A date in the previous post suggests a flashback to March 11, 2014,
and a post on that date titled "Dark Fields of the Republic"—
This uncredited translation of Plato is, Google Books tells us,
by “Francis MacDonald Cornfield.” The name is an error,
but the error is illuminating —
* See posts mentioning the novel with that title, republished as Limitless.
The President of the United States
on the Sony hacking
in his Dec. 19 press conference:
"But let’s talk of the specifics of what we now know.
The FBI announced today and we can confirm that
North Korea engaged in this attack. I think it says
something interesting about North Korea that they
decided to have the state mount an all-out assault
on a movie studio because of a satirical movie…."
This post was suggested in part by the contemptibly
misleading remarks of Carl Sagan in his "Cosmos"
TV series (see yesterday's Colorful Tale) and by the
following remarks in a Presentation Zen piece dated
March 11, 2014, "More Storytelling Lessons from 'Cosmos',"
praising Sagan's vulgarizations —
"Good storytelling causes the audience to ask questions
as your narrative progresses. As the storyteller you can
ask questions directly, but often a more interesting approach
is to present the material in a way that triggers the audience
to come up with the questions themselves. And yet we must
not be afraid to leave some (many?) questions unanswered.
When we think of a story we may think of clear conclusions
and neat, clear endings, but reality can be quite a bit more
complicated than that."
This post was suggested by today's previous post, Depth,
by Plato's Diamond, and by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's
recent fanciful fiction about Plato.
Plato, Republic , Book II, Paul Shorey translation at Perseus—
“Consider,” [382a] said I; “would a god wish to deceive, or lie, by presenting in either word or action what is only appearance?” “I don’t know,” said he. “Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?” “What do you mean?” he said. “This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.” “I don’t understand yet either.” “That is because you suspect me of some grand meaning,” [382b] I said; “but what I mean is, that deception in the soul about realities, to have been deceived and to be blindly ignorant and to have and hold the falsehood there, is what all men would least of all accept, and it is in that case that they loathe it most of all.” “Quite so,” he said.
Related material —
A meditation from the Feast of St. Francis, 2012 —
A post from Sept. 30, 2012, the reported date of death
for British children's author Helen Nicoll —
The New Criterion on the death of Hilton Kramer —
This uncredited translation of Plato is, Google Books tells us,
by "Francis MacDonald Cornfield." The name is an error,
but the error is illuminating —
From Jim Holt’s Aug. 29, 2008, review of
The Same Man:
George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War
by David Lebedoff
“Orwell thought ‘good prose is like a window pane,’
forceful and direct. Waugh was an elaborate stylist
whose prose ranged from the dryly ironical to the
richly ornamented and rhetorical. Orwell was solitary
and fiercely earnest. Waugh was convivial and
brutally funny. And, perhaps most important, Orwell
was a secularist whose greatest fear was the
emergence of Big Brother in this world. Waugh was
a Roman Catholic convert whose greatest hope lay
with God in the next.”
The Orwell quote is from “Why I Write.”
A search for the original yields…
Detail:
Synchronicity:
See, too, in this journal the
Chinese character for “field”—
Review:
An image suggested by Google's observance today
of Mies van der Rohe's 126th birthday—
Related material:
See also yesterday's Chapter and Verse by Stanley Fish,
and today's Arts & Letters Daily .
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