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Thursday, January 18, 2024
Monday, March 4, 2019
Davos Logos
A less sophisticated approach to logos —
See also Logos in this journal.
For those who prefer Latin, there is Verbum.
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Thursday, December 29, 2016
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
A Riddle for Davos
Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938
See also the life of Diogenes Allen, a professor at Princeton
Theological Seminary, a life that reportedly ended on the date—
January 13, 2013— of the above Log24 post.
January 13 was also the dies natalis of St. James Joyce.
Some related reflections —
"Praeterit figura huius mundi " — I Corinthians 7:31 —
|
Conclusion of of "The Dead," by James Joyce— The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. |
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Saturday, January 20, 2024
Needful Things: Faustus at the Magic Mountain
Image from a Sunday, January 7th, 2024, post now tagged "A Seventh Seal" —
Related image from a "Mathematics for Davos" post of
Thursday, January 18, 2024 —
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Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Continental Taste-Envy
The title is a phrase by Kyle Smith, who writes with
considerable taste and little envy.
Then there is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein . . .
See as well Heidegger at Davos.
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Sunday, January 13, 2019
Sunday the Thirteenth (Revisited)
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Monday, December 31, 2018
Eve’s Riddle
The Dickinson poem quoted above is numbered 373 at
the Poetry Foundation.
See also Eternity + 373 in this journal.
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Sunday, December 30, 2018
Also Sprach Aitchison
The New Yorker reviewing "Bumblebee" —
"There is one reliable source for superhero sublimity,
and it’s all the more surprising that it’s a franchise with
no sacred inspiration whatsoever but, rather, of purely
and unabashedly mercantile origins: the 'Transformers'
series, based on a set of toys, in which Michael Bay’s
exhilarating filmmaking offers phantasmagorical textures
of an uncanny unconscious resonance."
— Richard Brody on December 29, 2018
"Before time began, there was the Cube."
— Optimus Prime
Some backstory — A Riddle for Davos, Jan. 22, 2014.
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Saturday, February 10, 2018
Into the Upside Down
(Title suggested by the TV series Stranger Things )
" 'Untitled' (2016) is the most recent painting in the show
and includes one of Mr. Johns’s recurring images of a ruler."
— Image caption in an article by Deborah Solomon
in The New York Times online, Feb. 7, 2018
From a Log24 search for "Ruler" —
Related art —
See also, in this journal, Magic Mountain and Davos.
Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938
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Friday, January 26, 2018
Shadows and Reflections
From the post "For Guy Noir" of Wednesday morning, January 24 —
"as privileged viewers of the shadows and reflections"
Related material —
The death on January 24 of a famed ski film maker,
and the Sun Valley icon below (one of a pair of ski
location icons by Wink, a Minneapolis design firm).
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Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Spielfeld
For the original Davos icon by Wink-Minneapolis,
see the previous post.
For related geometry, see posts tagged Barth Art.
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Sunday, July 16, 2017
Snow Mann
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Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Roman Road
"All roads lead to Rome."
— Xi Jinping, President of the
People's Republic of China,
at Davos today
In memoriam Harvard art historian
James S. Ackerman, who reportedly
died on New Year's Eve 2016 —
"Is this an obelisk* I see before me?"
— Adapted from a play by William Shakespeare
* See the previous post and "The Cherished Gift."
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Monday, January 16, 2017
The Magic Valley*
An alternative to Davos —
From a professor at Grand Valley —
* Title suggested by Thomas Mann's 1924 novel about Davos
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Thursday, September 29, 2016
Reading for Michaelmas 2016
A review of …
Continental Divide : Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
By Peter E. Gordon
(Harvard University Press, 426 pp., $39.95)
The reviewer: David Nirenberg in The New Republic .
The review, dated January 13, 2011, ran in the
February 3, 2011, issue of the magazine.
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Thursday, July 7, 2016
About Nothing
"For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
See as well A Riddle for Davos.
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Monday, March 2, 2015
For Turing’s Cathedral
Item from the British press on Oct. 17, 2014:
Item from this journal on that same date:
A related "slash" —
Elementary, my dear Watson.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Kulturkampf for Princeton*
Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938
A sequel to Princeton Requiem,
Gesamtkunstwerk , and Serial Box —
Fearful Symmetry, Princeton Style:
* See as well other instances of Kulturkampf in this journal.
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Thursday, November 20, 2014
The Manchurian Candidate
Continued from Tuesday, Nov. 18
The above conclusion of a NY Times obituary
about a Monday death may also serve as the
missing conclusion of Monday's "A Search for
Missing Pieces" —
Related material starring Einstein and
Thomas Mann: "A Riddle for Davos."
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Friday, September 12, 2014
A Poet’s Word
The White Goddess link in the previous post led to, among other things,
a discussion of “Yahoo” as a poet’s word.
Another poet’s word: Davos.
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Tuesday, February 25, 2014
The Argument
The title of a review of Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age
was quoted here at noon last Saturday —
"The Place of the Sacred
in the Absence of God."
My comment from last Saturday —
"The place of the sacred is not, perhaps,
Davos, but a more abstract location."
A sequel —
"Religious Experience and the Modern Self,"
by Ross Douthat in The New York Times
today at 4:25 PM ET —
"The argument comes from the Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor and his
doorstop-thick magnum opus A Secular Age …."
Related material:
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Saturday, February 22, 2014
Grundlagenkrise*
The title was suggested by a 1921 article
by Hermann Weyl and by a review* of
a more recent publication —
The above Harvard Gazette piece on Davos is
from St. Ursula’s Day, 2010. See also this journal
on that date.
See as well a Log24 search for Davos.
A more interesting piece by Peter E. Gordon
(author of the above Davos book) is his review
of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age .
The review is titled
“The Place of the Sacred
in the Absence of God.”
(The place of the sacred is not, perhaps, Davos,
but a more abstract location.)
* Grundlagenkrise was a tag for a Jan. 13, 2011,
review in The New Republic of Gordon’s
book on Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos.
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Thursday, January 23, 2014
Shining Forth
Continued from remarks of Marissa Mayer at Davos last year —
Related material — This evening's NY lottery…
… and Log24 post number 1424 —
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Riddled
From this journal on Dec. 20, 2003 ("White, Geometric, and Eternal") —
Riddled:
The Absolutist Faith
of The New York Times
See also Dead Poets' Word and A Riddle for Davos, as well as…
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Snow
"Hans Castorp is a searcher after the Holy Grail.
You would never have thought it when you read
his story—if I did myself, it was both more and
less than thinking. Perhaps you will read the
book again from this point of view. And perhaps
you will find out what the Grail is: the knowledge
and the wisdom, the consecration, the highest
reward, for which not only the foolish hero but
the book itself is seeking. You will find it in the
chapter called 'Snow'…."
— Thomas Mann, "The Making of
The Magic Mountain "
In related entertainment news…
Click image for some backstory.
Mann's tale is set in Davos, Switzerland.
See also Mayer at Davos.
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Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Entities
Related material: "universe of discourse"—
- The concept In De Morgan and Boole
- The concept in De Morgan (1846)
- The concept and phrase in Boole (1854)
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Saturday, January 26, 2013
Nine Years
Excerpt from an essay cached nine years ago:
"The current dominant conceptual framework
which pictures the self as an inner entity
is slowly breaking up. And I am convinced that
some, if not all, of the approaches to the self
sketched here will form the basis for a new
conceptual framework…."
Context for the essay:
A journal issue titled "The Opening of Narrative Space" (pdf, 475 KB)
For one sort of narrative space, see Giordano Bruno in this journal.
See also Nine Years.
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