Answer
“Are you now, or have you ever been?”
entry of Feb. 12
“In the case of the Cartesian question, the answer is affirmative, and metaphysics has produced, in the four hundred years since, nothing much better than this. It is not only interesting but supremely practical. What could be more useful than having the means of convincing oneself that one exists whenever the question should arise?”
— Rebecca Goldstein,
Properties of Light
“… a nightshirted boy trying desperately to awake from the iridescent dizziness of dream life. Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it : not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.”
Transparent Things
“Le terme que l’on traduit par dédicace est en japonais ekô, littéralement ‘se tourner vers’. Il est composé de deux idéogrammes, e qui signifie ‘tourner le dos, se tourner, revenir en arrière’ et kô, ‘faire face, s’adresser à’.”
For more on Goldstein, see
The New York Times,
Feb. 14, 2005, and
Eight is a Gate,
Dec. 19, 2002.