Augustine's Confessions

Augustine was a great poet of grief. Here's a famous passage from the Confessions:

At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death. My native country was a torment to me, and my father's house a strange unhappiness; and whatever I had shared with him, wanting him, became a distracting torture. Mine eyes soughwhat to ant him every where but he was not granted them; and I hated all places, for that they had not him...I became a great riddle to myself, and I asked my soul, why she was so sad, and why she disquieted me sorely: but she knew not swer me.

Measure for Measure

Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still. Thou art not noble;
For all the accommodations that thou bear'st
Are nursed by baseness. Thou'rt by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get,
And what thou hast, forget'st. Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear's thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.

Flaubert's Deification of the Author

Flaubert once wrote that he disliked Uncle Tom's Cabin because the author was constantly preaching against slavery.

"Does one have to make observations about slavery? Depict it; that's enough... An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

Here's an interesting personal essay on Madame Bovary.

Der Rosenkavalier

"I'm in the mood when I'm so conscious of the frailty of everything earthy,
deep down in my heart,
how we can hold nothing,
how we can hug nothing,
how everything slips through our fingers,
everything we grasp for dissolves,
everything fades like mist or a dream..."

Nicomachean Ethics

The Nicomachean Ethics is a classic. Aristotle tackles the problems of ethics with coherence, elegance, and loads of sprezzatura. Here's a distillation of some important ideas:

1. Ethics is to the good as metaphysics is to being.

2. The good is determined by the end.

3. The end for humans is to become rational beings.

4. Happiness lies in realizing the end; it is what you desire for its own sake.

5. What determines happiness is not choice: We may choose what makes us miserable.

6. Happiness is becoming who we are, realizing the seed within the self, fulfilling teleology. The end of the child is to develop into an adult. The end of the flute player is playing the flute excellently.

7. Happiness is the result of practiced excellence; it lies in the performance of certain actions.

8. Happiness is success. Only the man who lives well can be a candidate for happiness: one cannot be happy in a state of destitution.

9. Happiness is the activity of the rational soul in accordance with virtue.

10. Virtue is what allows us to achieve happiness.

11. Virtue is being good at being human: It is doing what an excellent human being does.

12. Virtue is taking pleasure in doing virtuous acts.

13. Virtue is a habit, not a state of being; it is an acquired skill, even an acquired taste.

14. Virtue is as much contingent upon practice as lute-playing is.

15. Virtue cannot exist without the proper instruments.

16. Virtue is not a peak, an extreme, but a mean, a proportioning, a disposition fashioned by action.

17. Virtue is feeling the right thing at the right time with the right people in the right circumstances and in the right proportion.

Aquinas always referred to Aristotle as 'The Philosopher' as a mark of respect (just as he referred to Averroes as 'The Commentator').

The Battle of Cannae

It was--by all accounts--a blood bath. And it is--by all accounts--the most stunning battle ever fought.

And it was slow slaughter. Little by little, they were drawn into a death trap, an impossible and impotent formation so that they could barely use their arms; slowly squeezed in on all sides by the Spanish, the Numidians, and the Carthaganians, they found, to their horror, the crescent closing in on them; and hour by hour, jammed in a hellish rat hole with no escape, suffocating, choking, some, out of desperation, asphyxiating themselves in the bloody ground on which they found their feet slipping, infinitely slowly, they were hacked to pieces: 50,000 of them in a single day, in a space as large as a modern football stadium.

The slaughter was absolute, the defeat unprecedented, and the calamity unimaginable: In less than two years Rome had lost--parsing the population in modern terms--the equivalent of ten million men--all of the war dead from 1939 to 1945 put together.

Generals through the ages, right up to Norman Scharzkopf in the First Gulf War, have obsessed over this battle, and will, no doubt, continue to do so: What Hannibal achieved was the perfect victory--the complete encirclement of the enemy.

Here's Polybius' account. And here's an illustrated description of the Battle.

T.S. Eliot's Conversion to Skepticism

T.S. Eliot might have become as famous as a philosopher as he did as a poet. (If you enjoy his poetry, you'd know it really is a kind of sensuous philosophy, especially the Four Quartets.) His first--and I think true--conversion was from philosophy to poetry. His doctoral dissertation, which was never presented, is a testament to that. These ideas are the soil from which much of Eliot’s poetry springs; here's a 13-point primer:

1. Reality is a convention, a theory we all choose to believe in.

2. There is no objective, absolute, ultimate reality, but only realities.

3. Knowledge has no object; there are no real, stable objects to know; knowledge begins with faith.

4. Outside a context there are no answers; within a context there are no questions.

5. The proper study of reality is the study of words.

6. Philosophers ought to be poets.

7. Philosophy should be an analysis of words, not an analysis of things.

8. Language does not describe reality, it is continuous with it.

9. The description of an object depends upon perspective.

10. Words connote, they do not denote.

11. Words are coterminous with what they connote.

12. The explainer asks questions about what she calls reality, not realizing that she invents and constructs reality as she asks those questions.

13. The best kind of describer goes around the object she is describing and asks others what they see.

Philosophy, Eliot considered, should become a genre of prose writing. The proper study of philosophy is the study of fictions at work; it should not be a quest for ultimate reality; it ought to describe not explain.

Eliot admired Aristotle for being the philosopher most careful with words.

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Rhapsody on Rachmaninoff

There is a signature dream-like quality about Sergei Rachmaninoff's works. Take this passage from Ayn Rand, who adored Rachmaninoff:

A young photographer … noticed Howard Roark standing alone across the street, at the parapet of the river. He was leaning back, his hands closed over the parapet, hatless, looking up at the building. It was an accidental, unconscious moment. The young photographer glanced at Roark’s face -- and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in walking reality - why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete - and what was the extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture - and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods. He thought of that because he saw that extra quality for the first time in walking existence, he saw it in Roark’s face lifted to the building.

This describes beautifully Rachmaninoff’s music too. There is that quality of utter rapture--"causeless, utter rapture"--in “Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini.” Of ecstasy--not evident immediately: it is so intensely personal that it creeps up on you, a slow, delicious langour. The rapture of being alive. And alone.

Gilda

It's been called the most famous smoking pic in the world, courtesy of the Best Smoking Sites blog (where you'll find more gorgeous pics of women smoking).

In “Put the Blame on Mame”, Rita Hayworth glows like black tungsten. And a consuming gloom pervades her performance, telling a truth rarely told—sexuality is most resonant when tinged with a tone of despair.

Shelley on Marriage

I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which these poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.

From Epipsychidion.

Carlyle's Divine Drama

“His habitual, frustrated melancholy arose, in part, from the fact that his misfortunes were not serious enough to match his tragic view of life; and he sought relief in intensive historical research, choosing subjects in which divine drama, lacking in his own life, seemed most evident.” (Britannica)

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

In Nancy Milford’s biography, “we watch a life unfold, a life that is specially moving because it is … a representative American version of youth’s touching confidence that it can get away with anything and middle-age’s too-late discovery that it has got away with nothing." (TIME)

Svidrigailov's dreams

Dostoyevsky's dreamscapes before Svidrigailov’s suicide in Crime and Punishment are remarkable. First there is the nightmare of the girl of 14:

The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal. Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed herself crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled.

(http://www.bartleby.com/318/66.html)

Then there is the nightmare of the five-year old girl. He finds her crying and shivering in a corner. He takes her to his room, undresses her, and tucks her up in a blanket. She falls asleep. Before leaving, he checks up on her again. This is what he sees:

The child was sleeping soundly, she had got warm under the blanket, and her pale cheeks were flushed. But strange to say that flush seemed brighter and coarser than the rosy cheeks of childhood. “It’s a flush of fever,” thought Svidrigaïlov. It was like the flush from drinking, as though she had been given a full glass to drink. Her crimson lips were hot and glowing; but what was this? He suddenly fancied that her long black eyelashes were quivering, as though the lids were opening and a sly crafty eye peeped out with an unchildlike wink, as though the little girl were not asleep, but pretending. Yes, it was so. Her lips parted in a smile. The corners of her mouth quivered, as though she were trying to control them. But now she quite gave up all effort, now it was a grin, a broad grin; there was something shameless, provocative in that quite unchildish face; it was depravity, it was the face of a harlot, the shameless face of a French harlot. Now both eyes opened wide; they turned a glowing, shameless glance upon him; they laughed, invited him.… There was something infinitely hideous and shocking in that laugh, in those eyes, in such nastiness in the face of a child. “What, at five years old?” Svidrigaïlov muttered in genuine horror. “What does it mean?” And now she turned to him, her little face all aglow, holding out her arms.… “Accursed child!” Svidrigaïlov cried, raising his hand to strike her, but at that moment he woke up.

(http://www.bartleby.com/318/66.html)

Here's an interesting piece on Dostoyevsky's representations of childhood.