My Number
Is Death miles away from this house,
reaching for a widow in Cincinnati
or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker
in British Columbia?
Is he too busy making arrangements,
tampering with air brakes,
scattering cancer cells like seeds,
loosening the wooden beams of roller coasters
to bother with my hidden cottage
that visitors find so hard to find?
Or is he stepping from a black car
parked at the dark end of the lane,
shaking open the familiar cloak,
its hood raised like the head of a crow
and removing the scythe from the trunk?
Did you have any trouble with the directions?
I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this.
Billy Collins
From
Sailing Around the Room, Random House, 2002
The second art that I acquired in Pentonville [prison] was so-called "Marseilles chess."
It was invented by an elderly Frenchman, with a red scarf around his neck, who taught
it to me during exercise hours. In this game, each player in turn makes
two moves instead of one—the only restriction being that the first of the two
moves should not be a check to the King. To the chess-addict is this a nerve-racking
experience which shatters his outlook and upsets all his values. Hitler and the
Gestapo have faded into the past, but the memory of Marseilles chess in Pentonville
still makes me shudder.
Arthur Koestler
Introduction to
The Scum of the Earth (1954)
[John Horton] Conway paused for a moment, and his bushy eyebrows
furrowed. "Yes, I must really have a tremendous memory. As you know, I crossed the
Atlantic in, 1985 or 1986, and became a [Mathematics] professor at Princeton. Several
years later, when what's-his-name ... Harold Shapiro became President of the university,
he invited some of the faculty to a dinner party each week. There were about eight or ten
guests, and Shapiro asked each of us to say a few words about ourselves. I didn't like
that one bit. It reminded me of the recitations of poetry we had to do in elementary school.
So I recited a little poem about elves and goblins that I learned when I was, oh, about six years old. I hadn't thought about since then, and I was able to recall it at an instant.
Well, I wasn't invited to a dinner party again. But I don't worry about that;
I guess it looks as if I have an irresponsible attitude.
However, to do good work in math, you have to be somewhat irresponsible.
I only started doing real mathematics after I found the Conway group.
I got a much-needed ego boost - obviously I don't need one anymore.
Anyhow, after I made my name, I could do what I like, even if it was totally trivial.
When I want to play backgammon instead of doing math, I play backgammon.
If the people at Princeton don't feel that they're getting their money's worth out of me,
that's their problem. They bought me.
From Charles Seife,
Mathemagician,
(Impressions of Conway), The Sciences (May/June 1994), 12-15.
Available at
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~cgseife/conway.html
MOURNING THE DYING AMERICAN FEMALE NAMES
In the Altha Diner on the Florida Panhandle
a stocky white-haired woman
with a plastic nameplate "Mildred"
gently turns my burger, and I fall into grief.
I remember the long, hot drives to North Carolina
to visit Aunt Alma, who put up quarts of peaches,
and my grandmother Gladys with her pieced quilts.
Many names are almost gone: Gerturde, Myrtle,
Agnes, Bernice, Hortense, Edna, Doris, and Hilda.
They were wide women, cotton-clothed, early rising.
You had to move your mouth to say their names,
and they meant strength, speak, battle, and victory.
When did women stop being Saxons and Goths?
What frog Fate turned them in to Alison, Melissa,
Valerie, Natalie, Adienne, and Lucinda,
diminished them to Wendy, Cindy, Suzy, and Vicky?
I look at these young women
and hope they are headed for the presidency,
but I fear America has other plans in mind,
that they be no longer at war
but subdued instead in amorphous corporate work,
somebody's assistant, something in a bank,
single parent with word-processing skills.
They must have been made French
so they could be cheap foreign labor.
Well, all I can say is,
Good luck to you
Kimberly, Darlene, Cheryl, Heather and May.
Good luck April, Melane, Becky, and Kelly.
I hope it goes well for you.
But for a moment let us mourn.
Now is the time to say good-bye
to Florence, Muriel, Ethel, and Thelma.
Good-bye Minnie, Ada, Bertha, and Edith.
Hunt Hawkins,
The Domestic Life
Q: What is the correct response when someone calls you
on the telephone and asks for you by name?
—From "Mind Your Manners"
A: Not only is there no "correct" response when this disagreeable
thing happens, but there is no real response possible—in the
true sense of the word. Anything you say is makeshift. Hundreds
of "responses" have been tried by millions of phone users; every
one has proved either evasive or ridiculous or rude.
Let us say your name is Brinckerhoff. The phone rings and you answer it,
and a voice says, "I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please."
You are in an impossible situation. You can say, "This is I," and
be put down for a purist or a poseur. Or you can say, "This is me,"
and be taken for a tough. Or, rather desperately, you can reply,
"This is he," or "This is Brinckerhoff," or "This is Mr.
Brinckerhoff," referring to yourself grandiloquently in the third
person, in the manner of dictators and kings. Believe us, when a
man starts referring to himself in the third person, the end of the
good life is not far off. To the listener you sound either downright
silly or deliberately vainglorious. Your "response" has a slightly
moldy, undemocratic sound, as when, in the presense of a servant, you
refer to your wife as "Mrs. Brinckerhoff" instead of as "Esther."
Now, suppose you go off on an entirely different tack when the phone
rings and someone asks for you by name. Suppose you say, with forced
cheeriness, "Speaking!" What a pitiful attempt! The word has hardly
rolled off your tongue when it becomes meaningless, for you are no
longer speaking but are listening—listening, and hoping against hope
that it isn't somebody you can't stand. Or let's take a few other
conventional "responses" and see how miserably they fail:
Voice: "I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please."
Response: "You are." This is too rude, too familiar.
Voice: "I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please."
Response: "Why?" This is evasive, prying.
Voice: "I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please."
Response: "Go ahead!" Peremptory, unfriendly.
No, there is no "correct" response in this situation. There is
no response that is anything but discouraging. It is the most
disturbing phase of one's telephonic life. Unquestionably it was
not foreseen by Mr. Bell when he was so blithely tinkering with his
little magnets and diaphragms. If only a voice could have whispered,
"I would like to speak to Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, please," how
much that might have saved the world! Bell would have laid down his
tools with a tired sigh, a man who knew when he was licked.
From
The Second Tree from the Corner, by E B White
Icarus
John Updike
O.K., you are sitting in an airplane and
the person in the seat next to you is a sweaty, swarthy gentleman of Middle Eastern origin
whose carry-on luggage consists of a bulky black briefcase he stashes,
in compliance with airline regulations,
underneath the seat ahead.
He keeps looking at his watch and closing his eyes in prayer,
resting his profusely dank forehead against the seatback ahead of him,
just above the black briefcase,
which if you listen through the droning of the engines seems to be ticking, ticking
softly, softer than your heartbeat in your ears.
Who wants to have all their careful packing—the travellers� checks, the folded underwear—
end as floating sea-wrack five miles below,
drifting in a rainbow scum of jet fuel,
and their docile hopes of a plastic-wrapped meal
dashed in a concussion whiter than the sun?
I say to my companion, "Smooth flight so far."
"So far."
"That's quite a briefcase you've got there."
He shrugs and says, "It contains my life's work."
"And what is it, exactly, that you do?"
"You could say I am a lobbyist."
He does not want to talk.
He wants to keep praying.
His hands, with their silky beige backs and their nails cut close like a technician's,
tremble and jump in handling the plastic glass of Sprite when it comes with its exploding bubbles.
Ah, but one gets swept up
in the airport throng, all those workaday faces,
faintly pampered and spoiled in the boomer style,
and those elders dressed like children for flying
in hi-tech sneakers and polychrome catsuits,
and those gum-chewing attendants taking tickets
while keeping up a running flirtation with a uniformed bystander, a stoic blond pilot --
all so normal, who could resist
this vault into the impossible?
Your sweat has slowly dried. Your praying neighbor
has fallen asleep, emitting an odor of cardamom.
His briefcase seems to have deflated.
Perhaps not this time, then.
But the possibility of impossibility will keep drawing us back
to this scrape against the numbed sky,
to this sleek sheathed tangle of color-coded wires, these million rivets, the wing
like a frozen lake at your elbow.
From the
Partisan Review, in
Vol LXVII, No. 2.
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of
a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in
twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no difficulty
in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately,
until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people
in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by
the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far far away,
like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and
occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless
against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the
window. They needed his protection; he gave it them.
But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the
last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the
distance. Z is only to be reached once by one man in a generation.
Still, if he could reach R it would be
something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in
at Q, Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then
is Q—R—
Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the rams
horn which made the handle of the urn, and proceeded.
Then R... He braced himself. He clenched himself.
Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broiling
sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice,
foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?
A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity
of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard
people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more,
R—
Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the
Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor,
whose temper neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what
is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R—
The lizard's eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead
bulged. The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed
amongst its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious
distinction between the two classes of
men; on the one hand the steady
goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and perserving, repeat the
whole alphabet in order, twenty-six in all, from start to finish; on the
other hand the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the
letters together in one flash—the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid
no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every
letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he
stuck at Q. On, then, on to R.
Feelings that would not have disgraced
a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top
is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before
the morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him,
even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look
of whithered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some
crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to pierce
the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.
He stood stock still, by the urn with the geranium flowing over it. How
many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?
Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer,
without treachery to the expedition behind
him, `One perhaps.' One in a generation. Is he to be blamed if
he is not that one? provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best
of his power, till he has no more left to give?
From To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
If you're in the middle of writing a Ph.D. thesis or some other
painful document, you may find these
thoughts of Thomas Carlyle inspirational:
Writing is a dreadful Labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
The stupidity I labor under is extreme. All dislocated,
prostrated, obfuscated; cannot even speak, much less write.
What a dogged piece of toil lies before me, before I get
afoot again! Set doggedly to it then.
The whole thing I want to write seems lying in my mind;
but I cannot get my eye on it. The Machine is lazy, languid;
the motive principle cannot conquer the Inertia.
...this is a problem which some centuries may be taken up
in solving.
Ought any writing to be transacted with such intense difficulty?
Does not the True always flow lightly from the lips and pen?
I am not clear in this matter; which is a deeply practical one
with me...
Time flies; while thou balancest a sentence, thou are nearer
the final Period.
This however, I must say for myself: It is seldom or never the
Phraseology, but always the Insight, that fails me, and retards
me.
Thomas Carlyle, Selections from Carlyle's Journal, 1825-1832.
Edited by G.B. Tennyson, Cambridge University Press, 1969.
X was once a great king Xerxes
Xerxy
Perxy
Turxy
Xerxy
Linxy Lurxy
Great king Xerxes!
Edward Lear
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard? It resembles a wig.
He has ears, two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, laymen and clerical;
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotions,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads but cannot speak Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger-beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
Edward Lear
I would write on the lintels
of the door-post, Whim. I
hope it is somewhat
better than whim at last, but we
cannot spend the day in explanation.
Emerson. Self-Reliance
No sooner had we made our bow to Mr. Cambridge, in his library, than
Johnson ran eagerly to one side of the room intent on pouring over the
backs of the books. Sir Joshua observed aside, 'he runs to the books,
as I do to the pictures, but I have the advantage. I can see much
more of the pictures than he can of the books.' Johnson, ever ready
for contest, instantly started from reverie and answered, 'Sir, the
reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject
ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we
enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is know what
books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and
at the backs of books in libraries.' Sir Joshua observed to me
the extraordinary promptitude with which Johnson flew upon an argument.
'Yes,' said I, he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with his
sword; he is through your body in a moment.'
Boswell's Life of Johnson
"Omit needless words!" cries the author on page 21, and into that
imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days
when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words,
and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious
relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed
himself, a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill.
Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he
uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration
on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped
his lapels in his hands, and a husky, conspiratorial voice said,
"Rule Thirteen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit
needless words!"
...Will Strunk loved the clear, the brief, the bold, and his book is
clear, brief, bold. Boldness is perhaps its chief distinguishing
mark. On page 24, explaining one of his parallels, he says, "the
left-hand version gives the impression that the writer is undecided
or timid; he seems unable or afraid to choose one definite form of
expression and stick to it." And his Rule 12 is "Make definite
assertions." That was Will all over. He scorned the vague, the
tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be
irresolute than to be wrong. I remember a day in his class when he
leaned far forward in his characteristic pose—the pose of a man
about to impart a secret—and croaked, "If you don't know how
to pronounce a word, say it loud!" This comical piece of advice
struck me as sound at the time, and I still respect it. Why compound
ignorance with inaudibility?
EB White
On the evening of the first day out from Goliad we heard the
most unearthly howling of wolves, directly in our front. The
prairie grass was tall and we could not see the beasts, but the
sound indicated that they were near. To my ear it appeared that
there must have been enough of them to devour our party, horses
and all, at a single meal. The part of Ohio that I hailed from
was not thickly settled, but wolves had been driven out long
before I left. Benjamin was from Indiana, still less populated,
where yet the wolf roamed over the prairies. He understood the
nature of the animal and the capacity of a few to make believe
there was an unlimited number of them. He kept on toward the
noise, unmoved. I followed in his trail, lacking moral courage
to turn back and join our sick companion. I have no doubt that
if Benjamin had proposed returning to Goliad, I would not only
have "seconded the motion" but have suggested that it was very
hard-hearted in us to leave Augur sick there in the first place;
but Benjamin did not propose turning back. When he did speak it
was to ask: "Grant, how many wolves do you think there are in
that pack?" Knowing where he was from, and suspecting that he
thought I would overestimate the answer, I determined to show
my acquaintance with the animal but putting the estimate below
what possibly could be correct, and answered: "Oh, about twenty,"
very indifferently. He smiled and rode on. In a minute or
two we close upon them, and before they saw us. There were just
two of them. Seated upon their haunches, with their
mouths close together, they had made all the noise we had been
hearing for the past ten minutes. I have often thought of this
incident since when I have heard the noise of a few disappointed
politicians who had deserted their associates. There are always
more of them before they are counted.
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1885
Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician
Geometer, quack, conjurer, magician,
All arts his own the hungry Greekling counts.
Juvenal, Satires, iii, 76-77, in D. Junius Juvenalis
Satirae, tr. P. Austen Nuttal, new ed. (London: Nichols, 1836), p. 41.
Another Soviet technique was to use hidden cameras to film espionage targets making love, and to use the
film for blackmail...President Sukarno of Indonesia had an affair with a KGB plant, but when Soviet agents
came and showed him incriminating photographs Sukarno did not give a damn. He is said to have
nonchalantly pointed at the snapshots, saying, "I would like six of this picture and a dozen of that one..."
From Every Spy a Prince by Raviv and Melman
"One senior Saudi Arabian official was photographed in bed with a hooker who had been given instructions to
situate herself and her bedmate in such a way that the camera recorded both his face and the actual penetration.
Later, the Mossad confronted him with the evidence of his sexual escapades, spreading the photos on a table
and saying, "You might want to cooperate with us." But instead of recoiling in shock and
horror, the Saudi was thrilled with the photos. "This is wonderful," he said. I'll take two of those,
three of that," adding he
wanted to show them to all his friends.
From By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovosky.
The next morning a plane arrived with a full description of this
tremendous event in the human story.
Stimson brought me the report. The bomb, or its equivalent, had
been detonated at the top of a pylon 100 feet high. Everyone had
been cleared away for ten miles round, and the scientists and their
staffs crouched behind massive concrete shields and shelters at
about that distance. The blast had been terrific. An
enormous column of flame and smoke shot up to the fringe of the
atmosphere of our poor earth. Devastation inside a one-mile
circle was absolute. Here then was a speedy end to the Second
World War, and perhaps to much else besides.
Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War: Vol VI, Triumph and Tragedy, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1953), p. 552.
In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their
exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this
country's present and future manned space programs. If only I
could join them in their exciting endeavors!
Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr., LINE-OF-SIGHT GUIDANCE
TECHNIQUES FOR MANNED ORBITAL RENDEZVOUS, Ph.D. thesis,
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 1963), p. vii.
[The Moon] is a stark and strangely different place, but it looked friendly to me and it proved to be friendly.
Neil Armstrong (Apollo 11 post-flight press conference, July 1969).
Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word,
the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character.
If you act, you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it.
You think, because you have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have
given no opinion on the times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage,
on socialism, on secret societies, on the college, on parties and persons,
that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom.
Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to
utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for,
oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spiritual Laws. In Essays and Lectures
(The Library of America;
15), edited by Joel Porte, p. 318.
The reason they call it one hundred is because tenty ten is too hard to say.
Cole Plambeck, 26 January 2001 (age 5).
An idea frequently discussed in this kind of context
is the teleportation machine of science fiction. It is
intended as a means of 'transportation' from, say, one planet
to another, but whether it actually would be such, is what the
discussion is all about.
Instead of being physically transported
by a spaceship in the 'normal' way, the would-be traveller is
scanned from head to toe, the accurate location and complete specification
of every atom and every electron in his body being recorded in
full detail. All this information is then beamed (at the speed
of light), by an electromagnetic signal, to the distant planet
of intended destination. There, the information is collected
and used as the instructions to assemble a precise duplicate of
the traveller, together with all his memories, his intentions,
his hopes, and his deepest feelings. At least that is what is
expected; for every detail of the state of his brain has been
faithfully recorded, transmitted, and reconstructed. Assuming
that the mechanism has worked, the original copy of the traveller
can be 'safely' destroyed. Of course the question is: is this
really a method of travelling from one place to another
or is it merely the construction of a duplicate, together with
the murder of the original? Would you be prepared to use
this method of 'travel'—assuming that the method had been shown
to be completely reliable, within its terms of reference? If teleportation
is not travelling, then what is the difference in principle between
it and just walking from one room into another? In the latter
case, are not one's atoms of one moment simply providing the information
for the locations of the atoms of the next moment? We have seen,
after all, that there is no significance in preserving the identity
of any particular atom. The question of the identity of any particular
atom is not even meaningful. Does not any moving pattern of atoms
simply constitute a kind of wave of information propagating from
one place to another? Where is the essential difference between
the propagation of waves which describes our traveller ambling
in a commonplace way from one room to the other and that which
takes place in the teleportation device?
Suppose it is true that teleportation does actually
'work', in the sense that the traveller's own 'awareness' is actually
reawakened in the copy of himself on the distant planet (assuming
that this question has genuine meaning). What would happen if
the original copy of the traveller were not destroyed, as the
rules of this game demand? Would his 'awareness' be in two places
at once? Try to imagine your response to being told the following:
'Oh dear, so the drug we gave you before placing you in the Teleporter
has worn off prematurely has it? That is a little unfortunate,
but no matter. Anyway you will be pleased to hear that the other
you—er, I mean the actual you, that is—has now arrived safely
on Venus, so we can, er, dispose of you here—er, I mean of the
redundant copy here. It will, of course, be quite painless....
From The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose
They made their way along a passage which tunnelled into the
mountain, tortuous and irregular, the roof being in places so low
that they were obliged to creep along on all fours. At length they
came to a large space from which several more passsages branched
off, and after some hesitation by the two Arabs they entered
one of them, which was very narrow, long and craggy, and along this
they slowly and painfully toiled until they reached a spot where
two other apertures led to the interior.
"This is the place," said one of the Arabs to Belzoni, who could
not understand how a large sarcophagus could possibly have been
taken out through such a small aperture. That he was in a burial
chamber he was quite certain, for they were continually walking
over skulls and scattered bones. But that the sarcophagus could
have entered so narrow a recess seemed quite impossible, for
Belzoni himself could not get through. One of the Arabs and the
interpreter, however, managed to squeeze through and it was
agreed that Belzoni and the other Arab should wait until they returned.
They had gone a good way, for all trace of their light had disappeared,
when Belzoni suddenly heard a loud noise and the distant voice of
the interpreter crying out in fright: "O mon Dieu! mon Dieu! je
suis perdu!" Then complete and utter silence. Not knowing
what had happened Belzoni decided to return to seek help from the other Arabs.
Turning to the man with him, he told him to lead the way back, but
the Arab, staring at him idiotically, said he did not remember the
road to take. Belzoni called repeatedly to the interpreter, but
got no answer. The situation was not a pleasant one.
He made his way back to the open space where several passages
branched off, but all were so alike that he could not decide which
was the right one. He decided upon one, and along this they crawled,
their guttering candles burning lower and lower, yet he
felt it would be dangerous to put one out to save the other in
case the remaining one were, by accident, extinguished. Just when
they thought they were nearing the outside they found themselves
nearing the outside they found themselves up against a blank
wall; they had taken the wrong passage!
There was nothing left for it but to return to the centre of the
labyrinth and try again, after having made a mark on the passage
from which they had just emerged. Every moment of delay was
dangerous, for their swiftly diminishing candles would soon leave them in the dark...
Colin Clair, Giovanni
Belzoni: Strong Man Egyptologist. (Belzoni was
one of the worst of the antiquities plunderers of the late 18th and
early 19th centuries).
It is difficult to discover why the more permanent is the more
valuable or meaningful, why permanence or long-lastingness, why
duration in itself, should be important. Consider those things
people speak of as permanent or eternal. These include (apart from
God) numbers, sets, abstract ideas, space-time itself. Would it
be better to be one of these things? The question is bizarre: how
could a concrete person become an abstract object? Still, would
anyone wish they could become the number 14 or the Form of Justice,
or the null set? Is anyone pining to lead a setly existence?
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, Harvard 1981.
I suspect that something essential is omitted from the account of the
badness of death
by an analysis which treats it
as a deprivation of possibilities. My suspicion is
supported by the following suggestion of Robert Nozick. We could imagine discovering
that people developed from individual spores that had existed indefinitely far
in advance of their birth. In this fantasy, birth never occurs naturally more
than one hundred years before the permanent end of the spore's existence. But
then we discover a way to trigger the premature hatching of these spores, and
people are born who have thousands of years of active life before them. Given
such a situation, it would be possible to imagine oneself having come into
existence thousands of years previously. If we put aside the question whether
this would really be the same person, even given the identity of the spore,
then the consequence appears to be that a person's birth at a given time could
deprive him of many earlier years of possible life. Now while it would be cause
for regret that one had been deprived of all those possible years of life by being
born too late, the feeling would differ from that which many people have about death.
I conclude that something about the future prospect of permanent
nothingness is not captured by the analysis in terms of denied possibilities.
If so, then Lucretius's argument [(Note by Thane): that because being dead
is like being not born and you dont regret when you werent born, you shouldnt
think being dead is so bad, either] still awaits an answer....
Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge Univ Press, 1979,
from a footnote to a chapter entitled "Death."
* * *
Thane comments on the previous two passages:
In 1984 my friend Jim Sanks was in a supermarket in Cambridge, Massachusetts
and he recognized Nozick in the line ahead of him.
Jim told Nozick he thought he
(Nozick) was great, Jim had just read Philosophical
Explanations and thought it was
really good, etc.
Nozick (who was packing more than the 9 item maximum)
looked at Jim like Jim was insane and didnt reply. So in person RN didnt
turn out to be so funny. Is there a lesson?
Anyway: here we've got what philosophy has been reduced to in
the last 40 years: a good chuckle. I've been reading some of the
latest philosophy and the most interesting thing is that
it all seems to share one characteristic: it's damn entertaining, even
funny. Perhaps I am viewing the subject through the opaque lenses of a
Knitwear Specialist, and am senstive only to jokes? Maybe. But
Bertrand R. was quite the joker in his better passages, No? I wish
I wrote this Nozick thing, not because it's interesting or wise but
because its a damn good chuckler.
Returning to the Nagel passage above, in my opinion,
the passage above reaches hilarity precisely at
the third occurrence of the word "spore," more precisely,
at the words, "...even given the identity of the spore."
Maybe the humor has to do with the juxtapostions
of phrases like "permanent nothingness" and "denied possibilities"
along side the "spores."
If you're looking for good jokes, like me, then its good to
to focus on what seems to be known as "The Problem of Personal
Identity," particularly for the brain-exchanging Gedankenexperiments,
but also for other reasons.
Stand fast in your enchantments and your many sorceries, with which
you have labored from your youth; perhaps you may be able to succeed,
perhaps you may inspire terror. You are wearied with your many
counsels; let them stand forth and save you, those who divide the
heavens, who gaze at stars, who at the new moons predict what shall
befall you.
Behold, they are like stubble, the fire consumes them; they cannot
deliver themselves from the power of the flame. No coal for warming
oneself is this, no fire to sit before! Such to you are those with whom
you have labored, who have trafficked with you in your youth; they wander
about each in his own direction; there is no one to save you.
Isaiah 47, v 12-15.
Babbitt spoke well—and often—at these orgies of commercial
righteousness about the "realtor's function as a seer of the future
development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing
the pathway for inevitable changes"—which meant that a real-estate
broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow.
This guessing he called Vision.
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1922) p. 38.
On March 23, 1989, an asteroid bigger than an aircraft
carrier, traveling at 46,000 miles per hour, passed through Earth's
orbit less than 400,000 miles away. Our planet had been at that point
only six hours earlier. The asteroid was not detected until after it had
passed. Had it struck the Earth, the energy released would have been
equivalent to that of 1000 to 2500 megatons of TNT (or 1000-2500
one-megaton hydrogen bombs). In an area of high population density such as
the northeast corridor of the U.S., Los Angeles, or Tokyo, millions of
people would have died instantly.
The passing of this asteroid, named Apollo Asteroid 1989FC by its
discoverers (Henry E. Holt and Norman G. Thomas of the University of
Arizona), was not an isolated event. 1989FC is one of a class of objects
which periodically cross the orbit of the Earth. The first object of this
type was discovered in 1932 by Karl Reinmuth of Heidelberg Observatory.
It was in an orbit around the Sun that crossed the Earth's orbit, and was
named "Apollo," after the Greek Sun god, because of its close approach to
the Sun. (Most asteroids orbit the Sun at much greater distances,
generally between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter). Subsequent
discoveries revealed that a whole class of such objects exists,
and that an object the size of the one which just missed Earth in
March, 1989, probably comes by undetected once every two or three years.
Web page: Did Earth almost get hit by an Asteroid on March 23, 1989?
at http://www.itss.raytheon.com/cafe/qadir/q2879.html
On July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein, who had been the number two
man in Iraqi politics for eleven years, [wanted] to shove aside
his superior, the ailing President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakar, and have
himself declared President. At the time of his takeover, Saddam
was convinced that at least 5 of his closest friends and colleagues
in the Iraqi leadership had some reservations about his succession.
So, on the eve of his ascension, he had one of them arrested—Muhyi
Abd al-Husayn al-Muashhadi, the secretary-general of the Iraqi
Baath Party. Al-Mashhadi was then apparently tortured into agreeing
to make a confession that he was planning to topple Saddam with
some help of some other members of the leadership.
Then, on July 22, with real theatrical flair, Saddam convened an
extraordinary meeting of the Iraqi Baath Party Regional Congress
in order to hear al-Mashadi's confession—live. As al-Mashadi would
tell his story and mention the name of someone else in the leadership
involved in the bogus plot, that person would have to stand, and then
a guard would drag him from the chamber. Al-Mashadi just "happened"
to mention as co-conspirators the four other members of Iraq's ruling
Revolutionary Command Council—Mohammed Ayish, Mohammed Mahjub, Husayn
al-Hamdani, and Ghanim Abd al-Jalil—who Saddam felt were not totally
supportive of him. A videotape of the confessions was then distributed
to Baath Party branches across Iraq, as well as to army units; a few
bootleg copies even made their way to Kuwait and Beirut.
A Lebanese friend of mine saw the video and described it as follows:
"This guy would be reciting his confession and he would come to a person
and say, 'And then we went to see Mohammed to ask him to join the
conspiracy.' And this Mohammed would have to stand. And you could see
this guy crying, his knees shaking, and he could barely stay on his
feet. And then this guy would say, 'But he refused to help us,' and
then this Mohammed would slump back into his chair, exhausted with relief,
and they would move on to the next guy. I had nightmares about this video
for months..."
Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem
