constitutional convention hall in 1787 by a bystander what the meeting had produced: "A republic," Franklin said. "If you can keep it."
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Millionaires and a plumber (on Eisenhower's cabinet)