What did Isaac Newton do for entertainment? Question arises because of my anecdotal observation that the “smart people” of today, though paying homage to it, don’t seem particularly interested in high culture. (Interested in Star Trek, genre fiction, folk music, not in opera or poetry.) And so the question becomes — thinking here of smart people as being people with an aptitude for advanced math or logic — did smart people ever like high culture. What for example did Isaac Newton enjoy?

Glancing over a catalogue of his library, I’m reminded that for many people, then and today, their first and primary exposure to literary matters is through religion, but I didn’t see any indication of what he might have read during his leisure time. Perhaps it is a mistake to identify what I am calling “smart people” with what I would call “cultured people” (and perhaps “cultured people” are simply “rich people”, though I don’t have anecdotal data on that. Also, perhaps high culture is simply passed, and in a Democratic age, the most cultured are those who have looked most deeply into popular culture — Rock critics.)

THE PREFACE

………. The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

……….The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

………..Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

………..There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

………..The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

………..The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

………..All art is quite useless.
OSCAR WILDE [@Gutenberg]

Irregular stack of dirty plates on the sink side, …. the way they were stacked something particularly displeasing… a burdensome thought “stacked” upon another burdensome thought, a “soiled” thought; the thought of the unseemly soiled plates: it is a disorderliness on top of a dirtiness, an ordinariness on top of a disorderliness, it is an inevitability upon a randomness (things always messed up and off in precisely this fashion) … Overcoming this revulsion (which was, again, not for the extent or degree of dirtiness, or the work it implied, but for its particular arrangement and type, and for the vague awful thought it implied)… the whiteness of the whale, the disorder of the stack…

The white “Avon anniversary plate” between two rose-colored dinner plates, (a plate of smaller diameter between two of the same diameter: why not two dirty plates of the same diameter beneath a third dirty plate of a smaller diameter?), cream cheese on the sides of the bottom-most rose-colored dinner plate (why not cream cheese on a bagel plate, a plate on which items with cream cheese are served?); soup bowl on top of the higher of the two rose plates; another rose colored plate on top of the soup bowl; and a white bagel plate upon that (something very frustrating, to the point of being maddening, about the sight of a plate on top of a bowl. I would much sooner have a bowl facing down upon a bowl that is facing up –which there can be no reason at all for and is totally absurd– than having the bottom of a plate on the top of a bowl.)

I harpooned this “white whale” with these “two harpoons”, my left and right hands, and set it to rites in the dish sink, with the “spume well a-flowin”; yet the ghastly agglomerate of dish and utensil –a green-tinged potato chip projecting from some unfinished quiche– has endured, immitigable in memory, swimming free.

o you a
u …… ke
h …… i
a …… l
v …… ml
e …… he
nt …… t
o …… t
v …… h
er …… c
co …… oa
m …… r
ey …… p
our …… p
f …… a
e …… u
a …… o
rs …… Y
.v v iR v v

At the Louvre, looking at what random things a search for Delacroix brings up….

Palette ayant appartenu à Delacroix, (2), (3),  Secrétaire de Delacroix. among images: Paysage Afrique du Nord. (Enjoy the sequestration of that.)

Hippocrates 4.72 / English. “Ὁκόσοισιν οὖρα διαφανέα λευκὰ, πονηρά: μάλιστα δὲ ἐν τοῖσι φρενιτικοῖσιν ἐπιφαίνεται.”

(φρενιτικοῖσιν=phrenitis.) White clear urine is bad, and especially appears in those with phrenitis.