The String Quartet in D major is the only string quartet composed by César Franck… String Quartet in D major (Virtuoso Quartet, 1925)

Dreams. John Latta at his computer (he’s cheerfully erasing material that seems to me very good) — an extraordinary cliff face and a palace or carving upon it — Jacopo curled up in the round cat litter box — he fits there perfectly though way too large — looks sheepish and shakes the litter off as I order him to get out. No, Jacopo, no!

Agamemnon, 92-96 [Chorus]:

….. ……… ἄλλη δ᾽ ἄλλοθεν οὐρανομήκης
….. ……… λαμπὰς ἀνίσχει,
….. ……… φαρμασσομένη χρίματος ἁγνοῦ
….. ……… μαλακαῖς ἀδόλοισι παρηγορίαις,
….. ……… πελάνῳ μυχόθεν βασιλείῳ.

Smyth:

“Now here, now there, the flames rise high as heaven, yielding to the soft and guileless persuasion of holy ointment, the sacrificial oil itself brought from the inner chambers of the palace.”

….. ………

Je savais très bien que mon cerveau était un riche bassin minier, où il y avait une étendue immense et fort diverse de gisements précieux. Mais aurais-je le temps de les exploiter ? J’étais la seule personne capable de le faire. Pour deux raisons : avec ma mort eût disparu non seulement le seul ouvrier mineur capable d’extraire les minerais, mais encore le gisement lui-même […] Le Temps Retrouvé (wikisource.fr)

***

Andreas Mayor: “I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay cast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was the only person who could do this: with my death would disappear the one and only engineer who possessed the skill to extract these minerals and — more than that– the geological formation itself.” (Time Regained, pp. 458]

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“It ill befits anyone to make himself known save him who has qualities to be imitated, and whose life and opinions may serve as a model.” (Montaigne, Of Giving the Lie — trans. Frame)

Excerpt from the Pope’s encyclical on climate change from a bit ago, — I’ve put in bold some few items of it, probably more or less randomly.

Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity but to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening in the world into our own personal suffering…

People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behaviour, which at times appears self-destructive.

As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear. Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious, and the planet could continue as it is for some time. Such evasiveness serves as a licence to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen.

The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world. Otherwise, human beings will always try to impose their own laws and interests on reality.

Jesus worked with his hands, in daily contact with the matter created by God, to which he gave form by his craftsmanship. It is striking that most of his life was dedicated to this task in a simple life which awakened no admiration at all: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mk 6:3).

This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us.

It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony.

from encyclical

[*]

Saddam Hussein’s removal would have “enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told Congress in 2002. … POST

Frustration aside, Rimbaud’s procurement of weapons for Menelik II may have been his greatest contribution to modern African history. Scholars reckon that the guns he sold in 1887 likely helped the emperor defeat Italy in 1896 when the country’s troops tried to invade Ethiopia. As a result of the rout at Adwa, Italy signed a treaty recognizing Ethiopia as an independent nation.… TIMES

Thoreau putting flowers in his hat (Journals, June 19, 1852):

I am inclined to think that my hat, whose lining is gathered in midway so as to make a shelf, is about as good a botany-box as I could have and far more convenient, and there is something in the darkness and the vapors that arise from the head –at least if you take a bath–which preserves flowers through a long walk. Flowers will frequently come fresh out of this botany-box at the end of the day, though they have had no sprinkling.

still incapable

“Those ‘record highs’ and ‘record lows’ that the weathermen are always talking about– they’re meaningless now. It’s like comparing pole vaults between athletes using bamboo and those using fiberglass poles, or dash times between athletes who’ve been chewing steroids and those who’ve stuck to Wheaties. They imply a connection between the past and the present which doesn’t exist. The comparison is like hanging Rembrandts next to Warhols; we live in a postnatural world. Thoreau once said he could walk for half an hour and come to ‘some portion of the earth’s surface where man does not stand from one year’s end to an another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but the cigar-smoke of man.’ Now you could walk half a year and not reach such a spot. Politics –our particular way of life, our ideas about how we should live– now blows its smoke over every inch of the globe.” Bill Mckibben, The End of Nature (1988) Page 51.

The Sun: the worshiped sun [1.1.121]; the all-cheering sun [1.1.137]; the all-seeing sun [1.2.95]; It is the east and Juliet is the sun [2.2.3-4]; sun cheers the day and dries the night’s dank dew [2.3.5]; sunbeams [2.5.5]; the garish sun [3.2.25]; a meteor the sun exhales [3.5.13]; “When the sun sets the earth doth drizzle dew” [3.5.127]; “The sun for sorrow will not show its head” [5.3.306].

The Stars: star-crossed lovers [1.epilogue.6]; the earth-tredding stars [1.2.25]; some consequence yet hanging in the stars [1.4.107]; Juliet’s eyes as substitutes for stars [2.2.15]; Romeo should be cut into stars[3.2.22]; defying the stars [5.1.24]; inauspicious stars [5.3.111];

If a gravitational wave passed through you, you’d see one of your arms grow longer than the other. If you were wearing a watch on each wrist, you’d see them tick out of sync.… VOX

At that time, expectations were that the gas would burn out within a few weeks, but it has continued to burn more than four decades after it was set on fire….Darvaza Crater.

The use of improvisation on top of canovaccio enabled the avoidance of censorship because censors cannot censor that which is not written… Canovaccio

(above the glistening backs of cars)

This n-grams viewer graph jibes with my own sense that people are using the word robust a lot more often than they once did. (From latin robustus, literally “as strong as an oak.”)

I was under the vague impression that it was Donald Rumsfeld or the Bush administration that popularized its use, but the graph (which, of course, measures written and not spoken instances of the word) seems to indicate that its meteoric rise began circa 1980.

In a similar vein is the phrase “salacious details” which I recall as having arisen from the Monica Lewinsky investigation. (And, again, Iraq War, ‘embedded.’ — though contrast with ‘embedded journalist.’)

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams [ Keats]

American/ Sacramento River (map) El afán de independencia

pompier, “Un troisième pompier meurt dans les incendies au Portugal” (Monde.)

αι δ’ολολυγη πασαι Αθηνη χειρας ανεσχον.

*
ολολυγη, -ης: an ecstatic religious shout of women. (only citation in Cunliffe). ανεχω: hold up, lift up.

*
And all the women, crying ecstatically, lifted their hands to Athena.

*
Ian Johnston: All the women raised their hands, as they prayed to Athena.

préalablement ressortissant “un ressortissant nippon” lâche le supplice ,Deprisa — el redactó — Medio Ambiente — la petrolera :// salpicár, un perfil,rueda de prensa diaria,en deuil,,,, Having unleashed the most destructive political impulses of his party, he finally fell victim to them… Cantor (Nyt 2014/06/12)

…

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