Wise and simple?

The aim of [Aristotle's Ethics] is the acquisition and propagation of a certain kind of knowledge (science), but this knowledge and the thinking which brings it about are subsidiary to a practical end. The knowledge aimed at is of what is best for man and of the conditions of its realisation. Such knowledge is that which in its consumate form we find in great statesmen, enabling them to organise and administer their states and regulate by law the life of the citizens to their advantage and happiness, but it is the same kind of knowledge which on a smaller scale secures success in the management of the family or of private life.

It is characteristic of such knowledge that it should be deficient in "exactness," in precision of statement, and closeness of logical concatenation. We must not look for a mathematics of conduct. The subject-matter of Human Conduct is not governed by necessary and uniform laws. But this does not mean that it is subject to no laws. There are general principles at work in it, and these can be formulated in "rules," which rules can be systematised or unified. It is all-important to remember that practical or moral rules are only general and always admit of exceptions, and that they arise not from the mere complexity of the facts, but from the liability of the facts to a certain unpredictable variation. At their very best, practical rules state probabilities, not certainties; a relative constancy of connection is all that exists, but it is enough to serve as a guide in life. Aristotle here holds the balance between a misleading hope of reducing the subject-matter of conduct to a few simple rigorous abstract principles, with conclusions necessarily issuing from them, and the view that it is the field of operation of inscrutable forces acting without predictable regularity. He does not pretend to find in it absolute uniformities, or to deduce the details from his principles. Hence, too, he insists on the necessity of experience as the source or test of all that he has to say. Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them. The mere intellectual apprehension of them is not possible, or if possible, profitless.

...

[The first parts of the Ethics] lay down a principle which governs all Greek thought about human life, viz. that it is only intelligible when viewed as directed towards some end or good. This is the Greek way of expressing that all human life involves an ideal element—something which it is not yet and which under certain conditions it is to be. In that sense Greek Moral Philosophy is essentially idealistic. Further it is always assumed that all human practical activity is directed or "oriented" to a single end, and that that end is knowable or definable in advance of its realisation. To know it is not merely a matter of speculative interest, it is of the highest practical moment for only in the light of it can life be duly guided, and particularly only so can the state be properly organised and administered. This explains the stress laid throughout by Greek Moral Philosophy upon the necessity of knowledge as a condition of the best life. This knowledge is not, though it includes knowledge of the nature of man and his circumstances, it is knowledge of what is best—of man's supreme end or good.

But this end is not conceived as presented to him by a superior power nor even as something which ought to be. The presentation of the Moral Ideal as Duty is almost absent. From the outset it is identified with the object of desire, of what we not merely judge desirable but actually do desire, or that which would, if realised, satisfy human desire. In fact it is what we all, wise and simple, agree in naming "Happiness" (Welfare or Well-being).

In what then does happiness consist? Aristotle summarily sets aside the more or less popular identifications of it with abundance of physical pleasures, with political power and honour, with the mere possession of such superior gifts or attainments as normally entitle men to these, with wealth. None of these can constitute the end or good of man as such. On the other hand, he rejects his master Plato's conception of a good which is the end of the whole universe, or at least dismisses it as irrelevant to his present enquiry. The good towards which all human desires and practical activities are directed must be one conformable to man's special nature and circumstances and attainable by his efforts. There is in Aristotle's theory of human conduct no trace of Plato's "other worldliness", he brings the moral ideal in Bacon's phrase down to "right earth"—and so closer to the facts and problems of actual human living. Turning from criticism of others he states his own positive view of Happiness, and, though he avowedly states it merely in outline his account is pregnant with significance. Human Happiness lies in activity or energising, and that in a way peculiar to man with his given nature and his given circumstances, it is not theoretical, but practical: it is the activity not of reason but still of a being who possesses reason and applies it, and it presupposes in that being the development, and not merely the natural possession, of certain relevant powers and capacities. The last is the prime condition of successful living and therefore of satisfaction, but Aristotle does not ignore other conditions, such as length of life, wealth and good luck, the absence or diminution of which render happiness not impossible, but difficult of attainment.

Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics

the rules of perspective

If we are too young our judgement is impaired, just as it is if we are too old.
Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.
If we look at our work immediately after completing it, we are still too involved; if too long afterwards, we cannot pick up the thread again.
It is like looking at pictures which are too near or too far away. There is just one indivisible point which is the right place.
Others are too near, too far, too high, or too low. In painting the rules of perspective decide it, but how will it be decided when it comes to truth and morality?

Blaise Pascal, Pensees

all motivations working simultaneously

A psychological interpretation of science begins with the acute realization that science is a human creation, rather than an autonomous, non-human, or per se "thing" with intrinsic rules of its own. Its origins are in human motives, its goals are human goals, and it is created, renewed, and maintained by human beings. Its laws, organization, and articulations rest not only on the nature of the reality that it discovers, but also on the nature of the human nature that does the discovering. The psychologist, especially if he has had any clinical experience, will quite naturally and spontaneously approach any subject matter in a personal way by studying people, rather than the abstractions they produce, scientists as well as science.
  The misguided effort to make believe that this is not so, the persistent attempt to make science completely autonomous and self-regulating and to regard it as a disinterested game, having intrinsic, arbitrary chesslike rules, the psychologist must consider unrealistic, false, and even anti-empirical.
  ... Scientists are motivated, like all other members of the human species, by species-wide needs for food, etc.; by needs for safety, protection, and care; by needs for gregariousness and for affection-and-love relations; by needs for respect, standing, and status, with consequent self-respect; and by a need for self-actualization or self-fulfillment of the idiosyncratic and species-wide potentialities of the individual person. These are the needs that are best known to psychologists for the simple reason that their frustration produces psychopathology.
  Less studied but knowable through common observation are the cognitive needs for sheer knowledge (curiosity) and for understanding (the philosophical, theological, value-system-building explanation needed).
  Finally, least well known are the impulses to beauty, symmetry, and possibly to simplicity, completion, and order, which we may call aesthetic needs, and the needs to express, to act out, and to motor completion that may be related to these aesthetic needs.
  To date it seems as if all other needs or desires or drives are either means to the basic ends listed above, or are neurotic, or else are products of certain kinds of learning processes.
  Obviously the cognitive needs are of most concern to the philosopher of science. It is man's persistent curiosity that is most responsible for science in its natural-history stage, and it is his equally persistent desire to understand, explain, and systematize that generates science in its more theoretical and abstract levels. However, it is this latter theoretical urge that is more specifically a sine qua non for science, for sheer curiosity is seen often enough in animals.
  But the other motives are certainly also involved in science at all its stages. It is too often overlooked that the original theorizers of science often thought of science primarily as a means to help the human race. Bacon, for instance, expected much amelioration of disease and poverty from science. It has been shown that even for Greek science where pure unmanual contemplation of the Platonic sort was a strong tradition, the practical and humanistic trend was also fairly strong. The feeling of identification and belongingness with people in general, and even more strongly the feeling of love for human beings may often be the primary motivation in many men of science. Some people go into science, as they might into social work or medicine, in order to help people.
  And then finally we must recognize that any other human need may serve as a primary motivation for going into science, for working at it, or for staying in it. It may serve as a living, a source of prestige, a means of self-expression, or as a satisfaction for any one of many neurotic needs.
  In most persons, a single primary all-important motive is less often found than a combination in varying amounts of all motivations working simultaneously. It is safest to assume that in any single scientist his work is motivated not only by love, but also by simple curiosity, not only by prestige, but also by the need to earn money, etc.

Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (2nd ed., 1970: 1-3)

by definition without rule

Although Chaos can be studied in terms of antecedents in classical literature and philosophy, its appearance in [Paradise Lost] owes its problematic character to Milton's theology. Chaos is infinite, and filled by a ubiquitous God who has nonetheless withdrawn his creative will from chaotic matter (7.168-73). None of the categorical binaries established during the creation of Genesis inhere in Chaos. It is neither this nor that, "neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant cause mixed/ Confus'dly" (2.912-14); therefore Satan, as he traverses this indeterminate space, confusedly mixes locomotions, "And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies" (2.950). The "embryon atoms" (2.900) of Chaos are "the womb of Nature" (2.911), the pure potential that the Son first circumscribes with golden compasses when creating our universe (7.225-31) and will doubtless use again in creating new worlds (2.915-16). Chaos cannot be good until God has infused it with creative order. It is at least morally neutral, at best thoroughly praiseworthy, as a part of the process by which God makes and sustains all things.
  But alongside the language of atomism, Milton gives us a mythic Chaos, personified as the ruler of his realm, or rather its "Anarch" (2.988), since Chaos is by definition without rule. This Chaos, speaking for his consort, Night, and for a shadowy pack of Hesiodic creatures and personifications (2.963-67), expresses his resentment over recent losses (the creations of Hell and our universe) and supports Satan's mission on the assumption that "Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain" (2.1009). We thus arrive at a paradox. Theologically, Chaos is neutral or better. Mythically, in terms of the epic narrative, Chaos is the ally of Satan.

Kerrigan, Rumrich, & Fallon, intro. to Paradise Lost (2007: xiv-xv).

the element of sacredness

Apart from the precarious and random luck that makes possession of the loved one possible, humanity has from the earliest times endeavored to reach this liberating continuity by means not dependent on chance. The problem arises when man is faced with death which seems to pitch the discontinuous creature headlong into continuity. This way of seeing the matter is not the first that springs to mind, yet death, in that it destroys the discontinuous being, leaves intact the general continuity of existence outside ourselves. I am not forgetting that the need to make sure of the survival of the individual as such is basic to our desire for immortality but I am not concerned to discuss this just now. What I want to emphasise is that death does not affect the continuity of existence, since in existence itself all separate existences originate; continuity of existence is independent of death and is even proved by death. This I think is the way to interpret religious sacrifices, with which I suggest that erotic activity can be compared. Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea. In sacrifice, the victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of a continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature as religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. We should incidentally be unable to imagine what goes on in the secret depths of the minds of the bystanders if we could not call on our own personal religious experiences, if only childhood ones. Everything leads us to the conclusion that in essence the sacramental quality of primitive sacrifices is analagous to the comparable element in contemporary religions.

Georges Bataille, Erotism (1986: 21-22)

an impotent, quivering yearning

Physical eroticism has in any case a heavy, sinister quality. It holds on to the separateness of the individual in a rather selfish and cynical fashion. Emotional eroticism is less constrained. Although it may appear detached from material sensuality it often derives from it, being merely an aspect made stable by the reciprocal affection of the lovers. It can be divorced from physical eroticism entirely, for the enormous diversity of human kind is bound to contain exceptions of this sort. The fusion of lovers' bodies persists on the spiritual plane because of the passion they feel, or else this passion is the prelude to physical fusion. For the man in love, however, the fervour of love may be felt more violently than physical desire is. We ought never to forget that in spite of the bliss love promises its first effect is one of turmoil and distress. Passion fulfilled itself provokes such violent agitation that the happiness involved, before being a happiness to be enjoyed, is so great as to be more like its opposite, suffering. Its essence is to substitute for their persistent discontinuity a miraculous continuity between two beings. Yet this continuity is chiefly to be felt in the anguish of desire, when it is still inaccessible, still an impotent, quivering yearning. A tranquil feeling of secure happiness can only mean the calm which follows the long storm of suffering, for it is more likely that lovers will not meet in such timeless fusion than they will; the chances are most often against their contemplating in speechless wonder the continuity that unites them.

Georges Bataille, Erotism (1986: 19-20)

This is Politics

Do all primitive societies have government? Here again we immediately come up against another of the unfortunate interpretations of the word "primitive." Some writers, particularly in the nineteenth century, have thought that many of the institutions which are fundamental to western society developed fairly late in the history of mankind, so that we might expect not to find them among peoples who had not advanced along the path of civilization as far as ourselves. Government and law are among these, and if politics is defined as that which pertains to government, those who hold this view would consider that primitive societies pursue no activities which deserve the name politics.
  But there is another way of looking at politics, according to which it indubitably does exist in primitive societies. One definition of politics is the struggle for power; and even if one is not willing to agree that power is the only thing that men struggle for, one must admit that in every society there are conflicts which must somehow be reconciled if the society is not split into separate independent parts. Conflict and competition begin within the family, however little we care to admit it; in fact, this is recognized in such phrases as 'fraternal enmity'. But every society has an ideal of family unity such that disputes between kinsmen are expected to be settled without any outside intervention. Some anthropologists would hold that the sphere of politics begins where that of kinship ends. In the case of primitive societies it is not always easy to say where this line comes, for in such societies people trace the links of kinship much further than they do in the western world. But what one can say is that between people who are in close daily contact throughout their lives, sentiments are expected to develop (and often do) which limit the expression of conflict, whereas outside these narrow circles one cannot rely on sentiment alone to reconcile conflicting interests. In these wider fields of social relationships there are always and everywhere persons with conflicting and competing interests, seeking to have disputes settled in their favour and to influence community decisions ('policy') in accordance with their interests. This is politics.
  The seventeenth-century philosopher Hobbes contrasted the state of nature, in which every man's hand was against his neighbour, with civil society, in which authority had been surrendered to a sovereign ruler (not necessarily a single man). This was a logical rather than a historical argument; it followed from Hobbes' assumptions about human nature that if there were no supreme authority there could only be a war if each against all. But he did refer to "savage people in many places of America" whose condition he thought approached this. We shall see that in a number of primitive societies fighting is recognized as a legitimate means of obtaining redress for an injury, though in those cases it is not, as Hobbes imagined, a means of dominating others. The question whether societies of this kind can or cannot be said to have government or law is an interesting one, and contemporary anthropologists have answered it in many ways.
  Many modern writers have assumed that government must be carried on through the type of organization which we call the state - a body of persons authorized to make and enforce rules binding on everyone who comes under their jurisdiction, to settle disputes arising between them, to organize their defence against enemies, and to impose taxes or other economic contributions upon them, not to mention the multifarious new functions which the state has undertaken in the present century. Some primitive societies have this kind of organization, but others do not, and the question then arises whether they can be said to have government.

Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (1964: 9-11)

the childhood stage

People very commonly confuse the technical superiority of a nation with the moral and intellectual superiority of the population who make it up. Europeans are apt to talk about devices such as the internal combustion engine, or even the atomic reactor, as if they had all had a share in inventing them, whereas in fact most of us simply take advantage of inventions which we could not possibly have made and do not begin to understand. From this it is an easy step to seeing the peoples where these inventions were made as in some way more adult than those whose technical outfit does not include them. And this popular attitude gains support from the Jungian theory of psychology, which at the same time describes as 'primitive' the irrational elements in all human minds and holds that people who get through life with a primitive technical outfit have minds in which the irrational elements predominate.
  Let me make it clear, then, that if I write of primitive societies I am not implying anything about the characteristics of the persons who compose them - least of all that such persons have remained in the childhood stage if a human race whose maturity is represented by the "western" nations. It is ways of doing things which can be described as primitive or otherwise. The development of more complicated and efficient ways of doing things is a matter of discoveries and inventions which simply cannot be credited to the superiority of certain total populations over others. But the possession of a complex technology is what enables the modern state to control, and to a large extent organize, the lives of populations of many millions.

Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (1964: 8)

odd man

Strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general sense in the general senselessness. Whereas an odd man is most often a particular and isolated case. Is that not so?

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

the modern age

In "the modern age" the idea of freedom and a new beginning coincide ... yet if this truism is frequently forgotten, it is because liberation has always loomed large and the foundation of freedom has always been uncertain.

Heel of a shoe.

"How well-made that is! What a skillful workman! What a brave soldier!" That is where our inclinations come from, and our choice of careers. "What a lot that man drinks! How little that man drinks!" That is what makes people temperate or drunkards, soldiers, cowards, etc.

Pascal, Pensées 117 (1987: 38)

a really positive role

What I would like to get free from, is the idea that political power—in all its forms and at whatever level we grasp it—has to be analyzed within the Hegelian horizon of a sort of beautiful totality that through an effect of power is misrecognized or broken up by abstraction or division. It seems to me that it is both a methodological and a historical error to consider power as an essentially negative mechanism of repression whose principal function is to protect, preserve, or reproduce the relations of production. It also seems to me wrong to consider power as something situated in a superstructural level relative to the play of forces. Finally, it is wrong to consider power as essentially linked to the effects of ignorance. It seems to me that this kind of traditional and "omni-circulating" conception of power, found in historical writing and in present day political and polemical texts, is actually constructed on the basis of a number of outdated historical models. It is a composite notion that is inadequate for the real world in which we have been living for a considerable length of time, that is, since at least the end of the eighteenth century.
  From where is this conception of power borrowed that sees power impinging massively from the outside, as it were, with a continuous violence that some (always the same) exercise over others (who are also always the same)? It comes from the model of, or if you like, from the historical reality of, slave society. The idea that power has the essential function of prohibiting, preventing, and isolating, rather than allowing the circulation, change, and multiple combination of elements, seems to me a conception of power that also refers to an outdated historical model, in this case the model of caste society. By making power a mechanism whose function is not to produce but to deduct, to impose obligatory transfers of wealth and, consequently, to deprive some of the fruit of their work; in short, the idea that the essential function of power is to seal off the process of production and to make a certain social class profit from it, in an absolutely identical renewal of the relations of power, does not seem to me to refer at all to the real functioning of power at the present time, but to how we may suppose or reconstruct it as functioning in feudal society. Finally, in referring to a power that, with its administrative machinery of control, is superimposed on forms, forces, and relations of production established at the level of an already given economy, by describing power in this way, it seems to me that we are still using an outdated historical model that in this case is the model of the administrative monarchy.
  In other words, it seems to me that by making the major characteristics we attribute to political power into an instance of repression, a superstructural level, and an instance whose essential function is to reproduce and preserve the relations of production, we do no more than constitute, on the basis of historically outdated and different models, a sort of daguerreotype of power that is really based on what we think we can see in power in a slave society, a caste society, a feudal society, and in a society like the administrative monarchy. It hardly matters whether this is a failure to recognize the reality of these societies; it is in any case a failure to grasp what is specific and new in what took place during the eighteenth century and the Classical Age, that is to say, the installation of a power that, with regard to productive forces, relations of production, and the preexisting social systems, does not play a role of control and reproduction but rather a really positive role. What the eighteenth century established through the "discipline of normalization," or the system of "discipline-normalization," seems to me to be a power that is not in fact repressive but productive, repression figuring only as a lateral or secondary effect with regard to its central, creative, and productive mechanisms.

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975 (2003: 50-52)

the message of true love

"Love's highest need is to renounce its own power." This is what Lacan calls 'symbolic castration': if one is to remain faithful to one's love, one should not elevate it into the direct focus of one's love, one should renounce its centrality. Perhaps, a detour through the best (or worst) of Hollywood's melodrama can help us clarify this point. The basic lesson of King Vidor's Rhapsody is that, in order to gain the beloved woman's love, the man has to prove that he is able to survive without her, that he prefers his mission or profession to her. There are two immediate choices: (i) my professional career is what matters most to me, the woman is just an amusement, a distracting affair; (ii) the woman is everything to me, I am ready to humiliate myself, to forsake all my public and professional dignity for her. They are both false, they lead to the man being rejected by the woman. The message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive without you, I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession. The proper way for the woman to test the man's love is thus to 'betray' him at the crucial moment of his career (the first public concert in the film, the key exam, the business negotiation which will decide his career)—only if he can survive the ordeal, and successfully accomplish his task although deeply traumatized by her desertion, will he deserve her and will she return to him. The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal—it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we receive as an undeserved grace.

Slavoj Žižek, Why is Wagner Worth Saving? (intro. to Adorno, In Search of Wagner, xxii)

the destruction of objects

Children in particular (and here I am supposing it would also be necessary to include grown-ups in certain cases) willfully plunge their fingers into coloring materials, into containers of paint, for example, so as to leave traces of their passage while dragging their fingers across walls or doors. Such marks only "seem to be able to be explained as mechanical assertions of their author's personality." And in that capacity, Luquet associates them with one of the rare means that children have of asserting their personality, the destruction of objects, the exploits of "butter-fingered children"...

Georges Bataille, Primitive Art (The Cradle of Humanity, 2005: 36)

human no longer

Beyond consent the convulsions of the flesh demand silence and the spirit's absence. The physical urge is curiously foreign to human life, loosed without reference to it so long as it remains silent and keeps away. The being yielding to that urge is human no longer but, like the beasts, a prey of blind forces in action, wallowing in blindness and oblivion.

Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (1986:105)

the bridge across has been destroyed

Two men may talk together enthusiastically for an hour or so about shared experiences, and yet not have a true conversation. A lonely man who wants to indulge his nostalgic mood feels the need of someone with whom to share it. When he finds such a companion, he starts to pour out his monologue as though recounting a dream. And so the talk goes on between them, their monologues alternating, but after a time they suddenly become aware that they have nothing to say to each other. They are like two men standing at either side of a chasm, the bridge across which has been destroyed.

Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses (1990: 57)

no basis whatsoever

Somewhere Honda had become separated even from Iinuma. As the crowd surged by, it occurred to him that Kiyoaki himself, alive again, was caught in this same press of humanity. How wild a fancy this seemed here at midday beneath the early summer sun! He was dazzled by the excessive brightness of the mystery.
  Just as sea and sky blurred together at the horizon, so, too, dream and reality could certainly become confused when viewed from a distance. But here, at least around Honda, everyone was clearly subject to the law and, in turn, guarded by the law. His role was that of a guardian of the order established by the operative law of this world. This operative law was like a heavy iron lid upon the pot in which the multifarious stew of the day-to-day world simmered.
  Human beings eating, digesting, excreting, reproducing, loving and hating ... Honda reflected that these were the human beings under the court's jurisdiction. If worst came to worst they would appear before it as defendants.
  They alone had reality. Human beings who sneezed, laughed, human beings who went about with absurdly dangling reproductive gear. If all human beings were like this, there was no basis whatsoever for Honda's fearful mystery. Even if a single reborn Kiyoaki might be hidden in their midst.

Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses (55)

the present usually hurts

  We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
  Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

Pascal, Pensées (1987: 43)

Man is nothing but a subject full of natural error that cannot be eradicated except through grace. Nothing shows him the truth, everything deceives him. The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and, just as they trick the soul, they are tricked by [the soul] in their turn: it takes its revenge. The senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions. They both compete in lies and deception.

Pascal, Pensées (1987:42)

he's always there

On my way upstairs, in the dark, I bumped into old Salamano, my next-door neighbour. He had his dog with him. They've been together for eight years. The spaniel has got a skin disease—mange, I think—which makes almost all its hair fall out and covers it with brown blotches and scabs. After living with it for so long, the two of them alone together in one tiny room, Salamano has ended up looking like the dog. He's got reddish scabs on his face and his hair is thin and yellow. And the dog has developed something of its master's walk, all hunched up with its neck stretched forward and its nose sticking out. They look as if they belong to the same species and yet they hate each other. Twice a day, at eleven o'clock and six, the old man takes his dog for a walk. In eight years they haven't changed their route. You can see them in the rue de Lyon, the dog dragging the man along until old Salamano stumbles. Then he beats the dog and swears at it. The dog cringes in fear and trails behind. At that point it's the old man's turn to drag it along. When the dog forgets, it starts pulling its master along again and gets beaten and sworn at again. Then they both stop on the pavement and stare at each other, the dog in terror, the man in hatred. It's like that every day. When the dog wants to urinate, the old man won't give it time and drags it on, so that the spaniel scatters a trail of little drops behind it. But if the dog ever does it in the room, then it gets beaten again. It's been going on like that for eight years. Celeste always says, "It's dreadful," but in fact you can never tell. When I met him on the stairs, Salamano was busy swearing at his dog. He was saying, "Filthy, lousy animal!" and the dog was whimpering. I said, "Good evening," but the old man went on swearing. So I asked him what the dog had done. He didn't answer. He just went on saying, "Filthy, lousy animal!" I could just about see him, bent over his dog, busy fiddling with something on its collar. I asked again a bit louder. Then, without turning around, he answered with a sort of suppressed fury, "He's always there." Then he set off, dragging the animal after him as it trailed its feet along the ground, whimpering.

...

  We went out and Raymond bought me a brandy. Then he wanted a game of billiards and I just lost. After that he wanted to go to a brothel, but I said no because I don't like that sort of thing. So we made our way slowly back and he kept telling me how pleased he was that he'd managed to punish his mistress. I found him very friendly towards me and I thought it was a good moment.
  From some distance away I noticed old Salamano standing on the doorstep looking flustered. When we got nearer, I saw that his dog wasn't with him. He'd look in all directions, spin around, peer into the darkness of the hall, mumble a string of unconnected words and then start searching the street again with his little red eyes. When Raymond asked him what was wrong, he didn't answer at first. I vaguely heard him muttering, "Filthy, lousy animal," and he went on flustering. I asked him where his dog was. He replied abruptly that he'd disappeared. And then all of a sudden he spoke rapidly: "I took him to the Parade Ground, as usual. There were crowds of people, round the stalls at the fair. I stopped to watch 'the Escape King'. And when I turned to go, he wasn't there any more. Of course, I'd been meaning to get him a smaller collar for a long time. But I never thought the lousy animal could disappear like that."
  Raymond then explained that the dog might just have got lost and that it would come back. He cited cases of dogs that had travelled dozens of miles to get back to their masters. This only seemed to make the old man more flustered. "But they'll take him away from me, don't you see? If only someone would take him in. But they won't, everyone's disgusted by his scabs. The police'll get him, I know they will." So I told him he should go to the pound and they'd give it back to him for a small charge. He asked me how much the charge was. I didn't know. Then he got angry: "Pay money for that lousy animal. Ha! He can die for all I care!" And he started swearing at it. Raymond laughed and went inside the building. I followed him and we said goodnight to each other on the upstairs landing. A minute later I heard the old man's footsteps and he knocked at my door. When I opened it, he stood for a moment in the doorway and said, "Excuse me, excuse me." I asked him in, but he didn't want to. He was looking down at his boots and his scabby hands were trembling. Without looking up at me, he asked, "They won't take him away from me, will they, Mr. Meursault. They will give him back to me. Otherwise what will I do?" I told him that they kept dogs at the pound for three days for their owners to collect them and that after that they dealt with them as they saw fit. He looked at me in silence. Then he said, "Goodnight." He closed his door and I heard him pacing up and down. Then his bed creaked. And from the peculiar little noise coming through the partition wall, I realized that he was crying. For some reason I thought of mother. But I had to get up early in the morning. I wasn't hungry and I went to bed without any dinner.


...

Outside my door I found old Salamano. I asked him in and he told me that his dog was definitely lost, because it wasn't at the pound. The people there had told him that it might have been run over. He'd asked them if he could possibly find out at the police station. He'd been told that they didn't keep records of things like that, because they happened every day. I told old Salamano that he could get another dog, but he rightly pointed out to me that he'd got used to this one.
  I was crouched on my bed and Salamano had sat down on a chair by the table. He was facing me, with both his hands on his knees. He still had his old felt hat on. He was mumbling half-finished sentences into his yellowing moustache. He was annoying me a bit, but I didn't have anything to do and I didn't feel sleepy. To make conversation, I asked him about his dog. He told me that he'd got it when his wife had died. He'd married fairly late. As a young man he'd wanted to go into the theatre: in the army he used to act in military vaudevilles. But he'd ended up working on the railways and he didn't regret it, because now he had a small pension. He hadn't been happy with his wife, but on the whole he'd got quite used to her. When she'd died he'd felt very lonely. So he'd asked a friend in the workshop for a dog and he'd got this one as a puppy. He had to feed it from a bottle. But since a dog doesn't live as long as a man, they'd ended up growing old together. "He was bad-tempered," Salamano said. "Every now and then we had a right old row. But he was a nice dog all the same." I said he was a good breed and Salamano looked pleased. "Yes," he added, "but you should have seen him before his illness. His coat was his best point." Every night and every morning, after it got that skin trouble, Salamano used to rub it with ointment. But according to him, its real trouble was old age, and there's no cure for old age.
  At that point I yawned and the old man said he'd be going. I told him that he could stay, and that I was upset about what had happened to his dog: he thanked me. He told me that mother used to be very fond of his dog. He referred to her as "your poor mother." He seemed to assume that I'd been very unhappy ever since mother had died and I didn't say anything. Then, very quickly as if he was embarrassed, he told me that he realized that local people thought badly of me for sending my mother to a home, but that he knew me better and he knew I loved mother very much. I replied, I still don't know why, that I hadn't realized before that people thought badly of me for doing that, but that the home had seemed the natural thing since I didn't have enough money to have mother looked after. "Anyway," I added, "she'd run out of things to say to me a long time ago and she'd got bored of being alone." "Yes," he said, "and at least in a home you can make a few friends." Then he said he must go. He wanted to get some sleep. His life had changed now and he didn't quite know what he was going to do. For the first time since I'd known him, and with a rather secretive gesture, he gave me his hand and I felt the scales on his skin. He smiled slightly and before he went, he said, "I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine."


Albert Camus, The Outsider (2000: 30-31, 40-42, 46-48)

the morality of children's books

Broadly speaking, we can say that modern expert opinion has replaced the mutual exclusion of medical and judicial discourses by a game that could be called the game of dual, medical and judicial, qualification. This practice, this technique of dual qualification, organizes the realm of that very strange notion, "perversity," that begins to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century and that will dominate the entire field of this double determination and authorize the appearance of a range of manifestly obsolete, laughable, and puerile terms or elements in the discourse of experts who are justified as scientists. When you go through these expert medico-legal opinions ... you are struck by terms like laziness, pride, stubbornness, and nastiness. You are given biographical elements that do not in any way explain the action in question but are kinds of miniature warning signs, little scenes of childhood, little childish scenes that are presented as already analogous to the crime. It is a kind of scaled-down criminality for children characterized by the language used by parents or by the morality of children's books. In fact, the puerility of the terms, notions, and analysis at the heart of modern expert medico-legal opinion has a very precise function: it makes possible an exchange between juridical categories defined by the penal code, which stipulates that one can only punish when there is malice or a real intention to harm, and medical notions like "immaturity," "weak ego," "undeveloped superego," "character structure," and so on. You can see how notions like those of perversity make it possible to stitch together the series of categories defining malice and intentional harm and categories constituted within a more or less medical, or at any rate, psychiatric, psychopathological, or psychological discourse. The whole field of notions of perversity, converted into their puerile vocabulary, enables medical notions to function in the field of judicial power and, conversely, juridical notions to function in medicine's sphere of competence. This set of notions functions, then, as a switch point, and the weaker it is epistemologically, the better in functions.

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975 (2003: 32-33)

a vengeful ghost

Sitting opposite the Count, Kitazaki reached respectfully across the table with his wrinkled but honest-looking old hands and unfastened the purple cord that bound the scroll. Then he began to unroll it for the Count, revealing first the pretentious inscription at the top. It was a koan:

Chao Chu went to a nun one day, to say, "Do you have it? Do you have it?" And when the nun in turn raised her fists at him, Chao Chu went on his Way at once, declaring: "Shallow water affords poor anchorage."

  The oppressive heat of that night! Its sultry torpor, only aggravated by the breeze stirred at his back by Tadeshina's fan, seemed to the Count to equal that of a rice-steaming basket. The sake had begun to take effect; the Count heard the drumming of the rain outside as if it were striking the back of his skull; the world outside was lost in innocent thoughts of victory in war. And thus the Count sat looking down at the erotic scroll. Suddenly Kitazaki's hands flashed through the air to clap together a mosquito. He apologized at once for the disturbance of the noise, and the Count caught a glimpse of the tiny black smudge of crushed mosquito in his dry white palm, together with a red smear of blood, an unclean image that unsettled him. Why had the mosquito not bitten him? Was he really so well protected from everything?
  The first picture on the scroll was that of an abbot in a brown robe and a young widow seated facing each other in front of a screen. The style was that of haiku illustrations, drone with a light, humorous touch. The face of the abbot was drawn in caricature to look like a large penis.
  In the next picture the abbot sprang upon the young widow without warning, intent on raping her, and although she was putting up a fight, her kimono was already in disarray. In the next they were locked in a naked embrace and the woman's expression was now blissfully relaxed. The abbot's penis was like the twisted root of a giant pine, and his brown tongue stuck out in great delight. In accordance with this artistic tradition, the young widow's feet and toes were painted with Chinese white, and curved sharply inward. Tremors ran the length of her white, clinging thighs and ended finally at her toes, as though the tension there embodied her straining effort to hold back the flood of ecstasy that was about to gush out into eternity. The woman's exertions were altogether admirable, thought the Count.
  On the other side of the screen, meantime, a number of novice monks were standing on a wooden drum and a writing table, and boosting one another onto their shoulders, desperately keen to see what was going on behind the screen while simultaneously engaged in a comic struggle to keep down those parts of their anatomy that had already swollen to massive proportions. Finally the screen fell over. And as the stark-naked woman attempted to cover herself and escape, and the abbot lay exhausted with no strength left to reprimand the novices, a scene of total disorder began to unfold.
  The monks' penises were drawn to appear nearly as long as their owners were tall, the usual proportions being inadequate for the artist to convey the magnitude of their burden of lust. As they set upon the woman, the face of each of them was a comic study in indescribable anguish, and they staggered about under the weight of their own erections.
  After such punishing toil, the woman's entire body turned deathly pale and she died. Her soul flew out of her and took refuge in the branches of a willow tree blown by the wind. And there she became a vengeful ghost, her face drawn in the image of a vulva.
  At this point, the scroll lost whatever humor it had once had, and became permeated with fearful gloom. Not one but many ghosts, all similar, assaulted the men, hair streaming wildly, crimson lips gaping. Fleeing in panic, the men were no match for the phantoms, who swarmed over them in a whirlwind, tearing out their penises as well as the abbot's with their powerful jaws.
  The final scene was by the seashore. The emasculated men lay naked on the beach, howling desperately, while a boat weighed down with their mutilated penises was just setting sail on a dark sea. The ghosts crowded the deck, hair streaming in the wind, pale hands waving derisively, their vaginal faces mocking the wretched cries of their victims on the shore. The prow of the boat, too, was carved in the form of a vulva, and as it pointed toward deep water, a tuft of hair clinging to it waved in the sea breeze.

Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow (1972: 301-3)

The Bee Meeting

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers ---
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.

Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted ---
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

Sylvia Plath, 3 October 1962

falsehood in silky garments

I am bored with gabbers and their gab; my soul abhors them.
&#160 When I wake up in the morning to peruse the letters and magazines placed by my bedside, I find them full of gab; all I see is loose talk empty of meaning but stuffed with hypocrisy.
&#160 When I sit by the window to lower the veil of slumber from my eyes and sip my Turkish coffee, Mister Gabber appears before me, hopping, crying, and grumbling. He condescends to sip my coffee and smoke my cigarettes.
&#160 When I go to work Mister Gabber follows, whispering in my ears and tickling my sensitive brain. When I try to get rid of him he giggles and is soon midstream again, in his flood of meaningless talk.
&#160 When I go to the market, Mister Gabber stands at the door of every shop passing judgment on people. I see him even upon the faces of the silent for he accompanies them too. Thy are unaware of his presence, yet he disturbs them.
&#160 If I sit down with a friend Mister Gabber, uninvited, makes a third. If I elude him, he manages to remain so close that the echo of his voice irritates me and upsets my stomach like spoiled meat.
&#160 When I visit the courts and the institutions of learning, I find him and his father and mother dressing Falsehood in silky garments and Hypocrisy in a magnificent cloak and a beautiful turban.
&#160 When I call at factory offices, there too, to my surprise, I find Mister Gabber, in the midst of his mother, aunt, and grandfather chattering and flapping his thick lips. And his kinfolks applaud him and mock me.
&#160 On my visit to the temples and other places of worship, there he is, seated on a throne, his head crowned and a gleaming sceptre in his hand.
&#160 Returning home at eventide, I find him there, too. From the ceiling he hangs like a snake; or crawls like a boa in the four corners of my house.
&#160 In short, Mister Gabber is found everywhere; within and beyond the skies, on land and underground, on the wings of the ether and upon the waves of the sea, in forests, caves, and on the mountaintops.
&#160 Where can lover of silence and tranquility find rest from him? Will God ever have mercy on my soul and grant me the grace of dumbness so I may reside in the paradise of Silence?
&#160 Is there in this universe a nook where I can go and live happily by myself?
&#160 Is there any place where there is no traffic in empty talk?
&#160 Is there on this earth one who does not worship himself talking?
&#160 Is there any person among all persons whose mouth is not a hiding place for the knavish Mister Gabber?

Khalil Gibran, Mister Gabber (Thoughts and Meditations, 1969: 40-42)

not a mechanical print

The first thing that caught my attention was a portrait of mama that hung over the desk, in a magnificent carved frame of costly wood—a photograph, taken abroad, of course, and, judging by its extraordinary size, a very costly thing. I hadn't known and had never heard of this portrait before, and the main thing that struck me was the extraordinary likeness in the photograph, a spiritual likeness, so to speak—in short, as if it was a real portrait by an artist's hand, and not a mechanical print. As soon as I came in, I stopped involuntarily before it.
  "Isn't it? Isn't it?" Versilov suddenly repeated over me.
  That is, "Isn't it just like her?" I turned to look at him and was struck by the expression of his face. He was somewhat pale, but with an ardent, intense gaze, as if radiant with happiness and strength. I had never known him to have such an expression.
  "I didn't know you loved mama so much!" I suddenly blurted out, in rapture myself.
  He smiled blissfully, though there was a reflection as if of some suffering in his smile, or, better, of something humane, lofty... I don't know how to say it; but highly developed people, it seems to me, cannot have triumphant and victoriously happy faces. Without answering me, he took the portrait from the rings with both hands, brought it close, kissed it, then quietly hung it back on the wall.
  "Notice," he said, "it's extremely rare that photographic copies bear any resemblance, and that's understandable: it's extremely rare that the original itself, that is, each of us, happens to resemble itself. Only in rare moments does a human face express its main feature, its most characteristic thought. An artist studies a face and divines its main thought, though at the moment of painting it might be absent from the face. A photograph finds the man as he is, and it's quite possible that Napoleon, at some moment, would come out stupid, and Bismarck tenderhearted ... "

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 460-61)

Sunday, December 12, 1976

I read the Ruth Kligman book Love Affair about her "love affair" with Jackson Pollock—and that's in quotes. It's so bad—how could you ever make a movie of it without making it a whole new story? Ruth told me she wants me to produce it and Jack Nicholson to star.
  In the book she says something like, "I had to get away from Jackson and I ran as far as possible." So do you know where she went? (Laughs) Sag Harbor. He lived in Springs. So that's—what? Six miles? And she was making it like she went to the other side of the world. And then she said, "The phone rang—how oh how did he ever find me?" I'm sure she called hundreds of people to give them the number in case he asked them.

Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989: 7)

what's the point?

"I might be afraid of the godless man even now," the old man went on with concentration, "only thing is, my friend Alexander Semyonovich, that I've never once met a godless man, what I've met instead is vain men—that's how they'd better be called. They're all sorts of people; there's no telling what people: big and small, stupid and learned, even some of the simplest rank, and it's all vanity. For they read and talk all their lives, filled with bookish sweetness, but they themselves dwell in perplexity and cannot resolve anything. One is all scattered, no longer noticing himself. Another has turned harder than stone, but dreams wander through his heart. Yet another is unfeeling and light-minded and only wants to laugh out his mockery. Another has merely plucked little flowers from books, and even that by his own opinion; he's all vanity himself, and there's no judgment in him. Again I'll say this: there is much boredom. A small man may be needy, have no crust, nothing to feed his little ones, sleep on prickly straw, and yet his heart is always merry and light; he sins, he's coarse, but still his heart is light. But the big man drinks too much, eats too much, sits on a heap of gold, yet there's nothing but anguish in his heart. Some have gone through all learning—and are still anguished. And my thinking is that the more one learns, the more boredom there is. Take just this: they've been teaching people ever since the world was made, but where is the good they've taught, so that the world might become the most beautiful, mirthful, and joy-filled dwelling place? And I'll say another thing: they have no seemliness, they don't even want it; they've all perished, and each one only praises his perdition, but doesn't even think of turning to the one truth; yet to live without God is nothing but torment. And it turns out that what gives light is the very thing we curse, and we don't know it ourselves. And what's the point? It's impossible for a man to exist without bowing down; such a man couldn't bear himself, and no man could. If he rejects God, he'll bow down to an idol—a wooden one, or a golden one, or a mental one. They're all idolaters, not godless, that's how they ought to be called. Well, but how could there not be godless people as well? There are such as are truly godless, only they're much more frightening than these others, because they come with God's name on their lips. I've heard of them more than once, but I've never met any. There are such, my friend, and I think there must needs be."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 373-4)

you had better look at him when he laughs

I think that when a person laughs, in the majority of cases he becomes repulsive to look at. Most often something banal is revealed in people's laughter, something as if humiliating for the laugher, though the laughing one almost always knows nothing of the impression he makes. Just as he doesn't know, as nobody generally knows, what kind of face he has when he's asleep. Some sleepers have intelligent faces even in sleep, while other faces, even intelligent ones, become very stupid in sleep and therefore ridiculous. I don't know what makes that happen; I only want to say that a laughing man, like a sleeping one, most often knows nothing about his face. A great many people don't know how to laugh at all. However, there's nothing to know here: it's a gift, and it can't be fabricated. It can only be fabricated by re-educating oneself, developing oneself for the better, and overcoming the bad instincts of one's character; then the laughter of such a person might quite possibly change for the better. A man can give himself away completely by his laughter, so that you suddenly learn all his innermost secrets. Even indisputably intelligent laughter is sometimes repulsive. Laughter calls first of all for sincerity but where is there any sincerity in people? Laughter calls for lack of spite, but people most often laugh spitefully. Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth, but where is there any mirth in our time, and do people know how to be mirthful? ... A man's mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone's character won't be cracked for a long time, then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I'm not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how he weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he's a good man. Note at the same time all the nuances: for instance, a man's laughter must in no case seem stupid to you, however merry and simplehearted it may be. The moment you notice the slightest trace of stupidity in someone's laughter, it undoubtedly means that the man is of limited intelligence, though he may do nothing but pour out ideas. Or if his laughter isn't stupid, but the man himself, when he laughs, for some reason suddenly seems ridiculous to you, even just slightly—know, then, that the man has no real sense of dignity, not fully in any case. Or, finally, if his laughter is infectious, but for some reason still seems banal to you, know, then, that the man's nature is on the banal side as well, and all the noble and lofty that you noticed in him before is either deliberately affected or unconsciously borrowed, and later on the man is certain to change for the worse, to take up what's "useful" and throw his noble ideas away without regret, as the errors and infatuations of youth.
  I am intentionally placing this long tirade about laughter here, even sacrificing the flow of the story, for I consider it one of the most serious conclusions of my life. And I especially recommend it to those would-be brides who are ready to marry their chosen man, but keep scrutinizing him with hesitation and mistrust, and can't make the final decision. And let them not laugh at the pathetic adolescent for poking his moral admonitions into the matter of marriage, of which he doesn't understand the first thing. But I understand only that laughter is the surest test of the soul. Look at a child: only children know how to laugh perfectly—that's what makes them seductive. A crying child is repulsive to me, but a laughing and merry child is a ray from paradise, a revelation from the future, when man will finally become as pure and simplehearted as a child.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 352-53)

the silvery holes of her sieve

Sabina felt lost.
  The wild compass whose fluctuations she had always obeyed, making for tumult and motion in place of direction, was suddenly fractured so that she no longer knew even the relief of ebbs and flows and dispersions.
  She felt lost. The dispersion had become too vast, too extended. A shaft of pain cut through the nebulous pattern, Sabina had always moved so fast that all pain had passed swiftly as through a sieve leaving a sorrow like children's sorrows, soon forgotten, soon replaced by another interest. She had never known a pause.
  Her cape which was more than a cape, which was a sail, which was the feelings she threw to the four winds to be swelled and swept by the wind in motion, lay becalmed.
  Her dress was becalmed.
  It was as if now she were nothing that the wind could catch, swell and propel.
  For Sabina, to be becalmed meant to die.
  Anxiety had entered her body and refused to run through it. The silvery holes of her sieve against sorrow granted her at birth, had clogged. Now the pain had lodged itself inside of her, inescapable.
  She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost; she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: A papier-mâché horse.
  She had lost her sails, her cape, her horse, her seven-league boots, and all of them at once. She was stranded in the semi-darkness of a winter evening.
  Then, as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn inward for the first time, killing the external body, blurring the eyes, dulling the ears, thickening the palate and tongue, slowing the movements of the body, she felt intensly cold and shivered with the same tremor as leaves, feeling for the first time some withered leaves of her being detaching themselves from her body.
  ... she now could see the very minute fragments of her acts which she had believed unimportant causing minute incisions, erosions of the personality. A small act, a kiss given at a party to a young man who benefitted from his resemblance to a lost John, a hand abandoned in a taxi to a man not desired but because the other woman's hand had been claimed and Sabina could not bear to have her hand lie unclaimed on her lap: it seemed an affront to her powers of seduction. A word of praise about a painting she had not liked but uttered out of fear that the painter would say: "Oh, Sabina . . . Sabina doesn't understand painting."
  All the small insincerities had seeped like invisible rivulets of acid and caused profound damages, the erosions had sent each fragment of Sabina rotating like separate pieces of colliding planets, into other spheres, yet not powerful enough to fly into space like a bird, not organic enough to become another life, to rotate on its own core.
  ... And all her seeking of fire to weld these fragments together, seeking in the furnace of delight a welding of fragments, into one total love, one total woman, had failed!

Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (1982: 92-3)

fallen desperately in love with an inch

It is no wonder that names have been considered uncanny manifestations of supernatural power, and that men have identified their names with their souls or used them to invoke spiritual forces. Indeed, the power of words has gone to man's head in more than one way. To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand. More important still, words have enabled man to define himself—to label a certain part of his experience "I."
  This is, perhaps, the meaning of the ancient belief that the name is the soul. For to define is to isolate, to separate some complex of forms from the stream of life and say, "This is I." When man can name and define himself, he feels that he has an identity. Thus he begins to feel, like the word, separate and static, as over against the real, fluid world of nature.
  Feeling separate, the sense of conflict between man, on the one hand, and nature, on the other, begins. Language and thought grapple with the conflict, and the magic which can summon a man by naming him is applied to the universe. Its powers are named, personalized, and invoked in mythology and religion. Natural processes are made intelligible, because all regular processes—such as the rotation of the stars and seasons—can be fitted to words and ascribed to the activity of the gods or God, the eternal Word. At a later time science employs the same process, studying every kind of regularity in the universe, naming, classifying, and making use of them in ways still more miraculous.
  But because it is the use and nature of words and thoughts to be fixed, definite, isolated, it is extremely hard to describe the most important characteristic of life—its movement and fluidity. Just as money does not represent the perishability and edibility of food, so words and thoughts do no represent the vitality of life. The relation between thought and movement is something like the difference between a real man running and a motion-picture film which shows the running as a series of "stills."
  ... It is most convenient for scientific calculation to think of a movement as a series of very small jerks or stills. But confusion arises when the world described and measured by such conventions is identified with the world of experience. A series of stills does not, unless rapidly moved before our eyes, convey the essential vitality and beauty of movement. The definition, the description, leaves out the most important thing.
  Useful as these conventions are for purposes of calculation, language, and logic, absurdities arise when we think that the kind of language we can use or the kind of logic with which we reason can really define or explain the "physical" world. Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be "intelligible" in this sense is to want it to be something other than life. It is to prefer a motion-picture film to a real, running man. To feel that life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951: 46-48)

he could not escape the feeling

Honda sat cross-legged in the sand staring out at the waters of the bay. Though the sea was calm, its rolling waves fascinated him. As he watched, the crest of the sea seemed to be level with his eyes. How strange, he thought, that it should come to an abrupt end and give way to the land right in front of him.
  He kept pouring dry sand from one palm to the other. When he had spilled a good part of it in the process, he reached down automatically and began again with a fresh handful, his thoughts completely taken up with the sea.
  It ended a few feet from where he sat. The sea, broad and vast, with all its mighty force, ended right there before his eyes. Be it the edge of time or space, there is nothing so awe-inspiring as a border. To be here at this place with his three companions, at this marvelous border between land and sea, struck him as being very similar to being alive as one age was ending and another beginning, like being part of a great moment in history. And then too the tide of their own era, in which he and Kiyaoki lived, also had to have an appointed time to ebb, a shore on which to break, a limit beyond which it could not go.
  The sea ended right there before his eyes. As he watched the final surge of each wave as it drained into the sand, the final thrust of mighty power that had come down through countless centuries, he was struck by the pathos of it all. At that very point, a grand pan-oceanic enterprise that spanned the world went awry and ended in annihilation.
  But still, he thought, this final frustration was a gentle soothing one. A small, lacy frill, the wave's last farewell, escaped from disintegration at the last moment before merging into the glistening wet sand as the wave itself withdrew, and vanished into the sea.
  Starting a good way out in the offing at a point where the whitecaps thinned out, the incoming waves went through four or five stages, each of which was visible at any given moment—a swelling, a cresting, a breaking, the dissolution of its force and an ebbing—a constantly recurring process.
  The breaking wave let out an angry roar as it showed its smooth, dark green belly. The roar tailed off to a cry and the cry to a whisper. The charging line of huge white stallions yielded place to a line of smaller ones until the furious horses gradually disappeared altogether, leaving nothing but those last imprints of pounding hooves on the beach.
  Two remnants, streaming in from left and right, collided roughly, spread like a fan, and sank into the bright mirror of the sand's surface. At that moment, the reflection in the mirror came to life, catching the next white-crested wave just as it was about to come crashing down, a sharp vertical image that sparkled like a row of icicles.
  Beyond the ebb, where other waves kept rolling in one after the other, none of them formed smooth white crests. They charged at full power again and again, aiming for their goal with determination. But when Honda looked out to see in the distance he could not escape the feeling that the apparent strength of these waves that beat upon the shore was really no more than a diluted, weakened, final dispersion.
  The farther out one looked, the darker the color of the water, until it finally became a deep blue-green. It was as if the innocuous ingredients of the offshore water became more and more condensed by the increasing pressure of the water as it got deeper, its green intensified over and over again to produce an eternal blue-green substance, pure and impenetrable as fine jade, that extended to the horizon. Though the sea might seem vast and deep, this substance was the very stuff of the ocean. Something that was crystallized into blue beyond the shallow, frivolous overlapping of the waves—that was the sea.

Yukio Mishimia, Spring Snow (1990: 222-24)

I knew it pleased her

"Laugh, laugh at me!" I exclaimed in intoxication, because I was terribly pleased with this whole conversation and the direction it had taken. "From you it only gives me pleasure. I love your laughter, Anna Andreevna! You have this feature: you keep silent and suddenly burst out laughing, instantly, so that even an instant earlier one couldn't have guessed it by your face. I knew a lady in Moscow, distantly, I watched her from a corner. She was almost as beautiful as you are, but she couldn't laugh the way you do, and her face, which was as attractive as yours—lost its attraction; but yours is terribly attractive . . . precisely for that ability . . . I've long been wanting to tell you."
  When I said of the lady that "she was as beautiful as you are," I was being clever: I pretended that it had escaped me accidentally, as if I hadn't even noticed; I knew very well that women value such "escaped" praise more highly than any polished compliment you like. And as much as Anna Andreevna blushed, I knew it pleased her. And I invented the lady; I didn't know any such lady in Moscow, it was only so as to praise Anna Andreevna and please her.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 240-241)

I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world

"My dear," he said to me once, not at home, but one time in the street, after a long conversation; I was seeing him off. "My friend, to love people as they are is impossible. And yet one must. And therefore do good to them, clenching your feelings, holding your nose, and shutting your eyes (this last is necessary). Endure evil from them, not getting angry with them if possible, 'remembering that you, too, are a human being.' Naturally, you're in a position to be severe with them, if it's been granted to you to be a little bit smarter than the average. People are mean by nature and love to love out of fear; don't give in to such love and don't cease to despise it. Somewhere in the Koran, Allah bids the prophet to look upon the 'recalcitrant' as mice, to do them good and pass by—somewhat arrogant, but right. Know how to despise them even when they're good, for most often it's just here that they're nasty. Oh, my dear, I'm judging by myself in saying that! He who is only a little bit better than stupid cannot live and not despise himself—whether he's honest or dishonest makes no difference. To love one's neighbor and not to despise him is impossible. In my opinion, man is created with a physical inability to love his neighbor. There's some mistake in words here, from the very beginning, and 'love for mankind' should be understood as just for that mankind which you yourself have created in your soul (in other words, you've created your own self and the love for yourself), and which therefore will never exist in reality."
  "Never exist?"
  "My friend, I agree that this would be rather stupid, but here the blame isn't mine; and since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion of it."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 213-14)

you sometimes pretend

... "by the way, you heard about the shoulder from me, which means that at this moment you are making wicked use of my own simple-heartedness and trustfulness; but you must agree that that shoulder really wasn't as bad as it seems at first sight, especially for that time; we were only beginning then. I was faking, of course, but I didn't know I was faking. Don't you ever fake, for instance, in practical cases?"
  "Just now, downstairs, I waxed a little sentimental, and felt very ashamed, as I was coming up here, at the thought that you might think I was faking. It's true that on some occasions, though your feelings are sincere, you sometimes pretend; but downstairs just now it was all natural."
  "That's precisely it; you've defined it very happily in a single phrase: 'though your feelings are sincere, all the same you pretend.' Well, that's exactly how it was with me: though I was pretending, I wept quite sincerely. I won't dispute that Makar Ivanovich might have taken that shoulder as an added mockery, if he had been more clever; but his honesty then stood in the way of his perspicacity. Only I don't know whether he pitied me then or not; I remember I very much wanted that."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 126)

can a spider hate the fly?

This was a duel to the death. And here—I was not insulted! There was an insult, but I didn't feel it! Far from it! I was even glad; having come to hate her, I even felt I was beginning to love her. "I don't know, can a spider hate the fly it has picked out and wants to catch? Sweet little fly! It seems to me that one loves one's victim; at least one may. You see, I love my enemy: I find it terribly pleasing, for instance, that she's so beautiful. I find it terribly pleasing, madam, that you are so haughty and majestic; if you were a bit meeker, the satisfaction wouldn't be so great. You spat on me, but I'm triumphant; if you were actually to spit in my face with real spit, I really might not get angry, because you are my victim—mine, and not his. What a fascinating thought! No, the secret awareness of power is unbearably more enjoyable than manifest domination. If I were worth a hundred million, I think I'd precisely enjoy going around in my old clothes, so as to be taken for the measliest of men, who all but begs for alms, and be pushed around and despised; for me, the consciousness alone would be enough."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 42)

the impersonal recipes

His father explained to Shigekuni that since all his familiarity with the law came from books, it would be extremely valuable for him to come in contact with the actual process of law in Japan and to experience it at a practical level. Justice Honda had more than this, on his mind, however. Truth to tell, his main concern was to expose his still sensitive, nineteen-year-old son to those elements of human existence that were dredged up in all their shockingly sordid reality in criminal court. He wanted to see what Shigekuni was able to draw from such experience.
  It was a dangerous sort of education. Still, when the Justice considered the greater danger of allowing a young man to form his character out of an assimilation from careless popular behavior, cheap entertainment and so on, from whatever might please or appeal to his immature taste, he felt confident of the advantages of this educational experiment. There was a good chance that it would at least make Shigekuni acutely aware of the stern and watchful eye of the law. He would see all the amorphous, steaming, filthy detritus of human passions processed right then and there according to the impersonal recipes of the law. Standing by in such a kitchen should teach Shigekuni a great deal about technique.

Yukio Mishimia, Spring Snow (1990: 200)