tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77816465342017086292024-03-18T23:49:18.893+00:00ombhurbhuvaombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.comBlogger1464125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-51697206021747765292024-03-15T09:54:00.003+00:002024-03-15T09:54:25.817+00:00Dmitri Fydorvitch Karamazov packs pistols<p> <span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Dmitri Fydorvitch is on his way to Mokroye and Grushenka and the Pani that has come back to claim her, he that ruined her and left her a prey to a rich merchant, Samsonov. His life is going to change and the pistols won’t save him. Plug the Pole and then himself in a grand guignol of atrocity and take the rap for parricide, Daddy weltering in his blood and brother Ivan Fydorvitch in colloquy with a junior devil. Give me the pistols at once he says to the man he pawned them to. His destiny is there in Mokroye and is the significance of the Elder’s bow before him. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-af0a084e-7fff-d13e-2986-58794ed03d6d"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It is just as De Quincey wrote in essay on ‘The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ tension is heightened by business which delays the denouement of the horrible event that is to come. We give the shopping list, load the troika, show fistfulls of money, describe the grasping nature of the landlord, the foolery of Maximov and Kalegnov. There is an atmosphere of unconstrained hysteria and folly. How are we to go on? Send for Jews with fiddles and cymbals. Dmitri dissolves in tears and then laughs woodenly. Round his head the terrors begin to gather. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Dostoyevsky is at full strength automatic writing here, his genius has taken control and everything must be said. The things that ought not to be said, that are left for us to find, the parallels between the early life of Zosima the Elder and Dmitri are flickering shadows. As in life personalities blend together and at once are separate and alone with personal guilt that denies mitigation. Its not that we should have known but that we in fact did know. A great novelist creates that symbiosis, the sense that we are dramatis personae, flowing together in a single mind.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-24058256349372787512024-03-06T01:40:00.002+00:002024-03-06T01:40:29.213+00:00Leftovers show<p> <span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As I was saying about the connection between Atheism and Technism, Del Noce’s coinage for the fascination with gadget solutions to whatever ails you. ‘Is there an app for that’? As with the secret of Mont Saint Michel lurking at the bottom of a microscope even works of fiction, dramas, shows on tv have that belief that there is a final answer to be given by a sage scientist. This is evident in the rather, for the most part, excellent and imaginative show ‘The Leftovers’ put out by HBO in ‘14 - ‘17. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-67474ab6-7fff-5d0a-bbbb-412c7f761553"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leftovers_(TV_series)" target="_blank">The Leftovers</a></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Its more than a riff on rapture. Heidegger might have been consulted for it, I jest. Much of it has an underlying theme of the ultimate precarity of life and how facing that anxiety can either destroy us or demand authenticity. ‘That’s a lie’ is a constant refrain being said by all the characters in the 3 season show. John Murphey will burn your house down for that. All that is good and we accept the symbolism, shamanistic travels to other worlds, the bureaucratization of sudden departure, the scamming angle, the cult of the Guilty Remnant that adopts smoking as remembering. All of that is brilliant, deep, metaphysically profound, obscure, and simple as death. Then however it goes awry in the third season when they bring in the scientific solution, let’s call it by its true name, a one way teleporter between the two worlds that of the leftovers and that of the departed. Really they ought have, like Iris Dement sings in the theme song of the second series, ‘Let the Mystery Be’. Live in Keatsian Negative Capability.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: #d3e3fd; color: #040c28; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: #d3e3fd; color: #040c28; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.</span></blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span><p></p><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-86687200887438373312024-03-05T07:56:00.000+00:002024-03-05T07:56:17.626+00:00Hope is cheaper than despair.<p>
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<span>My tweets of the moment are grim and dark even melodramatically so. But that’s the nature of the tweet. I write:</span>
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<span>Compared to Repeal (of the 8th Amendment) all other social ‘improvements’ are tinsel and glitter. Ireland is on the skids heading towards a sea of evil.</span>
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<span>At least we haven’t been presented with the argument that ‘durable relationships’ would strengthen marriage, so far.</span>
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<span>By the branches of Rhetoric: No Logos (reasons), Ethos (testimonials from celebrities), lashings of Pathos (emotional manipulation). Such is the referendum debate from the Yes/Yes party.</span>
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<span>At this point I can hardly add much to those sentiments. Repeal did the most serious, indeed deadly, damage to Childhood, Motherhood, Fatherhood, and Family. These proposed amendments are merely tidying around the edges, cleaning up the debris and facilitating the erosion of the nation state and in time its destruction. At this point they look likely to be defeated. I hardly dare hope that this could be a return to moral sanity in the way that some small event could recall a different world. I remember the cop that got one of the pair of serial killers that went around Ireland years ago to confess by asking him if he remembered the day of his First Holy Communion. Everything is captured in Memory as Bergson wrote and can be a key.</span>
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<span>Socio-Political analysis would deny this and point out that a deeply unpopular government is having its claret tapped. That too and the Covidology Codology that continues to rankle even among those who were taken in by it, perhaps especially those. We’ve gone all antithetical as it were or contrary. Bile to be purged, boils to be lanced and the Green Party to be put away like the toys we are bored with and won’t bother to buy batteries for.</span>
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<span>Let’s hope. It’s cheaper than despair and you can always return it.</span>
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<span>Nisargadatta is not promulgating an ontology/epistemology. He uses the existing philosophy of the enquirer as a means to attainment of a path that might lead to enlightenment. The point is finding water by drilling deep not by a multitude of small holes. Sifting through various approaches, realism or idealism, internal or external reality is beside the point for him. Sincere seeking using the dialectical advaitic method of adhiropa/apavada or statement followed by retraction. Maharaj challenges the Questioner’s implicit realism:</span>
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<span></span></p><blockquote>“M: The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness, you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. Have a good look at yourself and all those misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve. Just as all our little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe is in you and cannot be without you.”</blockquote>
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<span> The important thing is getting detached from the panoply of awareness to focus on the central fact which cannot be sublated, the I AM you are in the moment. What are you at with your theories, you can only be distracted by them. By being in the presence of a master one has other business than that.</span>
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<span>On the face of it Maharaj seems to be offering a pure subjective idealism as a ‘final’ theory. Such would be the western way of doing philosophy. In advaita/nondualism the theory ends in the unsayable, the apophatic. Move towards the ‘trikala abheda’ or that which is un-contradicted in the three moments of time; past, present, and future.</span>
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<span>Last word from Nisargadatta Maharaj:</span>
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<span></span></p><blockquote>“Don’t mentalise and verbalise. Just see and be”</blockquote>
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<span>Somebody out on the internet wrote that they were going to read and review the intellectual autobiography of Mortimer Adler called ‘Philosopher at Large’ (pub 1977). What I knew of him was not very much, the ‘How to Read a Book’ which I haven’t got round to yet and the Great Books put out by Encyclopedia Britannica of which I have a few bought second hand which show no sign of having ever had daylight penetrate their inward parts. I have exposed them to UV radiation but the format of double columns marching endlessly is not a genial read.</span>
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<span>So far I have read a couple of chapters and my general impression is that of someone on the spectrum, high functioning Aspergers. The writing is flat, affectless, no descriptions of scenes, people, family only in general terms, friends as foils and interlocutors and always Adler studying all the time. In a big library reading room with books ranged round from A to Z he thinks it is a good idea to work his way around following the alphabet. Taxonomy, Logic guide his construction of the world. He seemed to have no idea about how his assailing his professors with questions, interjections, following up lectures with written objections and and responses to the answers given might be excessive. Another indication of the autistic type is extreme physical awkwardness and lack of interest in such activity. Proficiency in swimming was a requirement for a degree which was denied to him because he refused to go to swimming classes. He would write long philosophical letters to girls that he met. Indeed his record keeping has a touch of graphomania. Whoever has his posthumous papers requires extensive shelving.</span>
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<span>His talk on Aristotle’s account of happiness ( available on you tube) is good and now that he is dead after a long and strenuous life we may ask - was he happy? I don’t know. Acclaim is not sufficient. Was there any joy? Now read on: maybe, I haven’t got to C yet.</span>
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<span>Craft: when the practice becomes absorbed into the writer’s natural intelligence and the active imagination takes over. Ruth Rendall assuming the mask of Barbara Vine writes herself into the story as Faith the narrator of ‘A Dark Adapted Eye’. The title refers to the perceptual adaptation to low light by the eye. Of course it has the metaphorical import of the ‘falling of the scales’ also. Faith has come to the home of her aunts Vera and Eden who live in the rural England in a quiet village. Does a half sister become a half aunt? Helen the daughter by a first marriage of a paternal grandfather lives in a large country home nearby. Faith is avoiding the blitz and she is about eleven when the story opens. A swirl of information and dramatis personae come at you through the opening pages mirroring the narrator’s confusion and as the story progresses everyone takes their places. You are immediately told about the central event which isolates and maims this family history. Vera murdered her sister Eden and has been hanged for the crime. Its as if all the participants had their own observation platform of this landscape bringing horror, denial , revenge, reticence, snobbery, and the make and mend of frugal wartime.</span>
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<span> Faith’s voice changes as she grows through the years of contact with her aunts, her cousin Francis, his capers and later on Vera’s other child Jamie about whom there is a mystery. Who was the father if it was not Gerald the army officer who is serving abroad? All will not be revealed or rather some genteel obscurity of questions will remain at the end. The subtlety of diction reflecting progress towards being an English Literature student at Cambridge is what only instinctual craft can manage. Landscapes become a little more florid, personal reflection more stylised, and the persona of the non-judgemental liberal becomes clearer. But the horror, the horror as the man said will not go away as knowing the precise hour and manner of a death fixes the picture of the family. Faith’s father is Vera’s twin. He’s a respectable bank manager in London and he hides all evidence of connection. He rips out a photo of Vera from its frame and in doing so cuts himself leaving a smudge of blood on it. Barbara Vine must have hesitated over that piece of metaphor but an execution makes Shakespeares of us all.</span>
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<span> This is a why dun it story and the skein of tangled motive is like the jumper which is unraveled to make baby clothes for Jamie and must be washed and ironed to take out the kinks before knitting. I’d read it again. It’s a minor classic, a gothic analogue of ‘Middlemarch’. To say more would be, so to speak, drop stitches.</span>
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The two full brothers Ivan and Aloshya, the former a philosopher wielding arguments from evil to question God, to call him to task; the latter in the monkish garb of a novitiate responding with faith shaken by the examples that he is confronted with. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-e2e55875-7fff-3d8a-7350-692d0a67e043"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But really they are very young and are foolish; opinionated yet ignorant. Not stupid, that can’t be said of them, not in the least, because they want to get to the bottom of things. Young men, there will be terrible things to face before long. Will you be ready to ‘love life more than its meaning’, to live it with ‘your insides’? </span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-17471700564733681002024-01-26T08:29:00.001+00:002024-01-26T08:34:01.789+00:00'So Late in the Day' by Claire Keegan<p> <span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">In all of the following I am going to assume that the story has been read which might at the most take up an hour or so of your time. As ever it is crisply written and to this reader contains enough material between the lines to subvert a specious reading. Life enters fiction when the story gets away on Keegan.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2a5ddcfe-7fff-0028-5176-08dc9861b6a4"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Is it possible to construct a case for Cathal? Yes it is. Has he been hard done by? Indeed he has. Does he deserve it? We are being induced to think that he does in some sense. He is after all presented as a beta male whose department boss is ten years younger who wears designer suits (to work?) and keeps in trim by playing squash. Cathal owns one pair of shoes and a few, likely generic, trainers. The wedding suit will remain in the crypt of dreams peeping reproachfully from the wardrobe. Laugh down your snots ladies and cry ‘ecrasez l’infame’. In my edition there is an afterword in which reference is made to a version of this story in French published by Sabine Weapiesir called ‘Misogynie’. Might it not also have been entitled ‘Androgynie’? Sabine is also the name of the bolter at the altar.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="text-wrap: nowrap;"> </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Taking it from the beginning. Cathal has turned up for work on the Friday of his the cancelled wedding week end. Turning down bursary applicants must go on. An invidious note. While getting coffee he meets Cynthia from the finance department. The little interchange between them when you look back from the vantage point of the end of the story has a deeper significance than is apparent.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> It was almost ready when Cynthia, the brightly dressed woman from accounts, came in, laughing on her mobile. She paused when she saw him, and soon hung up.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘All right there, Cathal?’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Grand. You?’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘Grand.’ She smiled. ‘Thanks for asking.’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He took up the coffee, leaving before he’d sugared it, before she could say anything more.</span></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The alpha male boss is kind:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The boss was a Northern man, a good ten years younger than himself, who wore designer suits and played squash at the weekends.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘Well, Cathal. How are things?’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘Good, thanks.’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘Did you get a bite of lunch, something to eat?’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘Yeah,’ Cathal said. ‘No bother.’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The boss was looking him over, taking in the usual jacket, shirt, tie and trousers, his unpolished shoes.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘You know there’s no need to stay on,’ the boss said. ‘Why don’t you call it a day?’ He flushed a little then, seeming uneasy over the well-intentioned phrase.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘I’m just finishing the budget outline now,’ Cathal said. ‘I’d like to get this much done.’</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘Fair enough,’ the boss said. ‘Whatever. Take her handy.’</span></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">When you think of the humiliation that Cathal has just suffered his turning up for for work is brave. Theme song: I’m in the saddle again. His handling of Cynthia is correct and we can retrospectively allow the appellation that she maintains all men of the calibre of Cathal apply to all women. Yes, Cynthia is a cunt. That ‘thanks for asking’ has the true passive aggressive whine. Cathal is going to move on, unpolished shoes notwithstanding.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The gravamen of the charge against Cathal is that he is mean. However recall that he owns a house or his death owns a house, in Arklow. Paying for that out of a lowly clerkish salary requires fasting and abstinence. That’s a habit. He doesn’t own a car and is prepared to spend time waiting for the bus to get home. Sabine his girl friend lives in a flat which she shares with three students. That’s not expensive. Spending the week end with Cathal at his house and cooking there with viands she buys is certainly a better deal than hanging out with younger women. There’s an intimation that Sabine may be little cross eyed and beamy. She intends to slim down to get into her wedding dress. Noticeably she does not cook for Cathal when she turns to salad and low cal food. That cooking which was not very haute was really for herself and a defence against the accusation of mooching. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Then she moves in, with her impedimenta that tend to shoulder aside the frugal traps of Cathal. As everyman knows, when a woman gets to tidying you can never find anything. Seriously the institution of marriage gives the security that make these reactions trifling. These things build living together.. Then there’s the matter of the antique diamond ring that requires adjustment. The initial cost must have been painful and the resizing a twinge or two. The keeping of accounts is corrosive. The usual French women in literature is a picture of a shopper who is firm with rascally grocers and keeps a budget with logic and precision. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Sabine has tea at the Shelborne with Cynthia which is not of the Uncle Giles sort (cf Anthony Powell) fish paste sandwiches and a slice of seedcake. The dirt is dished and baby that’s all she wrote. Dear Cathal, its not me, its you. Well I respectfully demur and in the interstices of the story so does Keegan.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #4d5156; font-size: 10.5pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Will our hero move on? He already is doing so by turning up for work, bold micturation and other forms of ‘defi’. Having once made a serious move in life it can happen again. Marry an Arklow woman with a good knee to a pot. What were you thinking?</span></p><br /></span>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-83052326690337309432024-01-24T23:35:00.001+00:002024-01-24T23:36:12.686+00:00Intro to 'So Late in the Day' by Claire Keegan<p>
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<span> At the Altar-Rail</span>
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<span>‘My bride is not coming, alas!’ says the groom,</span>
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<span>And the telegram shakes in his hand. ‘I own</span>
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<span>It was hurried! We met at a dancing room</span>
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<span>When I went to the Cattle-Show alone,</span>
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<span>And then, next night, where the Fountain leaps,</span>
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<span>And the Street of the Quarter-Circle sweeps.</span>
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<span> </span></p><p><span>‘Ay, she won me to ask her to be my wife-</span>
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<span>‘Twas foolish perhaps! - to forsake the ways</span>
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<span>Of the flaring town for a farmer’s life.</span>
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<span>She agreed. And we fixed it. Now she says:</span>
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<span style="font-family: courier;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">“It’s sweet of you, dear, to prepare me a nest</span>
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<span style="font-family: courier;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">But a swift, short, gay life suits me best</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: courier;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">What I really am you never have gleaned</span></span>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">I had eaten the apple ere you were weaned.”</span></span>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">(Thomas Hardy)</span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">This poem about a cozening woman seems an apt introduction the the short story by Claire Keegan ‘So Late in the Day’. More anon. <br /></span></span></p></div>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-9521520824349040092024-01-07T08:03:00.002+00:002024-01-07T08:05:34.806+00:00'Small Things like These' by Claire Keegan<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Does it matter if your fiction is based on a mass illusion or a biased version of history that does not abide by facts that are readily available, well attested, and documented? Maybe but isn’t fiction in itself fictive and no account of any historical period can cover everything. There must be selection and that introduces distortion. Your scale of importance differs from mine and an overlooked event or attitude may be vital to the whole history.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The long short story by Claire Keegan ‘Small Things like These’ is a case of a true false novellatisation of history. I was around in 1985 and I remember quite well the economic recession and cold weather that winter. I asked my wife who also read the story:</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> - Do you think that nuns at that time would have put a girl in a coal shed at serious risk of hypothermia?</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> - No, she replied, in 1965 maybe.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Social attitudes towards the church had changed in 1985 and at that time there would be an inquest. A cover up would be difficult if not impossible. This is hinted at in the story. Recollect that the nuns tried to blame the other girls in the institution for the incarceration and that Mrs. Keogh a reliable weather vane had got some hint from the nuns about the unreliability of Furlong. They moved fast, a phone call would be enough. Remember this : those nuns did not come from Mars. They were Irish drawn from the class that values respectability more that anything. Eileen Furlong is in that cadre and the author has indicated that. Strangely very few people have made an obvious correlation and they prefer to think of the ‘nuns’ as alien corvids. It’s perfectly clear that Furlong’s Christmas burden would receive a frosty welcome.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The mummers of Wexford have a St.Stephens day tradition of going about in fancy dress playing music and gathering money. One of their characters is called the Sugan Earl after a pretender Earl of Desmond in the 17C. Twisted hay ropes (sugan) cover the players. One asks oneself- ‘Is Bill Furlong’ a sugan liberal stuffed with bien pensant hay’? It is an Irish liberal cliche that if were only Protestants we would have avoided all the Catholic guilt. Furlong has been reared in a Protestant milieu , so there’s that. However there is the cold wind of modernity that is cutting the legs from under the natives.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">“And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.”....</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">"If some complained over Joseph looking overly colourful in his red and purple robes, the Virgin Mary was met with general approval, kneeling passively in her usual blue and white. “</span></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Very well says you but what about the writing? For me the change in her usual style mars. The stripped out plainness of the prose loses the characteristic vigour displayed in her previous works which I enjoyed very much. There’s an alienating factor of a ‘voice’ that relates the story, seeming at times to be a local character a type of observing neighbour with limited education. There is just a soupcon of this, or is it just me.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>“Now, Furlong was disinclined to dwell on the past; his attention was fixed on providing for his girls, who were black-haired like Eileen and fairly complexioned. Already, they were showing promise in the schools. Kathleen, his eldest, came in with him to the little pre-fabricated office on Saturdays and for pocket money helped out with the books, was able to file what had come in during the week and keep an account of most things. Joan, too, had a good head on her shoulders and had recently joined the choir. Both were now attending secondary, at St Margaret’s.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>The middle child, Sheila, and the second youngest, Grace, who’d been born eleven months apart, could recite the multiplication tables off by heart, do long division and name the counties and rivers of Ireland, which they sometimes traced out and coloured in with markers at the kitchen table. They, too, were musically inclined and were taking accordion lessons up at the convent on Tuesdays, after school.”</span></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>‘Fairly complexioned’ is a local usage, “multiplication tables and long division”. ‘Pon my word they’re fierce scholars altogether.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>The truth needn’t be Gothic but in Ireland we love those images of a porteress sister with a great iron ring with a multitude of large keys </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt;">for locks that yield unwillingly,</span><span> drawn from the depths of sable robes. Did 10 or 20 or 30 thousand girls pass through those institutions? The McAleese report which took 6 months and covered the available paperwork opts for the lower figure. Others demur but consider this common sense idea: if you were getting headage payments from the state for some of the girls would the figures given by the nuns be inflated or otherwise?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>Mummers:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxQ5BcY8feI&ab_channel=FEENISH" target="_blank">straw men/sugan earl</a> </span></span>
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<span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">My wife was reading the Maggie O’Farrell book ‘I AM, I AM, I AM’. Is she a devotee of Nisargadatta Maharaj I asked:</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: bold; text-transform: none;"></span></span></p><blockquote>My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense ‘I am’ and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am'. It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked!</blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: bold; text-transform: none;">Or indeed a follower of Meher Baba whose motto was ‘Be Here Now’.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: bold; text-transform: none;">O’Farrell is in love with the continuous present in which her, all her, books are written. In my view she wants a cleansing course of the pluperfect to flush it out of her system. She ought to get in touch with her inner preterite and open up to multiple tenses. Her success as a writer is not affected by the cliche ‘I am now attending with a feverish vividness and ‘grokking on the fullness’. (Kesey also does time in, in ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’) . You can’t argue with a Sunday Times best seller which the afore mentioned ‘I am x 3' was. In that of course the intensity of brushes with death, only 17, focuses the mind wonderfully and the tense conveys that. These events are like what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’ that remain undiminished by time. In O’Farrell’s case they are shrines to mortality where attention is the homage paid to the dark god Thanatos. She carries to this day the burden of her childhood encephalitis which has left her damaged in her space perception and fine motor skills. These deficits play a part in those near things that grip you in a suspended unbelief which is irrational as the ‘I am here to tell you’ proof of life of the book testifies. Will she make it? Her publicity photos should show her clutching a copy of The Times of the day so we can be sure.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #202122; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: bold; text-transform: none;">Its a fine book. The chapter on her daughter who has multiple serious allergies is moving. As a parent you do not want to outlive your children. Can I go first please?</span></span>
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</span><p><style type="text/css"><span style="font-family: times;">#toc,
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It is effective when it is used to give the feeling of what the Freudians call a cathexis or a blocked forever undischarged traumatic scenario which remains as a persistent penumbra. <br /></p><p>||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| <br /></p><p> </p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"> I read a lot and there is the danger of dulling by surfeit the critical faculty. There are too many bad books reading over my shoulder slimeing with cliche<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold;"> </span>the the work in hand . One thing that causes me to put down a book immediately is the use of the continuous present. To the block Hilary Mantel. It seems to me a cheap attempt at immediacy and if the preterite won’t give your story force; it’s a weakling.</p><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><p></p><p>And then I was reading ‘Under Gemini, a Memoir’ by Mary Britton Miller and I realised that the continuous present in the first chapter was not producing the throw reflex. Why? Respondit Bergson by ouija:</p><p></p><p>This is not the Continuous Present it is the Durational Present. These events frame a soul and make a world: now. Miller is a very great writer and does not continue this device which is not a device past the opening. First in ordinary time she tells us what she is going to tell us.</p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>"There is a legend that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed. Our nurse, Mathilda, unable to tell which twin was which, called upon our mother to decide. She replaced the ribbons, saying I was Mary and the other child was Grace. Let us assume that she was right, for I was christened Mary and my twin was christened Grace; and so, awarding her the honor of having entered this world five minutes before I did, I will attempt to recapture the memories of our life together on this earth.”</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>Then she tells us:</p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>“There is a room darkened against the light and on the couch a gentleman with a dark moustache is lying fast asleep. He snores. Behind the couch I kneel and kneeling with me is my other self. Identical excitement, terror, fearful joy invades us. We wait. I watch my duplicate arise and I am rising with her. There is a moment for decision and then a swift resolve—a dreadful sharing of the consequences that will follow the awful act we contemplate; and then, excitement urging us, we spit directly in our father’s upturned face. He rises. We flee while panic overtakes us and then a sudden darkness, the waters of continuing experience engulf our father and his wrath. We have no further memory of him whatever.”</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>In the same way their memory of mother is cut off. The sudden night that overwhelms them is due to the death by cholera of both parents. All at once the life of the five children in the family becomes the care of a maternal uncle and his organising wife Aunt Anna. They now live with their grandmother and a carer which they are instructed to call Aunt Julia. Apart from a ceremonial visit on Sundays to Aunt Anna’s they are left alone to express themselves by mighty acts of domestic delinquency.</p><p></p><p>Aunt Anna is no downtrodden and subdued Victorian lady:</p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>"The spectacle of our Aunt Anna affected us quite differently. Whatever charm and geniality she might have had was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed. Her clothes fitted her tightly; they were handsome and well brushed, not glamourous at all but with their own special elegance. She did not approve of charm; she listened rather disapprovingly to Uncle Jim and always asked practical questions, saying, "My dear Jim, I don't agree. This should not be done. I don't approve." She said, "You must" and "You must not" with emphasis.”</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>The sweet sadness of the denouement of this memoir comes across the century. Now my problem is, what am I going to read after this elevation into contact with a real genius whose obscurity was self sought? I think more of her and then taper off with Elizabeth Bowen. Maybe Mrs. Gaskell first then Bowen. That’s what I’ll do.</p><p>American Classic.</p></div>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-27550404314093244102023-12-20T08:29:00.001+00:002023-12-20T08:29:20.529+00:00Regarding the Present Continous<p>
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<span>So I’ve said that the use of the continuous pr</span><span>esent is a cheap device to give a feeling of immediacy. Its particularly blatant used throughout novels such as those of Hilary Mantel and our latest Booker prize winner Paul Lynch in ‘Prophet Song’. Anthony Doerr uses it in ‘All the Light we cannot see’. Besides being affected and monotonous what else is wrong with it? I believe it is psychologically and epistemologically wrong creating a false picture</span>
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<span>of human action. First of all we do not act in a continuous stimulus response mode as though we were conditioned to do so. Sometimes we do but not always. In between bouts of habit there is considered action in which the past and its tense come into play. The brain as Bergson would maintain is an organ of action and is guided by what has worked in the past; in short, memory and not pure perception is the key to response. Our language reflects this modality. The future is attained by intention. What will it mean doing this or that or do it differently or not do it at all. We weigh our options against past error and success and altered situations. The past perfect, the present perfect come into play and offer their counsel. ‘I had considered at that point’ but it turned out that I was wrong and woe is me ‘I have done the same thing again’. The elision of all those subtleties must impoverish the expression of reality in a novel.</span>
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<span>Look no one talks in the continuous present except the gangsters in Damon Ruynon’s short stories. Leave it to them.</span></p><p><span>"</span><span>Anyway, I finally mention the names of these parties to Judge Goldfobber,
and furthermore I speak well of their reliability in a pinch, and of their
nerve, although I cannot conscientiously recommend their tact, and Judge
Goldfobber is greatly delighted, as he often hears of Harry the Horse, and
Spanish John and Little Isadore. " (from 'Breach of Promise')</span>
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<span>Professor Liz Harman has the common view about pregnancy that choice folk hold. When welcome it is a precious event that is shared with others and the medium favoured is a sonogram of the little swimmer. If miscarried at this point there is sadness and loss.</span>
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<span>Now if the pregnancy is unwelcome there is a medical situation that needs to be rectified. There is magically not a pregnancy which would imply in the course of nature a birth.</span>
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<span>The strangely normal thing is that the same woman can have both these attitudes at different times. Objectively the reality of there being a little sportive swimmer is the same in both cases.</span>
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<span>What is our likely attitude toward that moral stance? How would one view such mutability? As a mother with a favourite child, as a moral imbecile, a confused person, and probably not our first choice as a friend. They have intrinsic value even if they don’t recognise it. Would or should you trust them?</span>
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<span>One of the things said of Anthony Trollope by an enthusiastic</span><span> reader of his work which struck me was ‘I trust Trollope’. Should we? Is there mischief in Anthony, a sly misdirection between the deictic events, what he shows and what he tells us in his direct interpolations. Henry James did not like this breaking of the fabulous spell preferring to lay his mazing anfractuosities there on the page. None of your, please note I have nothing up my sleeve and my fingers never leave my hand.</span>
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<span>Is Trollope telling the truth? Looking the Palliser series I find his insistence that Frank Tregear was not after the money that Lady Mary would undoubtedly bring his way a little strained. After all Lady Mabel and he had broken off their attachment due to the fact that neither of them had any money. She loves him but knows that a life of penury would be impossible for them owing to their aristocratic taste for the finer things in life. I also recall that Frank has a brother that is due to inherit the modest estate in Cornwall but that he will probably not ever marry and is generally abroad travelling. Might he be eaten by a lion or destroyed by Corsican bandits or succumb to yellow fever? This could be a way of resolving the funds impasse. Frank however does not live in that suspended state and in a few months, takes his permission to seek another to Rome. He doesn’t go in for languish as does Lady Mabel who is secretly put out by his speed in moving on. As the Scots steward said in ‘The Eustace Diamonds’ don’t go after money but go where the money is. Which he does. Lady Mary, with her beauty and ‘sterling’ qualities falls and as we know Daddy Pally demurs. A penniless adventurer and my girl; that can never be. By the way have you noticed how fickle men are in the novels. Phineas Finn skips like a stone over the lake of love but sheers off when the wealthy Madam Marie puts it to him. In the end those two outsiders are married which brings me to what I think might have lurked in the back of Trollope’s mind. Can the beautiful but alien Isabel Boncassen be a suitable spouse for the future Duke of Omnium? I really think that from an aristocratic point of view the union with Lady Mabel who is beautiful, witty and wise would be more fitting and durable given the duties of that elevated sphere. Can the republican and the monarchist be friends over the long stretch of mutual accommodations that is marriage? Isabel must be an eternal outsider and she will feel it. Such an ending would make a subtle reprise of Plantagenet’s marriage which was to begin with against Lady Glen’s true feelings. In this case Silverbridge would simply have to revert to his initial love for Mabel. There could be Trollopian prosing about duty over several pages.</span>
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<span>Think of that.</span>
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<span> For me this novel was the weakest link in the series which probably took too long to die. The comedy element was more about social embarrassment, again the oil and water of different classes. The pathos of a man who neglected his family for quints (the decimal farthing) is there but is it enough.</span>
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We’ve seen similar situations before however I feel Trollope will ring the changes this time and there may be jetsam and someone left to languish. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-171ba6fe-7fff-b564-655d-3be8578b2eec"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The busyness of the Victorian upper class who had a fondness for laborious idleness, fox hunting, shooting, up in the morning out on the moor blasting away at the fowl of the month or stalking deer over miles of Scottish mountains. Behind this sport the army of support staff fettling horses, whipping in dogs, Masters of Fox Hounds blowing the horn, horse coping. The fixing of the Leger is a theme in this book and a gilded youth losing £70,000. In 187- serious money but Papa pays up. Will daughter Lady Mary get the man she loves, will Papa come round? Can the American beauty be accepted by the Duke of Omnium or will marrying out of the aristocracy be impossible to accept for his son. At a certain point you may feel that you know quite enough about the marriage arrangements of the idle wealthy. There are no less than two MPs in the romance stakes, both Conservative. Rebellious youth forsooth.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Like all Trollope novels he keeps you reading and wondering how the romantic tangles might be resolved. The other amazing thing is the amount of visiting each others houses they do. Mansions were required to keep up that level of hospitality. And cousin marriage; chinless wonders did not come from nowhere.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">‘The Duke’s Children’ is not the best novel in the series. Does Trollope succeed in humanising the Duke? So far there are touching episodes and those of us that have given their parents trouble will mist up a little recognising the forbearance we have received. I’m only half way there and this note is dashed off waiting for bread to bake.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-76110123792364055942023-11-25T02:04:00.003+00:002023-11-25T23:52:08.684+00:00Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels<p>It is what is vulgarly known as bro lit. If that drives you away from the action, if you are what Lucky Jack Aubrey would call shy, then so much the worse for you, the prize of a d- good read will elude you and you will fall on the ‘impermissible lee shore’ there to perish on the rocks of genre. Not the slightest trace of what the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill called ‘rum, bum, and concertina’. Maturin will admit to the rum ration, an astonishing half pint per diem along with grog which lead to falling from the rigging and gives another sense to ‘a tight ship’. As a scientist cum philosophe he was appalled by this customary ration which in ‘Post Captain’ the second in the series caused Jack to dive overboard to rescue Bonden swimming 50 yards up to him and grasping him by the pig tail held him fast till a boat was launched. He’s done that a few times in his career having the skill of natation unknown in the common tar who would not wish to prolong his agony if washed overboard in a storm. Maturin does not know how to swim which is uncanny as he knows everything else in this sublunary domain. However he is no dismal sciolist rather an amateur or lover of all branches of knowledge. In short he is a polymath and a foil to Aubrey who is a perfect John Bull, sentimental and also violent, given to boozy venery and we are glad when he finds his Sophie a rich prize in herself with £10,000 towing. He though is broke ‘caus the prize factor who was minding his money has indulged in major defalcation. The comedic aspect of Jack skulking on land to avoid bum baliffs and finding sanctuary in a quarter of London where they cannot tap him with their cudgels. Everything you will read in O’Brien’s books are founded on historical fact and the bold engagements of Jack Aubrey are founded on the real thing.</p><p><br /></p><p>The writing is excellent and varies from the excogitations of Maturin on everything to the naming of parts of rigging, naval lore, and the rectification of the trim of sailing ships by Jack, a highly skilled seaman who has been at sea from the age of 14. But away from the sea to the land and the first sight of the divine Sophie perhaps not coincidentally the name of the first sloop under Jack’s command. Sniggers in the focsle.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>“Sophia, the eldest, was a tall girl with wide-set grey eyes, a broad, smooth forehead, and a wonderful sweetness of expression - soft fair hair, inclining to gold: an exquisite skin. She was a reserved creature, living much in an inward dream whose nature she did not communicate to anyone. Perhaps it was her mother's unprincipled rectitude that had given her this early disgust for adult life; but whether or no, she seemed very young for her twenty-seven years. There was nothing in the least degree affected or kittenish about this: rather a kind of ethereal quality - the quality of a sacrificial object. Iphigeneia before the letter. Her looks were very much admired; she was always elegant, and when she was in looks she was quite lovely.”</p><p></p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>I read some of them years ago and although the adventures are free standing and good as that to read them in their order is the better course.</p><p>Most excellent.</p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> </p>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-72947353099253247452023-11-20T02:02:00.003+00:002023-11-20T02:02:54.149+00:00Etienne Gilson on Thoughts and Things<p> <span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As realists we abide in things not thoughts. The thing comes first not the thought about the thing. What you have in Descartes is certainty but its a dead certainty. Nothing living can come from it. It cuts us off from things and leaves us the world as a true hallucination as Taine put it. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-f7b93569-7fff-5f2b-2edf-46acd39b0638"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Etienne Gilson in his brilliantly clear ‘Methodical Realism’ which would be an offence to summarise has an essay of 30 paragraphs on the superiority of Realism to Idealism. Realism is the true because what we do would be impossible if Idealism were the case. Section 5 in the series is an example of his wit:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The knowledge the realist is talking about is the lived and experienced unity of an intellect with an apprehended reality. This is why a realist philosophy has to do with the thing itself that is apprehended, and without which there would be no knowledge. Idealist philosophers, on the other hand, since they start from thought, quickly reach the point of choosing science or philosophy as their object. When an idealist genuinely thinks as an idealist, he perfectly embodies the essence of a “professor of philosophy”, whereas the realist, when he genuinely thinks as a realist, conforms himself to the authentic essence of a philosopher; for a philosopher talks about things, while a professor of philosophy talks about philosophy.</span></p><div></div></blockquote><div><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-52529956665944269072023-11-12T01:50:00.000+00:002023-11-12T01:50:31.973+00:00'The Prime Minister' by Anthony TrollopeA frequently repeated locution in ‘The Prime Minister’ is the instructive ‘taught’. It occurs thirty two times in various forms which in a writer of Trollope’s attainments must be significant and more than careless repetition. In some of the cases you are a moral autodidact, in the others society and the power of the family will ‘larn’ you.
<blockquote> much perverseness in the girl, who might have taught herself </blockquote><blockquote>
must have taught you that when a man is cut up about a woman, </blockquote><blockquote>
in which she had first learned to love him, and had then taught herself to understand by some confused and perplexed lesson </blockquote><blockquote>
We had taught ourselves to think that you would have bound yourself closer with us down here </blockquote><blockquote>
She must be taught the great importance of money </blockquote><blockquote>
and she must be taught to use this influence unscrupulously </blockquote><blockquote>
she must be taught how imperative it was </blockquote><blockquote>
And so the first lesson was taught </blockquote><blockquote>
and she had taught herself to fancy that she could not live without Mrs. Finn. </blockquote><blockquote>
I think he ought to be taught to forget her </blockquote><blockquote>
had declared that there were some men to whom such lessons could not be taught, </blockquote><blockquote>
He had taught himself really to think that Fletcher had insulted him </blockquote><blockquote>
and she knew that the lessons which it taught were vulgar and damnable. </blockquote><blockquote>
and I've taught myself to think that they are not very different from other men. </blockquote><blockquote>
he had taught himself to look upon the sum extracted </blockquote><blockquote>
the tricks of trade as taught by Ferdinand Lopez </blockquote><blockquote>
It is because he has been taught to think that I am in a small way.He'll find his mistake some day." </blockquote><blockquote>
And so he taught himself to regard the old man as a robber and himself as a victim </blockquote><blockquote>.
and she must be taught to endure his will, </blockquote><blockquote>
His sense of honour had taught him to think </blockquote><blockquote>
he had already taught himself to regard it as one of those bygones </blockquote><blockquote>snd she had taught herself to think that absolute banishment </blockquote><blockquote>
I think I have taught myself to think nothing of myself </blockquote><blockquote>
He had trusted that the man whom he had taught himself some years since to regard as his wished-for son-in-law </blockquote><blockquote>,
and he had almost taught himself to think that it would be better for herself </blockquote><blockquote>Mrs. Fletcher the elder at last almost taught herself to believe </blockquote><blockquote>
could be taught to seem to forget him</blockquote>
The universe of ‘The Prime Minister’ is a very moral one and if I labour this point its so you don’t have to teach yourself to notice this thread of self mastery, self injunction and proceeding by mottoes and affirmations. You will notice that the recalcitrant women are poorly self taught or wrongly other taught and generally bound to go astray. Lady Glencora doesn’t teach herself anything being a creature of impulse and intuition and spur of the moment plans. Emily Wharton lacks that inner instructress and falls under the rod of Lopez whose copy book heading is ‘What I will is the good’. The Whartons and the Fletchers have been taught by history and civilisation and homo hierachicus. Foreigners are not part of the lesson plan, a Jew is automatically a bounder and so forth. Decent whiggery from the right sort is acceptable but really the Tories are godly you know.
Have you learned your lesson: Trollope is a stern invigilator and if you fail your exam you may not be allowed to re-sit. Its quite bracing. One trusts Trollope or so I have taught myself.
The character of Lopez is precisely demonstrated, his inner emptiness bolstered by outer show. I’m inclined to think that in a quiet way ‘The Prime Minister’ may be the strongest of the Palliser series. Now on to ‘The Duke’s Children’.
ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-32575334181258167062023-11-08T00:26:00.001+00:002023-11-08T00:26:25.423+00:00Thucydides on GazaReading the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides today I was struck by the speech of Diodotus against Cleon about the fate of Mytilene. His point was that when the innocent are punished just as much as the guilty then at the next revolt the former will join in knowing they have nothing to lose. The complete mobilisation of the people is inevitable. That is what Hamas wants and they will get it. The Israelis knowing this will try to push as many of the Gazans into exile as possible, creating a new Nakba.
The openly fascistic Netenyahu has his counterpart in Cleon:
<blockquote>
‘Personally I have had occasion often enough already to observe that a democracy is incapable of governing others, and I am all the more convinced of this when I see how you are now changing your minds about the Mytilenians. Because fear and conspiracy play no part in your daily relations with each other, you imagine that the same thing is true of your allies, and you fail to see that when you allow them to persuade you to make a mistaken decision and when you give way to your own feelings of compassion you are being guilty of a kind of weakness which is dangerous to you and which will not make them love you any more. What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you; you will not make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favour; your leadership depends on superior strength and not on any goodwill of theirs.</blockquote>
....
After a lapse of time the injured party will lose the edge of his anger when he comes to act against those who have wronged him; whereas the best punishment and the one most fitted to the crime is when reprisals follow immediately.
Diodotus:
<blockquote>Consider this now: at the moment, if a city has revolted and realizes that the revolt cannot succeed, it will come to terms while it is still capable of paying an indemnity and continuing to pay tribute afterwards. But if Cleon’s method is adopted, can you not see that every city will not only make much more careful preparations for revolt, but will also hold out against siege to the very end, since to surrender early or late means just the same thing?</blockquote>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-66622362293461613642023-10-31T11:16:00.000+00:002023-10-31T11:16:48.362+00:00Reading Trollope in the Rubble.Reading Trollope (The Prime Minister) in the wee hours is the best time to savour the skilful pacing and alternation between the world of the righteous lawyer Wharton and the yeoman Fletcher and the vain world of the meretricious meddler Lady Glencora. At the same time in this dimension towns are being rubbelised. Some of those blocks will be cleaned of mortar to be reused for new builds. A survivor child will write that novel that moves between the earnest kibbutz armed socialism - marrying a settler - or having an affair with a Palestinian in Berlin - a newspaper in Tel Aviv covering the story - Scots Jew known as Rabbi Burns and Ali Baba doing stand up in Islington.
You see,it’s easy.ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-47251570033085781992023-10-30T00:55:00.002+00:002023-10-30T00:55:16.982+00:00If we only had old Israel over here<p>repost from 2017: Has anything changed since then? The Israelis are creeping up to the Amalekite option. God in smiting mode:</p><p>"Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." (1 Samuel 15: 1)</p><p>However God was cross with the Israelites for sparing King Agag and some livestock:</p><p>"But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed."</p><p>Bibi has mentioned Amalek but didn't indicate what if anything might be spared. There is a gas field off the Gaza coast, so there's that. </p><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 22px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative;"><br /></h3><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 22px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative;">If we only had old Israel over here</h3><div class="post-header" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 10.8px; line-height: 1.6; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><div class="post-header-line-1"></div></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-2741885126297218474" itemprop="description articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 570px;"><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><br /></div>How far can you trust the moral sense of someone who thinks that Israel is a modern and liberal democracy? That is an obvious big lie, the whopper so big the stunned mind thinks there might be something to it. After a cup of strong tea you recover your wits and realise that this is the belief of someone who is so blinded by sectarian interests that the truth is beyond their reach. Like a man lost in a snowstorm they are moving in a circle thinking that they will eventually arrive in a place of safety. I often consider what the situation in Northern Ireland would be today if Israeli tactics as applied to Gaza had been used. Assassinations, razing of the family homes of convicted terrorists, drone bombs and the disregard for civilians that the Israelis attempt to justify. To qualify: their justifications are a function of their contempt in that they are not intended to persuade. 'You need this kind of thing, we don't care. Every now and then the grass needs cutting.' The Israelis are at the Cromwellian phase of dealing with the natives who are offered the choice of 'to Hell or to Connaught (Gaza)'.<br /><br />At this point even the liberal voices in Israel itself that deplore I.D.F. and settler actions in the Occupied Territories seem to be part of the plan to convince doubters that there is a reasonable element that can be talked to and will listen to reason. Meanwhile expropriation and extirpation can go on. They really don't care.<br /><br />I once bought by mistake an Israeli product. A packet of razor blades. The good news is that they were useless.</div>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-53614159668361941292023-10-26T08:40:00.001+01:002023-10-26T08:40:38.669+01:00The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope<p>Lizzie is a liar, no three ways about it, confabulating like a good‘un from morning till night and coming to see in the end there might be some truth in her story. Money, rank, and beauty give her licence to paint a poetry over the prose of this world. She is a widow whose sickly husband died within a short time and being a baronet left her a lady with a £4000 pa. income for her life and a son who is the heir to the title. Lady Eustace had a diamond necklace valued at £10000 put on her neck by her husband and she intends to make her own of it and not let it sink back into the estate as her bete noir the family solicitor Camperdown insists. It is an heirloom and therefore cannot be taken as personal property. Was it in London that she first received it or in Scotland at the home castle of Portray? If at home then it might be counted amongst the paraphernalia of the home and therefore property of her own. The law is uncertain on these fine points. Best let it be in Scotland. Yes it was in Scotland. </p><p> </p><p> Lively as a goat amongst the crags she leaps from fable to fib to buttress her stratagems getting increasingly confused as stern truth advances towards her. I read the Palliser series out of turn so I have foreknowledge of certain events and as I read I wondered how was this wrought. Simple when you know Lady Eustace and her mutability and invention all centred around the pole star of her own aims. Is it wrong to attempt to draw her first cousin Frank away from his true love Lucy. Not at all, in her computation it would suit them both,with her money his career as an M.P. and rising barrister would be enhanced. At that time MPs were not paid a salary and besides Frank Greystock is not a very good manager of his money. He’s in debt but still lives the life of a wealthy young man about town. His £2000 p.a. and her £4000 would be a fine basis for easy living. All his relations think so, a ‘poor’ man marrying the very plain governess for love, what is the sense of doing that. As ever the marriage mart is a theme of Trollope’s.</p><p> </p><p> It’s a very long novel but the narrative tension never slackens. As I wrote having read the books out of turn I wondered about certain outcomes but the author makes it all character centred and credible. The meddling Lady Glencora and Palliser’s quint farthing is a continuing theme from earlier books. An insinuating satire on the mores and manners of Victorian society twenty years before the Queen’s jubilee (1860‘s). George Gissing wrote ‘In the Time of Jubilee’ from the perspective of the lower middle classes if you want a more astringent version of of high Empire when the map was pink. Absolutely superb controlled writing but do read the Palliser novels in sequence. </p>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7781646534201708629.post-40119522423255391882023-10-05T01:32:00.000+01:002023-10-05T01:32:01.750+01:00 Etienne Gilson's Realism<p> <span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I’m reading a lot of Etienne Gilson at the moment, dropping in and out of his books on Realism and Neo-Thomism. He rightly scorns the idea that Cartesian methodic doubt can lead anywhere. Idealism has burned the bridge to anywhere and yet it fascinates by its apparent lucidity. It establishes the problem field and keeps us stuck there with the endless toing and froing of the external and the internal world that act like the two ends of a seesaw. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7aebef02-7fff-19fb-42b2-3a6084f70acf"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He writes of a Fr. Noel:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“Here we have finally come full circle, but the reader will be excused if he wonders why so much effort was expended creating the sensation of movement when in reality we have gone nowhere. First, we were told that we had to carry out an exhaustive, methodic doubt, but, since we were not permitted to doubt either thought or the fact of the existence of sensible reality, what did we actually doubt? Descartes’ doubt at least doubts something, but Monsignor Noel’s doubts nothing.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">It has been a notion of mine that Idealism is catching because it is easy to understand and modern psychology offers a specious basis. Realism as offered by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is a difficult complex philosophy which starts out in the difficult terrain of ontology going from being to the real and knowledge of it. Descartes as Gilson holds begins with epistemology and tries to catch hold of the real with Deus as the deus ex machina. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Another point that Gilson controverts elsewhere is the doctrine of Jacques Maritain’s that an intuition of being is essential for a true comprehension of metaphysics. He seems to me to have a strong argument. I shall have to go back to ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ to try and comprehend the different levels of abstraction involved in the intuition of being. I have this idea that Maritain may be conflating Aristotle and the Cartesian critical method moving from the initial judgement or apprehension i.e. it is and it is this, what is called an intuition. Gilson maintains that the true Thomistic realism goes from Being to the Real. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The analogies between this way of thinking and the Advaitic Realism are many. Gilson’s clarity and explanatory power is excellent. More anon.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span>ombhurbhuvahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com0