ENCHIRIDION OF EPICTETUS
17
Remember that you are an actor in a play, and the Playwright chooses the manner of it: if he wants it short, it is short; if long, it is long. If he wants you to act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well; the choice of the cast is Another’s.
This is the passage from Osiris & Isis that should contain (according to this wikipedia page) mention of the tamarisk, but I’m not seeing it, and edited it from the page. Here is English, story of the ark begins here.
ἐκ δὲ τούτου πυθέσθαι περὶ τῆς λάρνακος, ὡς πρὸς τὴν Βύβλου χώραν ὑπὸ τῆς θαλάσσης ἐκκυμανθεῖσαν αὐτὴν ἐρείκῃ τινὶ μαλθακῶς ὁ κλύδων προσέμιξεν ἡ δ᾽ ἐρείκη κάλλιστον ἔρνος ὀλίγῳ χρόνῳ καὶ μέγιστον ἀναδραμοῦσα περιέπτυξε καὶ περιέφυ καὶ ἀπέκρυψεν ἐντὸς ἑαυτῆς: θαυμάσας δ᾽᾽ ὁ βασιλεὺς τοῦ φυτοῦ τὸ μέγεθος καὶ περιτεμὼν τὸν περιέχοντα τὴν σορὸν οὐχ ὁρωμένην κορμὸν ἔρεισμα τῆς στέγῃ ὑπέστησε.
1er avril 1824… J’ai vu le masque moulé de mon pauvre Géricault. Ô monument vénérable ! J’ai été tenté de le baiser… sa barbe… ses cils… Et son sublime Radeau ! Quelles mains ! Quelles têtes ! Je ne puis exprimer l’admiration qu’il m’inspire.
Behind the gates of the wealthy
Food lies rotting from waste
Outside it’s the poor
who lie frozen to death.
–Du Fu (tr.)
A time in which humankind is experiencing repercussions, negative and positive, environmental and social, of the widespread adoption of advanced technology. (The forces that have driven us since the dawn of the industrial era have begun to push in palpable ways against hard boundaries.)
This is a challenge to the climate, most glaringly through greenhouse gas emissions, and a challenge to the Democracies of developed nations, through (a) globalization (and resultant creation of extreme economic winners and losers); (b) the balkanization of the news and information (and resultant tribalism); and (c) the emergence of serious low cost cyber and drone threats. [Question: how closely does the development of technology track that of Democracy. If one were to be slowed or stopped, the other would…?]
A path forward for the U.S. would involve: (i) raising taxes and increasing services (universal pre-K, “medicare for all”, infrastructure) and paying down debt (ii) massive investment in renewable energy, cyber-defense and drones (but not aircraft carriers or next generation jets.)
If I were to actually attempt to enact this agenda in a real political environment (as incoming president, for example), this would be my order of operations: Universal Pre-K (as my signature initiative); “medicare for all” (which would be a big name for a minor seeming but quite important tweak to Obamacare: the inclusion of a public option); infrastructure (because everyone loves infrastructure). With respect to climate, I would pursue an Obama-like all-of-above approach, doing two things to secure Republican support: (1) giving nuclear energy its due as our most reliable source of carbon-free energy (maybe even marketing my climate strategy as a nuclear strategy) (2) massively funding a manhattan-project-style initiative for a clean energy source through the D.O.D.
With respect to the debt, finally, I would like to be forward thinking and, while actually paying for the programs we implement that don’t qualify as investments through taxes, would really like to try and create a structure that will take as much out of the hands of future politicians as is possible with respect to it: have a commission of experts to determine what is a reasonable amount of debt for a country like the U.S. to take on, then have automatic cuts to expenditures and raising of taxes when that limit is reached… There’s clearly a problem with that as expressed (during the fiscal crisis, for example, our debt shot up, but government spending should have increased, not decreased) and I don’t know to what extent debt reduction can be automated like that, but at the very least it would be great to have a hard, informed national answer to the question of — how much debt is it reasonable for a nation like ours to have?
Thuc. 3.45.7
ἁπλῶς τε ἀδύνατον καὶ πολλῆς εὐηθείας,ὅστις οἴεται τῆς ἀνθρωπείας φύσεως ὁρμωμένης προθύμως τι πρᾶξαι ἀποτροπήν τινα ἔχειν ἢ νόμων ἰσχύι ἢ ἄλλῳ τῳ δεινῷ.
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“In a word, it is a thing impossible and of great simplicity to believe when human nature is earnestly bent to do a thing that by force of law or any other danger it can be diverted.” [Hobbes]
Sneeze Fixer. Tired of having your back almost broken from sneezing while reclining in a chair. This handy device, when pressed, would catapult you out of the chair right before you sneeze, so that you would sneeze while in mid air or (with practice) at the moment you land.
Scroll-o-cloth. This is like a regular paper table cloth that you could write on or spill whatever you liked on only this one has been written on by an actual scribe for at least one hour.
If memory serves I was at his 84th (but, a moment’s reflection reveals it couldn’t be correct) I might have been at his 74th or 78th. Indeed I have no idea, a vague recollection of having seen him dance in the City Light…. Happy 100th Birthday Lawrence Ferlinghetti!
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J’ouvris largement la bouche, et mes poumons se saturèrent de fraîches molécules.
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“The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love.” (Emmerson, Experience.)
Do I accept ‘mindfulness’ as a virtue as I would for example ‘temperance’? (I do.)
But I find myself disinclined from using the term itself, as being New Age, and from all the other terms that will seem interchangeable with it: ‘consciousness’, ‘awareness’, ‘attentive-ness’, (I’m not sure I’ve ever heard ‘attentiveness’) and such things. Surely there must be an older western word for so fundamental a concept (it must be western because I couldn’t understand it if it were eastern)? (I can’t think of one, there might not surely be one, a so-called western word for what you mean by ‘awareness.’ It may be I will need western and eastern civilization to merge to a greater extent –English and Chinese will need to become indistinguishable– before I can learn to become properly ‘aware.’) Aurelius, who has a New Age feel, might use one.
…Maybe ‘patience’ comes close, but Patience implies an ultimate relief from the conditions of the present, a deliverance, whereas ‘mindfulness’ asks us to consider that there can be no other present, that we should not want such relief (the present is something to be and stay in, not to endure or get through, not to be patient of) [patience implies satisfaction will ultimately be attained, ‘mindfulness’, that it is always present] mindfulness proudly feels cold it doesn’t bear or endure it
(You have a good point.)
…Concentration comes close but in the way of an opposite insofar as they are means of data collection. Concentration like a shovel or telescope, ‘mindfulness’ like an antennae or radar dish.
(I suppose you qualify the way in which they are opposites (“insofar as they are means of data collection”) because you feel that the opposite of concentration, in an absolute sense, is distractedness, not mindfulness. Yet you feel suddenly under-confident that you understand how to speak properly of opposites. The opposite of the north pole is I suppose the South Pole. The opposite of a pole, is I suppose a middle — the equator. Thus the polar opposite of concentration you would say is mindfulness, while the opposite of concentration as such is distractedness? You do feel suddenly uncertain about all this.)
Robert’s dissenting opinion (and this holds true for the other conservative justices’ dissents) amounts to a charge of judicial activism and asserts that this is an issue best left to the legislature. (Robert’s opinion of the importance of the legislature seems to me at odds with his opinion in Shelby, where he overturns a thoroughly researched and overwhelmingly supported civil rights law, apparently because of the justice’s own assessment that it’s no longer necessary.)… The petitioners are not being denied a right, according to Roberts, which would be protected by due process, but are asking for a new right that does not yet exist. He concludes by posing the question of:– if the court can redefine marriage from opposite sex to same sex, cannot it not also redefine it as occurring between two people and several (i.e., why not bigamy?). He also says there might have been room for the court to have justifiably upheld for equal protection on narrower grounds (i.e., hospital visitation rights, taxes, etc.)
Kennedy, writing for the majority, meanwhile tries to derive an essential idea of a right to marriage based on the court’s other opinions on the subject, adducing four principles. I felt that his strongest or most concrete point, though I’m not sure he comes out and directly says it, was that married couples enjoy so many legal privileges over unmarried ones (in laws with respect to inheritance, taxation, hospital access and medical decisions, etc.) that to deny some couples this right, whatever their composition, must constitute an infringement of the Equal Protection clause.
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Can’t say I’ve felt very comfortable with any of the decisions of the Roberts court that I’ve so far read. Citizens United: I thought Stevens’ dissent far stronger than Robert’s majority argument (and the wrong decision). Shelby: I thought Ginsburg’s dissent stronger than Robert’s majority opinion, and the wrong decision. Heller: I thought Stevens’ dissent and Scalia’s majority more or less equally well argued (after correcting for my bias) and the wrong decision…. How you stand on Obergefell, as a legalistic matter, seems to depend crucially on your view of the scope of the due process clause, and I did not understand well the peculiarities and history of that dispute. On balance, however, I found Robert’s dissent a bit stronger than Kennedy’s majority, yet that the majority upheld the right decision — and wondered if there was something of a “reverse Dred Scott” feeling to the whole thing. Working on a very shaky remembrance of that case, I feel it was decision well-grounded in the Constitution that substantiated something today found morally abhorrent (that a person can be property), whereas Obergefell, is on morally stronger, but constitutionally weaker, grounds…. That idea leads me to imaginatively yet irrelevantly wonder (and, so wondering, conclude): if Dred Scott had been argued in Scott’s favor, what about race and slavery in the U.S. would have changed?)
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One’s body more and more seeming a part of the earth, and that the husk of one’s helpless seed….“Cezanne of The Earth”
Non est tanti… It’s no big thing. Cui bono
Boswell, Life of Johnson [pp.981]:
“He disliked much all speculative desponding considerations, which tended to discourage men from diligence and exertion. He was in this like Dr. Shaw, the great traveller, who, Mr. Daines Barrington told me, used to say, ‘I hate a cui bono man.’ Upon being asked by a friend what he should think of a man who was apt to say non est tanti; — ‘That he’s a stupid fellow, Sir, (answered Johnson): what would these tanti men be doing the while?” When I in a low-spirited fit, was talking to him with indifference of the pursuits which generally engage us in a course of action, and inquiring a reason for taking so much trouble; “Sir (said he, in an animated tone) it is driving on the system of life.”
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Le programme des cours, qu’il lut sur l’affiche, lui fit un effet d’étourdissement : cours d’anatomie, cours de pathologie, cours de physiologie, cours de pharmacie, cours de chimie, et de botanique, et de clinique, et de thérapeutique, sans compter l’hygiène ni la matière médicale, tous noms dont il ignorait les étymologies et qui étaient comme autant de portes de sanctuaires pleins d’augustes ténèbres.
Il n’y comprit rien ; il avait beau écouter, il ne saisissait pas. Il travaillait pourtant, il avait des cahiers reliés, il suivait tous les cours ; il ne perdait pas une seule visite. Il accomplissait sa petite tâche quotidienne à la manière du cheval de manège, qui tourne en place les yeux bandés, ignorant de la besogne qu’il broie.
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