Log24

"Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate" — Memory rhyme

For Rebekah Gay—

Click for image source.

Vigil for a teacher slain yesterday —

"Another student tweeted today to bring a candle
to Danvers High School at 8 p.m. tonight."

"How many miles to Babylon?"

From Saturday Night Live  last night—

Related material from the Log24 post "Now Lens"
(March 11, 2011)—

Errol Morris in The New York Times  on March 9, 2011—

"If everything is incommensurable, then everything
is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ."

"Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, 'there is nothing
more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.' [72]"

See also Borges on Shakespeare, everything, and nothing 
in a note from September 7, 2006.

Everything and nothing in Peter J. Cameron's weblog yesterday—

The existence of everything entails the existence of nothing;
indeed, the existence of anything (any set A) entails
the existence of the empty set (the set {x∈A:x≠x}).
But not the other way round.

Right, I had better put on my anorak and go out now …

Illustration added by m759—

How many miles to Babylon?*
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?**
Yes, and back again.

* Suggested by the Pindar link in this journal yesterday.

** Quoted in the "Seven is Heaven" post on All Souls' Day.

George Steiner —

"Man is, in Lévi-Strauss's view, a mythopoetic primate
(it's a difficult phrase but we don't have a better one)…."

Wikipedia —

"Primate is a title or rank bestowed on some bishops in certain Christian churches." 

Pope Benedict XVI at the 2012 Easter Vigil on April 7 —

"The great hymn of the Exsultet, which the deacon sings at the beginning of the Easter liturgy, points us quite gently towards a further aspect. It reminds us that this object, the candle, has its origin in the work of bees. So the whole of creation plays its part. In the candle, creation becomes a bearer of light.

But in the mind of the Fathers, the candle also in some sense contains a silent reference to the Church. The cooperation of the living community of believers in the Church in some way resembles the activity of bees. It builds up the community of light."

http://twitter.com/#!/skdh —

On John McCain’s presidential campaign eight years ago:

“He always pauses a second for effect and then says: ‘I’m going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don’t agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.’ This is McCain’s closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder. Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well, it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They’re cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain’s resume and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters’ pain but relief from it. Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated. It hurts.

We learn this at like age four– it’s grownups’ first explanation to us of why it’s bad to lie (‘How would you like it if…?’). And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks– that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you’re supposed to believe in’s really just a game based on lies….

… It’s painful to believe that the would-be ‘public servants’ you’re forced to choose between are all phonies… who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they’ve just got to believe you’re an idiot.”

Snippets:
A Reply to John Updike

See Updike on digitized snippets.

The following four snippets were pirated from the end of MathPages Quotations, compiled by Kevin Brown.

They are of synchronistic interest in view of the previous two Log24 entries, which referred (implicitly) to a Poe story and (explicitly) to Pascal.

"That is another of your odd notions,"
said the Prefect, who had the fashion
of calling everything 'odd' that was
beyond his comprehension, and thus
lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities.'
                             Edgar Allan Poe

I knew when seven justices could not
take up a quarrel, but when the parties
were met themselves, one of them
thought but of an If,  as, 'If you said so,
then I said so'; and they shook hands
and swore brothers. Your If is the only
peacemaker; much virtue in If.
                             Shakespeare

I have made this letter longer than usual
because I lack the  time to make it shorter.
                             Blaise Pascal

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
                             Dante, 1302

For translations of the Dante (including one by Dorothy Sayers), see everything2.com.

An anonymous author there notes that Dante describes a flame in which is encased a damned soul. The flame vibrates as the soul speaks:

If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore
    cease shaking.

But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.

-- Dante, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66,
    translated by Dorothy Sayers

Updike says,

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web but much of it is grievously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, I have the impression, to inflame what is most informally and non-critically human about us. Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.”

Note Updike’s use of “inflame.”

For an aw-shucks version of “what is most informally and non-critically human about us,” as well as a theological flame, see both the previous entry and the above report from Hell.

Note that the web serves also to correct material that is inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. For examples, see Mathematics and Narrative. The combination of today’s entry for Pascal’s birthday with that web page serves both to light one candle and to curse the darkness.

Cursing the Darkness

From my entries on this date last year…

“…we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out.”

Thought for today:

Render unto Rome that which is Rome’s.

See also my remarks of January 29, 2003,
on the opening in New Zealand of
Cullinane College.

Release Date

From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar —

• Novelist William S. Burroughs [of the Burroughs adding machine family], author of Naked Lunch, was born on this day in 1914.
• The Charlie Chaplin film “Modern Times“ was released on this day in 1936.
• The adding machine employing depressible keys was patented on this day in 1850.

“It all adds up.” — Saul Bellow, book title

“I see my light come shining
 From the west unto the east.
 Any day now, any day now,
 I shall be released.”
     — Bob Dylan

From Robert Morris’s page on Hopkins (see note of Sunday, February 2 (Candlemas)):

“Inscape” was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for a special connection between the world of natural events and processes and one’s internal landscape–a frame of mind conveyed in his radical and singular poetry….

This is false, but suggestive.

Checked, corrected, and annotated

"History is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake"
— James Joyce in Ulysses

"Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God's grace shall never be put out."
— Hugh Latimer, former Bishop of Worcester, to his friend Nicholas Ridley, former private chaplain to Henry VIII, on the occasion of their being burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic queen Bloody Mary Tudor on October 16, 1555