Accidental Buddhist

'...Few writers have cut through themselves, their assumptions, their romances, so unsentimentally as the intermittently reclusive Frenchman, who notes in the same book that “We ought at least, for prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people’s views are never in accordance with our own.” And after pages and pages on what he so Buddhistically calls “the variability of the self” and on the tenacity with which we cling to an image of someone even as that person is constantly changing, he simply concludes, “What one knows does not belong to oneself,” as if placing the entire frame of his project in a building without a roof.'

Discusser

'All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter.'

oceanul oval

L’Isolement

Cependant, s’élançant de la flèche gothique,
Un son religieux se répand dans les airs ;
Le voyageur s’arrête, et la cloche rustique
Aux derniers bruits du jour mêle de saints concerts.

contrainte impossible

•   Il faut, Nathanaël, que tu brûles en toi tous les livres.

 Nathanaël, il y a d'admirables préparatifs au sommeil ; il y a d'admirables réveils ; mais il n'y a pas d'admirables sommeils, et je n'aime le rêve que tant que je le crois réalité. Car le plus beau sommeil ne vaut pas le moment où l'on se réveille.

ICCS

 iccs2014

ICTAI

I FOUND the phrase to every thought    I ever had, but one;

perchance

The Only News I know
Is Bulletins all Day
From Immortality.
The Only Shows I see 

Tomorrow and Today 

 Perchance Eternity.

contrariwise

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'   (Lewis Carroll)

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'
Lewis Carroll
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/lewis_carroll.html#TsMf7eOiT33x9IA5.99

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'
Lewis Carroll
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/lewis_carroll.html#TsMf7eOiT33x9IA5.99

von Goethe

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm - in the real world all rests on perseverance. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/johann_wolfgang_von_goeth.html#ZEEC2gxe8o6mwZpk.99

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/johann_wolfgang_von_goeth.html#ZEEC2gxe8o6mwZpk.99

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/johann_wolfgang_von_goeth.html#ZEEC2gxe8o6mwZpk.99

Outside world

...'He is unabashedly literary and so unapologetic in his encyclopedic range that he remains an exemplar of what literature can be: at once timeless and time bound, universal and elitist, a mix of uncompromising high seriousness with moments of undiminished slapstick. Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust—not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved. Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.'

riddling

Bibliothèque

...'Car je hais la dorure et la fioriture
Sur l’acajou trop dense ou tels autres bois lourds :
Tout au plus des pattes en cuivre et des chefs d’ours ;

Ou bien du bois de rose aux coins, où se torture
Le rococo de Boulle et celui de Boucher…
Ou des planches au long d’un mur, où tout nicher !'...

ouvrage

Modern Perception

The constellations we inhabit, whether in the wunderkammer of the collector, or on the pages of the essay, represent the latest configuration of our reality.

En roulant

'Tant de fois, au cours de ma vie, la réalité m'avait déçu parce que au moment où je la percevais, mon imagination qui était mon seul organe pour jouir de la beauté, ne pouvait s'appliquer à elle en vertu de la loi inévitable qui veut qu'on ne puisse imaginer que ce qui est absent. Et voici que soudain l'effet de cette dure loi, s'était trouvé neutralisé, suspendu, par un expédient merveilleux de la nature, qui avait fait miroiter une sensation - bruit de la fourchette et du marteau,...

Quelquefois que

 

•  Le passé, c'est la seule réalité humaine. Tout ce qui est, est passé.

Rideau de la scène

'Et ils garnissent les murs comme des mouches, jusqu'au plus fond. Et je vois ces centaines de visages blancs. L'homme s'ennuie, et l'ignorance lui est attachée depuis sa naissance. Et ne sachant de rien comment cela commence ou finit, c'est pour cela qu'il va au théâtre. Et il se regarde lui-même, les mains posées sur les genoux. Et il pleure et il rit, et il n'a point envie de s'en aller.'

quantum indeterminacies

'The compatibilists' main adversaries are incompatibilists, who deny the compatibility of free will and determinism. Some incompatibilists remain agnostic as to whether persons have free will. But most take a further stand regarding the reality or unreality of free will. Some of these incompatibilists, libertarians, hold that at least some persons have free will and that, therefore, determinism is false. Other incompatibilists, hard determinists, have a less optimistic view, holding that determinism is true and that no persons have free will. In recent times, hard determinism has fallen out of fashion, largely because our best sciences suggest that determinism is false. But the spirit of the hard determinist position is sustained by hard incompatibilists, who hold that there is no free will if determinism is true, but also, that there is no free will if determinism is false.'

harmful for young or old to read

...'Perhaps reading Dickens’s novels quietly alone doesn’t have this immediate effect, but great writing initiates a real relationship that urges us to think and feel as the author does. It is in this sense that it can indeed do harm.'

puzzling question

 
'Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the little glass table. `Now, I'll manage better this time,' she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key, and unlocking the door that led into the garden. Then she went to work nibbling at the mushroom (she had kept a piece of it in her pocked) till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and THEN-she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the coolfountains.'

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Screencast

• Bertrand Russell 

• Henri Bergson 

• Lewis Carroll 

• Honoré de Balzac 

• Marcel Proust

• Henry James

   

 

generating ideas

'Powerful ideas emerge from particular places— places both figurative and literal. Figuratively, people need to find common ground before they can come together to find new solutions to difficult problems. Literally—well, some places just seem to provide inspiration. They attract creative people who feel more productive and more open to new possibilities when they are there and, as a result, innovation happens. '

misty

Orientations

deviation constraints

The uncertainty principle simply says that for some pairs of questions to the oddsmaker, the answers may be interrelated. Famously, the answer to the question of a particle’s position is constrained by the answer to the question of its velocity, and vice versa. In particular, if we have a huge ensemble of systems each prepared in the same quantum state, the more the position is narrowed down, the less the velocity is, and vice versa.

Conundrum

 

'I think the beginnings of an answer may be found in Aristotle’s notion of “formation.”  To wrestle with basic questions about the nature of ourselves or the world we inhabit or the interface between the two or how creatures such as we should behave in such a world forms us in some way.  '

failed to identify

feeling for art

 

"Wasn't it Sophocles," he asked, "who prayed for the time when he would be delivered from the wild beast of passion that devoured his heart-strings?"

Spiritive, Appetitive, and Reasoning.

'They are told that people generally are guided primarily by one part of their soul, like being left-handed or right-handed. They are told that they have the capacity for being guided primarily by reason and are able to control the balance of the parts of their soul. They are told that those who are superior have the right and the duty to rule absolutely for the good of society. '

Indecisively

'The centrality of dreams in his stories also reflects Freud’s certainty about the significance of the dream life. The spread of Freudianism and the rise of Kafka’s reputation ran, not without good reason, in parallel. Kafka reads like Freud fictionalized. Freud’s reputation is now quite properly in radical decline; Kafka’s, somehow, lives on. Without belief in Freud, Kafka’s stories lose their weight and authority.'

Translating

'An idea need have no intrinsic reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode. But any idea that has representative reality must surely come from a cause that contains at least as much intrinsic reality as there is representative reality in the idea. For if we suppose that an idea contains something that was not in its cause, it must have got this from nothing; yet the kind of reality that is involved in something’s being represented in the mind by an idea, though it may not be very perfect, certainly isn’t nothing, and so it can’t come from nothing. It might be thought that since the reality that I am considering in my ideas is merely representative, it might be possessed by its cause only representatively and not intrinsically. That would mean that the cause is itself an idea, because only ideas have representative reality. But that would be wrong. Although one idea may perhaps originate from another, there can’t be an infinite regress of such ideas; eventually one must come back to an idea whose cause isn’t

perspectively

'So the trance ended, and we grew
Restless, we knew not how or why;
And there were sudden gusts that blew
Our dreaming banners into storm;
We wore the uncertain crumbling form
Of a brown swirl of windy leaves,
A phantom shape that stirs and heaves
Shuddering from earth, to fall again
With a dry whisper of withered rain.'

Cold Commemorative

'Umbra ta, lovindu-se de ziduri,

iar se sparge-n cioburi colorate.

Oh, de-aceea m-ai zărit în stradă

adunând pierdutele-i pătrate.

Şi s-o fac la loc, în ceasul nopţii,

peste geamuri ţi le-aşez cu grijă,

verzi, albastre, galbene şi roşii,

încoifate-n creştet cu o sprijă.'

(

Nichita Stănescu - Vitraliu )

Iff

'While the meaning of artefacts is subjective and even their existence, as I have pointed out, is subject to selection and pressure, it does seem that up to a certain extent they act as independent witnesses. We can read many meanings into a text but, to a certain extent, a spade is a spade. Either a civilization developed a steam engine or it did not. Therefore, the archaeological record is to a certain extent uncontaminated by the grosser swings of theoretical fashion. '

"Check!"

'By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: `but it doesn't matter much,' thought Alice, `as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.' So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for a little more conversation with her friend.'

Nullius in verba

'We have undoubtedly shifted the nature of the correspondences, and their alignments one to another. With the demise of alchemy, we have looked increasingly to experiment and measurable results to dictate the nature of our science. Alchemy is the last moment when the magical is still permitted as a licit element of the genuinely scientific enterprise, and it is a moment that has a sort of afterlife in Newton, who would appear to have regarded force at a distance as an occult power, and who never gave up his alchemical experiments to the end of his life.'

Une démarche s'impose

«les mouvements autonomistes avaient pensé pouvoir trouver une légitimité à leurs discours grâce à la construction européenne. C'est à dire qu'on serait passé d'une Europe des nations à une Europe supranationale reconnaissant d'autres modes d'organisations...»

Ignotum per æque ignotum

'Out of the stories of Greek myth modern poets and painters have constructed new “classical” worlds, not, however, really classical, but transmuted in their crucibles and tempered into romanticism. In spirit, if not in letter, the legends told and painted by the new artists are as unlike the old, as the Arcadia of the Renaissance is unlike the Arcadia of geography. But it is from the new vessels that we drink in our early childhood. By the time we can read Greek literature for ourselves, our imaginations are dyed with romantic colours; the poetry of Homer and Euripides is laden with imported qualities; the light of antiquity comes to us through painted panes. If we do not take good heed, the impression produced by Tennyson’s Lotos Eaters, a poem trembling with modern emotion, will imperceptibly adulterate the nature of our pleasure in the passage of Homer’s Lotophagoi with the melancholy languor of the afternoon.'

fastidiosité

Quand vous me montrez l’hirondelle
Qui part jusqu’au prochain avril,
Pourquoi mon âme se meurt-elle ?
Quand vous me montrez l’hirondelle,
C’est que je pense à mon exil.

Habit of mind

'..the doubt of one who would rather walk in mystery than in false lights, who awaits that he may win, and who prefers the broken fragments of truth to the imposing completeness of a delusion.'

Characteristic

'Life seen throughout as a countless show of the finest works of Art; Life shaped, and purged of the irrelevant, the gross, and the extravagant; Life, as it were, spiritually selected ­that is Truth; a thing as multiple, and changing, as subtle, and strange, as Life itself, and as little to be bound by dogma.  Truth admits but the one rule:  No deficiency, and no excess!  Disobedient to that rule ­nothing attains full vitality.  And secretly fettered by that rule is Art, whose business is the creation of vital things.That aesthete, to be sure, was right, when he said:  “It is Style that makes one believe in a thing; nothing but Style.”  For, what is Style in its true and broadest sense save fidelity to idea and mood, and perfect balance in the clothing of them? '

types d’anglicismes

'... L’emploi des équivalents français devient alors obligatoire au sein des administrations et des services publics, en remplacement des termes étrangers. La loi Toubon a aussi rendu obligatoire l’utilisation du français dans la publicité. Ainsi, les supports publicitaires sur lesquels apparaissent des slogans ou des textes utilisant des mots en anglais doivent «impérativement» en donner la traduction (qui apparaît généralement en petits caractères et précédée d’un astérisque).'

formalized symbols

'When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose - not simply accept - the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to mak on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.'

challenge to reality

“‘Pataphysics is the science which lies as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics lies beyond physics, in any direction.”

ocurént

"Dacă sistemele vechi s-au golit de conţinut, nu înseamnă că nu mai pot fi create altele noi. Dar, dacă sistemele şi stilurile sînt greu de înlocuit, fiind dificilă construcţia altora noi, dacă nu chiar imposibilă, jocul nesfîrşit al nuanţelor oferă spiritului creator al popoarelor şi oamenilor posibilităţi nelimitate. (Petre Ţuţea, Filozofia nuanţelor, 1969)

l'optique illusoire

.. 'Tout, la cendre latine et la poussière grecque,
Se mêlaient. J’étais haut comme un in-folio.
Deux voix me parlaient. L’une, insidieuse et ferme,
Disait :  » La Terre est un gâteau plein de douceur ;  Je puis  (et ton plaisir serait alors sans terme !)
Te faire un appétit d’une égale grosseur.  »
Et l’autre :  » Viens ! oh ! viens voyager dans les rêves,
Au delà du possible, au delà du connu !  »
Et celle-là chantait comme le vent des grèves,..'

fictiveness of fiction

The phrase ‘in reality’ had pointed us, of course, to the dimensions of reality which are available within the book, its planar perspectives. And in terms of the ‘slight digression’, all fiction is a digression from the serious business of acting. All writing that analyses human motivation or describes the psychological condition of its characters is to some degree recapitulating the fable of Achilles and the tortoise: to the extent that every distance is infinitely divisible into more and more minute units of description, writing is a series of parentheses within parentheses. Its very nature is to be digressive. We are in one sense getting nowhere...

picking up

'The problem, of course, is that the "human mind meld" is an unfiltered process. We might like to think that we have completely original minds, but we are easily influenced by others and have an "unknowingness" of how this mind meld works. '

alléguant

'Foarte puţine din opiniile comunicate de Noica unuia sau altuia din numeroşii ofiţeri (care „lucrau spre binele poporului român“–Noica dixit!) au devenit publice, şi anume în „Glasul Patriei“, oficina de propagandă a regimului. Destule sunt aproape de nereprodus. Iată doar o jumătate de rând din cele 29 de pagini ale unei declaraţii, date la ieşirea din închisoare, în 1964, despre Emil Cioran:  „Nu-i un om, e un refuz uman“.'

affordability

When we teach children to simply memorize material so they can pass tests, we give children access to the knowledge on only one side of the box. So when life tosses this box up (as it certainly will), it may not land on a side that is visible and accessible. In this case, the kids don’t have access to the knowledge. The end-result answers are not the only things that kids need to know. They need to learn to navigate the course of acquiring knowledge -essentially, to get to the answers by being curious and coming up with a lot of questions, a lot of whys. They need to get accustomed to learning from different directions, playing with concepts, and figuring out how to ask the whys in order to gain access to knowledge.

La postérité de Victor Hugo se porte bien

Les fléchettes, même les plus acérées, adressées à un tel géant, sont dérisoires. Au-delà même du vaste et protéiforme génie de Victor Hugo, nous lui devons les bases d'un humanisme et d'une fraternité, concrètement vécus de jour en jour, d'oeuvre en oeuvre.

Sables mouvants

Démons et merveilles

Vents et marées     

Motivating cause

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell

Adducing

Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent, she was evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to her, and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties. A single glance was enough to show that....

Randomly

As for living standards, only the most historically ignorant would deny that it hasn’t raised them. Unfortunately it doesn’t stop the whingers in the comments section from claiming they’ve suddenly found themselves back in Dickensian Britain. It would help if they’d read Dickens, of course. Crucially, however, the purpose of capitalism is simple and easy to understand – obviously too easy for the sophisticated minds of Orr and her ilk: it’s to make profits for the shareholders and business owners.

Emphasize

Holidays

New Year's Day

 Rummy

Birthday

Poker