Upon finishing Dr. FAUSTUS

WHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Spengler quote on modern art (self-love) with respect to judeo-christian Godliness

"A new class of critics served as midwives at the birth of these monsters. I marveled in the essay noted above over the fact that museum-goers gush over Pollock's random dribbles, but never would listen to Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions at a concert hall. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham famously said that people don't like music; they only like the way it sounds. In the case of Pollock, people neither like his work nor the way it looks; what they like is the idea that the artist in his arrogance can redefine the world on his own terms.

To be an important person in this perverse scheme means to shake one's fist at God and define one's own little world, however dull, tawdry and pathetic it might be. To lack creativity is to despair. Hence the attraction of the myriad ideological movements in art that gives the despairing artists the illusion of creativity. If God is the Creator, then imitation of God is emulation of creation. But that is not quite true, for the Judeo-Christian god is more than a creator; God is a creator who loves his creatures. "

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XLVI

"My poor, great friend! How often, reading in this achievement of his decline, his posthumous work, which prophetically anticipates so much destruction, have i recalled the distressful words he uttered at the death of the child. It is not to be, goodness, joy, hope, that was not to be, it would be taken back, it must be taken back! "Alas, it is not to be!""

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXXVII

"Gentlemen, this is now really the door-knob. I am already outside. I must say one more thing. The Germans should leave it to the Jews to be pro-German. With their nationalism, their pride, their foible of 'differentness,' their hatred of being put in order and equalized, their refusal to let themselves be introduced into the world and adopted socially, they will get into trouble, real Jewish trouble, je vous le jure. The Germans should let the Jew be the mediateur between them and society, be the manager, the impresario. He is altogether the right man for it, one should not turn him out, he is international, and he is pro-German. Mais c'est en vain. Er c'est tres dommage! Am I still talking? No, I left long ago. Cher Maitre, j`etais enchante. J`ai manaque ma mission but I am delighted. Mes respects, monsieur le professeur. Vous m'avez assiste trop peu, mais je ne vous en veux pas. Mille choses a Madame Schwei-ge-still. Adieu, adieu..."

encore, Destroyer please.

"Now, come on honey let's go outside
You disrupt the world's disorder just by virtue of your grace, you know
I didn't wanna go, but leave I must
as satisfied as this dust was"

Flu, Cold and Throat problems

Thanks to Newark's beautiful weather that changes by the hour these days, I have been suffering from pretty intense symptoms of flu, cold and throat irritation. I am hoping to come back from my sick-leave, sometime in next twelve hours.

les affiches officielles de la Droite et la Gauche

vive le france! (in lower case)

A French blogger on campaign posters for this weekend's election

"For example, Sarkozy’s face appears, well-lit, from a darkened landscape, above his name and nothing else. Subtext - I am a leader without party, come to relieve our darkness. Join! Francois Bayrou’s is not that dissimilar, which should not really be surprising given that he thinks he really is without party, and that his party used to be more rightwing than Sarko’s as recently as 1994.

Ségoléne Royal’s face is inevitably the centre of hers, but what is this? Grainy, monochrome photography, with a block red masthead and italic, bold white Helvetica type. It looks like a 1970s leftwing paper’s front page from some demonstration, presumably intended to lend some revolutionary romance to her image (and herald a last-minute tack to the base?). More importantly, it’s easily the best-designed and most recognisable of the lot, rivalled only by…

Le Pen’s, which shows the man himself on stage, looking astonishingly like Ian Paisley. Like the Man Standing in the Gap Left By God, "

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXXIII

"If I were a novel-writer, I could make out of my tortured recollections a most lively picture of such a futile and flagitious assemblage. There was a writer of belles-lettre, who spoke, not without charm, even with a sybaritic and dimpling relish, on the theme of "Revolution and Love of Humanity," and unloosed a free discussion - all too free, diffuse, and confused - by such misbegotten types as only see the light at moments like this: lunatics, dreamers, clowns, flibbertigibbets and fly-by-nights, plotters and small time philosophers."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXXIII

"No stopping them! My soul, think not on it! Do not venture to measure what it would mean if in this our uniquely frightful extremity the dam should break, as it is on point of doing, and there were no more hold against the boundless hatred that we have fanned to flame among the peoples round us! True, by the destruction of our cities from the air, Germany has long since become a theatre of war; but still remains for it to become so in the most actual sense, a sense that we cannot and may not conceive. Our propaganda even has a strange way of warning the foe against the wounding of our soil, the sacred German soil, as against a horrible crime... The sacred German soil! As though there were anything still sacred about it, as though it were not long since deconsecrate over and over again, through uncounted crimes against law and justice and both morally and de facto laid open to judgment and enforcement! Let it come! Nothing more remains to hope, to wish, to will. The cry for peace with the Anglo-Saxon, the offer to continue alone the war against the Sarmatic flood, the demand that some part of the condition of unconditional surrender be remitted, in other words that they treat with us - but with whom? All that is nothing but eye-wash: the demand of a regime which will not understand, even today seems not to understand, that its staff is broken, that it must disappear, laden with the curse of having made itself, us, German, the Reich, I go further and say all that is German, intolerable to the world."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXXII

""What is suffering, what fear and humiliating danger," said she, "in comparison with the one sweet, indispensable triumph, without which one would not live: to hold to its better self that frivolous, evasive, worldly, torturing, irresponsible charmingness, which yet has true human value; to drive its flippancy to serious feeling, to possess the elusive, and at last, at last, not only once but for confirmation and reassurance never often enough, to see it in the state that suits its worth, the state of devotion, of deep suspiring passion!"
I do not say the woman used exactly these words, but she expressed herself in very like ones. She was well read, accustomed to articulate her inner life in speech; as a girl she had even attempted verse. What she said had a cultured precision and something of the boldness that always arises when language tries seriously to achieve feeling and life, to make them first truly live, to exhaust them in it. This is no everyday effort, but a product of emotion, and in so far feeling and mind are related, but also in so far gets its thrilling effect..... And always there was this curious equation of worthiness with sensual passion, this fixed and strangely drunken idea that inward worthiness could only fulfill itself, in fleshly desire, which obviously something of like value with "worth"; that it was at once the highest and the most indispensable happiness to keep them together. I cannot describe the glowing, albeit melancholy and insecure, unsatisfied notes in her voice as she spoke of this mixture of the two conceptions "worth" and "desire"; how much desire appeared as the profoundly serious element, sternly opposed to the hated "society" one, "society" where true worth in play and coquetry betrayed itself; which was the inhuman, treacherous element of its exterior surface amiability; and which one must take from it, tear from it, to have it alone, utterly alone, alone in the most final sense of the word. The disciplining of lovableness till it become love: that was what it amounted to; but at the same time there was more abstruse matter, about something wherein thought and sense mystically melted into one; the idea that the contradiction between the frivolity of society and the melancholy untrustworthiness of life in general was resolved in his embrace, the suffering it caused most sweetly avenged."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXXI

"The whole temper of art, believe me, will change, and withal into the blither and more modest; it is inevitable, and it is a good thing. Much melancholy ambition will fall away from her, and a new innocence, yes, harmlessness will be hers. The future will see in her, see herself will once more see in herself, the servant of a community, which will comprise far more than 'education' and will not have culture but will perhaps be a culture. We can only with difficulty imagine such a thing; and yet it will be, and be the natural thing: an art without anguish, psychologically healthy, not solemn, unsadly confiding, as art per du with humanity...."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXXI

"The memory comes back to me, because the Gesta actually show something like a return to the musical style of Love's Labour's Lost, while the tone language of the Marvels of the Universe leans more to that of the Apocalypse or even the Faust. Such anticipations and overlappings often occur in creative life; but I can explain to myself the artistic attraction which this material had for my friend: it was an intellectual charm, not without a trace of malice and solvent travesty, springing at it did from a critical rebound after the swollen pomposity of an art epoch nearing its end. The musical drama had taken its materials from the romantic sagas, the myth-world of the Middle Ages, and thus suggested that only such subjects were worthy of music, or suited to its nature. Here the conclusion seemed to be drawn; in a right destructive way, indeed, in that the bizarre, and particularly the farcically erotic, takes the place of the moralizing and priestly, all inflated pomp of production it rejected and the action transferred to the puppet theatre, itself already burlesque."

Destroyer's 3000 Flowers

I was Clytæmnestra on a good day, dispensing wisdom to
the uninitiated...
The initiates brought out in tumbrils shat out by the dawn...
Shat out by the dawn...

And, like a woman, I was kept as the wealthy
American Underground wept
at the sight of Rhode Island sinking into the sea.
And the sky still reigned supreme over the land as The Music Lovers
sat cross-legged in the sand and in Time and in Space, and (in other
words) in a band who, much like churchgoers, fuck themselves... up...

Destroyer's Rubies

Quiet, Ruby, someone's coming.
Approach with stealth.
Oh, it's just your precious American Underground
and it is born of wealth.
With not a writer in the lot.
Sapphires vie for your attention
Cheap dancers, they mean well in their way.
But Priest says - "Please, I can't stand my knees
And I can't bear her raven tresses caught up in a breeze like that!"

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXX

"This picture, not to call an idea, possessed all our heads, companionably side by side with another: the belief that we were forced into war, that sacred necessity called us to take our weapons - those well-polished weapons whose readiness and excellence always induced a secret temptation to test them. Then there was the fear of being overrun from all sides, from which fate only our enormous strength protected us, our power of carrying the war straightway into other lands. Attack and defence were the same, in our case: together they made up the feeling of providence, a calling, a great hour, a sacred necessity. The peoples beyond our borders might consider us disturbers of the peace if they chose, enemies of life and not to be borne with; but we had the means to knock the world on the head until it changed its mind and came not only to admire but to love us"

Destroyer's Priest Knees

"And I couldn't bear to follow you there, where trauma exists in the sky.
20th Century Masters welcome these disasters, and so do I.
But, no!
Oh baby, please don't go up into it!"

"Nouvaeu West-Coast Hipster"

Ed Valle at the bar calling me a, well, look at the title of this post.

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXV

"You assaye to question me in order to be feared, to be afraid of the pangs of hell. For the thought of back-ward turning and rescue, of your so-called soul-heal, of withdrawing from the promise lurks in the back of your mind and you are acting to summon up the attritio cordis, the heartfelt anguish and dread of what is to come, of which you may well have heard, that by it man can arrive at the so-called blessedness.
Let me tell you, that is an entirely exploded theology. The attrition-theory has been scientifically superseded. It is shown that contritio is necessary, the real and true protestant remorse for sin, which means not merely fear repentance by churchly regulation but inner, religious conversion; ask yourself whether you are capable of that; ask yourself, your pride will not fail of an answer. The longer the less will you be able and willing to let yourself in for contritio, sithence the extravagant life you will lead is a great indulgence, out of the which a man does not so simply find the way back in to the good safe average. Therefore, to your reassurance be it said, even hell will not afford you aught essentially new, only the more or less accustomed, and proudly so. It is at bottom only a continuation of the extravagant existence. To knit up in two words its quintessence, or if you like its chief matter, is that it leaves its denizens only the choice between extreme cold and an extreme heat which can melt granite. Between these two states they flee roaring to and fro, for in the one the other always seems heavenly refreshment but is at once and in the most hellish meaning of the word intolerable. The extreme in this must please you."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXV

"The criticism of ornament, convention, and the abstract generality are all the same one. What it demolishes is the pretence in the bourgeois work of art; music, although she makes no picture, is also subject to it. Certainly, this 'not making a picture' gives her an advantage over the other arts. But music too by untiringly conforming her specific concerns to the ruling conventions has as far as she could played a role in the highbrow swindle. The inclusion of expression in the general appeasement is the innermost principle of musical pretence. It is all up with it. The claim to consider the general harmonically contained in the particular contradicts itself. It is all up with the once bindingly valid conventions, which guaranteed the freedom of play."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXV

"The idea, then, a matter of three, four bars, no more, isn't it? All the residue is elaboration, sticking at it. Or isn't it? Good. But now we are all experts, all critics: we note that the idea is nothing new, that it all too much reminds us of something in Rimsky-Korsakov or Brahms. What is to be done? You just change it. But a changed idea, is that still an idea? Take Beethoven's notebooks. There is no thematic conception there as God gave it. He remoulds it and adds 'Meilleur'. Scant confidence in God's prompting, scant respect for it is expressed in that 'Meilleur' - itself not so very enthusiastic either. A genuine inspiration, immediate, absolute, unquestioned, ravishing, where there is no choice, no tinkering, no possible improvement; where all is as a sacred mandate, a visitation received by the possessed one with faltering and stumbling step, with shudders of awe from head to foot, with tears of joy blinding his eyes: no, that is not possible with God, who leaves the understanding too much to do. It comes but from the divel, the true master and giver of such rapture."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXV

"Do you ween that any important work was ever wrought except its maker learned to understand the way of the criminal and madman? Morbid and healthy! Without the morbid would life all its whole life never have survived. Genuine and false! Are we land-loping knaves? Do we draw the good things out of the nose of nothing? Where nothing is, there the Devil too has lost his right and no pallid Venus produces anything worth while! We make naught new - that is other people's matter. We only release, only set free. We let the lameness and self-consciousness, the chaste scruples and doubts go to the Devil. We physic away fatigue merely by a little charm-hyperaemia the great and the small, of the person and of the time. That is it, you do not think of the passage of time, you do not think historically, when you complain that such and such a one could have it 'wholly', joys and pains endlessly, without the hour-glass being set for him, the reckoning finally made. What he in his classical decades could have without us, certainly, that, nowadaies, we alone have to offer. And we offer better, we offer only the right and true - that is no lenger the classical, my friend, what we give has not been tried. Who knows today, who even knew in classical times, what inspiration is, what genuine, old, primeval enthusiasm, insickled critique, unparalysed by thought or by the mortal domination of reason - who knows the divine raptus? I believe, indeed, the devil passes for a man of destructive criticism? Slander and again slander, my friend! Gog's sacrament! If there is anything he cannot stomach, it is destructive criticism. What he wants and gives is triumph over it, is shining, sparkling, vainglorious unreflectiveness!"

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXV

"Time? Simple time? No, my dear fere, that is not devyll's ware. For that we should not earn the reward, namely that the end belongs to us. What manner of time, that is the heart of the matter! Great time, mad time, quite bedivelled time, in which the fun waxes fast and furious, with heaven-high leaping and springing - and again, of course, a bit miserable, very miserable indeed, I not only admit that, I even emphasize it, with pride, for it is sitting and fit, such is artist-way and artist-nature. That, as is well knowen, is given at all times to excess on both sides and is in quite normal way a bit excessive. Alway the pendulum swings very wide to and fro between high spirits and melancholia, that is usual, and is so to speak still according to moderate bourgois Nueremberg way, in comparison with that which we purvey. For we purvey the uttermost in this direction; we purvey towering flights and illuminations, experiences of upliftings and unfetterings, of freedom, certainty, facility, feeling of power and triumph, that our man does not trust his wits - counting in besides the colossal admiration for the made thing, which could soon bring him to renounce every outside, foreign admiration - the thrills of self-veneration, yes, of exquisite horror of himself, in which he appears to himself like an inspired mouthpiece, as a godlike monster. And correspondingly deep, honourably deep, doth he sink in between-time, not only into void and desolation and unfruitful melancholy but also into pains and sicknesse - familiar incidentally, which had always been there, which belong to his character, yet which are only most honorably enhanced by the illumination and the well-knowen 'sack of heyre.' Those are pains which a man gladly pays, with pleasure and pride, for what he had so much enjoyed, pains which he knows from the fairy-tale, the pains which the little sea-maid, as from sharp knives, had in her beautiful human legs she got herself instead of her tail. You know Andersen Little Sea-maid? she would be a sweetheart for you! Just say the word and I will bring her to your couch"

The Great Books by Allan Bloom

The following is an example list from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. (1940, 1972)

1. Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus: Tragedies
4. Sophocles: Tragedies
5. Herodotus: History
6. Euripides: Tragedies
7. Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates: Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes: Comedies
10. Plato: Dialogues
11. Aristotle: Works
12. Epicurus: "Letter to Herodotus"; "Letter to Menoecus"
13. Euclid: Elements
14. Archimedes: Works
15. Apollonius: Conic Sections
16. Cicero: Works
17. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil: Works
19. Horace: Works
20. Livy: History of Rome
21. Ovid: Works
22. Plutarch: Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus: Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus: Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy: Almagest
27. Lucian: Works
28. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
29. Galen: On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus: The Enneads
32. St. Augustine: On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri: The New Life; On Monarchy; The Divine Comedy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More: Utopia
44. Martin Luther: Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
48. William Gilbert: On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser: Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon: Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare: Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei: Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler: Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey: On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
57. René Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton: Works
59. Moliere: Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza: Ethics
63. John Locke: Letter Concerning Toleration; 'Of Civil Government'; Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine: Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding; Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve: The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
76. David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell: Journal Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth
87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat
88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
89. William Wordsworth: Poems
90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria
91. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma
92. Karl von Clausewitz: On War
93. Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
94. Lord Byron: Don Juan
95. Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism
96. Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
97. Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology
98. Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy
99. Honore de Balzac: Pere Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
100. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal
101. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
102. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
103. John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
104. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
105. Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
106. Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
107. Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden
108. Karl Marx: Capital; Communist Manifesto
109. George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch
110. Herman Melville: Moby Dick; Billy Budd
111. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
112. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories
113. Henrik Ibsen: Plays
114. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
115. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
116. William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragamatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
117. Henry James: The American; The Ambassadors
118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power
119. Jules Henri Poincare: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
120. Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
121. George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces
122. Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
123. Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
124. John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
125. Alfred North Whitehead:. An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
126. George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
127. Lenin: The State and Revolution
128. Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
129. Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analsysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
130. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
131. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
132. James Joyce: 'The Dead' in Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
133. Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
134. Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle
135. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
136. Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
137. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; The Cancer Ward

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXV

"But choose any one you list among the pet names the peasants give me. Only one I cannot and will not abide because it is distinctly a malicious slander and fits me not a whit. Whosoever calls me Dicis et non facis is in the wrong box. It too may even be a finger chucking my chin, but it is a calumny. I do ywisse what I say, keep my promise to a tittle; that is precisely my business principle, more or less as the Jews are the most reliable dealers, and when it comes to deceit, well, it is a common saying that it was always I, who believe in good faith and right-wiseness, who am beguiled"

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXIV

"A music-lover who had tired of romantic democracy and popular moral harangues and demanded an art for art's sake, an ambitionless - or in the most exclusive sense ambitious - art for artists and connoisseurs, must have been ravished by this self-centered and completely cool esoterics; but which now, as esoteric, in the spirit of the piece in every way mocked and parodistically exaggerated itself, thus mixing into its ravishment a grain of hopelessness, a drop of melancholy.

Yes, admiration and sadness mingled strangely as I contemplated this music. "How beautiful!" the heart said to itself - mine at least said so - "and how sad!" The admiration was due to a witty and melancholy work of art, an intellectual achievement which deserved the name of heroic, something just barely possible, behaving like arrogant travesty. I know not how otherwise to characterize it than by calling it a tense, sustained, neck-breaking game played by art at the edge of impossibility. It was just this that made one. But admiration and sadness, admiration and doubt, is that not almost the definition of love? It was with a strained and painful love for him and what was his that I listened to Adrian's performance."

Book Club - 2007

Yes the book club idea is back on yes when I yes talking to a bunch of drunk friends the idea came up yes and yes the summer is just around the corner yes yes a magnificent yes earth shattering yes work yes yes of heart breaking genius yes has to be picked yes for the book club of 2007 yes

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXIII

"He wanted to go away, but farther away than an hour's journey towards the mountains. Of the music of Love's Labour's Lost he had written the piano sketch of the expository scenes; but then he had got stuck, the parodistic artificiality of the style was hard to keep up, needing as it did a supply of whimsicality constantly fresh and sustained. He felt a desire for more distant air, for surroundings of greater unfamiliarity. Unrest possessed him. He was tired of the family pension in Rambergtrasse; its privacy had been an uncertain quantity, people could always intrude on it. "I am looking," he wrote to me, "I keep asking round about and hankering for news of a place buried from and untroubled by the world, where I could hold speech alone, with my life, my destiny..." Strange ominous words!"

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXIII

"Jeanette was a writer of novels. Grown up between two languages, she wrote ladylike and original studies of society in a charmingly incorrect idiom peculiar to herself alone. They did not lack psychological or melodic charm and were definitely a literary achievement. She noticed Adrian at once, and took to him; he, in his turn, felt at home in her presence and conversation. She was aristocratically ugly and good form, with a face like a sheep, where the high-born and the low-born met, just as in her speech, her French was mingled with Bavarian dialect. She was extraordinarily intelligent and at the same time enveloped in the naively inquiring innocence of the spinster no longer young. Her mind had something fluttering and quaintly confused about it, at which she herself laughed more heartily than anyone else - though by no means in the fashion of Leo Zink, who laughed at himself as a parlour trick, where she did the same out of sheer lightness of heart and sense of fun. She was very musical, a pianist, a Chopin enthusiast, a writer on Schubert; on friendly terms with more than one bearer of a great name in the contemporary world of music. Her first conversation with Adrian had been a gratifying exchange upon the subject of Mozart's polyphony and his relation to Bach. He was and remained her attached friend for many years.

But no one will suppose that the city he had chosen to live in really took him to her bosom or ever made him her own. The beat of the grandiose village under the melting blue of the Alpine sky, with the mountain stream rushing ad rippling through it: that might please his eye; the self-indulgent comfort of its ways, the suggestion it had of all-the-year-round carnival freedom, might make even his life easier. But its spirit - sit venia verbo! - its atmosphere, a little mad and quite harmless; the decorative appeal to the senses, the holiday and the artistic mood of this self-satisfied Capua: all that was of course foreign to the soul of a deep, stern nature like his. It was indeed the fitting and proper target for that look of his I had so long observed: veiled and cold and musingly remote, followed by the smile and averted face.

The Munich I speak of is the Munich of the later Regency, with only four years between it and the war, whose issue was to turn its pleasantness to morbidness and produce in it one sad and grotesque manifestation after another; this capital city of beautiful vistas, where political problems confined themselves to a capricious opposition between a half-separatist folk-Catholicism and the lively liberalism professed by the supporters of the Reich; Munich, with its parade concerts in the Feldherrenhalle, its art shops, its palaces of decorative crafts, its recurring exhibitions, its Baurem-balls in carnival time, its seasonal "Marzbrau" and week-long monster fair of the "Oktoberweise," where a stout and lusty folkishness, now long since corrupted by modern mass methods, celebrated its saturnalia; Munich, with its residuary Wagnerism, its esoteric coteries performing their aesthetic devotions behind the Siegestor; its Bohemia, well bedded down in public approval and fundamentally easy-going. Adrian looked on at all that, moved in it, tasted of it, during the nine months that he spent at this time in Oberbayern - an autumn, a winter, and a spring. At the artist festivals that he attended with Schildknapp in the illusory twilight of artistically decorated ballrooms he met members of the Rodde circle, the young actors, the Knoterichs, Dr. Kranich, Zink and Spengler, the daughters of the house. He sat at a table with Inez and Clarissa, Rudiger, Spengler, and Kranich, perhaps Jeanette Scheurl."

Beckett film on YouTube.

Have to watch it later:

Part I
Part II

DR. FAUSTUS- Chapter XXII

"He had very good looks and had kept his Swiss manner of speech, pleasant to the ear, deliberate, formal, interspersed with survivals of old-German expressions oddly solemn to hear."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXI

"Yes, Monsignor Hinterpfortner is right: we are lost. In other words, the war is lost; but that means more than a lost campaign, it means in very truth that we are lost: our character, our cause, our hope, our history. It is all up with Germany, it will be all up with her. She is marked down for collapse, economic, political, moral, spiritual, in short all-embracing, unparalleled, final collapse. I suppose I have not wished for it, this that threatens, for it is madness and despair. I suppose I have not wished for it, because my pity is too deep, my grief and sympathy are with this unhappy nation, when I think of the exaltation and blind ardour of its uprising, the breaking-out, the breaking-up, the breaking-down; the purifying fresh start, the national new birth of ten years ago, that seemingly religious intoxication - which then betrayed itself to any intelligent person for what it was by its crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation, filthiness - ah, how unmistakably it bore within itself the seeds of this whole war! My heart contracts painfully at the thought of that enormous investment of faith, zeal, lofty historic emotion; all this we made, all this is now puffed away in a bankruptcy without compare. No, surely I did not want it, and yet - I have been driven to want it, I wish for it today and will welcome it, out of hatred for the outrageous contempt of reason, the vicious violation of the truth, the cheap, filthy backstairs mythology, the criminal degradation and confusion of standards; the abuse, corruption, and blackmail of all that was good, genuine, trusting, and trustworthy in our old Germany. For liars and lickspittles mixed us a poison draught and took away our senses. We drank - for we Germans perennially yearn for intoxication - and under its spell, through years of deluded high living, we committed a superfluity of shameful deeds, which must now be paid for. With what? I have already used the word, together with the word "despair" I wrote it. I will not repeat it: not twice could I control my horror or my trembling fingers to set it down again."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XX

"The women were not quite so lucky with him as he was with them, so far as I saw; at least not individually, for collectively they enjoyed his entire devotion. It was a roving, all-embracing devotion, it referred to the sex as such, and the possibilities for happiness presented to him by the entire world; for the single instance found him inactive, frugal, reserved. That he could have as many love-affairs as he chose seemed to satisfy him, it was as though he shrank from every connection with the actual because he saw therein a theft from the possible. The potential was his kingdom, its endless spaces his domain - therein and thus far he was really a poet. He had concluded from his name that his forebears had been giant attendants on knights and princes,..."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XVIII

"But to be frank, this disillusioned masterpiece of orchestral brilliance already bore within itself the traits of parody and intellectual mockery of art, which in Leverkuhn's later work so often emerged in a creative and uncanny way. Many found it chilling, even repellent and revolting, and these were the better, if not the best sort, who thus judged. All the superficial lot simply called it witty and amusing. In truth parody was here the proud expedient of a great gift threatened with sterility by a combination of scepticism, intellectual reserve, and a sense of the deadly extension of the kingdom of the banal. I trust I have put that alright. My uncertainty and my feeling of responsibility are alike great, when i seek to clothe in words thoughts that are not primarily my own, but have come to me only through my friendship with Adrian. Of a lack of naivete I would not speak, for in the end naivete lies at the bottom of being, all being even the most conscious and complicated. The conflict - almost impossible to simplify - to simplify between the inhibitions and the productive urge of inborn genius, between chastity and passion, just that is the naivete out of which such an artist nature lives, the soil for the difficult, characteristic growth of his work; and the unconscious effort to get for the "gift" the productive impulse, the necessary little ascendancy over the impediments of unbelief, arrogance, intellectual self-consciousness: this instinctive effort stirs and becomes decisive at the moment when the mechanical studies preliminary to the practice of an art begin to be combined with the first personal, while as yet entirely ephemeral and preparatory plastic efforts."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XVI

"Playing much Chopin, and reading about him. I love the angelic in his figure, which reminds me of Shelley: the peculiarly and very mysteriously veiled, unapproachable, withdrawing, unadventurous flavour of his being, that not wanting to know, that rejection of material experience, the sublime incest of his fantastically delicate and seductive art. How much speaks for the man the deep, intent friendship of Delacroix, who writes to him: "J'espere vous voir ce soir, mais ce moment est capable de me faire devenir fou." Everything possible for the Wagner of painting! But there are quite a few things in Chopin which, not only harmonically but also in a general, psychological sense more than anticipate Wagner, indeed surpass him. Take the C-sharp minor Nocturne Op. 27, No. 2, and the duet that begins after the enharmonic change from C-sharp minor to D-flat major. That surpasses in despairing beauty of sound all the Tristan orgies - even in the intimate medium of the piano, though not as a grand battle of voluptuosity; without the bull-fight character of a theatrical mysticism robust in its corruption. Take above all his ironic relation to tonality, his teasing way with it, obscuring, ignoring, keeping it fluctuating, and mocking at accidentals. It goes far, divertingly and thrillingly far...."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XV

"In Germany music enjoys that respect among the people which in France is given to literature; among us nobody is put off or embarrassed, uncomfortably impressed, or moved to disrespect or mockery by the fact that a man is a musician;"

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XIV

"Why? I felt, not without a pang, the foreordained gulf between his existence and that of these striving and high-purposed youths. It was the difference of the life-curve between good, yes, excellent average, which was destined to return from that roving, seeking student life to its bourgeois courses, and the other, invisibly singled out, who would never forsake the hard route of the mind, would tread it, who knew wither, and whose gaze, whose attitude, never quite resolved in the fraternal, whose inhibitions in his personal relations made me and probably others aware that he himself divined this difference."

Cornelius - New Music Machine

03 New Music Machi...

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XIV

".. we left the train and set out with rucksacks and capes, on shank's mare, in all-day marches, eating in village inns or sometimes camping at the edge of a wood and spending the night in the hayloft of a peasant's yard, waking in the grey dawn to wash and refresh ourselves at the long trough of a running spring. Such an interim form of living, the entry of city folk, brain workers, into the primitive countryside and back to mother earth, with the knowledge, after all, that we must - or might - soon return to our usual and "natural" sphere of middle-class comfort: such voluntary screwing down and simplification has easily, almost necessarily something artificial, patronizing, dilettante about it; of this we were humorously aware, and knew too that it was the cause of a good-natured, teasing grin with which many a peasant measured us on our request for his hayloft. But the kindly permission we got was due to our youth; for youth, one may say, makes the only proper bridge between the bourgeois and the state of nature; it is a pre-bourgeois state from which all student romance derives, the truly romantic period of life. To this formula the ever intellectually lively Deutschlin reduced the subject when we discussed it in our loft before falling asleep, by the wan light of the stable lantern in the corner. We dealt with the present mode of our existence; and Deutschlin protested that it was poor taste for youth to explain youth: a form of life that discusses and examines itself thereby dissolves as form, and only direct and unconscious being has true existence."

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XI

"I should be sorry, after what I have said, to be taken for an utterly irreligious man. That I am not, for I go with Schleiermacher, another Halle magician, who defined religion as "feeling and taste for the Infinite" and called it "a pertinent fact," present in the human being. In other words, the science of religion has to do not with philosophical theses, but with an inward and given psychological fact. And that reminds me of the ontological evidence for the existence of God, which has always been my favorite, and which from the subjective idea of a Highest Being derives His objective existence. But Kant has shown in the most forthright words that such a thesis cannot support itself before the bar of reason. Science, however, cannot get along without reason; and to want to make a science out of a sense of the infinite and the eternal mysteries is to compel two spheres fundamentally foreign to each other to come together in a way that is in my eyes most unhappy and productive only of embarrassment. Surely a religious sense, which I protest is in no way lacking in me, is something other than positive and formally professed religion. Would it not have been better to hand over that "fact" of human feeling for the infinite to the sense of piety, the fine arts, free contemplation, yes, even to exact research, which as cosmology, astronomy, theoretical physics, can serve this feeling with religious devotion to the mystery of creation - instead of singling it out as the science of the spirit and developing on it structures of dogma, whose orthodox believers will then shed blood for a copula?"

The book club in Summer 2005

In Summer of 2005, we, a bunch of then-close friends, had a book-club going on. The idea was Danielle's, I think. I remember, I blurted out, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain as a book I had been meaning to read. I was buzzed and then lo' and behold the book was adopted by the newly-formed book-club on the other corner of the bar. I picked up Thomas Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS recently and it had been twice as fun to read as "Magic Mountain" but I had been also thinking about those summer meets when "we" used to have arguments on Magic Mountain. And it really all came back to me when in DOCTOR FAUSTUS, I came across a character who grew up in Lancaster County, and It reminded me of Emily and Freddy:

"At about the middle of the eighteenth century there had flourished in his native Pennsylvania a German community of pious folk belonging to the Baptist sect. Their leading and spiritually most respected members lived celibate lives and had therefore been honoured with the name of Solitary Brethren and Sisters; but the majority of them reconciled with the married state an exemplary pure and godly manner of life, strictly regulated, hard-working and dietetically sound, full of sacrifice and self-discipline. Their settlements had been two: one called Ephrata, Lancaster County, the other in Franklin County, called Snowhill; and they had all looked up reverently to their head shepherd and spiritual father, the founder of the sect, a man named Beissel, in whose character fervent devotion to God mingled with the qualities of leadership, and fanatic religiosity with a lively and blunt-spoken energy"

Black Heart - Calexico

Spring is frozen now I'm stuck in low
Wrapped with wire, tapped to the heart
Can't find no poison, now I've got no cure
(the) fangs are stuck inside my skin
Payne county line
Watching unjust claims
One man's righteousness is another man's
Long haul, sentence carried out
Long haul, counting the miles
To the four corners of the world
Spring is rusted shut, (faith's) coiled and cracked
Apparitions worth their weight in gold
Scratched in metal, name erodes away
Hands are scarred, heart is charred
Burnt though, and ashen
Trip on fence post line
Sifting through the remains
One man's close pursuit is another man's
Last chance, make it through the divide
Last chance, suffer the weight or get buried by this
Black heart, sweeping over the land
Black heart, crawling its way

-- from their record: Feast of Wire

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter VIII

"He produced several such Pythagorean jests, intended more for the eye than the ear, which music had now and again been pleased to make and came out roundly with the statement that in the last analysis he ascribed to the art a certain inborn lack of the sensuous, yes an anti-sensuality, a sacred tendency to asceticism. Music was actually the most intellectual of all the arts, as was evident from the fact that in it, as in no other, form and content are interwoven and absolutely one and the same. We say of course that music "addresses itself to the ear"; but it does so only in a qualified way, only in so far, namely, as the hearing, like the other senses, is the deputy, the instrument, and the receiver of the mind. Perhaps, said Kretschmar, it was music's deepest wish not to be heard at all, nor even seen, nor yet felt; but only - if that were possible - in some Beyond, the other side of sense and sentiment, to be perceived and contemplated as pure mind, pure spirit."

Two books that should be a must-read in the near future

1 - Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux
2 - The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (Thanks to Mariel for recommending it. It looks good.!)

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter VI

"Here let me be bold enough to express an opinion born of the experiences of our own time. To a friend of enlightenment the word and conception "the folk" has always something anachronistic and alarming about it; he knows that you need only tell a crowd they are "the folk" to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil. What all has not happened before our eyes - or just not quite before our eyes - in the name of "the folk," though it could never have happened in the name of God or humanity or the law! But it is the fact that actually the folk remain the folk, at least a certain stratum of its being, the archaic; and people from Little Brassfounder's Alley and round about, people who voted the Social-Democratic ticket at the polls, are at the same time capable of seeing something demonic in the poverty of a little old woman who cannot afford a lodging above-ground. They will clutch their children to them when she approaches, to save them from the evil eye. And if such an old soul should have to burn again today, by no means an impossible prospect, were even a few things different, "the folk" would stand and gape behind the barriers erected by the Mayor, but they would probably not rebel. - I speak of the folk; but this old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being."

DR. FAUSTUS
Thomas Mann

DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter I

"Now this word "genius", although extreme in degree, certainly in kind has a noble, harmonious, and humane ring. The likes of me, however far from claiming for my own person a place in this lofty realm, or ever pretending to have been blest with the divinis inflixibus ex alto, can see no reasonable ground for shrinking, no reason for not dealing with it in clear-eyed confidence. So it seems. And yet it cannot be denied (and has never been) that the demonic and irrational have a disquieting share in this radiant sphere. We shudder as we realize that a connection subsists between it and the nether world, and that the reassuring epitheta which I sought to apply: "sane, noble, harmonious, humane," do not for that reason quite fit, even when - I force myself, however painfully, to make this distinction - even when they are applied to a pure and genuine, God-given, or shall I say God-inflicted genius, and not to an acquired kind, the sinful and morbid corruption of natural gifts, the issue of a horrible bargain...."

DR. FAUSTUS
Thomas Mann

Afterword from "The Loser" - II

"The one exception was his mother's father, the poet and philosopher Johannes Freumbichler, who loved this awkward, strong-willed child and became his mentor. Bernhard later noted that it was his grandfather who instilled in him a fierce intellectual independence, warning him, for instance, not to take school seriously or to believe his teachers."

I got the same kinda advice from this guy, not that I can possibly make a comparison between Mr. Bernhard and myself.

Afterword from "The Loser"

"During his lifetime Thomas Bernhard's texts provoked more than the ordinary share of scandals. But perhaps the most enduring scandal will turn out to be his very last text, his will:

"Whatever I have written, whether published by me during my lifetime or as part of my literary papers still existing after my death, shall not be performed, printed or even recited for the duration of legal copyright within the borders of Austria, however this state identifies itself".

Bernhard had taken care not to reveal the contents of this will before he died; infact, he even stipulated that news of his death not be announced until he was buried. This parting slap in the face of his native country thus came not only as a surprise; it came from the hand of a dead man, whose laughter rang out from the grave."

On Mahabaharta

One gentleman who I admire alot had recently this to say:

"The actual Mahabharata is fabulous. It's like a main river with a lot of tributaries and distributaries. It's quite amazing how all these skeins are bound together.
Most of us pick up the various pieces through complete stories in themselves, dramas, dances etc."

Yeojaneun namjaui miraeda - (Woman is the future of man)

Director: Sang-soo Hong

Somehow this film ended up on top of my queue and I was kind of surprised to see Martin Scorcese's two minute introductory clip for this film in the DVD. I am not a big fan of Martin Scorsese. I consider his movies a stopover in one's journey in the cinema to the exciting territories of Tarkovskys, Antonionis and Kar-Wais of the world. He hangs onto characters and as Ted Goransson so sharply pointed out, latches his camera-eye to character's coat tails. This makes him more of a movie murderer of so many cinematic possibilities than a real movie director. You get kicked around with a Taxi Driver or be made to hang out with a wannabe gangster who is trying awkwardly to keep his cool when his partner shoots the waiter. For sure, there are some great films which are popular too like the great character essay in Raging Bull or the Catholic guilt-fest in Mean Streets and infact two of his unknown films: Afterhours and We don't live here anymore are so off the track, the regular Marty track, that they seem to exist in a vacuum. So, his auteur-ship came in front of the camera and introduced this film, I was pleasantly surprised and at the same time it unnerved me to see him making grand statements about this film. As usual, he went straight to what he thought best about this film which was in his opinion those great "characters" but then he said it was like peeling an orange (a metaphor he borrowed from someone) and finding layers of reality underneath.

The film plunges us in a simple situation of two friends meeting up after a long time and catching up on a few beers and shots of Korean rice liquor. There are flashbacks interspersed in-between the scene that neatly complements the dialogue: the half-spoken word-truths, the gestures and the uneasiness of two old friends trying to seek out connections and old memories. This is Rohmer territory but it is framed in a different way. That is where the film has a major problem. It relies on the secrets these three friends (film has only three characters: a girl who had been involved with two friends at different points in the past) hold back from each other and memories that they share to create a drama. Naturally, Martin Scorsese was raving about it: Characters' shared reality charged with smart dialogue that carried the secrets of the past and viewer as God in the know of everything. But, it looked like watching a play than a movie. It didn't take me anywhere viscerally, it kept a safe distance from exploring the emotional flux in between the characters, lest we, as viewers, get burnt. The result is a film which is boring and a little ridiculous.

Last night

So, last night I made an exception to my self-imposed ban on going to the bar that kicked me out because a friend of mine came to visit from South Carolina and I didn't want to bore him with all the crap of what, when, why. On the side, I ran into two Russian and an Irish grad student at the bar. New things that I found out:

1 - Pushkin Square in Moscow is a great spot to rendezvous with your dates.
2 - Dubh in Irish is pronounced as Dove which means Black.
3 - Russians have three names: first, middle and last. The middle name is father's name that ends with 'vich'. For example, Mikhail's son will bear the second name as Mikhailivich.
4 - Pushkin was half black because his folks came from South Africa. He had curly hair, supposedly a dead giveaway of having mixed blood in Russia.
5 - Bodolov is a good contemporary russian novelist.
6 - Russia routinely has ups and downs every hundred years or so.
7 - Irish have a particular name for their language which I forgot.
8 - 'Langer' is penis in Russian (or was it Celtic?) where in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu it's the food that's cooked in the Temple or Gurdwara's kitchen.
9 - Absurdistan could be an alternate name for Russia although I thought it suited Pakistan better. I am definitely going to read the book within next six months.
10 - A Russian is well-entitled at the bar to order a son of James when he actually wants a shot of Jameson. That shot made me throw up in the kitchen sink later that night.

A beautiful excerpt from Spengler's "Cherry blossoms, the beautiful and the good"

"It is a common observation that a sense of the natural, or the spontaneous, uniquely characterizes Japanese art: the unpredictable patterns of ash glaze in ceramics, the freedom of calligraphy, the impressionistic representation in painting, the allusiveness of poetry. Nature is cruel as well as generous, but always beautiful, and this balance and tension pervades the Japanese esthetics that Professor Fujiwara associates with samurai ethics. If nature is as cruel as it is spontaneous, then men also may be spontaneously cruel.

The comparison may seem peculiar, but the Japanese in a way resemble the Jews in their passion to bring something of the eternal into every detail of everyday life. As Franz Rosenzweig put it, the myriad laws regulating Jewish prayer, diet, marital relations, and so forth all stem from a single motive, to import eternity into daily life. As Fujiwara avers, that is what the Japanese do by making every aspect of life into a work of art. But the contrast is as sharp as the parallel. Jewish food generally is unappetizing as well as visually unappealing, as opposed to Japan's magnificent national cuisine; Jewish manners are brusque, while Japan has made an art form of courtesy; and no aspect of Jewish religious life is concerned with visual beauty in any way at all. "

Asia Times
Spengler