Ethics, Book III, prop 39. Scholia. (Edwin Curley translation.) “Further, this affect, by which a man is so disposed that he does not will what he wills, and wills what he does not will, is called Timidity, which is therefore nothing but fear insofar as a man is disposed by it to avoid an evil he judges to be future by encountering a lesser evil (see Prop 28). But if the evil he is timid toward is Shame, then the timidity is called a Sense of shame. Finally, if the desire to avoid a future evil is restrained by a Timidity regarding another evil, so that he does not know what he would rather do, then the Fear is called Consternation, particularly if each evil he fears is of the greatest.”

Delacroix: other people are able to occupy themselves productively while waiting for inspiration to come, but I can only sit around and be bored.

Dimanche 13 juin. “Tant que l’inspiration n’y est pas, je m’ennuie. Il y a des gens qui, pour échapper à l’ennui, savent se donner une tâche et l’accomplir.” (x)

Not the focus of this essay, but interesting to me, it puts forward that Conrad’s political conservatism is to be understood not as something Old World and Deeply European (which, whatever that may mean, I suppose I’d assumed) but as that of an immigrant to England from Central Europe, anxious to prove he belonged, a framework I’d not thought of at all.

Idea that the political problems of our time are of an essentially non-political nature, and that only people of the opposite faction are able to see the imbecility and inefficacy of our own faction’s political attempts to solve it.

That’s different from the Trump-Dylan-thought that conservatives are responding to a cultural problem through politics while liberals, not seeing a cultural problem, are responding to problems of politics through legislation.

(The Trump-Dylan-thought is that populism from the right is subverting political institutions while populism from the left is subverting cultural institutions — Dylan winning the Nobel prize.)

It is also a different thought from what seems straight-forwardly the case reading the news, that Republicans are to blame. This would be a truly both-sidist view, not to suggest such a thing is inherently desirable, which proposes the total impenetrability of seeing through a political lens what has created the problem in politics. The person on the left can easily see the imbecility of having Trump for a President, for example, but is totally incapable of seeing its own imbecility, whatever that might be, with respect to this most central problem.

As to what sort of problem this “most central problem” might be –a problem that creates the appearance of being political but admits of no direct political solution– it could be literally the drinking water, an environmental issue, a philosophical problem, race… the most likely suspect would be Technology, and all of its ramifications to trade and social media and income distribution … while an outside of the box example, not perhaps unrelated to that, would be infantilization: that we know for some reason we are lesser figures than our parents, lacking gravitas and stature and what have you; and they of their parents, and so on; and in some effort to arrest this progress of diminishment, we embrace politics, feel intensely we must “change the world..”

But maybe the fever has broken. And that period between Reagan and Trump, between the Republican Revolution and the storming of the capitol, so aggravating and incomprehensible to those who lived them, is finally over. Without having really resolved anything, we’ve just moved on.

Customer said newly purchased running shoes, while heavier, had more support. Customer said Vietnamese diacritical marks indicated raising or lowering of pitch, while another mark signaled an abruptness to the word’s pronunciation — phhhht! (System devised by French monks.)

Customer said it was good to have gotten his exercise out of the way early. Customer said that, exercising in the heat, you limit the benefit of your cardiovascular work out. (Body expends so much energy cooling down.) Customer ordered small cap with whole milk on way to get hair done. Precise rectilineal angles characterized the thighs and crotches of the two seated men. Customer “must have been teacher”: had left behind multiple corrected tests. Customer observed that he was drinking water from a Styrofoam cup and drinking coffee from a treated paper cup, which were at odds with his expressed environmental views. Customer said political canvassing was definitely outside her comfort zone yet was glad they’d managed to flip the seat.

Dust pile on the tile floor became “more and more obnoxious” to attendant (“Pilus interruptus” diagnosed wherein the attendant has swept refuse into a pile but has been prevented from sweeping it up. There it lies in the center of the floor, among so many steps, this way and that, of unrealizing customers.)

(Attendant the worried shopkeeper of the movie, not the hero of the movie, and so must have his eyes out for the hero. Of these people he encountered, who was the hero?)

Back Windows — these were museum display cases — the telephone box or transformer among the trees and the wires that came out of it, suffused with embalming daylight.

Customer’s focus interrupted by removal, swift and unannounced, of the napkin that lay by his mouse pad.

Being Haunted by The Unlikely

Curiosity: why did attendant feel his thought that the customer, who’d left behind him multiple corrected tests must have been a teacher, was a stupid thought? Response to query: because he supposed the smart person would say, he was obviously a teacher. To the attendant, not as daft as he could seem but testing around the middle of the pack, the improbable always had a 50 percent chance of occurring. It loomed large before him that you could imagine some reason a non-teacher would leave behind corrected school tests.

Attendant now quite in interested in this, which could be even a larger problem for customers, this problem of being haunted by the unlikely . . . Why would a customer not think that, for example, a surgery’s ninety-five percent success rate would be worth trying to ease his crippling pain? Because he thinks there is a ninety percent chance that he’ll be among the five percent, for whom it doesn’t work, and a pretty good chance he’ll be among the one percent who die. (And if you dig into who the five percent are, certain customers might not be wrong about that.) Conversely the same customer might think nothing of dropping fifty dollars on a dietary supplement, which has no chance of working, on the outside chance that it just might, that it “at least can’t hurt.”

(Chance Sweepings)

over that art/ Which you say adds to nature, is an art/ That nature makes …

An excerpt from the Theophrastus book “Characters”, this concerns the dissimulating character [Perseus] [English]. “Hearing something he pretends not to, and claims not to have seen what he’s seen; and having previously agreed now doesn’t recall… “:

καὶ ἀκούσας τι μὴ προσποιεῖσθαι, καὶ ἰδὼν φῆσαι μὴ ἑορακέναι, καὶ ὁμολογήσας μὴ μεμνῆσθαι: καὶ τὰ μὲν σκέψασθαι φάσκειν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ εἰδέναι, τὰ δὲ θαυμάζειν, τὰ δ᾽ ἤδη ποτὲ καὶ αὐτὸς οὕτως διαλογίσασθαι. καὶ τὸ ὅλον δεινὸς τῷ τοιούτῳ τρόπῳ τοῦ λόγου χρῆσθαι: ‘οὐ πιστεύω᾽, ‘οὐχ ὑπολαμβάνω᾽, ‘ἐκπλήττομαι᾽ καὶ ‘λέγεις αὐτὸν ἕτερον γεγονέναι: καὶ μὴν οὐ ταῦτα πρὸς ἐμὲ διεξῄει᾽, ‘παράδοξόν μοι τὸ πρᾶγμα᾽, ‘ἄλλῳ τινὶ λέγε᾽, ‘ὅπως δὲ σοὶ ἀπιστήσω ἢ ἐκείνου καταγνῶ, ἀποροῦμαι᾽, ‘ἀλλ᾽ ὅρα, μὴ σὺ θᾶττον πιστεύεισ᾽.

Action: let go of keys
Immediately followed by: sound of keys on flagstone
Picture: splayed out keys beside still right root
Realization: hole in pocket
Remembrance: there was a hole in this pocket.
Quietly exclamatory iamb or spondee: “That’s right.”

Suddenly the sky, like we’ve not seen before, is everywhere and expansive, yet answered and subdued by the thundering road, even with the traffic light. Horizon cut. (underpass at left below with woods.) pride and laughter Dedicatory placard. Chain fence and guard rails (we laugh out of denial, out of refusal, goodbye you are ridiculous) guardrails and sidewalks on each side of the purely functional unadorned hulking bridge, which has a bird’s nest in one of its street lamp’s casement openings. Over the moat of where I was as at each moment I am

To the left, far off, the building he saw grow gradually up, become skeletal then whole, and there, too, nearer the bridge over which that four lane county road passes, parallel again. What did he say was the problem with ambition? The problem with ambition, he had said, was that it “ran counter to one’s self-disappearance” that doesn’t sound like a problem, “is a sturdy embrace of materialism, a cultivation of the soul as a mere sense impression” –yes but that doesn’t sound– “–interrupts that process of decoction, you see, which one feels true writing is, or will one day be, to reach briefly but with chemical surety and explosiveness one’s true self.” The problem with ambition (but “was getting a haircut now and then so at odds with compassion? was wearing a collared shirt?”) let others have and win and surfeited with my loss and absence I will truly be something I will not be that shadow I thought to attain unto and

(No: it isn’t much of a bridge. What makes a bridge much is the gap it crosses over or the points it crosses between.) Pass below the one “beautiful” or natural area (found to be so) that irregular triangle between the off-ramp and the 10 lane highway, irregularly mowed (whitman like nature, van gogh like wheat.) (When they had rebuilt a nearby retaining wall they had turned this area into a parking lot for their bobcats, for their cement trucks, for their dumpsters and pickups, but a year or two later and this beloved triangle, whose legs are roads, whose waist and belt are also roads, is now how it was again, overgrown, neglected.)

Street left at end of bridge. (Decision to take most direct route, stepping off sidewalk, rather than following sidewalk a few extra feet toward ramp.) (Remark: I should make a catalogue of such shortcuts that posterity may know.) That street turns into a cul de sac where there is a realty business. Boxed flower beds are owned by County: fresh food grown for hunger program. (To say that the community on one side of the bridge is a mirror image of the community of the other side of the bridge, just as the two sides of the street on both sides of the bridge are mirror images of each other, is roughly so, I want to say, but actually at just this point is one of the pockets of difference between them, an irregularity in the glass as it were, because of the small commercial building with its small parking lot after the turn off-here, abutting the County’s vegetable beds, which formerly hosted an HVAC repair place and firestation 107, though both having been decommissioned in recent years, the latter the first of two firehouses I’m to pass.)

[STUDY OF SOUNDS]

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Suspected this of being a typo but it’s an actual name for a bear: bruin.

Three other interesting points from the article where that was found: bear spray works very well as a deterrent on bears; bear spray is a strengthened form of pepper spray, which is really made from peppers. (A standard pepper spray is about five times “hotter” than a habenero pepper, while bear spray is about three times “hotter” than your standard pepper spray.) Bear spray costs between 30 & 50 dollars for an 8-10 oz can.

Κυμαῖος πύκτην ἰδὼν πολλὰ τραύματα ἔχοντα ἠρώτα, πόθεν ἔχει ταῦτα. τοῦ δὲ είποντος· ἐκ τοῦ μύρμηκος. ἔφη· διὰ τί γὰρ χαμαί κοιμᾷ;

A Cumaen seeing a boxer with many wounds asked how he received them. Boxer said — “from the ant”. Cumaen said –” why then do you sleep on the ground?”