A cover for his classic book is displayed in
this evening's New York Times obituary for Pirsig.
Related material in this journal —
A cover for his classic book is displayed in
this evening's New York Times obituary for Pirsig.
Related material in this journal —
A brief excerpt from a 2018 book about the woman who inspired Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . . . "There is a passage in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), which exemplifies much about what Quality means . . . . … the narrator, Marlow … is … in an environment he finds malign, sinister, macabre, chaotic, indifferently cruel, and nightmarishly meaningless. What saves him is his accidental discovery of a dry old seamanship manual . . . ." Conrad, as quoted in the book cited below: It was an extraordinary find. Its title was An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship, by a man Towser, Towson – some such name – Master in his Majesty’s Navy. The matter looked dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking strain of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real. — From pp. 36-37 of James Essinger and Henry Gurr's
A Woman of Quality: |
See also earlier posts tagged Weir'd.
Jerome Griswold on a poem by Wallace Stevens:
Santayana says, “The suasion of sanity is physical:
if you cut your animal traces, you run mad”….
The reference is to
"the penultimate chapter of Scepticism and Animal Faith
( 'XXVI. Discernment of Spirit')."
An animal trace related to the previous post —
Griswold reportedly died on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022.
The epigraph of the previous post —
"To Phaedrus, this backlight from the conflict between
the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely
new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato." — Robert M. Pirsig
Related reading and art for academic nihilists — See . . .
Reading and art I prefer —
Love in the Ruins , by Walker Percy, and . . .
Van Gogh (by Ed Arno) and an image and
a passage from The Paradise of Childhood
(by Edward Wiebé):
"To Phaedrus, this backlight from the conflict between
the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely
new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato." — Robert M. Pirsig
"It’s all in Plato, all in Plato;
bless me, what do they
teach them at these schools?”
— C. S. Lewis in
The Narnia Chronicles
Compare and Contrast — Plato's Diamond.
"Los embaldosados" means the tilings .
The image referencing Robert M. Pirsig is
from "Classic Romantic," Dec. 19, 2020.
The title is from yesterday's 8:19 PM post.
An image from yesterday's 12:31 PM post —
What happens when the Logies meet the Ities ?
A clue . . .
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ,
Ch. 6 (italics are mine):
“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself.
A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance .”
“He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it.
That master diamond cutter.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , Part III.
Kant’s “category theory” —
“In the Transcendental Analytic, Kant deduces the table of twelve categories, or pure concepts of the understanding….
The categories must be ‘schematized’ because their non-empirical origin in pure understanding prevents their having the sort of sensible content that would connect them immediately to the objects of experience; transcendental schemata are mediating representations that are meant to establish the connection between pure concepts and appearances in a rule-governed way. Mathematical concepts are discussed in this context since they are unique in being pure but also sensible concepts: they are pure because they are strictly a priori in origin, and yet they are sensible since they are constructed in concreto . ” — Shabel, Lisa, “Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/kant-mathematics/>. |
See also The Diamond Theorem and Octad.us.
The title was suggested by a 2014 Vanity Fair piece
by James Toback (Harvard '66).
"He squinted at this vision of a Qualityless world for a while,
conjured up more details, thought about it, and then squinted
some more and thought some more and then finally circled
back to where he was before.
Squareness.
That's the look. That sums it. Squareness. When you subtract
quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence
of squareness."
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
And when you add quality?
A related Zen joke from Final Club (June 19, 2017) —
.
The previous post, on subjective and objective quality,
suggests a review of Pirsig —
“And finally: Phaedrus, following a path
that to his knowledge had never been taken before
in the history of Western thought,
went straight between the horns of
the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said
Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter.
It is a third entity which is independent of the two.
He was heard along the corridors
and up and down the stairs of Montana Hall
singing softly to himself, almost under his breath,
‘Holy, holy, holy…blessed Trinity.’ “
See also Guitart in this journal, noting esp. Zen and the Art.
I found today that the following reference to my work —
Steven H. Cullinane.
Geometry of the I Ching. 2006 [text]
— was placed by Anthony Judge in a draft webpage
dated 24 August 2015.
Today's previous Log24 post, Zen and the Art,
suggests some context I prefer to the colorful
remarks of Judge — namely, a Log24 search for
See esp. a post from the date of the Judge webpage,
24 August 2015, titled
The Wrench and the Nut
From Schicksalstag 2012 —
The Quality
with No Name
And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good —
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance
Related material from Wikipedia today:
See as well a search in this journal for “Permutation Group” + Wikipedia .
"What on earth is
— Said to be an annotation |
In the spirit of the late Thomas Guinzburg…
See also "Concrete Universal" in this journal.
Related material— From a Bloomsday reply
to a Diamond Theory reader's comment, an excerpt—
The reader's comment suggests the following passages from
the book by Stirling quoted above—
Here Stirling plays a role analogous to that of Professor Irwin Corey
accepting the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
(Continued from August 23, 2012)
“Good is a noun. That was it.
That was what Phaedrus had been looking for.
That was the homer over the fence
that ended the ballgame.”
But perhaps not a proper noun.
See the link to Good's Singularity
at the end of today's previous post.
This journal on June 24, 2006—
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , 1974:
"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of
conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle
the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings
of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people
in irrational areas of thought… occultism, mysticism, drug changes
and the like… because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason
to handle what they know are real experiences."
"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."
"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University
is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've
never had to understand it really. It's always been completely
bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of
the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it
because it doesn’t make 'sense.' But what's really wrong is not
the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it.
People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover
art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the
branches, they're at the roots."
See also an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that opened Dec. 23—
— and an exhibition in this journal of the image "Root Circle."
The New York Times top online front page story this morning—
"A version of this article appeared in print
on November 9, 2012, on page B1 of
the New York edition with the headline:
An Innovator vs. a Follower." — The Times
Some related material from this journal—
The Quality of Diamond,
Log24 entries from Feb. 2004:
The Quality
with No Name
And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance
"When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf,
and takes his dog to see the sport,
he should take care to avoid mistakes.
The dog has certain relationships to the wolf
the shepherd may have forgotten."
* An embroidered tale. See Paranoia, Dog Tale, and Kristallnacht 2006.
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven | |
---|---|
line 540 (xxx.18): | In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once. |
The cover art of a 1976 monograph, "Diamond Theory," was described in this morning's post.
As Madeleine L'Engle noted in 1976, the cover art resembles the character Proginoskes in her novel A Wind in the Door.
A search today for Proginoskes yields a description by Brendan Kidwell…
A link at Kidwell's site leads to a weblog by Jeff Atwood, a founder of Stack Overflow, a programmers' question-and-answer site.
(Stack Overflow is said to have inspired the similar site for mathematicians, Math Overflow.)
Yesterday Atwood discussed technical writing.
This suggests a look at Robert M. Pirsig on that subject in his 1974 philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
(See also a document on Pirsig's technical-writing background.)
Pirsig describes his novel as "a sort of Chautauqua."
This, together with the Stevens and Proginoskes quotes above, leads back to the Log24 Feb. 1 post The Search.
An image from that post (click to enlarge)—
Here the apparently fragmented nature of the set of
images imagined as rising above the podium of the
Hall of Philosophy at Chautauqua rather naturally
echoes Stevens's "hundreds of eyes" remark.
… and Finishing Up at Noon
This post was suggested by last evening’s post on mathematics and narrative
and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning’s New York Times.
Above: Frank Langella in Right: Johnny Depp in |
“One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage.”
— “Is Fiction the Art of Lying?”* by Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times essay of October 7, 1984
My own adventures in that realm— as reader, not author— may illustrate Llosa’s remark.
A nearby stack of paperbacks I haven’t touched for some months (in order from bottom to top)—
What moral Vargas Llosa might draw from the above stack I do not know.
Generally, I prefer the sorts of books in a different nearby stack. See Sisteen, from May 25. That post the fanciful reader may view as related to number 16 in the above list. The reader may also relate numbers 24 and 22 above (an odd couple) to By Chance, from Thursday, July 22.
* The Web version’s title has a misprint— “living” instead of “lying.”
Intercultural Documentation
From this date four years ago—
Cleavage Term
“… a point of common understanding
between the classic and romantic worlds.
Quality, the cleavage term
between hip and square, seemed to be it."
“What on earth is a 'concrete universal'?"
— Said to be an annotation (undated)
by Robert M. Pirsig of A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston, Society of Jesus.
From Aaron Urbanczyk's 2005 review of Christ and Apollo by William Lynch, S.J., a book first published in 1960—
"Lynch's use of analogy vis-a-vis literature provides, in a sense, a philosophical basis to the theoretical paradox popularized by W. K. Wimsatt (1907-1975), which contends that literature is a sort of 'concrete universal.'"
The following figure has often been
offered in this journal as a symbol of Apollo—
Arguments that it is, rather, a symbol of Christ
may be left to the Society of Jesus.
One possible approach—
Urbanczyk's review says that
"Christianity offers the critic
a privileged ontological window…."
"The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light."
Or: "Gopnik Meets Oppenheimer in Heaven"
(Or, for those less philosophically minded, "Raiders of the Lost Pussy")
Midrash on "A Serious Man" "A Serious Man kicks off with a Yiddish-language frame story that takes place in a 19th-century Eastern European shtetl, where a married couple has an enigmatic encounter with an old acquaintance who may be a dybbuk," recounts Dana Stevens . "The import of this parable is cryptic to the point of inscrutability." It seems to me that the Coen Brothers’ dybbuk is the Jewish folkloric equivalent of Schrodinger’s Cat . When we first meet the main character, a physics professor named Larry Gopnik, he’s writing equations on the board: "So if that’s that, then we can do this, right? Is that right? Isn’t that right? And that’s Schrodinger’s paradox, right? Is the cat dead or is the cat not dead?" Likewise, we can’t know whether Fyvush Finkel [the aforementioned old acquaintance] is alive or a dybbuk. We can only evaluate probabilities. When a Korean student named Clive Park complains to Larry that he shouldn’t have failed the Physics midterm because "I understand the physics. I understand the dead cat," Larry says: You can’t really understand the physics without understanding the math. The math tells how it really works. That’s the real thing; the stories I give you in class are just illustrative; they’re like, fables, say, to help give you a picture. An imperfect model. I mean— even I don’t understand the dead cat. The math is how it really works. But the fable actually tells us that the math doesn’t capture reality. |
The story in images below summarizes a meditation suggested by this parable and by
Blackboard in "A Serious Man"–
Blackboard at the Institute for Advanced Study–
"Daddy's home! Daddy's home!"
Related material–
A Zen meditation from Robert Pirsig
is suggested by the time on the above
alarm clock– 8:20– interpreted,
surrealistically, as a date — 8/20.
Sophists
From David Lavery’s weblog today—
Kierkegaard on Sophists:
“If the natural sciences had been developed in Socrates’ day as they are now, all the sophists would have been scientists. One would have hung a microscope outside his shop in order to attract customers, and then would have had a sign painted saying: Learn and see through a giant microscope how a man thinks (and on reading the advertisement Socrates would have said: that is how men who do not think behave).”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, edited and translated by Alexander Dru
To anyone familiar with Pirsig’s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the above remarks of Kierkegaard ring false. Actually, the sophists as described by Pirsig are not at all like scientists, but rather like relativist purveyors of postmodern literary “theory.” According to Pirsig, the scientists are like Plato (and hence Socrates)– defenders of objective truth.
Pirsig on Sophists:
“The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all sought to establish a universal Immortal Principle in the external world they found around them. Their common effort united them into a group that may be called Cosmologists. They all agreed that such a principle existed but their disagreements as to what it was seemed irresolvable. The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides’ disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless.
The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ These were the famous teachers of ‘wisdom,’ the Sophists of ancient Greece.
To Phaedrus, this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato. Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.
Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people… there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.
The results of Socrates’ martyrdom and Plato’s unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it’s unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.
And yet, Phaedrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists.”
I agree with Plato’s (and Rebecca Goldstein’s) contempt for relativists. Yet Pirsig makes a very important point. It is not the scientists but rather the storytellers (not, mind you, the literary theorists) who sometimes seem to embody Quality.
As for hanging a sign outside the shop, I suggest (particularly to New Zealand’s Cullinane College) that either or both of the following pictures would be more suggestive of Quality than a microscope:
For the “primordial protomatter”
in the picture at left, see
The Diamond Archetype.
"Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." –Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This apparent conflict between eternity and time, fixity and motion, permanence and change, is resolved by the philosophy of the I Ching and by the Imagism of Ezra Pound. Consider, for example, the image of The Well
as discussed here on All Saints' Day 2003 and in the previous entry.
As background, consider the following remarks of James Hillman in "Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique," Part III: Persons as Images—
"To conceive images as static is to forget that they are numens that move. Charles Olson, a later poet in this tradition, said: 'One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception… always, always one perception must must must move instanter, on another.' 80 Remember Lavater and his insistence on instantaneity for reading the facial image. This is a kind of movement that is not narrational, and the Imagists had no place for narrative. 'Indeed the great poems to come after the Imagist period– Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets; Pound’s Cantos; Williams’s Paterson– contain no defining narrative.' 81 The kind of movement Olson urges is an inward deepening of the image, an in-sighting of the superimposed levels of significance within it. 82 This is the very mode that Jung suggested for grasping dreams– not as a sequence in time, but as revolving around a nodal complex. If dreams, then why not the dreamers. We too are not only a sequence in time, a process of individuation. We are also each an image of individuality."
80 The New American Poetry (D. M. Allen, ed.) N.Y.: Evergreen, Grove, 1960, pp. 387-88. from Jones, p. 42. 81 Jones,* p. 40. 82 H. D. later turned narration itself into image by writing a novel in which the stories were "compounded like faces seen one on top of another," or as she says "superimposed on one another like a stack of photographic negatives" (Jones, p. 42). Cf. Berry,** p. 63: "An image is simultaneous. No part precedes or causes another part, although all parts are involved with each other… We might imagine the dream as a series of superimpositions, each event adding texture and thickening to the rest." * Imagist Poetry (Peter Jones, ed.) London: Penguin, 1972 ** The contrast between image simultaneity and narrative succession, and the different psychological effects of the two modes, is developed by Patricia Berry, "An Approach to the Dream," Spring 1974 (N. Y./Zürich: Spring Publ.), pp. 63, 68-71 |
Hillman also says that
"Jung’s 'complex' and Pound's definition of Image and Lavater's 'whole heap of images, thoughts, sensations, all at once' are all remarkably similar. Pound calls an Image, 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'… 'the Image is more than an Idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy'… 'a Vortex, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.' 79 Thus the movement, the dynamics, are within the complex and not only between complexes, as tensions of opposites told about in narrational sequences, stories that require arbitrary syntactical connectives which are unnecessary for reading an image where all is given at once."
79 These definitions of Image by Pound come from his various writings and can all be found in Jones, pp. 32-41. Further on complex and image, see J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-17, London: Secker & Warburg, 1975, pp. 164-68. |
These remarks may help the reader to identify with Ada during her well-viewing in Cold Mountain (previous entry):
"She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo…."
If such complexity can be suggested by Hexagram 48, The Well, alone, consider the effect of the "cluster of fused ideas… endowed with energy" that is the entire 64-hexagram I Ching.
“Well, it changes.”
A related Log24 link from
that same date, November 27:
“Plato hadn’t tried to destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato’s Good. Plato’s Good was taken from the rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato’s Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.”
— as well as Cold Mountain —
“So in short order Ada found herself bent backward over the mossy well lip, canted in a pose with little to recommend it in the way of dignity or comfort, back arched, hips forward, legs spraddled for balance. She held a hand mirror above her face, angled to catch the surface of the water below.
Ada had agreed to the well-viewing as a variety of experiment in local custom and as a tonic for her gloom. Her thoughts had been broody and morbid and excessively retrospective for so long that she welcomed the chance to run counter to that flow, to cast forward and think about the future, even though she expected to see nothing but water at the bottom of the well.
She shifted her feet to find better grip on the packed dirt of the yard and then tried to look into the mirror. The white sky above was skimmed over with backlit haze, bright as a pearl or as a silver mirror itself. The dark foliage of oaks all around the edges framed the sky, duplicating the wooden frame of the mirror into which Ada peered, examining its picture of the well depths behind her to see what might lie ahead in her life. The bright round of well water at the end of the black shaft was another mirror. It cast back the shine of sky and was furred around the edges here and there with sprigs of fern growing between stones.
Ada tried to focus her attention on the hand mirror, but the bright sky beyond kept drawing her eye away. She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo, as if she could at any moment pitch backward and plunge head first down the well shaft and drown there, the sky far above her, her last vision but a bright circle set in the dark, no bigger than a full moon.
Her head spun and she reached with her free hand and held to the stonework of the well. And then just for a moment things steadied, and there indeed seemed to be a picture in the mirror.”
— and Log24 on December 3 —
Part I: Matisse
The Wisdom of the Ego,
by George E. Vaillant,
Harvard University Press (1993)
Cover illustration:
“Icarus,” from Jazz, by Henri Matisse
Publisher’s description of author:
George E. Vaillant is Professor of Psychiatry;
Director of the Study of Adult Development,
Harvard University Health Services;
and Director of Research in
the Division of Psychiatry,
Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“This is a remarkable synthesis of the best current thinking on ego psychology as well as a many-faceted picture of what Robert White would call ‘lives in progress.’ It makes on its own not only a highly innovative contribution to ego psychology but an equally original and impressive contribution to longitudinal research. A remarkable and many-faceted work.”
— The late George W. Goethals
of Harvard University
Part II:
The Hospital
Cached from http://bostonist.com/2007/12/01/boston_blotter_164.php
December 1, 2007Boston Blotter: More on Harvard Student Found Dead–John Edwards, the Harvard sophomore whose body was found yesterday at Harvard Medical School,* committed suicide. People who knew him, such as a professor and his roommate are mystified. Eva Wolchover lists Edwards’ many accomplishments. He was a top science student (and that’s saying something around here), a stem cell researcher, and a guitar player. A Facebook group named “In Memory of John Edwards” has already been established. * Other reports say the body was found at about 11 PM on Thursday, Nov. 29– the presumed date of Edwards’s death. Edwards was said to have conducted stem cell research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. |
Part III:
Down to Earth
The reviewer in Icarus, Part I, above,
Dr. Goethals, was my teacher in a
1960-61 freshman seminar at Harvard.
He admired the work of
Harry Stack Sullivan.
The cover of the Sullivan book below
may serve to illustrate yesterday’s
“Plato’s Horses” remarks.
The ego defenses of today’s
Harvard students seem to need some
strengthening. Perhaps Vaillant, Sullivan,
and the philosophies of Pirsig and of Plato
discussed in yesterday’s entry
may be of use in this regard.
Related material:
Wallace Stevens,
opening lines of
The Necessary Angel:
We recognize at once, in this figure, Plato’s pure poetry; and at the same time we recognize what Coleridge called Plato’s dear, gorgeous nonsense. The truth is that we have scarcely read the passage before we have identified ourselves with the charioteer, have, in fact, taken his place and, driving his winged horses, are traversing the whole heaven.”
Stevens, who was educated at Harvard, adds:
“Then suddenly we remember, it may be, that the soul no longer exists and we droop in our flight and at last settle on the solid ground. The figure becomes antiquated and rustic.”
Many who lack a Harvard education to make them droop will prefer to remember Robert Craig Knievel (Oct. 17, 1938 – Nov. 30, 2007) not as antiquated and rustic but as young and soaring.
See also the entries for
last February’s
Academy Awards night:
Hollywood Sermon and
Between Two Worlds.
From today's online NY Times:
Obituaries in the News
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: [Wednesday] Gennie DeWeese BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP) — Gennie DeWeese, an artist known for her landscape paintings and woodblock prints whose works are displayed at museums across the Northwest, died Monday [November 26, 2007]. She was 86. DeWeese died at her studio south of Bozeman. Dahl Funeral Chapel confirmed her death. Her first oil painting was of her dog, done when she was 12 years old. In 1995, DeWeese received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Montana State University, and she received the Montana Governor's Award for the Arts. |
Robert M. Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(April 1974) —
"The rhetoricians of ancient Greece were the first teachers in the history of the Western world. Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they’re unique in that they’ve stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told. The Church of Reason that I talked about was founded on their graves. It’s supported today by their graves. And when you dig deep into its foundations you come across ghosts." I look at my watch. It’s after two. "It’s a long story," I say. "You should write all this down," Gennie says. |
Quod erat
demonstrandum.
For more information,
click on the black monolith.
Related material:
GENEVA: British-born author Magdalen Nabb, whose crime novels about a quirky Italian investigator were acclaimed by her idol Georges Simenon, has died, her Swiss publishing house said Tuesday. She was 60.
Nabb, who also wrote stories for children and young adults, died of a stroke on Saturday [August 18, 2007] in Florence, Italy, where she had lived and worked since 1975, said Diogenes Verlag AG of Zurich….
Nabb published 13 books for children and young adults, including “The Enchanted Horse,” “Twilight Ghost” and the “Josie Smith” series about a “girl who always has plenty of ideas.”
Happy Birthday,
Robert Redford:
A Concrete Universal.
“No matter how it’s done,
you won’t like it.“
— Robert Redford to
Robert M. Pirsig in Lila
Material related to
Twilight Ghost:
Logos and Epiphany
and
Fire Chaplain.
“A twilight ghost doesn’t come to
frighten people, though it might
want to tell them something.
A twilight ghost is just
a kind of long lost memory….”
“What on earth is
— Said to be an annotation
(undated) by Robert M. Pirsig
of A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston,
Society of Jesus.
“No matter how it’s done,
you won’t like it.“
— Robert Redford to
Robert M. Pirsig in Lila
“In chapters 19 and 20 of LILA there is a discussion about the possibility of making Zen and the Art into a movie. It opens with a scene where Robert Redford, who ‘really would like to have the film rights,’ comes to meet and negotiate with Phaedrus in his New York City hotel room. Phaedrus tells the famous actor that he can have the rights to the book, but maybe that’s just because he’s star-struck and doesn’t like to haggle. Under his excitement, Phaedrus has a bad feeling about it. He tells us that he’s been warned by several different people not to allow such a film to be made. Even Redford warned him not to do it. So what’s the problem? As it’s put at the end of that discussion, ‘Films are social media; his book was largely intellectual. That was the center of the problem.'”
— David Buchanan at robertpirsig.org
“The insight is constituted precisely by ‘seeing’ the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete.”
— Fr. Brian Cronin‘s Foundations of Philosophy, Ch. 2, “Identifying Direct Insights,” quoted in Ideas and Art
See also Smiles of a Summer Evening, the current issue of TIME, the time of this entry (7:20:11 PM ET), and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.
"I Put a Spell on You"
— Nina Simone,
title of autobiograpy
— Glenna Whitley, "Voodoo Justice," The New York Times, March 20, 1994
"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought… occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like… because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences."
"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."
"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn’t make 'sense.' But what's really wrong is not the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots."
Related material:
D-Day Morning,
Figures of Speech,
Ursprache Revisited.
See also
the midnight entry
of June 23-24, 2006:
"Let the midnight special
shine her light on me."
(continued from
January 9, 2003)
George Balanchine
|
"What on earth is
a concrete universal?"
— Robert M. Pirsig
Review:
From Wikipedia's
"Upper Ontology"
and
Epiphany 2007:
"There is no neutral ground
that can serve as
a means of translating between
specialized (lower) ontologies."
There is, however,
"the field of reason"–
the 3×3 grid:
Click on grid
for details.
As Rosalind Krauss
has noted, some artists
regard the grid as
"a staircase to
the Universal."
Other artists regard
Epiphany itself as an
approach to
the Universal:
— Richard Kearney, 2005,
in The New Arcadia Review
Kearney (right) with
Martin Scorsese (left)
and Gregory Peck
in 1997.
— Richard Kearney, interview (pdf) in The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, Vol. 14, 2005-2006
For more on "the possible," see Kearney's The God Who May Be, Diamonds Are Forever, and the conclusion of Mathematics and Narrative:
"We symbolize
logical necessity with the box and logical possibility with the diamond
"The possibilia that exist,
— Michael Sudduth, |
“What on earth is
a concrete universal?”
— Robert M. Pirsig
From A Shot at Redemption—
John Constantine,
cartoon character, and
Donald E. Knuth,
Lutheran mathematician
A photo opportunity —
and a recent cartoon:
From Calvin College,
today’s meditation:
Best Wishes for a
C. S. Lewis
Christmas
Image of Lewis from |
“What on earth is a concrete universal?” — Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance For one approach to an answer, click on the picture at left. |
Update of 4:23 PM:
The Lewis link above deals with the separation of Heaven from Hell. The emphasis is on Heaven. A mysterious visitor to this website, “United States,” seems to be seeking equal time for Hell. And so…
TIME OF DATE OF PAGE VISITED
VISIT PAGE VISITED
1217 040520 Parable
1218 060606 The Omen
1220 051205 Don’t Know Much About History
1225 030822 Mr. Holland’s Week (And in Three Days…)
1233 030114 Remarks on Day 14 (What is Truth?)
1238 040818 Train of Thought (Oh, My Lolita)
1244 020929 Angel Night (Ellis Larkins)
1249 040715 Identity Crisis (Bourne and Treadstone)
1252 050322 Make a Differance (Lacan, Derrida, Reba)
1255 050221 Quarter to Three on Night of HST’s death
1256 040408 Triple Crown on Holy Thursday
1258 040714 Welcome to Mr. Motley’s Neighborhood
1258 030221 All About Lilith
0103 040808 Quartet (for Alexander Hammid)
0104 030106 Dead Poet in the City of Angels
0109 030914 Skewed Mirrors (Readings on Aesthetics)
0110 050126 A Theorem in Musical Form
0125 021007 Music for R. D. Laing
0138 020806 Butterflies & Popes (Transfiguration)
0140 060606 The Omen (again)
0156 030313 ART WARS: Perennial Tutti-Frutti
0202 030112 Ask Not (A Bee Gees Requiem)
0202 050527 Drama of the Diagonal, Part Deux
0202 060514 STAR WARS continued (Eclipse and Venus)
0207 030112 Ask Not (again… Victory of the Goddess)
0207 030221 All About Lilith (again… Roll credits.)
“What on earth is
a ‘concrete universal’?”
— Said to be an annotation
(undated)
by Robert M. Pirsig of
A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston,
Society of Jesus.
For an answer, see
“The Structure of the
‘Concrete Universal’
in Literature,”
by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.,
PMLA, Vol. 62, No. 1
(March, 1947), pp. 262-280.
This is reprinted in Wimsatt’s
The Verbal Icon:
Studies in the
Meaning of Poetry.
The final chapter of
The Verbal Icon
is titled
“Poetry and Christian Thinking.”
For more on Wimsatt
and this topic, see
“Reclaiming the Bible
as Literature,”
by Louis A. Markos.
“Who knows where madness lies?”
— Rhetorical question
in “Man of La Mancha”
(See previous entry.)
Using madness to
seek out madness, let us
consult today’s numbers…
Pennsylvania Lottery
Nov. 22, 2006:
Mid-day 487
Evening 814
The number 487 leads us to
page 487 in the
May 1977 PMLA,
“The Form of Carnival
in Under the Volcano“:
“The printing presses’ flywheel
marks the whirl of time*
that will split La Despedida….”
From Dana Grove,
A Rhetorical Analysis of
Under the Volcano,
page 92:
“… a point of common understanding
between the classic and romantic worlds.
Quality, the cleavage term between
hip and square, seemed to be it.”
— Robert M. Pirsig
Rebecca Goldstein
The 8/14 entry also deals with
Rebecca Goldstein, who
seems to understand
such cleavage
very well.
(See also today’s previous entry.)
* Cf. Shakespeare’s “whirligig of time“
linked to in the previous entry.)
Cleavage Term
Snow is mainly remembered as the author of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).
According to Orrin Judd, we can now see “how profoundly wrong Snow was in everything except for his initial metaphor, of a divide between science and the rest of the culture.”
For more on that metaphor, see the previous entry, “The Line.”
I prefer a lesser-known work of Snow– his long biographical foreword to G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. The foreword, like the book itself, is an example of what Robert M. Pirsig calls “Quality.” It begins with these words:
“It was a perfectly ordinary night at Christ’s high table, except that Hardy was dining as a guest.”
Wallace Stevens,
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Part III:
“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…
hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”
See also the discussion of
subjective and objective
by Robert M. Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance,
Part III,
followed by this dialogue:
Are We There Yet?
Chris shouts, “When are we
going to get to the top?”
“Probably quite a way yet,”
I reply.
“Will we see a lot?”
“I think so. Look for blue sky
between the trees. As long as we
can’t see sky we know it’s a way yet.
The light will come through the trees
when we round the top.”
Related material:
The Boys from Uruguay,
Lichtung!,
The Shining of May 29,
A Guiding Philosophy,
Ticket Home.
The philosophy of Heidegger
discussed and illustrated
in the above entries may
be regarded as honoring
today’s 100th anniversary
of the birth of Heidegger’s
girlfriend, Hannah Arendt.
See also
Happy birthday, Robert M. Pirsig.
Readings for the hour of the wolf:
Yesterday was Arthur Koestler’s birthday.
“By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us.”
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
— Obituary of Lawrence J. Sacharow at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution
“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”
— Under the Volcano
"Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame." —Robert M. Pirsig
"How should we define goodness?"
— Title of an article (pdf) available online from Harvard.
This article (Journal of Theoretical Biology 231 (2004) 107–120), examines goodness in the light of evolutionary dynamics as it involves altruism and social reputation, and concludes that goodness as an evolved social trait has two characteristics: those with good reputations are helped, those with bad reputations are not helped. This is expressed as follows. (English is apparently not the native language of the authors, from Kyushu University in Japan.)
"One [feature of goodness] is that a player interacting with good persons are assessed by what he does. Cooperation with good individuals should be good and defection against good ones should be bad. The second feature should we consider with much emphasis: a good player who refused to help a bad person must be labeled good. This enables players facing cheaters to refuse help without worrying about the influence of the action on their own good reputation."
In other words,
"… a person in good standing falls into bad if and only if he fails to cooperate with an opponent in good standing. Even if he refuses to help an individual in bad standing, he does not lose his good standing. This is because the refusal is interpreted as punishment against a selfish individual (for studies on punishment, see Brandt and Sigmund (2003), Fehr and Gachter (2000), Fehr and Rockenbach (2003), and Henrich and Boyd (2001))."
See also Harry Truman and Hiroshima, on this date in 1945.
Related material:
Hitler's Still Point:
A Hate Speech for Harvard
The 5 Log24 entries ending
with "Three in One" on
December 30, 2002
"Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark."
— "Ancient Zen saying," according to "Today in History," June 24, by the Associated Press
"A man may be free to travel where he likes, but there is no place on earth where he can escape from his own Karma, and whether he lives on a mountain or in a city he may still be the victim of an uncontrolled mind. For man's Karma travels with him, like his shadow. Indeed, it is his shadow, for it has been said, 'Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.'"
— Alan W. Watts, The Spirit of Zen, third edition, Grove Press, 1958, page 97
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974:
"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought… occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like… because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences."
"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."
"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn’t make 'sense.' But what's really wrong is not the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots."
Related material:
D-Day Morning,
Figures of Speech,
Ursprache Revisited.
See also
the previous entry.
In honor of his birthday,
a three-part meditation
on quality:
Part I —
From The Quality of Diamond,
Log24 entries from Feb. 2004:
The Quality
with No Name
And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance
Part II —
From Log24 on
Dec. 7, 2003:
Eyes on the Prize Dialogue from “Good Will Hunting” — Will: He used to just put a belt, Location, Location, Location |
Part III —
From the website of
Noam D. Elkies,
Harvard mathematician:
SLUMMERVILLE |
Somerville, |
Where the livin’ is sleazy: |
Folk are humpin’ |
And the chillun is high. |
Oh yo’ daddy’s rich, |
‘Cos yo’ ma is good lookin’ |
So hush, ugly baby, |
Or I’ll make you cry. |
[“Parody by Noam D. Elkies;
not the original lyrics,
of course.”]
Related material
from Log24 on
April 10, 2006:
Noam D. Elkies
The Line
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 6 (italics are mine):
“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.”
STRANGER – We are far from having exhausted the more exact thinkers who treat of being and not-being. But let us be content to leave them, and proceed to view those who speak less precisely; and we shall find as the result of all, that the nature of being is quite as difficult to comprehend as that of not-being.
THEAETETUS – Then now we will go to the others.
STRANGER – There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence.
THEAETETUS – How is that?
STRANGER – Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body.
THEAETETUS – I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are.
STRANGER – And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.
THEAETETUS – True.
— Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 18:
“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…
hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”
What Pirsig means by “quality” is close to what Yagoda means, in the previous entry, by “style.”
Lila
Robert M. Pirsig, Lila, 1991 Bantam hardcover, p. 111:
“… Quality ‘is’ morality. Make no mistake about it. They’re ‘identical.’ And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world.”
— Quoted at
The Alexander-Pirsig Connection.
“This creative activity of the Divine is called lila, the play of God, and the world is seen as the stage of the divine play.”
— Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Third Edition, Updated, 1991, Shambhala paperback, pp. 87-88, quoted here
“All the world’s a stage.”
The Quality with No Name
And what is good, Phædrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance
Brad Appleton discusses a phrase of Christopher Alexander:
“The ‘Quality Without A Name‘ (abbreviated as the acronym QWAN) is the quality that imparts incommunicable beauty and immeasurable value to a structure….
Alexander proposes the existence of an objective quality of aesthetic beauty that is universally recognizable. He claims there are certain timeless attributes and properties which are considered beautiful and aesthetically pleasing to all people in all cultures (not just ‘in the eye of the beholder’). It is these fundamental properties which combine to generate the QWAN….”
See, too, The Alexander-Pirsig Connection.
Homer
“No matter how it’s done, you won’t like it.”
— Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila
“The evening before Harriet injures Roy,
she asks him, in a restaurant car,
whether he has read Homer.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural
“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
— Cole Porter lyric for a show that opened
on December 30, 1948
Judy Davis as Harriet Bird
Thine eyes I love…
Shakespeare, Sonnet 132
“Roy’s Guenevere-like lover is named Memo Paris,
presumably the face that launched a thousand strikes.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural
Nicole Kidman
as Memo Paris
“Iris is someone to watch over Roy.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural
Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch
From the second-draft screenplay
for The Sting,
with Robert Redford as Hooker:
HOOKER
(shuffling a little)
I, ah…thought you might wanna come out for a while. Maybe have a drink or somethin’.
LORETTA
You move right along, don’t ya.
HOOKER
(with more innocence than confidence)
I don’t mean nothin’ by it. I just don’t know many regular girls, that’s all.
LORETTA
And you expect me to come over, just like that.
HOOKER
If I expected somethin’, I wouldn’t be still standin’ out here in the hall.
Loretta looks at him carefully. She knows it’s not a line.
LORETTA
(with less resistance now)
I don’t even know you.
HOOKER
(slowly)
You know me. I’m just like you…
It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.
The two just stand there in silence a second. There’s nothing more to say. She stands back and lets him in.
Iris Murdoch on Plato’s Form of the Good,
by Joseph Malikail:
“For Murdoch as for Plato, the Good belongs to Plato’s Realm of Being not the Realm of Becoming…. However, Murdoch does not read Plato as declaring his faith in a divine being when he says that the Good is
the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which [one who] would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed (Republic…).
Though she acknowledges the influence of Simone Weil in her reading of Plato, her understanding of Plato on Good and God is not Weil’s (1952, ch.7)*. For Murdoch,
Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos in the Republic… is a façon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the ‘gods.’ There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person (1992, 38)**.
As she understands Plato:
The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo … Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give the sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God (ibid., 475)**.
Mary Warnock, her friend and fellow-philosopher, sums up Murdoch’s metaphysical view of the Vision of the Good:
She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God.
Or as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.’ (1992, 496)**”
*Weil, Simone. 1952. Intimations of Christianity Among The Ancient Greeks. Ark Paperbacks, 1987/1952.
**Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. London: Chatto and Windus.
From the conclusion of Lila,
by Robert M. Pirsig:
“Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame.”
Hope of Heaven
This title is taken from a John O’Hara novel I like very much. It seems appropriate because today is the birthday of three admirable public figures:
“No one can top Eleanor Powell – not even Fred Astaire.” — A fellow professional. Reportedly, “Astaire himself said she was better than him.”
That’s as good as it gets.
Let us hope that Powell, Hawkins, and Q are enjoying a place that Q, quoting Plato’s Phaedrus, described as follows:
“a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents!”
This is a rather different, and more pleasant, approach to the Phaedrus than the one most familiar to later generations — that of Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance. Both approaches, however, display what Pirsig calls “Quality.”
One of my own generation’s closest approaches to Quality is found in the 25th Anniversary Report of the Harvard Class of 1964. Charles Small remarks,
“A lot of other stuff has gone down the drain since 1964, of course, besides my giving up being a mathematician and settling into my first retirement. My love-hate relationship with the language has intensified, and my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total. I read a little, but not systematically. I’ve always been enthralled by the notion that Time is an illusion, a trick our minds play in an attempt to keep things separate, without any reality of its own. My experience suggests that this is literally true, but not the kind of truth that can be acted upon….
I’m always sad and always happy. As someone says in Diane Keaton’s film ‘Heaven,’ ‘It’s kind of a lost cause, but it’s a great experience.'”
I agree. Here are two links to some work of what is apparently this same Charles Small:
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