Re: The cockiness of callow youth vs. the arrogance of accomplished adulthood: Only the first is forgivable, since you can't expect him to know any better.
millbox: I guess somehow this post got deleted, because I discovered, during my bimonthly email check just now, that disqus sent me your comment on it, but then when I went to reply the original post was nowhere to be found. your comment pasted below.
peter: yeah, my disqus is *&@%ed.
lmao. I’m so showing this to the librarians.
heee. look at how his mouth also gets tinier.
In keeping with last week’s example of doppelgangers in the world of the arts, how ‘bout this one? Bogey and The ‘Bert:
Compare & Contrast
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
—Wittgenstein, Tractatus (1921), tr. Pears & McGuiness (Routledge, 2000), 74.
I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is the place I must be at now.
Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.
—Wittgenstein, (1930) in Culture and Value, tr. Winch (Blackwell, 1980), 7.
But in reality we cannot compare joy with sorrow. Comparison is possible only by the very rapid alternation between two states of mind, and you cannot switch back and forth between the genuine feelings of joy and sorrow as you can shift your eyes between a cat and a dog. Sorrow can only be compared with the memory of joy, which is not at all the same thing as joy itself.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (Vintage, 1951), 91
On the relation between realism and reality
Dorothy Van Ghent on technique in 19th-century English realist novels, for which she suggests a spoon as a better analogy than Hamlet’s mirror:
The “mirror” of the mind shapes what it sees. It does not passively “reflect” things-as-they-are, but creates things-as-they-are. Though we can clearly discriminate the quality of intention shown by a realistic art—and it usually reduces finally to a choice of materials from the field of the quotidian, the commonplace, the mediocre—yet its aim of veraciousness is necessarily one of veraciousness to what the artist sees in the shape-giving, significance-endowing medium of his own mind.
….The question is not one of whether things are really this way or that way, for either vision touches responsive similitudes within us, and God knows what things really are. The question is one of different organizations and different illuminations of the infinite possible qualities of things-as-they-are.
Technique is that which selects among the multitude of possible qualities, organizes them in the finite world of the novel, and holds them in a shape that can catch the light of our own awareness, which, without shapes to fall upon, is ignorant. Technique is like the concave or convex surface of the spoon, and the different turnings and inclinations to which it is liable; technique elongates or foreshortens, and while the rudimentary relationships of common experience remain still recognizable, it reveals astonishing bulges of significance, magnifies certain parts of the anatomy of life, of whose potentialities we had perhaps not been aware, humbles others.
The English Novel: Form and Function (Harper, 1967), 210-11. Originally published 1953. Emphasis added.
Depression is rage spread thin.
—Paul Tillich
The imagination is the romantic.
Wallace Stevens, I forget where
It is always a great crime to deprive a people of its liberty on the pretext that it is using it wrongly.
— Tocqueville, quoted by Camus in his Notebooks: 1935-1942 (ML, 1963), 197.
Photo of Pablo Picasso from LIFE Magazine by Gjon Mili, 1949
The distortion of the minotaur…
