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And naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew (pg.86)

I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses, but I go on visiting them.  I have visited them every day, for although I have always hated them – and because I have always hated them – I have always suffered from the Viennese coffeehouse disease.  I have suffered more from this disease than from any other.  I frankly have to admit that I still suffer from this disease, which has proved the most intractable of all. The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses because in them I am always confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself, and certainly not in a coffeehouse, where I go to escape from myself.  Yet it is here that I find myself confronted with myself and my kind. I find myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers and brooders like myself. I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself, and so when I am in Vienna I have to forbid myself to visit the coffeehouses, or at least I have to be careful not to visit a so-called literary coffeehouse under any circumstances whatever.  However, suffering as I do from the coffeehouse disease, I feel an unremitting compulsion to visit some literary coffeehouse or other, even thought everything within me rebels against the idea. The truth is that the more deeply I detest the literary coffeehouse of Vienna, the most strongly I feel compelled to frequent them. Who knows how my life would have developed if I had not met Paul Wittgenstein at the height of the crisis that, but for him, would probably have pitched me headlong into the literary world, the most repellent of all worlds, the world of Viennese writers and their intellectual morass, for at the height of this crisis the obvious course would have been to take the easy way out, to make myself cheap and compliant, to surrender and throw in my lot with the literary fraternity. Paul preserved me from this, since he had always detested the literary coffeehouses. It was thus not without reason, but more or less to save myself, that from one day to the next I stopped frequenting the so-called literary coffeehouses and started going to the Sacher with him — no longer to the Hawelka but to the Ambassador, etc., until eventually the moment came when I could once more permit myself to go to the literary coffeehouse, when they no longer had such a deadly effect on me. For the truth is that the literary coffeehouses do have a deadly effect on a writer. Yet it is equally true that I am still more at home in my Viennese coffeehouses that I am in my own home at Nathal.’

To award someone a prize is no different from pissing on him

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew (pg 67):

If one disregards the money that goes with them, there is nothing in the world more intolerable than award ceremonies.  I had already discovered this in Germany.  That do nothing to enhance one’s standing, as I had believed before I received my first prize, but actually lower it, in the most embarrassing fashion.  Only the thought of the money enabled me to endure these ceremonies; this was my sole motive for visiting various ancient city halls and tasteless assembly rooms – until the age of forty.  I submitted to the indignity of these award ceremonies – until the age of forty.  I let them piss on me in all these city halls and assembly rooms, for to award someone a prize is no different from pissing on him.  And to receive a prize is no different from allowing oneself to be pissed on, because one is being paid for it. I have always felt that being awarded a prize was not an honor but the greatest indignity imaginable.  For a prize is always awarded by incompetents who want to piss on the recipient.  And they have a perfect right to do so, because he is base and despicable enough to receive it.

The grapes that are to give us the champagne hereafter

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, dating June 1 (?) 1851 as Melville worked to finish Moby Dick:

It is a rainy morning; so I am indoors, and all work suspended. I feel cheerfully disposed, and therefore I write a little bluely. Would the Gin were here! If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert, — then, O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us, — when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity. Then shall songs be composed as when wars are over; humorous, comic songs, — “Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the world,” or, “Oh, when I toiled and sweated below,” or, “Oh, when I knocked and was knocked in the fight” — yes, let us look forward to such things. Let us swear that, though now we sweat, yet it is because of the dry heat which is indispensable to the nourishment of the vine which is to bear the grapes that are to give us the champagne hereafter.

Not all of them ride in carriages

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Cesare Pavese’s Moon and the Bonfires (pg. 83 of the NYRB edition).  I wonder if there is an overarching name for this joke and all its endless variants of target, targeted vice, targeted locale, etc.

Another thing I heard that day was that there was a carriage at Canelli that drove out every so often with three women in it, sometimes four, and these women made a tour of the streets, as far as the Station, as far as Sant’Anna, up and down the highway, buying soft drinks in various places – all this to make a show, to attract clients.  Their owner had worked it out, and then whoever had the money and was old enough went into that house at Villanova and slept with one of them.

“Do all the Canelli women do that?” I asked Nuto, when I’d understood.
“Better if they did, but no,” he said.  “Not all of them ride in carriages.”

‘Good?’ she said, returning to her senses, ‘a woman who farts is not dead.’

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From toward the end of Book II of Rousseau’s Confessions, on the death of an early employer, Madam de Vercellis:

Elle ne garda le lit que les deux derniers jours, et ne cessa de s’entretenir paisiblement avec tout le monde. Enfin, ne parlant plus, et déjà dans les combats de l’agonie, elle fit un gros pet. Bon! dit-elle en se retournant, femme qui pète n’est pas morte. Ce furent les derniers mots qu’elle prononça.”

She kept to her bed for only her last two days, and never stopped conversing cheerfully with everyone.  At last, no longer speaking, and already in the throes of agony, she let out a great fart.  ‘Good?’ she said, returning to her senses, ‘a woman who farts is not dead.’  There were the final words she pronounced.

Well, I don’t know. I don’t know Chinese. I haven’t seen the relevant evidence.

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Paul Feyerabend’s The Tyranny of Science (pg.76).  To me Feyerabend often feels pretty careless and free-wheeling in his treatment of early Greek thinkers and theories – in his ability as an heir of the western intellectual tradition to comment on his forerunners as though he understood them, their culture, and their concepts in full – so it’s half amusing, half telling of this bias that it’s only in approaching non-western culture that he ever feels the need to concede his limitations.

Not all early thinkers belonged to the Xenophanes-Parmenides category. In China scientists used a multiple approach corresponding to the many different regions of nature and the variety of her products.  There was a unity – but it was a loose connection between events, not an underlying essence.  This view was more practical than its western alternative and indeed, Chinese technology, medicine included, was for a long time far ahead of the West. I say ‘it was far ahead of the West’ as if I knew.  Well, I don’t know.  I don’t know Chinese.  I haven’t seen the relevant evidence.  I only read a few books, some volumes of Needham’s monstrous work on Chinese science included, and this is what they say.

An anxious quest in a frozen universe of solitude

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity (pg.170), on the scientific world view and its insistence on empirical knowledge as the only authentic source of truth

… proposing no explanation but imposing an ascetic renunciation of all other spiritual fare was not [an idea] of a kind to allay anxiety but aggravated it instead.  By a single stroke it claimed to sweep away the tradition of a hundred thousand years, which had become one with human nature itself. It wrote an end to the ancient animist covenant between man and nature, leaving nothing in place of that precious bond but an anxious quest in a frozen universe of solitude.  With nothing to recommend it but a certain puritan arrogance, how could such an idea win acceptance? It did not; it still has not. It has however commanded recognition; but that is because, solely because of its prodigious power of performance

It would, moreover, be interesting to psychologize some historical psychologists.

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment
From Pierre Hadot’s The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (pg 257, translation of  La Citadelle Intérieure. Introduction aux Pensées de Marc Aurèle).  Hadot in his writing – and even more so in the little I’ve read of his personal side – was typically as gentle and easygoing as befits a former priest turned scholar of Greek and Roman philosophy as lived philosophy.  But every now and then some of the more enterprising revisionists set him off and you get a glimmer of his wit sharpened to a different direction:

I believe I have sufficiently demonstrated the workings of a certain type of historical psychology.  Generally speaking, it is based upon ignorance of the modes of thought and composition of ancient authors, and it anachronistically projects modern representations back upon ancient texts.  It would, moreover, be interesting to psychologize some historical psychologists; I believe we could discover in them two tendencies. One is iconoclastic: it takes pleasure in attacking such figures as Plotinus or Marcus Aurelius, for example, who are naively respected by right-thinking people. The other is reductionist: it considers that all elevation of soul or of thought, all moral heroism, and all grandiose views of the universe can only be morbid and abnormal.  Everything has to be explained by sex or drugs.

The sophism which ruined me

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From volume 2 of Rousseau’s Confessions.  I am reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus at the moment and this could pass for an excerpt from either, minus the Christian toning.

(I don’t like this translation at all but it is free on Gutenberg and I’m feeling too lazy to type another one.)

The sophism which ruined me has had a similar affect on the greater part of mankind, who lament the want of resolution when the opportunity for exercising it is over. The practice of virtue is only difficult from our own negligence; were we always discreet, we should seldom have occasion for any painful exertion of it; we are captivated by desires we might readily surmount, give into temptations that might easily be resisted, and insensibly get into embarrassing, perilous situations, from which we cannot extricate ourselves but with the utmost difficulty; intimidated by the effort, we fall into the abyss, saying to the Almighty, why hast thou made us such weak creatures? But, notwithstanding our vain pretexts, He replies, by our consciences, I formed ye too weak to get out of the gulf, because I gave ye sufficient strength not to have fallen into it.

Le sophisme qui me perdit est celui de la plupart des hommes, qui se plaignent de manquer de force quand il est déjà trop tard pour en user. La vertu ne nous coûte que par notre faute, et si nous voulions être toujours sages, rarement aurions-nous besoin d’être vertueux. Mais des penchants faciles à surmonter nous entraînent sans résistance ; nous cédons à des tentations légères dont nous méprisons le danger. Insensiblement nous tombons dans des situations périlleuses, dont nous pouvions aisément nous garantir, mais dont nous ne pouvons plus nous tirer sans des efforts héroïques qui nous effrayent, et nous tombons enfin dans l’abîme en disant à Dieu : « Pourquoi m’as-tu fait si faible ? » Mais malgré nous il répond à nos consciences : « Je t’ai fait trop faible pour sortir du gouffre, parce que je t’ai fait assez fort pour n’y pas tomber. »