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Monthly Archives: December 2013

Redeem the Time Being from Insignificance

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Artist, Christianity, Christmas, family, For the Time Being, holidays, Mary McCleary, meaning, Poem, poetry, religion, Thanksgiving, Time, W.H. Auden

W. H. Auden by Richard Avedon, bromide print, 1960

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this…

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

IV
Chorus

He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

__________

From W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being.

My aunt, the artist Mary McCleary, inscribed the above chorus on the letter she gave me the day I graduated from college. That card is now the centerpiece of the bulletin board above my desk. (Given how little time there is now for poetry, I can’t be too surprised that guests are yet to identify much less ask about the card. But then again, I wasn’t aware of the reference ’til I received the card from MM.)

The entirety of “For the Time Being” stretches over 1,400 lines. (For perspective: a few of Shakespeare’s plays are less than 2,000 lines.) I can’t find the full text online, but if anyone knows where I can, please send a link to my email or drop it in the comments area.*

From a technical standpoint, the above section is a sterling example of what postmodernism can do so long as it has a substantive core and also wears itself lightly. That may sound simple in principle; in practice, it’s not. Like much of Auden’s work, the subversion of classical form here does not signal a disregard for traditional ideas. The free verse is flecked with obvious nods to scripture (“lead us into temptation”) — nods which, like a photographer’s macrographic study, expose otherwise unseen parts of a whole we had gotten used to identifying by rote. Moreover, with the chorus — especially that fantastic phrase “Kingdom of Anxiety” — there is a redressing of old ideas which cloaks them in modern clothes. After all, who had anxiety in the first century?

As the verses clearly indicate, “For the Time Being” is a poem about the holidays. These words, and in particular the line I misremembered as “the time being redeemed of insignificance,” were rattling around my head throughout quieter moments at my family’s Thanksgiving. And although they work especially well as a panacea for post-holiday melancholy, they may get more mental mileage if you are reminded of them before the official Christmas week kicks off.

The pictures are of Auden, a man who once said that his face looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

*Again the brilliant Ted Rey has come through and found an archived full text of “For the Time Being”. As always, thank you, Ted.

NPG x25900; W.H. Auden by Bill Potter

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Meet Thomas Jefferson’s Father

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

American History, Biography, Dan Zevin, family, fatherhood, history, Jon Meacham, Mark Twain, Patriarch, Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Peter Jefferson -- Thomas Jefferson's Father

“He was the kind of man people noticed. An imposing, prosperous, well-liked farmer known for his feats of strength and his capacity for endurance in the wilderness, Peter Jefferson had amassed large tracts of land and scores of slaves in and around what became Albemarle County, Virginia. There, along the Rivanna, he built Shadwell, named after the London parish where his wife, Jane, had been baptized.

The first half of the eighteenth century was a thrilling time to be young, white, male, wealthy, and Virginian. Money was to be made, property to be claimed, tobacco to be planted and sold…

As a surveyor and a planter, Peter Jefferson thrived there, and his eldest son, Thomas, born on April 13, 1743, understood his father was a man other men admired. Celebrated for his courage, Peter Jefferson excelled at riding and hunting. His son recalled that the father once singlehandedly pulled down a wooden shed that had stood impervious to the exertions of three slaves who had been ordered to destroy the building… The father’s standing mattered greatly to the son, who remembered him in a superlative and sentimental light…

Jefferson was taught by his father and mother, and later by his teachers and mentors, that a gentleman owed service to his family, to his neighborhood, to his county, to his colony, and to his king. An eldest son in the Virginia of his time grew up expecting to lead—and to be followed. Thomas Jefferson came of age with the confidence that controlling the destinies of others was the most natural thing in the world. He was born for command. He never knew anything else.

Thomas Jefferson grew up with an image—and, until Peter Jefferson’s death when his son was fourteen, the reality—of a father who was powerful, who could do things other men could not, and who, through the force of his will or of his muscles or of both at once, could tangibly transform the world around him. Surveyors defined new worlds; explorers conquered the unknown; mapmakers brought form to the formless. Peter Jefferson was all three and thus claimed a central place in the imagination of his son, who admired his father’s strength and spent a lifetime recounting tales of the older man’s daring. Thomas Jefferson, a great-granddaughter said, ‘never wearied of dwelling with all the pride of filial devotion and admiration on the noble traits’ of his father’s character. The father had shaped the ways other men lived. The son did all he could to play the same role in the lives of others.”

__________

From Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Today marks the birthday of my dad, a reader of this blog and the guy I thought about as I first flipped through these pages.

Now on the quotes page:

“Lately all my friends are worried that they’re turning into their fathers. I’m worried that I’m not.” – Dan Zevin

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain

In case you don’t come here often, there’s more Jefferson-related stuff to see.

Thomas Jefferson

Meet Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

How Jefferson Fostered Compromise on the National Debt

Thomas Jefferson Randolph

Jefferson’s Advice to His Teenage Grandson

Top: Peter Jefferson; below: Thomas.

Thomas Jefferson

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Stateless, But Not Voiceless

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Journalism, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Brazil, Edward Snowden, ethics, National Security Administration, NSA, Open Letter to the Brazilian People, Person of the Year, spying, State Secrecy, surveillance, The Guardian, The United States

Edward Snowden

“Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more. They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation.

American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not ‘surveillance,’ it’s ‘data collection.’ They say it is done to keep you safe. They’re wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement — where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion — and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power…

[After leaking documents] I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice.”

__________

From Edward Snowden’s Open Letter to the Brazilian People.

Although I like Francis, my nomination for person of the year is Mr. Snowden, the man who did something in 2013 which was not only fascinating, but brave.

Read on:

Lady Justice

Why the Obama Administration Is Wrong about Ed Snowden

Surveillance Cameras

In Today’s News: Bridling the Surveillance State

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“For My Brother” by David McLoghlin

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

David McLoghlin, For My Brother, Poem, poetry, Waiting for Saint Brendan

Ranch - Thanksgiving

I read brother in another poem
and immediately think of him:
wild, contrary,
secretly caring deeply,
handsome, discreet as a stone
with our secrets,
braver than me.
And so I think,
should he not have been
the older brother?

Would, then, the things that happened
not have happened
if he’d been the older,
because some warning
would have sounded
when he met the abuser?

Or, maybe, in part, he is these things
because I was the sandbags
so that the breach wouldn’t happen
further in, further on down the line.

__________

“For My Brother” by David McLoghlin. Find more of McLoghlin’s work in his new collection Waiting for Saint Brendan and Other Poems.

I took the picture at my ranch in New Ulm, Texas a few days ago.

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The Occasional Pleasure of Advancing Years: Christopher Hitchens on the Passage of Time

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

A Moveable Feast, Age, Aging, Angela Gorgas, Capitalism, Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, James Fenton, Martin Amis, Marxism, memoir

NPG x133006; Christopher Hitchens; James Martin Fenton; Martin Amis by Angela Gorgas

“In some ways, the photograph of me with Martin and James is of ‘the late Christopher Hitchens.’ At any rate, it is of someone else, or someone who doesn’t really exist in the same corporeal form. The cells and molecules of my body and brain have replaced themselves and diminished (respectively). The relatively slender young man with an eye to the future has metamorphosed into a rather stout person who is ruefully but resignedly aware that every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less.

As I write these words, I am exactly twice the age of the boy in the frame. The occasional pleasure of advancing years — that of looking back and reflecting upon how far one has come — is swiftly modified by the immediately succeeding thought of how relatively little time there is left to run. I always knew I was born into a losing struggle but I now ‘know’ this in a more objective and more subjective way than I did then. When that shutter clicked in Paris I was working and hoping for the overthrow of capitalism. As I sat down to set this down, having done somewhat better out of capitalism than I had ever expected to do, the financial markets had just crashed on almost the precise day on which I became fifty-nine and one-half years of age, and thus eligible to make use of my Wall Street-managed ‘retirement fund.’ My old Marxism came back to me as I contemplated the ‘dead labor’ that had been hoarded in that account, saw it being squandered in a victory for finance capital over industrial capital, noticed the ancient dichotomy between use value and exchange value, and saw again the victory of those monopolists who ‘make’ money over those who only have the power to earn it…

Christopher Hitchens and Angela Gorgas

I now possess another photograph from that same visit to Paris, and it proves to be even more of a Proustian prompter. Taken by Martin Amis, it shows me standing with the ravissant Angela [Gorgas], outside a patisserie that seems to be quite close to the Rue Mouffetard, praise for which appears on the first page of A Moveable Feast. (Or could it be that that box of confections in my hand contains a madeleine?) Again, the person shown is no longer myself. And until a short while ago I would not have been able to notice this, but I now see very clearly what my wife discerns as soon as I show it to her. ‘You look,’ she exclaims, ‘just like your daughter.’ And so I do, or rather, to be fair, so now does she look like me, at least as I was then. The very next observation is again more evident to the observer than it is to me. ‘What you really look,’ she says, after a pause, ‘is Jewish.’ And so in some ways I am — even though the concept of a Jewish ‘look’ makes me bridle a bit — as I shall be explaining. (I shall also be explaining why it was that the boy in the frame did not know of his Jewish provenance.) All this, too, is an intimation of mortality, because nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.”

__________

From the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

More from the memoir:

Christopher Hitchens

Friendship, Love, Irony, Humor, Parenthood, Literature, and Music

Hitchens at Home

The Grape and the Grain

Christopher Hitchens by Angela Gorgas

A Map of the World that Did Not Show Utopia

Christopher Hitchens Cancer

These Contradictions

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Time for Silence

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Journalism

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Advice, Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Writing

Christopher Hitchens“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

__________

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Letters to a Young Contrarian.

Hitch passed away two years ago today. Read more from CH.

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Partying with the Greeks

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Ancient Greece, Archilochus, Greece, Greeks, Homer, jokes, knowledge, merriment, parties, poetry, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, sobriety, society, Song, symposia, Thomas Cahill, Wisdom

Greek Symposia

“Banquets of like-minded friends were called symposia. (The singular, symposium—the Greek original is symposion—means ‘a drinking together,’ that is, a drinking party.)…

There was plenty of tension in Greek life, since the Greeks, however many parties they threw, became as time went on even more bellicose than they had been in Homer’s day. These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—’the father of all, the king of all,’ ‘always existing by nature,’ as the Greek philosophers expressed it. Enough wine and one could forget about the war of the moment or, if not forget, reduce its importance at least temporarily. Thus this ditty attributed to Theognis, an early-sixth-century songwriter of airy facility who believed in good breeding, great parties, and lively romance, the Cole Porter of ancient Greece:

Strike the sacred strings and let us drink,
and so disport ourselves ’mid sounding reeds
that our libations gratify the gods—
and who gives a shit about war with the Medes

But as tends to be the case when drunkenness substitutes for thoughtfulness, the hilarity often ended badly… There’s sadness beneath the merriment. It is as if, no matter how much these revelers sing, dance, howl, recite their jokes, and screw one another, a constant, authoritative note of pessimistic pain sounds beyond all their frantic attempts not to hear it. Even Archilochus, a sensational athlete in his time and a master of the revels if ever there was one, cannot deny that none of these nighttime activities makes good sense. In his most thoughtful lines, he seems to remove the mask, denuding himself of his gruff and rollicking persona, and to counsel himself in the clear light of day not to excess but to sobriety—to balance, modesty, and even resignation:

O heart, my heart, no public leaping when you win;
no solitude nor weeping when you fail to prove.
Rejoice at simple things; and be but vexed by sin
and evil slightly. Know the tides through which we move.

The last sentence is quietly ominous. The tides through which we move—the highs and the lows, the peaks and the troughs—tell us repeatedly that nothing lasts… Let us temper our excitement and agitation, whether for the ecstasy of battle or the ecstasy of sex, whether over great achievement or great loss, and admit to ourselves that all things have their moment… If we live according to this sober knowledge, we will live as well as we can.”

Archilochus

__________

From the closing of chapter 3 of Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.

I wrote some comments about the above bust of Archilochus in a post yesterday. Check it out, as well as the sources (brought to my attention by Ted Rey) of the lines from Archilochus cited above.

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How Wittgenstein Found God (and Wrote a Masterpiece) in the Trenches of World War One

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, War

≈ Comments Off on How Wittgenstein Found God (and Wrote a Masterpiece) in the Trenches of World War One

Tags

Austria, Austro-Hungary, battle, Christianity, conversion, Descartes, Faith, Friedrich Nietzsche, Galicia, General Philosophy, Georg Henrik von Wright, Gospels in Brief, Italian front, Italy, John Maynard Keynes, Leo Tolstoy, logic, Ludwig Wittgenstein, psychology, religion, Rudolph Carnap, Sir Colin St. John Wilson, Socrates, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Vienna, W.A. Hijab, War, World War I

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Swansea, Wales, September 1947

“At the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. His friend Pinsent enlisted with the British army and thus was on the opposing side. Wittgenstein volunteered not because he particularly believed in the cause of the German powers but because he felt it was his duty. As a Wittgenstein he could easily have become an officer, but he chose to remain in the ranks – an extremely dangerous decision… Throughout his service Wittgenstein continued to write down his philosophical ideas in notebooks. He was doing original philosophy, but he also remained constantly on the brink of suicide. Despite these distractions, Wittgenstein was an utterly fearless soldier, and his exemplary bravery won him two medals. (Among the soldiering philosophers, his only rival was Socrates.)

Wittgenstein was a parody of the driven personality. Characteristically he saw no reason to try to alleviate this condition by searching for its cause in his own psychological makeup. On the contrary, if only everyone were true to his nature, he thought, everyone could be like this. Wittgenstein rationalized his condition to himself by claiming that life was ‘an intellectual problem and a moral duty.’ The intellectual and moral aspects of his personality had so far remained distinct entities, each spurring the other on. It was only during the war that they fused.

World War One Trenches

Under constant intellectual pressure (from himself) and the persistent threat of death (from both the enemy and himself), Wittgenstein once again found himself in familiar territory, on the brink of insanity. One day, during a lull in the fighting in Galicia, he came across a bookshop. Here he found Tolstoy’s Gospels in Brief, which he bought for the simple reason that there was no other book in the shop. Wittgenstein had been against Christianity – he associated it with Vienna, his family, lack of a logical foundation, meek and mild behavior, and other anathemas. But reading through Tolstoy’s book was to bring the light of religion into Wittgenstein’s life. Within days he had become a convinced Christian – though his conversion had a distinctly Wittgensteinian tenor. With typical rigor he set about integrating his beliefs into his intellectual life.

Religious remarks now began appearing in the pages of his notebooks, alongside those on logic. And it soon becomes clear that these two topics have more than intellectual rigor in common. The spirit of one informs the other in compelling fashion. Even Wittgenstein’s religion had to assume a logical force and clarity: ‘I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field.’ There was something problematic about the world, and this we call its meaning. But this meaning did not lie within the world, it lay outside it. ‘The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.’ According to Wittgenstein, to pray was to think about the meaning of life. (Which meant that he had been praying all his life, even when he didn’t believe there was a God or meaning to life. Wittgenstein couldn’t bear to be wrong – ever.)…

World War: Parade through Ruins

In 1918 Wittgenstein was promoted to officer and transferred to the Italian front…

When Wittgenstein was taken prisoner by the Italians, he had in his rucksack the only manuscript of the philosophical work he had been writing throughout the war. This was eventually to be called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and is the first great philosophical work of the modern era. Right from its opening sentences it becomes obvious that philosophy has entered a new stage.

‘1 The world is all that is the case’
‘1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’
One clear, ringing assertion follows another, linked by the absolute minimum of justification or argument:
‘1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.’
‘1.2 The world divides into facts.’
The book’s conclusion is even more memorable:
‘7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

Few others have altered the course of philosophy in quite so striking a fashion. Such succinct perspicacity is surpassed only by Socrates (‘Know thyself’), Descartes (‘I think, therefore I am’), and Nietzsche (‘God is dead’). In those parts where it is not too technical (in the logical sense), Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is the most exciting work of philosophy ever written.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

__________

From Paul Strathern’s entertaining biographical sketch Wittgenstein: Philosophy in an Hour.

On a somewhat random recommendation, I bought this short book ($1.99 on Amazon) and read it two nights ago. I had parsed some of Wittgenstein’s nearly impenetrable philosophy before and knew he’d been a pupil of Bertrand Russell, but my knowledge of the man extended barely beyond that. Now having read Strathern’s introduction to him, I’m convinced Wittgenstein is one of the more singular and compelling people of the 20th century.

Don’t take my word for it…

Russell called Wittgenstein, “The most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating”.

John Maynard Keynes, after meeting with Wittgenstein at his arrival in Cambridge, wrote in a 1929 letter to his wife: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.”

Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague, claimed that, “He was of the opinion… that his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.”

Rudolph Carnap, the German-born philosopher, noted about Wittgenstein that, “The impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

W.A. Hijab, a former pupil of Wittgenstein’s, said, “He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don’t appreciate that.”

Sir Colin St. John Wilson is quoted in Autism and Creativity as saying, “[He was] a magician and had qualities of magic in his relations with people.”

I’ve cited Wittgenstein a half dozen times on this blog, and have directly quoted a passage from his Philosophical Investigations. Find that selection below:

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein on God and Belief

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Know the Tides

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Archilochus, Art History, defeat, Dionysus, General Philosophy, Greece, history, Poem, poetry, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, Thomas Cahill, victory, Writing

Archilochus

O heart, my heart, no public leaping when you win;
no solitude nor weeping when you fail to prove.
Rejoice at simple things; and be but vexed by sin
and evil slightly. Know the tides through which we move.

__________

Words by Archilochus, the celebrated Greek poet who wrote and lived in the seventh century BC.

I just came across these lines in Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, and though I’ve tried to track them down on the internet, am still yet to find their original source. Send me a message or post a comment if you happen to know.

The above bust is of Archilochus. It is a first or second century AD marble sculpture based on an original dating from the late third century BC.

The ivy crown adorning his head signifies he is a poet, while the berries symbolize the gifts of Dionysus. Art historians believe this to be Archilochus due to the similarities it shares with four other Roman copies as well as a silver coin from Paros, which shows the poet seated, holding a lyre. Though he began his adult life as a mercenary, Archilochus eventually became one of the most famous lyric poets of Antiquity. His poems, of which only fragments of remnants remain, principally concern love, war, and the revelries of the table.

Sometime this weekend I’ll post the context in which Cahill quotes this verse. It’s pretty unexpected. Pick up the book here if you can’t wait.

*Update: This morning, reader Ted Rey responded to my question and found the source of the above quote from Archilochus. Ted writes:

“It seems to be an alternate translation for Fragment 67, as translated by R. Lattimore

Heart, my heart, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength,
up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault
of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beamlike spears.
Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show,
nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry.
Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree you
give way to sorrow. All our life is up-and-down like this.

The war motif has been bypassed. I like the more generalized message that emerges.

Another translation is:

Soul, my soul, don’t let them break you,
all these troubles. Never yield:
though their force is overwhelming,
up! attack them shield to shield…

Take the joy and bear the sorrow,
looking past your hopes and fears:
learn to recognize the measured
dance that orders all our years.

Archilochus: To His Soul : A Fragment, as translated from the Greek by Jon Corelis”

Thanks for that, Ted. Much appreciated.

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Einstein Breaks Up with His First Girlfriend

11 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Aarau, Albert Einstein, Biography, girlfriend, letter, Marie Winteler, Mileva Marić, Pauline Winteler, physics, relationship, science, Walter Isaacson, Zurich Polytechnic

Young Albert Einstein

“It fills me with a peculiar kind of satisfaction that now I myself have to taste some of the pain that I brought upon the dear girl through my thoughtlessness and ignorance of her delicate nature. Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying yet relentlessly strict angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles. If only I were able to give some of this to the good child.

And yet, what a peculiar way this is to weather the storms of life—in many a lucid moment I appear to myself as an ostrich who buries his head in the desert sand so as not to perceive the danger. One creates a small little world for oneself, and as lamentably insignificant as it may be in comparison with the perpetually changing size of real existence, one feels miraculously great and important, just like a mole in his self-dug hole. — But why denigrate oneself, others take care of that when necessary, therefore let’s stop.”

__________

A section of a letter written by Albert Einstein to the mother of his then- (and soon to be ex-) girlfriend.

In this letter, an 18-year-old Einstein is writing to Pauline Winteler (who he addresses as “Momma”), the mother of his first girlfriend, Marie Winteler, who has invited him to stay at the family’s country house. Einstein declines, citing that he would not want to lead on young Marie (who’s become, as they say, clingy) any more than he already has. It is a remarkably discerning and introspective letter, which illustrates not only the emotional and social maturity of Einstein, but also his becoming self-aware that physics is not merely something he wants to do — it is something he must do.

I first read this letter in Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe. And as Isaacson continually notes, it is oft-forgotten that unlike the scientist-stereotype, Einstein loved women, and they reciprocated. In descriptions of him as a young man, he is characterized as darkly handsome, with an insouciance towards all things establishment that cast him as a rebel — two traits which the girls whom he pursued never failed to notice with endearment.

Albert Einstein

In his text, Isaacson bookends his quoting of this letter with the following analysis:

Einstein’s new bohemian life and old self-absorbed nature made it unlikely that he would continue his relationship with Marie Winteler, the sweet and somewhat flighty daughter of the family he had boarded with in Aarau. At first, he still sent her, via the mail, baskets of his laundry, which she would wash and then return. Sometimes there was not even a note attached, but she would cheerfully try to please him. In one letter she wrote of ‘crossing the woods in the pouring rain’ to the post office to send back his clean clothes. ‘In vain did I strain my eyes for a little note, but the mere sight of your dear handwriting in the address was enough to make me happy.’…

But he wanted to break off the relationship. In one of his first letters after arriving at the Zurich Polytechnic, he suggested that they refrain from writing each other. ‘My love, I do not quite understand a passage in your letter,’ she replied. ‘You write that you do not want to correspond with me any longer, but why not, sweetheart? … You must be quite annoyed with me if you can write so rudely.’ Then she tried to laugh off the problem: ‘But wait, you’ll get some proper scolding when I get home.’…

Einstein’s coolness toward Marie Winteler can seem, from our vantage, cruel. Yet relationships, especially those of teenagers, are hard to judge from afar. They were very different from each other, particularly intellectually. Marie’s letters, especially when she was feeling insecure, often descended into babble… Whoever was to blame, if either, it was not surprising that they ended up on different paths. After her relationship with Einstein ended, Marie lapsed into a nervous depression, often missing days of teaching, and a few years later married the manager of a watch factory. Einstein, on the other hand, rebounded from the relationship by falling into the arms of someone who was just about as different from Marie as could be imagined…

That girl to which Isaacson hints is the brilliant Mileva Marić, a student (and one of the only females) at the Zurich Polytechnic, who would later become Einstein’s first wife.

Albert and Elsa Einstein

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Prisoners

06 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Freedom, History

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Apartheid, Booker T. Washington, case study, Connie Newman, Constance Berry Newman, Freedom, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, injustice, justice, Madiba, Nelson Mandela, protest, racism, slavery, social activism, South Africa

Nelson Mandela

“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”

Nelson Mandela

__________

From Nelson Mandela, writing in his 1994 autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.

Last summer, I took an eight-person night class on leadership taught by Constance Newman. Oftentimes I and a few other students would linger behind with Connie, trying to pick her brain about this-and-that and glean from her any anecdote she could offer about her upbringing, illustrious tenure in the U.S. government, and time she lived in apartheid South Africa.

I remember one occasion when I and my friend G. asked her who she thought was the greatest political leader since the industrial revolution. Since the course was part of a graduate program in American government, and Connie possesses a deep understanding of American history, my friend and I were expecting one of the usual suspects — Washington, Lincoln, one of the Roosevelts, maybe King. But her answer was as quick as it was unequivocal. Nelson Mandela.

A few weeks later, she assigned us the Kennedy School of Government’s case study on Madiba (I’ve hosted the PDF here) and devoted the subsequent class to explaining what made Mandela such an insuppressible leader and incandescent symbol of justice around the world. As I left class that night, I understood why she answered the way she did.

The entire case study is worth flipping through — especially in these next few days when we mourn Madiba’s passing — but my favorite portion can be found on page 14, in the section titled “Life with him was a life without him”. It reads:

Mandela met Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela in 1957 and decided almost on the spot, he recalls fondly, that he wanted to marry her…

They married June 14, 1958 at her home but had no time for a honeymoon. Nor did they have much time for marriage. As Mandela himself recognized: ‘The wife of a freedom fighter is often like a widow, even when her husband is not in prison.’ He rose at 4 a.m. and was often not home until midnight, after political meetings. Winnie wrote:

There was never any kind of life that I can recall as family life, a young bride’s life, where you sit with your husband and dream dreams of what life might have been… You just couldn’t tear Nelson from the people, from the struggle. The nation came first. Everything else was second.

From 4 a.m. to midnight. “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – NM, 1918-2013

Nelson Mandela

(Perhaps randomly, the arch of Mandela’s life, and particularly his refusal to succumb to bitterness upon liberation, called to mind another great freedom fighter — this one from our country, and a survivor of our own legacy of racial injustice. Booker T. Washington, who reflected on his freedom after years of slavery and said,

“I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak. It is now long ago that I learned this lesson… and resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him…”

Read on:

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington on Living for Others

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