A plight unknown to the born reader

Edith Wharton. From The Vice of Reading.

It follows that he who reads by time often "has no time to read"; a plight unknown to the born reader, whose reading forms a continuous undercurrent to all his other occupations.

Edith Wharton - The Vice of Reading

An interesting take from Edith Wharton on The Vice of Reading.

This observation caught my eye.

What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader's mind just as it left the writer's -- without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought -- it has been read to no purpose. In such cases, of course, the reader is not always to blame. There are books that are always the same -- incapable of modifying or of being modified -- but these do not count as factors in literature. The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought. Where, from one cause or the other, this reciprocal adaptability is lacking, there can be no real intercourse between book and reader. In this sense it may be said that there is no abstract standard of values in literature: the greatest books ever written are worth to each reader only what he can get out of them. The best books are those from which the best readers have been able to extract the greatest amount of thought of the highest quality; but it is generally from these books that the poor reader gets least.

There's the rub of it; "The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought". Just how is that plasticity conjured such that some certain books are read with constantly renewed delight two, three, six generations after they were written.

Montaigne on religious conviction

Montaigne, The Complete Works:

It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.

A vegetarian butcher, eh? Well, it's an interesting business model for a challenging time.

From an article (Wurst Case Scenario by Andrew D. Blechman in the January 2010 edition of The Smithsonian Magazine)

I had spoken by phone with Gero two weeks earlier, trying to put Axel's struggle and the rapid decline of Germany's most iconic profession into context. "A vegetarian butcher, eh?" Gero had said. "Well, it’s an interesting business model for a challenging time. Most butchers are branching out into catering, cafes or organic products - so-called 'green meat.' Everyone must specialize if they want to survive. I guess selling vegetables is one way to do that. We could all use more balance in our diet, and I know plenty of overweight butchers who might benefit from eating more vegetables. But I have a feeling it means we've lost yet another butcher."

Memeology?

Is there a word for the history and application of ideas and concepts. Something akin to industrial archaeology which looks at the history and application of technology? Perhaps memeology? Why do some ideas take off in one environment or time and not in others? Why did the New World civilizations have the idea of the wheel (as evidenced by wheeled toys for children) but never used it for transportation as far as we can tell? Why did the Chinese develop the capability of steel production for a couple of hundred years and then abandon it to the point of total amnesia.

All this is brought to mind by an article (Blissful Oblivion by Stephaine Pain in New Scientist, March 7th, 2009) which examines the catalytic influence of Western medical technology upon Japanese practitioners between the 18th and 19th centuries and particularly with regard to the parallel development of anaesthetics in isolation of one another. A fascinating little story.

He has found something to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think.

From G.K. Chesterton's What I Saw in America. That is the problem with finding books on-line. Yes you can read them electronically, but if you are like me, you can only really consume them when they are a book in hand. One to be held, reflected upon, set aside, gone back to. This appears to be an excellent discourse, using travel to expand on philosophy and vice versa and delivered in engaging, witty prose.

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger--the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.

Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellers are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on it their serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that the Englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such better way is the only excuse of this book.

Let me begin my American impressions with two impressions I had before I went to America. One was an incident and the other an idea; and when taken together they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind. It is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferior to the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. It is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in dealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning two working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; the sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of thing he has a duty to understand and respect, because it is the explanation of the joke.

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Embassies and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they stand; and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. I have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and a little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last palm-trees fringing a desert. In the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks and Egyptians, I have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English gentleman. The officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game called 'Confessions' which my friends and I invented in our youth; an examination paper containing questions like, 'If you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden, what would you do?' One of my friends, I remember, wrote, 'Take the pledge.' But that is another story, and might bring Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time.

One of the questions on the paper was, 'Are you an anarchist?' To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, 'What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?' along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an [Greek: arche]. Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of subverting the government of the United States by force?' Against this I should write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'Shall I slay my brother Boer?'--the answer that ran, 'Never interfere in family matters.' But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with a beautiful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you.' Or, 'I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity.' Or again, 'Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries.' There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies.

Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreign problems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have I any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.

Define: Polysororal

Polysororal. Came across in an article (Findings, Harper's Magazine, March 2009)

The eldest sisters in polysororal families tend to lose their virginity later. Female worker ants who attempt to reproduce via parthenogenesis in the presence of the queen will be attacked by their peers.

I can't find anyone online that defines polysoral but Merriam-Webster offers sororal. Polysororal would, by logic, then be a family with multiple female siblings.

Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: so·ro·ral
Pronunciation: \sə-ˈrȯr-əl\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin soror sister — more at sister
Date: 1858

Gossamer strands: Dietrich and Kipling?

Kipling's 'If' poem shows up in the oddest places. I would suspect it is one of those poems whose popular currency vastly exceeds its critical respect. I came across this interesting tidbit from Ted Malone's Pack Up Your Troubles (1942).

"It was the winter of 1918 in Berlin," Miss Dietrich wrote, "and my coming upon 'If' then gave me a philosophy and comfort which helped during the most trying days of my life."

She recalled it was the time of Germany's realization and shock that it had lost the World War; food was acutely scarce; the country had been starved insensible, except to the rigors of one of the worst winters northern Europe had experienced in years.

Further, only a few weeks before, the girl had learned of her father's death in fierce action on the Russian front. She had no brothers or sisters. She and her mother, quite penniless, were trying to find a new footing in revolution-crazed, famine-ridden Berlin.

"One morning, on my way to the food depot where we stood in line for milk and bread, I had to pass a baker's shop. Rioters had broken in the night before. Glass was all over the roped-off sidewalk. Such sights were common in Berlin, but as I stopped to look I saw a little framed picture in the rubbish which had spilled outside. It was a poem, and I could clearly read only the first line: 'If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. . . . '

"A year or so later I managed to get a copy of the complete poem. I have always treasured it. I must have six or seven embossed copies of the work at home, presented by friends who knew I liked it. 'If' helped me through the most critical period of my life. Once a great source of encouragement, it is still that and, in addition, a nostalgic pleasure."

If . . .

If
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream-and not make dreams your master;
If you can think-and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And-which is more-you'll be a Man, my son!

Good King Wenceslas

The Feast of Stephen is the second day of Christmas, December 26th, also known as Boxing Day in England. Further background to the story and the hymn is here.

Good King Wenceslas
by John Mason Neale

Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen.
When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.
Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight, gathering winter fuel.

Hither page and stand by me if thou knowst it telling
Yonder peasant, who is he, where and what his dwelling?
Sire, he lives a good league hence, underneath the mountain,
Right against the forest fence, by Saint Agnes' fountain.

Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pinelogs hither
Thou and I will see him dine when we bear them thither
Page and monarch forth they went, forth they went together
Through the rude winds wild lament, and the bitter weather.

Sire the night is darker now, and the wind blows stronger
Fails my heart I know now how, I can go no longer.
Mark my footsteps my good page, tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter's rage freeze thy blood less coldly.

In his master's steps he trod where the snow lay dinted
Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed
Therefore Christian men be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.