• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Monthly Archives: March 2013

“Osama Is My Brother”

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Journalism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Osama bin Laden, The Age of Horrorism, The Second Plane

Osama bin Laden

“It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend – a reporter and political man of letters – approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama’s lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.

At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another’s apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.

More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan’s pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires – fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.

‘Why you want these? You like Osama?’

I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given – reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: ‘Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.’ No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:

‘You like Osama?’

‘Of course. He is my brother.’

‘He is your brother?’

‘All men are my brothers.’

All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother – by definition. Osama is not my brother.”

__________

From the opening of Martin Amis’s essay “The Age of Horrorism”.

I’d encourage any of you to read the remainder of this essay, as well as the larger collection it is published in, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom.

By the way, Amis has since disclosed that the friend he mentions in this story is none other than his best pal, Christopher Hitchens.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Try to Wish the World into Nonexistence

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

existence, Henri Bergson, Jim Holt, nothingness, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Why Does the World Exist?

Henri Bergson

“Close your eyes, if you will, and stop up your ears. Now picture yourself in an absolute void. Try to wish into nonbeing the entire contents of the world. You might begin, as Coleridge’s little boy did, by imagining away all the men and women and trees and grass and birds and beasts and earth and sky. And not just the sky, but everything in it. Think of the lights going out all over the cosmos: the sun disappearing, the stars extinguished, the galaxies winking into nonexistence one by one, or billion by billion. In your mind’s eye, the entire cosmos is sliding into silence, cold, and darkness — with nothing to be silent or cold or dark. You have succeeded in imaging absolute nothingness.

Or have you?

When the French philosopher Henri Bergson tried to imagine universal annihilation, he found that there was inevitably something left over at the end of the experiment: his inner self. Bergson thought of the world as being as “an embroidery on the canvas of the void.” But when he attempted to strip this embroidery away, the canvas of his consciousness remained. Try as he might, he could not suppress it. “At the very instant that my consciousness is extinguished,” he wrote, “another consciousness lights up — or rather, it was already alight; it has arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first.” He found it impossible to imagine absolute nothingness without some residuum of consciousness creeping into the darkness, like a little light under the door. Therefore, he concluded, nothingness must be an impossibility.”

__________

From Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

The picture is of Henri Bergson.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

What Else Distinguishes Us?

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

artificial intelligence, Deep Blue, Gary Kasparov, God, human nature, humanity, intelligence, man, Ravi Zacharias, Who Are You Really?

Ravi Zacharias

“When Gary Kasparov was playing chess, years ago, against IBM’s Deep Blue, and he was asked why he was so nervous about playing the match with the computer, he said, ‘Because I’m afraid that, if I lose, we would lose human dignity.’

I lost my dignity when they came out with calculators; he’s talking about computers.

So before he played Deep Blue, he decided to just prepare and prepare and prepare. And Dr. David Gelernter — who was one-time professor of Computer Science at Yale — he wrote this article in Time magazine.

He said, ‘The idea that Deep Blue has a mind is absurd. How can an object that wants nothing, fears nothing, enjoys nothing, needs nothing and cares about nothing have a mind? It can win at chess, but not because it wants to.

It isn’t happy when it wins or sad when it loses. What are its after-the-match plans if it beats Kasparov? Is it hoping to take Deep Pink out for a night on the town? It doesn’t care about chess or anything else. It plays the game for the same reason a calculator adds or a toaster toasts: because it is a machine designed for that purpose.

No matter what amazing feats they perform, inside they will always be the same absolute zero. No computer can achieve artificial thought without achieving artificial emotion too…

In the long run I doubt if there is any kind of human behavior computers can’t fake, any kind of performance they can’t put on. It is conceivable that one day, computers will be better than humans at nearly everything. I can imagine that a person might someday have a computer for a best friend. But that will be sad — like having a dog for your best friend, only sadder.

The gap between human and surrogate is permanent and will never be closed. Machines will continue to make life easier, healthier, richer and more puzzling…’

Now listen to this line. He couldn’t resist it:

‘And human beings will continue to care, ultimately, about the same things they always have: about one another and, many of them, about God.’

You know, unwittingly he picked the two greatest commandments. To love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your strength, and all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself — on these two hang all of the laws of the prophets.

What else distinguishes us?

What else distinguishes us?

You know we talk so much about sexuality, which is a symptom, an expression. You will never be able to answer what’s right about sex until we answer the question what does it mean to be human.

What does it mean to be human?

We must answer that first.

And, ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a world so bereft of wisdom. We desperately need young men, young women with wisdom.

Wisdom in marriage. Wisdom in raising children. Wisdom in how we organize our time. Wisdom to keep the body in the best shape we can keep it in. All these things demand wisdom.”

__________

From the only pastor (and one of the few people) I always enjoy learning from and listening to: Ravi Zacharias.

Watch this excerpt, and Zacharias’s transition to the topic of wisdom, in his sermon “Who Are You, Really?” posted below.

 

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Isaac Newton

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Science

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Alexander Pope, Astronomy, calculus, Gravity, history, Isaac Newton, Laws of Gravity, mathematics, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Optics, physics, Planetary Motion, science, scientists, Smartest Person Ever, Time Magazine

Isaac Newton

If you could meet and talk with any scientist who had ever lived, who would it be, and why?

“Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton. No question about it: Isaac Newton. The smartest person ever — ever to walk the face of this earth. You read his writings, the man was connected to the universe in spooky ways. The most successful scientists in the history of the world are those who pose the right questions… Newton, his questions reached into the soul of the universe, and he pulled out insights and wisdom that transformed our understanding of our place in the cosmos.

Someone said to him, ‘Isaac, why is it that planets orbit in these shapes you call ellipses, rather than circles? Why that shape?’ Newton said, ‘You know, I’ll get back to you on that.’ He goes away for a few months, comes back, and says, ‘Here’s the answer. Here’s why gravity produces ellipses for orbits.’

His friend asks, ‘Well how’d you figure that out?’

He says, ‘Well I had to invent this new kind of mathematics to do it.’ He invented calculus. Most of us sweat through it — for multiple years in school — just to learn it. He invented it practically on a dare.

He discovered the laws of motion. The laws of gravity. The laws of optics. Then he turned twenty-six.”

__________

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response to the question, “If you could meet and talk with any scientist who had ever lived, who would it be, and why?”

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said Let Newton be! and all was light.
– Alexander Pope’s intended epitaph for Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Pick up the James Gaelic’s much praised biography Isaac Newton, then watch the Time Magazine interview below:

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Can You Remember Where You Left Those Keys?

25 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

literature, Martin Amis, memory, Money: A Suicide Note, novel

Young Martin Amis“Memory’s a funny thing, isn’t it. You don’t agree? I don’t agree either. Memory has never amused me much, and I find its tricks more and more wearisome as I grow older. Perhaps memory simply stays the same but has less work to do as the days fill out. My memory’s in good shape, I think. It’s just that my life is getting less memorable all the time. Can you remember where you left those keys? Why should you? Lying in the tub some slow afternoon, can you remember if you’ve washed your toes? (Taking a leak is boring, isn’t it, after the first few thousand times? Whew, isn’t that a drag?) I can’t remember half the stuff I do any more. But then I don’t want to much.”

__________

A reflection from John Self, protagonist of Martin Amis’s hilarious riot-of-a-novel Money: A Suicide Note.

Read other excerpts from the book here:

Martin Amis

There’s Only One Way to Get Good at Fighting

New YorkIn L.A.

Thailand PlaneThat Head-on-Heart Stuff

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

We Are Not Provided with Wisdom

22 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Age, Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, Wisdom, Within a Budding Grove

Proust

“There is no man… however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”

__________

From Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

A selection of this passage is quoted in one of the books I’m currently reading, Clive James’s expansive and brimming collection of essays Cultural Amnesia. On the bus home tonight, as I fanned through its pages, I came across this passage and immediately felt a cool and clarifying sense of uplift — the kind that washes over you in that moment when a paragraph or lyric or painting somehow expresses a thought you had but couldn’t recognize or express until something else spoke it to and for you. This passage from Proust did exactly that, and while I haven’t read his formidable series of novels, this paragraph certainly indicates why they are so loved and lauded.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

“Coming” by Philip Larkin

20 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Childhood, Coming, Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry

Ireland Birds

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon –
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

__________

“Coming” by Philip Larkin. Find it in his Collected Poems.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Aching Questions

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Debate, Religion, Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Atheism, David Berlinski, Freeman Dyson, Heinrich Himmler, Joel Primack, Nazism, phsyics, religion, science

Masada

“The aching questions that trouble the human imagination about which the sciences, when seriously considered, are resolutely silent, remain just as they were. And the religious tradition, especially the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, has offered a coherent body of belief and doctrine by which they can be explained.

Do we understand why the universe arose? No, we don’t. Do we understand why it’s here at all? No, we have no idea. Do we understand how life emerged on Earth? Not a prayer right now. Do we understand the complexity of life? We can’t even begin to describe a living creature in anything resembling precise terms. A recent article in Science Digest said that cell division requires four thousand coordinated proteins acting together. What a remarkable statement. What a wealth of information we possess about biology. What an abundant lack of understanding we have about living systems.

Do we understand why the laws of nature are true? No, we have no idea. Do we understand the miracle of analytic continuation in physics—when certain kinds of functions can be pushed forward into the future contrary to all experience? Do we understand why the universe remains stable from moment to moment? The medievals pondered this question. Ladies and gentlemen they came to the conclusion, and I quote a Medieval theologian, that ‘God is everywhere conserving the world.’ What a remarkable declaration—can we do without it?

Do we have an explanation for the continuity and stability of the universe? There is one paper that I know of in the literature by Freeman Dyson that addresses the stability of matter, but beyond that, everything is enigmatic.

How can we propose, seriously and solemnly, to rule out of court in advance a hypothesis that not only answers to the human heart in many respects, but that answers to genuine intellectual needs in other respects? When one sees the American scientific community like a herd of wildebeests trotting across a fruited plain, it’s very reasonable to ask are they going someplace or are they fleeing from someplace? And I think the overwhelmingly obvious answer is that they are fleeing. They are fleeing from an idea that they reject for a variety of reasons. Not only is the inquiry about atheism not necessary in terms of the history of social thought, it’s not necessary in terms of the outline of scientific thought.

But there is a last question to be addressed. It is perhaps the most important for you and me. The cosmologist Joel Primack asked an interesting question. He asked what compels the electron to follow the laws of nature. Good question. I don’t know. But Heinrich Himmler, who had presided over the destruction of churches and synagogues throughout Europe and was the mastermind behind the extermination of the Jewish people, asked a very similar question in 1944. When confronted with the onerous treaty obligations the German state had adopted with respect to its own satraps, he asked insouciantly but pregnantly, ‘After all, what compels us to keep our promises?’ Moral relativism is very often derided as an unhappy consequence of atheism. I don’t think moral relativism is a particularly deep issue, but I do think the issue of what compels us to keep our promises is very relevant.

I have in front of me a rather remarkable button. If you should press it, yours would be untold riches and whatever else you desire. The only consequence to pressing it beyond your happiness is the death of an anonymous Chinese peasant. Who among us would you trust with this button?'”

__________

The latter part of Dr. David Berlinski’s opening in his debate against Christopher Hitchens on the motion “Atheism Poisons Everything.”

The photograph was taken at sunrise from atop the plateau of Masada in Southern Israel.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Again I Pause to Remember

11 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Journalism, Politics, War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Anti-Semitism, Daniel Pearl, Ed Koch, Islam, Judaism, Mark Daily

Daniel Pearl2The opening and closing of Christopher Hitchens’s Lecture in honor of Daniel Pearl, given at UCLA in 2010:

“If I lived in an uncivilized society, today could have been for me a kind of Martyr’s day. I was just taken, by some very courteous and gallant young cadets, to see the veteran’s memorial on the other side of this campus, where is commemorated Second Lieutenant Mark Daily. A young man who gave his life in Kurdistan a few years ago for the liberation of Iraq, and wrote very movingly to me about it and his service. A man I was hoping to meet, and whose family I am very pleased now to count — as I now can with great pride claim the Pearls — if not family, then very close friends. And I thought to myself: after I go to this memorial, I have to go speak for Daniel.

But just as it marks the scattering of his ashes, there will be, today, no ululations, no wailings, no shooting in the air, no tossing of the coffin on the shoulders of mob, no hoarse, brutal cries for revenge and suicide and murder. No. We won’t have that.

Instead, we’ll have honest, decent, modest, brave people trying to deal with their grief, and trying to apply reason to the crises that lead to their deprivation. And I think that marks, if you like, part of the boundary between civilization and barbarism that this lecture is designed to patrol — and I would say enforce.

At the scattering of Mark’s ashes, on a beautiful coastal spot in Oregon, I quoted from the last scene of MacBeth. And I think I can do it again — I had difficulty doing it that time.

Where, as you’ll recall, the tyrant is gone, the tyranny and the usurpation is over. But Old Siward, he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s lost his son. And I believe it’s MacDuff who has to say to him the following — and I’ll address it to the Pearl’s if I may:

Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt.
He only lived but till he was a man,
The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed
In the unshrinking station where he stood,
But like a man he died.

And that’s hard enough to get through. But it’s Shakespeare, so it isn’t ’til the next beat or so that you get it all, as MacDuff adds:

Your cause of grief
Must not be measured by his worth
For then it hath no end

That’s the best tribute I can offer you, and I’m very acutely aware of my own debt to a finer register of emotion.

Now one more thing: I was late in discovering my Jewish heritage, and I once wrote that anyone who wanted to defame the Jewish people would, if they were doing so, be defaming my wife, my mother, my mother- and father-in-law, and my daughters, and so I didn’t think I really had to say anything for myself.

But I did add that in whatever tone of voice the question was put to me — whether it was friendly or hostile — Was I Jewish? I would always answer Yes. Denial in my family would end with me.

But, of course, there was the most acute possible test of that question faced by the young Daniel Pearl, in the most appalling circumstances, and again I pause to remember how proudly, and how bravely, and how nobly he refused any sort of refuge in denial.

Again, setting a standard of a Shakespearean kind that’s very hard for me to approach without a feeling of a want of proportion…

And I’ll close by saying this: Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity, and of civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason. Most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad.

Daniel Pearl’s revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students’ Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe today as I’m talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this pest, by its right name, to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it’s probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment and resolving some of the time at any rate to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.

__________

Daniel Pearl

American journalist Daniel Pearl was murdered on February 1st, 2002, in Karachi, Pakistan.

In the video that was taken of him immediately before his murder, Pearl is taunted by his captors and asked whether he is Jewish. His response:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel. Back in the town of Bnei Brak, there is a street named after my great-grandfather, Chaim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.”

And those were Daniel Pearl’s final words. Contrast the bravery of Daniel Pearl — and his family’s legacy of construction and contribution to Israel — with the barbarism and cruelty and evil of the murderers who shortly thereafter took his life.

The life and death of Daniel Pearl is, in other words, a story about everything to love and fight for (intelligence, sincerity, family, Western Civilization) and everything to despise (racism, savagery, murder, violence, the slaughter of innocent people, fanaticism). Thus Daniel Pearl’s story is, in microcosm, a story about the battle between civilization and barbarism — and one could even say between good and evil.

Former mayor of New York City Ed Koch, who died last month, had his tombstone inscribed with Pearl’s last words: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Watch Hitchens’s lecture below.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

How Can We Tell with Nothing to Compare?

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Poetry

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Instead of an Epilogue, Kingsley Amis, Life, Love, Martin Amis, Time, To H.

Kingsley Amis

I.

In 1932 when I was ten
In my grandmother’s garden in Camberwell
I saw a Camberwell Beauty butterfly
Sitting on a clump of Michaelmas daisies.
I recognised it because I’d seen a picture
Showing its brownish wings with creamy edges
In a boy’s paper or on a cigarette-card
Earlier that week. And I remember thinking,
What else would you expect? Everyone knows
Camberwell Beauties come from Camberwell;
That’s why they’re called that. Yes, I was ten.

II.

In 1940 when I was eighteen
In Marlborough, going out one winter’s morning
To walk to school, I saw that every twig,
Every leaf in the vicar’s privet hedge
And every stalk and stem was covered in
A thin layer of ice as clear as glass
Because the rain had frozen as it landed.
The sun shone and the trees and shrubs shone back
Like pale flames with orange and green sparkles.
Freak weather conditions, people said,
And one was always hearing about them.

III.

In ’46 when I was twenty-four
I met someone harmless, someone defenceless,
But till then whole, unadapted within;
Awkward, gentle, healthy, straight-backed,
Who spoke to say something, laughed when amused;
If things went wrong, feared she might be at fault,
Whose eye I could have met for ever then,
Oh yes, and who was also beautiful.
Well, that was much as women were meant to be,
I thought, and set about looking further.
How can we tell, with nothing to compare?

__________

“Instead of an Epilogue” by Kingsley Amis, which concludes his Memoirs.

Kingsley Amis, in putting the final stamp on his rather dry series of memoirs, decided not to write the prose for which he was so lauded throughout his life. Instead, he penned this, an ode to longing, love, and loss, and the unavoidable truth that we can never fully understand a moment until it is already a memory.

Kingsley himself called the poem “To H.,” with H being Hillary Bardwell, his first wife, and the women he was relentlessly unfaithful to, and divorced, yet helplessly loved throughout his life. Following his divorce from his second wife (writer Elizabeth Jane Howard), and even though he was an incorrigibly philandering and unfaithful husband, Hillary agreed to take Kingsley in, allowing him to live with her (and her new husband, Lord Kilmarnock) for the last decade of his life. This unusual ménage à trois brought Kingsley out of what his son Martin Amis called “a trough of misogyny” that had ruined his writing, rekindling in him the exuberant creativity and comedy which had brought him recognition so many years before. It was in this arrangement that Amis wrote one of his best novels, the Booker prize winner The Old Devils, at the age of 65. It was also the place wherein Kingsley wrote this poem.

“Instead of an Epilogue” reveals a side of Amis that is often overlooked in the typical view of him as a misanthrope that objectified women while objecting to all social norms and rejecting any situation where a bottle wasn’t close at hand.

Here we see a man registering full and true emotions of wistfulness and affection, projecting simultaneous moods of melancholy, gratitude, and bemused humor. You try to do that. It’s not an easy task, and it’s why “Instead of an Epilogue” stands, at least to me, at the crest of modern poetry.

By the way, the poem in close second: “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Arithmetic of Nothingness

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Arithmetic, Jim Holt, mathematics, numbers, Why Does the World Exist?, zero

Raindrops on a Car

“As for the origin of the numeral ‘0,’ that has eluded historians of antiquity. On one theory, now discredited by scholars, the numeral comes from the first letter of the Greek word for ‘nothing,’ ouden. On another theory, admittedly fanciful, its form derives from the circular impression left by a counting chip in the sand–the presence of an absence.

Suppose we let 0 stand for Nothing and 1 stand for Something. Then we get a sort of toy version of the mystery of existence: How can you get from 0 to 1?

In higher mathematics, there is a simple sense in which the transition from 0 to 1 is impossible. Mathematicians say that a number is ‘regular’ if it can’t be reached via the numerical resources lying below it. More precisely, the number n is regular if it cannot be reached by adding up fewer than n numbers that are themselves smaller than n.

It is easy to see that 1 is a regular number. It cannot be reached from below, where all there is to work with is 0. The sum of zero 0’s is 0, and that’s that. So you can’t get from Nothing to Something.

Curiously, 1 is not the only number that is unreachable in this way. The number 2 also turns out to be regular, since it can’t be reached by adding up fewer than two numbers that are less than 2. (Try it and see.) So you can’t get from Unity to Plurality.

The rest of the finite numbers lack this interesting property of regularity. They can be reached from below. (The number 3, for example, can be reached by adding up two numbers, 1 and 2, each of which is itself less than 3.) But the first infinite number, denoted by the Greek letter omega, does turn out to be regular. It can’t be reached by summing up any finite collection of finite numbers. So you can’t get from Finite to Infinite.”

__________

From the chapter “The Arithmetic of Nothingness” in Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

The photograph: Rain on the hood of a car. Houston, Texas.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Today’s Top Pages

  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
    "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
  • Three Words Ben Franklin Crossed out of the Declaration of Independence
    Three Words Ben Franklin Crossed out of the Declaration of Independence
  • "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
    "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: