A two-page spread from The New Yorker of Sept. 7, 1968
Detail, end of page 133 text . . .
In the full two-page spread, note the passage from the ad on the left —
"So long old friend" — to the ad on the right —
Swim with the Day People
Dance with the Night People
Come with the Fun People.
This passage may be viewed as as a metanarrative description of the
passage from a vale of tears to a more pleasant environment.
|
"For all their wealth of content, for all the sum of history and social institution vested in them, music, mathematics, and chess are resplendently useless (applied mathematics is just higher plumbing, a kind of music for the police band). They are metaphysically trivial, irresponsible. They refuse to relate outward, to take reality for arbiter. This is the source of their witchery."
— George Steiner on chess in “A Death of Kings,” |
Steiner says that mathematics refuses "to relate outward,
to take reality for arbiter."
Related reading . . .
"The bond with reality is cut."
— Hans Freudenthal, 1962
This post was suggested by a mention of Colorado Springs
in a New York Times obituary from yesterday, and a subsequent
search in this journal for a Colorado Springs mathematician . . .
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260629-Minion-in-Wiktionary.jpg
* A phrase by George Steiner from the previous post.
A more operatic phrase . . .
George Steiner on chess in “A Death of Kings,” The New Yorker,
issue dated September 7, 1968, page 133 —
| At the sight of a set, even the tawdriest of plastic pocket sets, one’s fingers arch and a coldness as in a light sleep steals over one’s spine. Not for gain, not for knowledge or renown, but in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach’s inverted canons or Euler’s formula for polyhedra. There, surely, lies one of the real connections. For all their wealth of content, for all the sum of history and social institution vested in them, music, mathematics, and chess are resplendently useless (applied mathematics is just higher plumbing, a kind of music for the police band). They are metaphysically trivial, irresponsible. They refuse to relate outward, to take reality for arbiter. This is the source of their witchery. They tell us, as does a kindred but much later process, abstract art, of man’s unique capacity to “build against the world,” to devise forms that are zany, totally useless, austerely frivolous. Such forms are irresponsible to reality, and therefore inviolate, as is nothing else, to the banal authority of death. |
See also . . .
"Gabriel Ice is supposed to be an 'amiable geek'
whose greed and success as a tech entrepreneur
have turned him to the dark side, but it’s hard to
believe that this kid billionaire and his wife would
choose to live in 'deep hairband country' on the
Upper East Side, in a grand dwelling boasting a
Bösendorfer Imperial in the corner of one of its
public rooms, 'at which generations of hired piano
players have provided hours of Kander & Ebb,
Rodgers & Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber
medleys.' "
— Michiko Kakutani,
review of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge
Related Internet material —
See also LARB on Pynchon's fictional DeepArcher program.
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