La clémence des princes n’est souvent qu’une politique pour gagner l’affection des peuples.

The mercy of princes is often no more than a political ploy to win the affection of the people.

[15]

It finally reached a point where I fell ill, more spiritually than physically; I gave it all up and went to the steppes of the Bashkirs to breathe fresh air, drink koumiss, and live an animal life… Tolstoy, My Confession

Koumiss is fermented mare or donkey milk: koumiss

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“How can we dominate our domination; how can we master our own mastery?” (tweet)

Like this question’s phrasing. Population explosion indicates a certain mastery, climate change however suggests limits to that mastery, is what I think of.

Would toss out that a beginning to” mastering our mastery” would involve acknowledging we’ve mastered just a small part of a larger thing to be mastered (e.g., we’ve mastered growth but not sustainable growth), or part of a thing which can’t ultimately be mastered (“God”, “ourselves”).

Thus yields the cedar to the axe’s edge,/ Whose arms gave shelter to the princely eagle,…

Hippocrates 8. 8: “ὁκόταν δὲ ἀκμάζῃ τὸ νούσημα, τότε λεπτοτάτῃ διαίτῃ ἀναγκαῖον χρέεσθαι.” (When the disease is full the diet should be meager.)

Delacroix’s journal (x) –the masons raised walls exclusively by instinct and consequently can never make the same thing twice:

Abraham nous disait que les maçons élevaient en général les murs sans cordeau entièrement d’instinct ; que tel ouvrier était incapable de refaire une chose qu’il avait faite avant.

Below are the same two paragraphs from the wikipedia article on Fletcher Henderson, but the first is from October 2017, while the other is from today. They are exactly the same except for the last two sentences, the first and earlier of which suggest that Henderson turned to music because there weren’t any job opportunities for black chemists, the second and current one somewhat shading with doubt the idea that Henderson was strongly interested chemistry. Either way, what’s interesting to me about Henderson remains the same– that he was a math and science person as well as an arts person. But it’s also worthwhile recalling from time to time that Wikipedia is a mutable and non-monolithic resource, whose sources need to be checked. Might be interesting to look at this passage again in a few years.

Although a talented musician, Henderson decided to dedicate himself to math and science. At age 18 he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and changed his name to Fletcher Henderson, giving up James, his grandfather’s name. He attended Atlanta University (where he was a member of the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha) and graduated in 1920 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and mathematics. After graduation, he moved to New York City to attend Columbia University for a master’s degree in chemistry. Finding his job prospects in chemistry to be poor because of his race, Fletcher turned to music.

Current:

Although a talented musician, Henderson decided to dedicate himself to math and science. At age 18 he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and changed his name to Fletcher Henderson, giving up James, his grandfather’s name. He attended Atlanta University (where he was a member of the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha) and graduated in 1920 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and mathematics. After graduation, he moved to New York City with the intention of attending Columbia University for a master’s degree in chemistry, but no evidence proves he actually enrolled. He did get a part-time job as a lab assistant in a downtown Manhattan chemistry firm, but this only lasted a year.

Mimesis, pp. 459:

“We may ask ourselves how it came about that modern consciousness of reality began to find literary form for the first time precisely in Henri Beyle of Grenoble. Beyle-Stendhal was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and, despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity. There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuation between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject. But, such as he was, he offered himself to the moment; circumstances seized him, tossed him about, and laid upon him a unique and unexpected destiny; they formed him so that he was compelled to come to terms with reality in a way which no one had done before him.”

Of the principal senior generals who fought at Gettysburg, virtually all, with the conspicuous exception of Sickles, have been memorialized with statues. When asked why there was no memorial to him, Sickles supposedly said, “The entire battlefield is a memorial to Dan Sickles.”…. Dan Sickles.

Odd connection: Shelby Foote’s first wife married the bombadier of the Bockscar, the plane that dropped the second atomic bomb.

A nice phrase from Foote, describing the abrupt chaotic retreat of Federal troops (The Civil War, Fredricksburg to Meridian, pp. 477):

Yelling with pleasure at the sight of the blue flood running backwards across the fields as if the landscape had been tipped […]

ngrams: “data are, data is,” “data show,data shows“… (see)

Auerbach suggested a possible new “project” for me, which was to investigate time (in a Good Old Neon kind of way) in To The Lighthouse. Would try to measure how long scenes took in the novel’s time, versus how many words the scene took, and how much time it took to read that many words. If the scene included a flash back, you might also try to measure how long that flashbacked-scene is relative to the scene in which it occurs. I’m not sure what this would accomplish but it might be nice to get some hard numbers.

Good Old Neon tells us that an impossible amount of information occurs in a single moment of time which can’t be conveyed in writing. (Or put it this way which sounds a little like Heisenberg: that writing can convey the information experienced in a moment but not in the time that moment occurs in, or it can convey the time it occurs in but not the information.) This is probably a scandalously awful or dumb thing to do but maybe you could put some numbers to that…. Maybe sometimes what occurs in a moment takes pages and pages to describe while other times — perhaps this is what action novels are about– words have trouble keeping up.

Maybe this is the same question or maybe it is something different: how much would fictional time need to be slowed or dilated in order for fictional thought to be intelligible to a reader, that is, in order for actual reading time to be equal to fictional thinking time? Anyway — To The Lighthouse. Maybe it’s time could be contrasted with another novel’s, say a Bloom (or Stephen) chapter from Ulysses — or Mrs. Dalloway?

Ce cadran que j’aperçois et que parcourt une aiguille mobile, n’est-ce pas un manomètre ? *

L’estomac dérangé commande en maître, mais en maître bien indigne de régner, car il remplit mal ses fonctions, et arrête tout le reste. (X) (X)

Dramas deprived of all dramatic incident — how Roger Fry described Cezanne’s still lifes.

Delacroix here — part of Napoleon’s superiority was that there was nothing of the artist in his character —

Je pense, le lendemain, qu’une partie de la supériorité de Louis-Napoléon vient sans doute de ce qu’il n’a rien de l’artiste….15 mars 1854

“JOHNSON. ‘And really it is wonderful, considering how much attention is necessary for men to take care of themselves, and ward off immediate evils which press upon them, it is wonderful how much they do for others. As it is said of the greatest liar, that he tells more truth than falsehood; so it may be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil.'” Life of Samuel Johnson (pp. 771), James Boswell.

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