...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc2, relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.
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| By unknown, a copy of a painting of Blaise Pascal (of the famous wager) by François II Quesnel, which was made for Gérard Edelinck in 1691 |
| Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean |
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| Philip Larkin (1922-1985) in a library |
Philip Larkin...observes in his imperishable "Aubade" that [not knowing that you are dead] is exactly the thing about the postmortem condition that actually does and must make one afraid:But given that I blog daily, whether I have anything to say or not, it was because of another bit about Larkin that I'm writing this article today. (Let's not dwell on death for now.)
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true....
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear....[p. 14, Hitch-22]
[Larkin] always knew where he stood, never fooled himself or said anything he did not mean. When he told you he felt something, you could be quite sure he did feel it, a priceless asset to a poet, and a poet of feeling and mood at that.That is, I wanted to take this occasion to say something that I do have to say: I apologize for the times I've had nothing to say, and said it.
The same quality ensured that when he had nothing to say he said nothing, a turn of mind that helped him not to write any bad poems. [emphasis mine; at about 2 hours, 25 minutes in the digital recording I'm listening to]
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| Kingsley Amis taught at Vanderbilt University in the late 1960s |
John Wain [minor English poet, novelist, and critic] slotted in his three years of undergraduate residence while I had been away at the war. He had been found unfit for military service (lungs), like Philip [Larkin] (eyes), like others who, when counted in with those who had craftily evaded service elsewhere, like Dylan Thomas, made up quite a total and suggests, as part of an answer to the old question, Why were the Great War poets better than the Second War lot? Because a good half of the Second War lot managed to stay out of it.
I digress, however....
I found [John Wain] most attractive, lightly caustic with a voice and manner to match, knowledgeable, worldly wise, a budding academic without crap....
...He was full of stories, like the one about the sherry bottle that held something other than sherry. The inconvenience of his rooms in Redding had led him to pee habitually into a bottle last thing at night, emptying it first thing in the morning. Once, about to hand some guests glasses of what was meant to be Tio Pepe, he had noticed at the last moment that this was not so and deduced in the nick of time that what had gone down the pan that morning was the Tio Pepe.
"Hold it," he had blurted, "this isn't good enough for you. It's piss, in fact. Have some gin instead".... [at about 1:45 into a 12:52 reading]
Thursday of the week is devoted to airing out religion and religions. The column's title, "Thor's Day," comes from the etymology of the word Thursday, literally "Thor's Day."Last Thor's Day, I quoted the Dalai Lama (and also Saint Paul and Jesus).
I first laid eyes on Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, in the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, Vermont, which beautiful town I remembered fondly in yesterday's post. I read the memoir last year, and one of the many passages that fascinated me was Hitchens's account of meeting Margaret Thatcher. It must have been in 1974 (when Hitchens was 25 years old), soon after she became the leader of the Conservative opposition:Sundays feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, Never on Sunday.
Your proudest achievement? Since I can't claim the children as solely "mine," being the dedicatee of books by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, and poems by James Fenton and Robert Conquest. [p. 370]I've downloaded a half-dozen of Amis's books to listen to, or to at least try to read. I started with his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence. Hitchens doesn't mention the book, but Sean Carroll does in From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, in which he cites the novel's telling a story in reverse. Real time can flow only forward, but must a story?
It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you will about it, the present is unavoidable.The present is unavoidable. It's just the way it had to be. And the Judeo-Christian ethic could not have developed with any more inclusive affirmation of life than it did. "What if" conjectures about its (or anything else's) having been different from what it was are of mostly academic interest. Mostly idle.
Like Walter [Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad], we might individually resist—or become conscious that something in us seems to want to resist—but happenings both within us and around us continue to roll on just the way they individually and collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.*There, less of a muddle, I hope.
Like Walter, we might individually resist, but happenings continue to roll on just the way they collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.That paragraph wasn't literally the conclusion. It was followed by a sort of coda about the unrolling of things' being believed by some as "God's plan in action," with special favors doled out to the believers.
Terrorist (2006: John Updike) [Fatherless eighteen-year-old Ahmad—half Irish, half Egyptian—has been under the influence of imam Shaikh Rashid since he was eleven. Ahmad's Jewish guidance counselor in his inner-city New Jersey high school offers help, but Ahmad agrees to commit violence for his religious beliefs] 05-2012My high opinion of Christopher Hitchens remains intact.
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science behind the Headlines (2008: Richard A. Muller) [Physics professor explains basic physics to help government leaders and their constituents make better decisions about issues they face. Presents the science behind terrorism, energy, nuclear weapons and power, space and satellites, and global warming. Debates the future of alternative eco-friendly resources and new technologies.]Terror, terror, terror—terrorism everywhere. Not frequently orange anymore, but there in static white noise everyday of our lives.
The orange of the Gulf sign at the all-night gas station two blocks away is the only emphatic touch of color in the pre-dawn vista. Here and there in the neighborhood a wan, low-voltage night light warms the window of a child's room or a stair landing. In the semi-darkness, under a polished dome of darkness weakened by the climbing rot of city glow, the fore-shortened angles of roof lines, shingles, and sidings recedes to infinity. [at approximately the 55-minute point of a 10-hour, 37-minute reading](How could my Yale roommate Jim Carney possibly have been sincere in comparing my own collegiate letter writing to Updike's?)
Prize student at Central High, Class of '59, before it felt so much like a prison and you could still study and take pride in the praise of the teachers.Yes, those were the days.
It was like tuning the violin he used to play in his boyhood. "Another Heifetz, another Isaac Stern." Is that what his parents had hoped for?But now,
He disappointed them, a segment of misery where his own and the world's coincided. His parents grieved. He had defiantly told them he was quitting lessons; the life in books and on the streets meant more to him. He was eleven, maybe twelve, to take such a stand, and never picked up the violin again, though sometimes, hearing on the car radio a snatch of Beethoven or a Mozart concerto or Dvořák's gypsy music that he had once practiced in a student arrangement, Jack is surprised to feel the fingering trying to live again in his left hand, twitching on the steering wheel like a dying fish. [at approximately the 44-minute point]
He lies exposed, as to a sickening blast of radioactivity, to an awareness of his life as a needless blot, a botch, a prolonged blunder imposed upon the otherwise immaculate surface of this ungodly hour.It's the world in which American-born Muslim teenager Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy will be drawn (implausibly? see below) into a terrorist plot against "infidels"....
In the world's dark forest he had missed the right path. But was there any right path, or was being alive in itself the mistake?
In the stripped-down history that he used to purvey to students who had trouble believing that the world didn't begin with their births and the proliferation of computer games, even the greatest men came to nothing, to a grave, their visions unfulfilled—Charlemagne, Charles the Fifth, Napoleon, the unspeakable but considerably successful and still, at least in the Arab world, admired Adolf Hitler. History is a machine perpetually grinding mankind to dust.
Jack Levy's guidance counseling replays in his head as a cacophony of miscommunication. He sees himself as a pathetic elderly figure on a shore, shouting out to a flotilla of the young as they slide into the fatal morass of the world, its dwindling resources, its disappearing freedoms, its merciless advertisements geared to a preposterous popular culture of eternal music and beer and impossibly fit and thin young females. [at approximately the 49-minute point]
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| Nicholas Poussin's painting, c. 1636, gives its name to Powell's opus |
A Dance to the Music of Time (TV 1997: Alvin Rakoff, Christopher Morahan) [Nick Jenkins reminisces, recalling the people he met over the previous half-century, his encounters with the great and the bad] [G] 5-15,16,17,18-2012The narrator of the story, Nick Jenkins, describes the painting early on. He and a companion have happened onto it in a museum (its location is the Wallace Collection, London). In the first book, apparently (according to Wikipedia), Nick simply reflects narratively on the painting:
These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. [emphasis mine]I don't recall that the dramatization makes use of the italicized words, although maybe it does, for it had already occurred to me (that is, before seeing this passage) that the title could be a metaphor for history as controlled by no one, but simply unfolding, one moment determined by the preceding moment, as Sam Harris seems, in Free Will, to be saying of our lives (of his life and of yours and mine). We witness our life happening with no more than the illusion that we are freely choosing the sequence of our thoughts and feelings and actions, for each of our thoughts and feelings and actions has actually been formed in our brain prior to our becoming conscious of it. I often only discover what I think, for example, in the course of writing something, answering a question, essaying on a provocative topic.
To get one question out of the way before we begin:Comparing Powell to Proust, Hitchens writes that, "Like Proust, Powell was not exactly pithy (I can't offhand recall any 'quotations' from Powell, as one can from his great contemporaries Wodehouse and Waugh)...." [p. 315]
At one of these public interrogations (I am not sure which college) a professor prefixed a question by saying—rather archly—that he was uncertain how to pronounce my name. As an inspiration of the moment I replied that like the Boston family of Lowell I rhymed it with Noël rather than towel. [emphasis mine]Here Anthony Powell was describing an incident on his tour of New England in the early 1960s....[p. 311]
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| This book-wallah is not an itinerant |
His system of exchange was that for any book in his bundle you gave him four annas, and any other book. Not quite any book, however, for the book-wallah, though analphabetic, had learned to recognise and refuse a Bible.______________
"No, sahib," he would say plaintively, "no. This book" (he would turn it over disapprovingly in his flat brown hands) "this book with a black cover and gold letters—this one I cannot take. I know not how it is, but all sahibs are offering me this book, and none are taking it. What can it be that is in this black book? Some evil, undoubtedly." [p. 124]
