I wonder if Weil read Genealogy of Morals? It’s curious that just as squarely as Nietzsche locates the origins of Christianity in Judaism — in contrast with the Homeric tradition — Weil, in Poem of Force, finds it in the Homeric tradition as distinct from the Judaic.
Nietzsche thinks Christianity is the efflorescence of Jewish “resentment.” Weil finds Jewish ultranationalism at odds with the essentially pacific message of The Iliad and the Gospels.
Shadow of bird, actual bird;
shadow of wire, actual wire;
actual road, curb and grass.
Sight of the bug passing over speed limit sign;
thought of that image, as language, passing briefly in brain.
Strong sun, deep morning shade, gentle breeze, abundant recent grass clippings over walk; scent of these clippings; strange contrails in the evening: all the planes in the area seeming hastily to have converged toward the same Southwestern point.
Massive crane lowering dumpster full of rocks for the replenishment of riparian rip rap. Workers with ropes below giving direction to the crane operator. Tree, perfectly circumscribed by mulch, its dark browns offset by a child’s dress.
I’ve been a Dickens hater for years, but I had never read David Copperfield, and the last paragraph of the first chapter has entirely changed my mind about him. Beautiful.
αὐτόματοι δ’ ἀγαθοὶ ἀγαθῶν ἐπὶ δαῖτας ἵενται *
Squad car leaping from its spot to stop the car that just rolled through that intersection. I may remember this as the time when I started to see a lot of Teslas. Repair man’s truck painted Christmas colors. UPS truck with its unique squeak of suspension and rattle in its approach — always with acceleration. Door open to what had been Ellen and her boy’s unit: new owners remodeling now. Reston. Guam. China. New Jersey. Mom sat in corner couch seat. House with lien on it. Fresh dog urine stream from trash can base. Two flies darting off — helical flight paths — an acorn-sized excremental bit.
The possibility emerges that the shirt I put in my bag, which I’d thought to be a nice collared work appropriate shirt, was actually a similarly colored collared exercise shirt full of holes and a smell I can’t expunge. Something not seen before: someone washing himself in 4 Mile beneath bridge. (Covid.) Idea that, ironically, you have settled on a philosophy of nothing ever happening during a time of accelerated historical change — (not ironic but because of your own stasis.) Water in curb — “somebody washing car.” Art should show people the Everyday imbued with magic, a story is magic, an argument is magic, but I keep dithering in the Thoreau territory of how to live, and what is real. Be spherical, I enjoin myself again.
Construction worker shimmying, shimmying, his arms high on the wheel barrow’s handles: he strives to eject the last gravel granules from the front corner’s divot. Cabbie’s complaints of yesterday recalled: you would think that people when they got in a cab would have a working idea of how much their trip was going to cost them, but maybe they don’t.
A playing card face down on the road: I stoop and flip it over to test my luck or see my future, and it is too weathered to tell. One of those people whose palms, when their arms are in a relaxed hanging position, face directly back, rather than slightly inward like mine do — delivery man. FLA plates, driver wearing fez. New row of trees where they’d been doing the gas line work.
POST 3/19/22: “I felt like I was with someone but at the same time felt like I wasn’t, since he existed in a way where I didn’t have to be attentive of his needs or think about him,” said Shirai, 27. “I felt no awkwardness or pressure to speak. It may have been the first time I’ve eaten in complete silence.”
“To live a dispassionate, cultured life beneath the dewfall of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking about writing, a life slow enough to be always just on the edge of tedium, but considered enough not to slip into it.” (Pessoa, Book of Disquiet, trans. Lancastre/ Costa)
Fixture to mean a sporting match.
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D.revetment ; piltdown man ; Maman ;…..k
p ן ɹ o ʍ ǝ ɥ ʇ o ʇ ǝ b ɐ s s ǝ ɯ ʎ ɯ s ı s ı ɥ ʇ
…..
This felt like a story for our times. “He was, ultimately, not a serious person. And, now, he stands accused of being a rank crook.”
some inconclusive/ uninteresting ngram results: melt down,break down ; having a melt down / having a nervous break down ; spazzing out,melting down… But THIS is a little interesting: spazzing out,wigging out. (Wig as a verb attested from the 1950’s.)
Out of town for a bit.
“But perhaps, in a larger perspective, that is exactly what the Jokics mean to teach him: that he should give up his solemn airs and become what he rightly is, a figure of fun, an old gent with one leg who when he is not hopping around on his crutches roams the streets on his home-made tricycle.” (Coetzee, Slow Man)
ὁ δὲ πόλεμος ὑφελὼν τὴν εὐπορίαν τοῦ καθ’ ἡμέραν βίαιος διδάσκαλος καὶ πρὸς τὰ παρόντα τὰς ὀργὰς τῶν πολλῶν ὁμοιοῖ (*)
*
Once I read the translation this made sense…. My mistakes: didn’t realize ὁμοιοῖ was a verb and πρὸς τὰ παρόντα gave me trouble. Still don’t quite understand the τοῦ.
I think of The Modern as being characterized by — autobiographical or even personal content with a scientific style — Realism having had no where left to go but the Personal — and The Iliad is not of that kind.
However, if sophistication is the measure of The Modern, then the Iliad is much more modern than, say, The Song of Roland or The Lord of the Rings, and many more works that are much more recent. It’s artistic, which the Song of Roland sort of isn’t.
Εοικεν ὁ βίος θεάτρῳ· διὸ πολλάκις χείριστοι τὸν κάλλιστον ἐν αὐτῷ κατέχουσι τόπον. (x)
….a recently completed chunk of the memoir.
Seersucker Whipsaw, great crime fiction which loses some energy at the end. Written in the 1960’s, it attempts a position on race that I’m sure would not be found acceptable today, but was interesting to see.
(I’m reminded that a protagonist of Infinite Jest, really its hero, Don Gately, was an inveterate user of racial slurs, but I believe we’re only told this in a footnote, and don’t think we ever actually witness him using such language.)
Tweet: in D&D there’s a monster called a mimic which camouflage itself as a treasure chest, but then it’s a big mouth inside and it eats you. What would this be in real life? I think it’s your phone
(Comment: also Bitcoin and many such things, seemingly new to our times. Destroyers of value in the appearance of treasure chests.)
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 