From a post of April 17, 2025 —
Some may interpret this as a chessboard, with the white bishops on
their home squares 39 and 36 and the black bishops on 33 and 30.
"I like to fold my magic carpet, after use,
in such a way as to superimpose
one part of the pattern upon another."
– Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory
Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism
by Alma Steingart (University of Chicago Press, 2023) has an
illustration of interest.
The illustration and its caption are from an article by Ernst Gombrich
in The Atlantic, April 1958.
But seriously . . . For Calvin University —
“Anomalies must be expected along the conceptual frontier
between the temporal and the eternal.”
— The Death of Adam, by Marilynne Robinson, Houghton Mifflin,
1998, essay on Marguerite de Navarre.
“D’exterieur en l’interieur entre
Qui va par moi, et au milieu du centre
Me trouvera, qui suis le point unique,
La fin, le but de la mathematique;
Le cercle suis dont toute chose vient,
Le point ou tout retourne et se maintient.”
— Marguerite de Navarre
From this journal on March 7, 2003 —
Chez Mondrian
Kertész, Paris, 1926
|
The Concise Encyclopedia of Modern World Literature, From an unsigned article on Hermann Broch, page 79 — "Some of the sentences in The Death of Virgil must be the longest in literature. Undoubtedly this prolixity is meant to indicate the endlessly involved nature of human experience. In his earlier trilogy. Die Schlafwandler (1930-2, tr. as The Sleepwalkers, 1932), Broch had tried to show the progressive decay of values in the modern world. He had also, in 1936, published a study of James Joyce (q. v.). Broch was a matltematician and philosopher by training, and the quality of mind that drew him to these studies is reflected in liis creative writing. Like his Virgil, he had finally been driven to the profession of poetry. Now, at the moment of death, actual for Virgil, imagined reality for Broch, the intricate complications of experience break loose in human consciousness. Sanity is perhaps the ability to punctuate. These sentences roll on because in nature there is no full stop. Language cannot impose order on 'this demonic chaos of all separated voices, all separated perceptions, all isolated things, regardless of whether they belong to the present, the past, or the future.' But art is not a state of nature; and paradoxically Broch chooses to give form to his despair of form. His theory of art is that it is a science; he wants it to reflect total reality. It does, but not by spreading scientifically, rather by contracting, as in The Death of Virgil, and so making a finite shape in the infinite." |
As for "the ability to punctuate" . . .
See as well a post from the reported dies natalis of Idris Parry.
Time and the River
Harvard Class of 1964
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report:
"At this writing (November, '88), President-elect Bush has just announced his intention to name me to his Cabinet and to nominate me as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Given the state of play in Washington, I suppose I may find myself in premature retirement by the time this report is published.
That is not an entirely unattractive prospect. Kath (Kathleen Emmet, '64) and I live in an idyllic setting, overlooking the Little Falls of the Potomac, just twelve minutes upstream from the Capitol. She writes– she's now completing a book on American writers in Paris after World War II. Our children (Willy and Jonathan) do what healthy growing twelve- and seven-year-olds do. The river works its way peacefully over the falls and riffles around a woodsy island through the Chain Bridge narrows, and then on into the familar wide mud-basin of Washington– a wholly different world.
When I was an undergraduate, I asked all the adolescent questions. I still do: Why does the river flow the way it does? Why does one move downstream and back? The allure of such simple questions is as great for me today as when we talked of them so seriously and so long at the University Restaurant or the Casablanca, or on the steps of Widener. The only difference seems to be that I'm now a bit more willing to settle for answers that seem simpler, less profound, sometimes even trite. But only a bit."
— Richard Darman, who died today at 64
Requiem for a Curator
"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question
'What is truth?'"
"I confess I do not believe in time.
I like to fold my magic carpet,
after use, in such a way
as to superimpose
one part of the pattern
upon another."
Figure by Coxeter
reminiscent of the
Ojo de Dios of
Mexico's Sierra Madre
In memory of
National Gallery
of Art curator
Philip Conisbee,
who died on
January 16:
|
"the God's-eye of the author"
— Dorothy Sayers, |
"one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see in all directions"
— Vladimir Nabokov, |
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