My Ántonia

I love the introduction to Willa Cather’s masterpiece so much that it’s actually hindered my completion of the book, so often do I return to read it. It’s a little long to type out here in full, but here’s the first paragraph:

“Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden–Jim Burden , as we still call him in the West. He and I are old friends–we grew up together in the same Nebraska town–and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we say in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it was like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”

I suppose the first thing to say is just how remarkably Cather strikes precisely the appropriate tone for her Virgilian epgraph: “Optima dies…prima fugit”, from Georgics 3. Life springs seamlessly from descriptions passionately evocative of death; the mere repetition of “burning” is so well employed as to avoid all sense of redundancy and instead to imply the insurmountable rift between language and experience, the unbridgeable memorial gap between the past and the present. Death as well as life lie in those hidden interstices and yield to one another: Nature,by virtue of its bounty “stifles”, yet remains as stimulating as the otherwise sterile ground “stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron”. This burning unknown desire, this animating principle seeking for something, searching for some kind of expression, dying to live and living to die, ultimately finds its answer in attempted reconstruction of another human being, an act of artistic creation, of memorial parturition. The best days have fled; the Golden Age has past. How can we keep alive within us its burning splendor?

UPDATE: Here is the extended quote from Georgics 3.  I think it more or less supports my interpretation:

Optuma quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus
et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis.

“Ah! life’s best hours are ever first to fly
From hapless mortals; in their place succeed
Disease and dolorous eld; till travail sore
And death unpitying sweep them from the scene.”

(J. B. Greenough, trans.)

A Brief Statement of Purpose(3): Contradiction

Contradictions among the opinions in various posts are not to be dismissed or avoided; rather, as in the style of medieval quaestiones, they should be interpreted as opportunities to explore deeper truths through the potential reconciliation of ideas at variance.  “Gotcha” may be a fun game for point-scoring politicians, but it leads nowhere.

1 point for Wikipedia

A bit earlier I mentioned that Wikipedia somewhat rubs me the wrong way academically in that it’s not really that great about citations. I’m about to blatantly contradict that. Just so you know…caveat lector.

I was reading the entry on the “Golem” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem) when I ran across the following passage:

“It is said that the body of Rabbi Loew’s golem still lies in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue in Prague. A legend is told of a Nazi agent during World War II ascending the attic and trying to stab the golem, but perishing instead.^{[citation needed]} The attic is not open to the general public.”

I’m particularly tickled by notion that an urban legend requires a citation!

But upon further reflection, it provides fodder for the ponderings of another day. What kind of people would we be if we demanded the strict sifting of myth and fact?

Silly

Back when the early church decided to celebrate Christmas in the dead of winter, might it have been the case that the following phrase was uttered somewhere by someone:

Christus hibernatus est.

Apropos that last post…

…I really really want to read this: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LATWEH.html

A Purely Theoretical Question

I mentioned Fahrenheit 451 a few posts earlier, and the following thought knocked out of my head this evening while looking over a closet filled with books, most of which at some point must be gotten rid of when we eventually move: Is it ever the case that one should burn a book?

I suppose that’s merely a rather inflammatory (heh) way of stating the general question of whether the censorship of any medium is permissible in any case. But then again, maybe not. After all, there is something particularly evocative both physically and historically about destruction specifically by immolation. For something to burn, to be consumed by flames, to devolve into a dry husk and ashes swept by the wind…the doggerel could continue ad nauseam ultraque.

But those clever, clever blokes at Amazon have gone and flippantly named their novel (heh) apparatus the “Kindle”. Granted, they may have been thinking more along the trope of knowledge enkindled in the mind of man, but that only throws the primeval paradox into higher relief. All over the world, fire is symbolically both creative and destructive, from the mythical Prometheus to the historical Mayan prince Fire is Born to the Great Chicago Fire. Power and fragility.

I suppose that gets a bit closer to my (weakly) conservative reaction to the Kindle. I mean, have you ever tried to burn a computer? It doesn’t really work all too well…oh sure, it won’t function after lighting one too many matches under the hard drive, but that’s not really the point. Despite the fact that we may know that all the linguistic information you’re reading on the screen now (and then some) is all actually physically indicated by various microscopic markings somewhere (and if that’s not really true and you’re all just rolling around on the floor laughing at my patent ignorance of computers, just bear in mind that that actually bolsters the point I’m making), books and the knowledge and language they contain in actual script are somehow more material and personal and “alive”, as it were.

One may object, of course, that computers are just as material as books are, if not more. On that account it may just be that we’re not as sensitive about computer burnings not only because it’s never really happened, but also because computers are so much a part of our working lives in a way that books really never were, that we can’t really imagine anyone ever carrying it out on a societal scale without basically shooting themselves in the foot.

Still, unless you’re dealing with heats not generally manageable by your average angry, devil-machine-burning mob, you’re probably going to end up with substantial piece of twisted metal and plastic char. In other words, it will probably be (just barely) recognizable and it won’t fly away with the next strong gust of wind. Its material identity will remain as a weighty blob, and that weight, that substance, that massive vestige of quiddity is important.

Books, on the other hand, are fragile, and perhaps accordingly we consider what is written on them to be just as fragile. Or to be a bit more specific, perhaps the fragility of the material recalls a corresponding fragility we’d rather forget, namely, that of civilized, communal knowledge. It’s a well-known metaphor that the durability of writing material is in some sense intended to indicate the durability of the encoded concepts (cf. Horace, Odes, 3.30 “Exegi monumentum aeris perennium”; Shelley, “Ozymandias”). Is this merely compensation for inadequacy?

This post has rambled on for long enough. It’s time to bring it to a close:

The preceding blather is all in some sense an argument that it’s not the Kindle (or any such product) that I’m against, but rather that I’m a bit wary of the quick’n'dirty reconfigurations of fundamental societal concepts and symbols that technological innovation produces. In other words, this minor qualm is part of a much larger qualm about the way in which the ever-increasing interpenetration of our daily lives with communications/information technology may be setting us up for a fall by radically restructuring the way we learn to value information and information-bearing objects such that our fundamental ideas about e.g. worth, endurance, fragility, prohibition, and trust all become skewed by an extremely manipulable technological crutch. But manipulability aside, such a radical value shift away from a natural basis, while not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, raises the question of what happens to such a society in the event of a sudden inability to produce the technology that has been so incorporated into its members’ lives as to alienate them from a more natural state of affairs. And then there’s also the problem of the creation of potentially insurmountable cultural chasms between the technologically advanced elite and the rest of the plough-pushing world…

I think I have the answer: Oral poetry

A curious problem

I hope this to be the first in a rather lengthy series of, er, amusing statements and problems found in mathematics textbooks. This one is from Chapter 1, section 1 of Seth Warner’s Modern Algebra (Dover ed., 1990 reprint). I’m listing only the interesting conditions:

Let M be the set of all American men now alive, and let W be the set of all American women now alive. Determine whether f is a function and, if so, what its domain and range are, if f is the set of all (x, y) M x W such that

a) y loves x

c) x is the husband of y

j) y is your instructor’s wife. (How does your answer depend on his marital status?)

How’s that for making set theory relevant?

ὦ τέκνα, Κάδμου τοῦ πάλαι νέα τροφή

I’m only a few short days away from being a male in his mid-20-somethings living alone with his mother, something the Real World apparently frowns upon as either a growth-stunting state of affairs or a sure indication of irreversibly infantalizing (”tantalizingnesses”; thank you, spell check), quasi-Oedipal damage done. Those perhaps may be the case when one’s parents are, say, by and large healthy and mobile; however, things are different when they get to be over 60 and/or dead/dying. That kind of ratchets up the required level of maturity a few notches pretty damn fast, and it becomes essentially a game of sink or swim. I noticed just the other day, though, that I’m rather ably treading water. There’s something about an utter absence of self-consciousness in standing alone before a wall full of supermarket tampons in the middle of the day while discussing rather loudly with one’s mother over a fuzzy cell phone connection the appropriateness of brands and sizes that suggests that some significant portion of the ineluctable miasma of adulthood has descended upon one’s shoulders and is there to stay. That, or the Freudians among you are going to have a field day with this one.

Set Theory in Action!

Did you notice that on the sidebar there’s a category for uncategorized posts?  Spin, Bertand Russell, spin!!!

Truth in Advertising

Earlier this afternoon, I was driving past a local Taco Bell whose marquee read, “Grilled stuff[sic] burrito”.

Considering my last experience of Taco Bell cuisine from over 8 years ago, I’m debating the accuracy of my editorial judgment…