Rite of Spring

Anna Karenina

This rainy Saturday morning I began rereading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  The translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is immeasurably superior to the translation I read previously.  The Pevear/Volokhonsky team are known for their Dostoevsky translations, particularly The Brothers Karamazov.  I found that couldn't put it down and read straight through the first book.  I'm particularly taken with the characters of Oblonsky and Levin.  The two are set up to be something of opposing tendencies, poles apart, yet friends.  They seem to be very close to aspects of my own personality, Levin, my dark, moody, obstinate, country loving, conservative side and Stepan, my light, cheerful, easygoing, cosmopolitan, liberal side. 

I'm deeply impressed, not only with Tolstoy's depth of insight into human beings and their world, but in his ability to articulate his insight clearly and convincingly.  Not a single character's thoughts, moods, or feelings are at any time foreign to my own experience of internal dialogue.  Tolstoy is such an astute observer of human beings that I believe that, upon reading his work, I would feel self conscious were I to be in his presence.

I like this excerpt from the libretto of Die Fledermaus:

Himmlisch ist's, wenn ich bezwungen

Meine irdische Begier;

Aber doch wenn's nicht gelungen

Hatt'ich auch recht hübsch Plaistir!

In English:

Heavenly it would be to conquer

My earthly lusts;

But though I've not succeeded,

I still have lots of pleasure!

As he said this Stepan Arkadyich smiled subtly, Levin also could not help smiling.

Update:

I awoke at 3:00 AM this Sunday morning, and being unable to return to sleep, and with little email or other internet work to fritter away my time with, I picked up Anna Karenina again.

I'm up to chapter 14 (in book 2) and I can feel the pull of Levin drawing me away.  It's no secret that Tolstoy likes him best.  The country life, the solitude and the soon to be domestic life… This must be the meaning of life!  It's still raining outside, and I can smell the wet soil on the cold November air through my open window.  That's a smell that I enjoy… dirt.  No really, it smells wonderful!

"But of Levins there are a great many in Russia, almost as many as Oblonskys." -Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer

The Sand-Reckoner

There are some ... who think that the number of [grains of] sand is infinite.... There are some who, without regarding it as infinite, yet think that no number has been named which is great enough.... But I will try to show you [numbers that] exceed not only the number of the mass of sand equal to the Earth filled up ... but also that of a mass equal in magnitude to the Universe.

-Archimedes, The Sand-Reckoner

http://learner.org/resources/series210.html

I love this game

http://metroidr.brpxqzme.net/index.php?act=resdb&param=02&c=1&id=356

Cueva de los Cristales

Cueva de los Cristales, Chihauahua, Mexico.

Image Source.

DIMD

I've been listening to ohGr's newest release a lot:

I particularly like "Pepper" folowed by "D.Angel"

Dasein

Man Has No Nature:

By José Ortega y Gasset

The stone is given its existence. It need not fight for being what it is—a stone in the field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing but not the reality. This he has to conquer hour after hour. Man must earn his life, not only economically but metaphysically.

And all this for what reason? Obviously—but this is repeating the same thing in other words—because man's being and nature's being do not fully coincide. Because man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it. Dante would have likened him to a boat drawn up on the beach with one end of its keel in the water and the other in the sand. What is natural in him is realized by itself; it presents no problem. That is precisely why man does not consider it to be his true being. His extranatural part, on the other hand, is not there from the outset and of itself; it is but an aspiration, a project of life. And this we feel to be our true being; we call it our personality, our self. Our extra—and antinatural portion, however, must not be interpreted in terms of any of the older spiritual philosophies. I am not interested now in the so-called Geist, a pretty confused idea laden with speculative wizardry.

If the reader reflects a little upon the meaning of the entity he calls his life, he will find that it is the attempt to carry out a definite program or project of existence. And his self—each man's self—is nothing but this devised program. Thus man begins by being something that has no reality, neither corporeal nor spiritual; he is a project as such, something which is not yet but aspires to be. One may object that there can be no program without somebody having it, without an idea, a mind, a soul, or whatever it is called. I cannot discus this thoroughly because it would mean embarking on a course of philosophy. But I will say this: although the project of being a great financier has to be conceived of in an idea, "being" the project is different from holding the idea. In fact, I find no difficulty in thinking this idea but I am very far from being this project.

Here we come upon a formidable and unparalleled character which makes man unique in the universe. We are dealing—and let the disquieting strangeness of the case be well noted—with an entity whose being consists not in what is already, but in what is not yet, a being that consists in not-yet-being. Everything else in the world is what it is. An entity whose mode of being consists in what is already, whose potentiality coincides at once with his reality, we call a "thing." Things are given their being ready-made.

At every moment of my life there open before me diverse possibilities: I can do this or that. If I do this, I shall be A the moment after; if I do that, I shall be B. At the present moment the reader may stop reading me or may go on. And, however slight the importance of this article, according as he does the one or the other the reader will be A or will be B, will have made of himself an A or a B. Man is the entity that makes itself, an entity which traditional ontology only stumbled upon precisely as its course was drawing to a close, and which it in consequence gave up the attempt to understand: the causa sui. With this difference, that the causa sui had only to "exert itself" in being the cause of itself and not in determining what self it was going to cause. It had, to begin with, a self previously determined and invariable, consistent, for example, to infinity.

But man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power. By a coincidence that is not casual, the doctrine of the living being, when it seeks in tradition for the concepts that are still more or less valid, find only those which the doctrine of the divine being tried to formulate. If the reader has resolved now to go on reading into the next moment, it will be, in the last instance, because doing this is what is most in accordance with the general program he has mapped out of his life, and hence with the man of determination he has resolved to be. This vital program is the ego of each individual, his choice out of diverse possibilities of being which at every instant open before him.

Concerning these possibilities of being the following remarks fall to be made:

1. That they likewise are not presented to me. I must find them for myself, either on my own or through the medium of those of my fellows with whom my life brings me in contact. I invent projects of being and doing in the light of circumstance. This alone I come upon, this alone is given me: circumstance. It is too often forgotten that man is impossible without imagination, without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life, to "ideate" the character he is going to be. Whether he be original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

2. That among these possibilities I must choose. Hence, I am free. But, be it well understood I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not. Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity that, apart from and previous to such pursuit, is already possessed of fixed being. To be free means to be lacking the in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed, stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability.

In order to speak, then, of man's being we must fist elaborate a non-Eleatic concept of being, as others have elaborated a non-Euclidean geometry. The time has come for that seed sown by Heraclitus to bring forth its mighty harvest...

Man invents for himself a program of life, a static form of being, that gives a satisfactory answer to the difficulties posed for him by circumstance. He essays this form of life, attempts to realize this imaginary character he has resolved to be. He embarks on the essay full of illusions and prosecutes the experiment with thoroughness. This means that he comes to believe deeply that his character is his real being. But meanwhile the experience has made apparent the shortcomings and limitations of the said program of life. It does not solve all the difficulties, and it creates new ones of its own. When first seen it was full face, with the light shining upon it: hence the illusions, the enthusiasm, the delights believed in store. With the back view its inadequacy is straightway revealed. Man thinks out another program of life. But this second program is drawn up in the light, not only of circumstance, but also of the first. One aims at avoiding in the new project the drawbacks of the old. In the second, therefore, the fist is still active; it is preserved in order to be avoided. Inexorably man shrinks from being what he was. On the second project of being, the second thorough experiment, there follows a third, forged in the light of the second and first, and so on. Man "goes on being" and "unbeing"—living. He goes on accumulating being—the past; he goes on making for himself a being through his dialectical series of experiments. This is s a dialectic not of logical but precisely historical reason—the Realdialektik dreamt of somewhere in his papers by Dilthey, the writer to whom we owe more than to anyone else concerning the idea of life, and who is, to my mind, the most important thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century.

In what does this dialectic that will not tolerate the facile anticipation of logical dialectic consist? This is what we have to find out on the basis of facts. We must know what is this series, what are its stages, and of what nature is the link between one and the next. Such a discovery is what would be called history were history to make this its objective, were it, that is to say, to convert itself into historical reason.

Here, then, awaiting our study, lies man's authentic "being"—stretching the whole length of his past. Man is what happened to him, what he has done. Other things might have happened to him or have been done by him, this constitutes a relentless trajectory of experiences that he carries on his back as the the vagabond his bundle of all he possesses. Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being. In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only on fixed, pre-established, and given line bu which he may chart his course, only one limit; the past. The experiments already made with life narrow man's future. If we do not know what he is going to be, we know what he is not going to be. Man lives in view of the past.

Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is—history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man.

The Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib

In my last post, I mentioned that I'm not a big fan of Science Fiction. Perhaps I'm catching the bug... I'm rereading Dune and enjoying it. I particularly like this quote:

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection all things move toward death.

-from "The Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan