opposing forces

'While memory has been portrayed as an automatic system of recall, considering how it serves us in an evolutionary sense gives a more accurate picture. Memory, much like everything at its base, is adapted to help us survive. "There is only a limited evolutionary advantage in being able to reminisce about what happened to you, but there is a huge payoff in being able to use that information to work out what is going to happen next. ... Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does."'

Images

'Je ne me représentais pas alors les villes, les paysages, les monuments, comme des tableaux plus ou moins agréables, découpés çà et là dans une même matière, mais chacun d’eux comme un inconnu, essentiellement différent des autres, dont mon âme avait soif et qu’elle aurait profit à connaître. Combien ils prirent quelque chose de plus individuel encore, d’être désignés par des noms, des noms qui n’étaient que pour eux, des noms comme en ont les personnes. Les mots nous présentent des choses une petite image claire et usuelle comme celles que l’on suspend aux murs des écoles pour donner aux enfants l’exemple de ce qu’est un établi, un oiseau, une fourmilière, choses conçues comme pareilles à toutes celles de même sorte. Mais les noms présentent des personnes –et des villes qu’ils nous habituent à croire individuelles, uniques comme des personnes– une image confuse qui tire d’eux, de leur sonorité éclatante ou sombre, la couleur dont elle est peinte uniformément comme une de ces affiches, entièrement bleues ou entièrement rouges, dans lesquelles, à cause des limites du procédé employé ou par un caprice du décorateur, sont bleus ou rouges, non seulement le ciel et la mer, mais les barques, l’église, les passants.'

Larger Hope

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last – far off – at last to all,
And every winter change to spring.

Style, science and nonsense

'Thus managing cause and effect to discriminate,
The student must fruitlessly try to eliminate,
And painfully learn, that in order to do it, he
Must find the Equation of Continuity.
The reason is this, that the tough little element,
Which the force of impulsion to beat to a jelly meant,
Was endowed with a property incomprehensible,
And was "given," in the language of Shop, "inexten-sible."
It therefore with such pertinacity odd defied
The force which the length of the chain should have modified,
That its stubborn example may possibly yet recall
These overgrown rhymes to their prosody metrical.
The condition is got by resolving again,
According to axes assumed in the plane.
If then you reduce to the tangent and normal,
You will find the equation more neat tho' less formal.'

Beale Street Blues

...'And he picked up a saxophone, grunting and rasping,
The red-hot horn in his hot hands clasping,
And he played a typical radio jazz;
He started an earthquake, he knew what for,
And at last he started the late World War.
Our nerves all razzed, and our thoughts all jazzed,
Booth and his saxophone started the war!'...

Carol of The Bells

Always on the Mark

His journalism, in which he championed the victims of tyranny and stupidity and “Islamofascism” (his coinage), takes its rightful place on the shelf along with that of his paradigm, Orwell. As for the wit … one day we were talking about Stalin. I observed that Stalin, eventual murderer of twenty, thirty—forty?—million, had trained as a priest. Not skipping a beat, Christopher remarked, “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?” I thought—as I did perhaps one thousand times over the course of our three-decade long tutorial—Wow. A few days later, at a dinner, the subject of Stalin having come up, I ventured to my dinner partner, “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?” The lady to whom I had proferred this thieved aperçu stopped chewing her salmon, repeated the line I had so casually tossed off, and said with frank admiration, “That’s brilliant.” I was tempted, but couldn’t quite bear to continue the imposture, and told her that the author of this nacreous witticism was in fact none other than Christopher. She laughed and said, “Well, everything he says is brilliant.” Yes, everything he said was brilliant. It was a feast of reason and a flow of soul, and, if the author of “God Is Not Great” did not himself believe in the concept of soul, he sure had one, and it was a great soul.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/12/postscript-christopher-hitchens.html#ixzz1goufB9gU

Chrysostom of unbelievers

...Hitchens made his living as an impolite but often persuasive contrarian whose amusing performances, in person and in writing, were designed to reduce even the most ancient and imaginative hopes and dreams to the size of a pragmatically hopeless six-foot man who proclaimed proudly God Is Not Great–and Mother Teresa wasn’t much better. After all, what could an angry so-called Deity do? Strike him dead at 62?

Of course: The word “Eeyorish” comes from “Eeyor,” the eternally pessimistic donkey in Winnie the Pooh. Only Hitchens would have used this neologism in casual conversation, and only Hitchens would have put it in the context of Balkan conflict. And that was his genius. He had a profound knowledge of English literature, from A.A. Milne to Virginia Woolf.

And what was extraordinary about his late work, given the circumstances, was not so much its content (illuminating as that was) but its quality of consistency, as well as the consistency of its quality. Throughout his ordeal his prose remained lucid, his self-pity absent, and his deadlines met. He never abandoned his convictions or lost his sense of humor, which in its ironic restraint was nearly worthy of the masters (Jane Austen, Dorothy Parker, Grace Paley, et al.).

Declaring

Find them a conscience declared in
an absolute casual
sun, find them a feat
declared by the happy
things
Absolute windows, absolute little lives
Always tell a wall, letter throne
stone desk-life, as it may
That which through
a cautious power dwells, accidental and passing

ça passe ou ça casse

Face aux rumeurs de mésentente qui courent, stigmatisant leur antagonisme ­supposé, elle a riposté : « Seuls lui et moi savons la qualité de notre relation. Ce qui est écrit ne reflète absolument pas la réalité. Nous travaillons harmonieusement ensemble. » Après des débuts houleux, en 2007, l’énergique et volubile Français semble avoir trouvé un registre commun avec cette Allemande calme et sérieuse. « Il suffit de les voir dans l’intimité d’une réunion pour ne pas douter une seconde de leur complicité », soulignent deux proches du président. Au G20 de Cannes, réduit à un champ de ruines pour cause de psychodrame grec, le couple joue de cette connaissance ­mutuelle : « C’est Angela qui va vous expliquer comment je fonctionne », sourit Nicolas Sarkozy devant des chefs d’Etat non européens. Elle, amusée, commence : « Voilà ce qu’il faut savoir de Nicolas… »

shade of reflections

The fish in the fishbowl and the bird in the cage.
You refuse to invent them in the sea or the air.
You stylize or copy once you have seen
their small, agile bodies with your honest eyes.

You love a matter definite and exact,
where the toadstool cannot pitch its camp.
You love the architecture that builds on the absent
and admit the flag simply as a joke.

The steel compass tells its short, elastic verse.
Unknown clouds rise to deny the sphere exists.
The straight line tells of its upward struggle

and the learned crystals sing their geometries.

notwithstanding

The duty lies on us to choose the idea which seems truest, or rather the only one which seems true; for I decline to believe that we can sincerely hesitate between the truth that is only apparent and the one that is real. The moment must always come when we feel that one of these two is possessed of more truth than the other. And to this truth we should cling: in our actions, our words, and our thoughts; in our art, in our science, in the life of our feelings and intellect. Its definition, perhaps, may elude us. It may possibly bring not one grain of reassuring conviction. Nay, essentially, perhaps, it may be but the merest impression, though profounder and more sincere than any previous impression.<

Risk Perception

Seemingly smart people can make patently dumb choices because the brain is only the organ with which we think we think. Most of our risk perception decision making happens subconsciously, and relies on instinctive psychological cues and subconscious mental shortcuts we have evolved to help us quickly turn the few facts we have into a judgment about what feels safe and what feels dangerous. This instinctive system works wonderfully in many cases. It has, after all, gotten us this far through evolution’s challenging gantlet.