biberius caldius mero

• 2013-02-24

  Othello’s oath

  OTHELLO 
  O, that the slave had forty thousand lives! 
  One is too poor, too weak for my revenge. 
  Now do I see ‘tis true. Look here, Iago; 
  All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven. 
  ‘Tis gone. 
  Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell! 
  Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne 
  To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy fraught, 
  For ‘tis of aspics’ tongues!

        IAGO 
                                Yet be content.

        OTHELLO 
  O, blood, blood, blood!

        IAGO 
  Patience, I say; your mind perhaps may change.

        OTHELLO 
  Never, Iago: Like to the Pontic sea, 
  Whose icy current and compulsive course 
  Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on 
  To the Propontic and the Hellespont, 
  Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, 
  Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love, 
  Till that a capable and wide revenge 
  Swallow them up. Now, by yond marble heaven,

  In the due reverence of a sacred vow 
  I here engage my words.

• 2012-10-22

  “States, especially the developing nation-states, played a very substantial structuring role in the development of civil society and its classes. Not even revolutionary politics flow simply from the conflict between classes already “out there” in civil society. The class actors aroused during the French Revolution barely existed before the Revolution. They were created by its power processes—partly because militant ideologists worked hard to mobilized class sentiments, but mostly because they were unintentionally fosterd by political power relations.”

  —Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Vol. 2)

  This book is awesome and I really wish I had the time to read it all. Now that is surely a “grad student problem”!

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  “It became conventional in the eighteenth century—and it has remained so ever since—to distinguish between two fundamental spheres of social activity—“civil society” (or just “society”) and “the state”… Yet, such a clear division between society and state carries dangers. It is, paradoxically, highly political, locating freedom and morality in society, not the state.”

  —Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Vol. 2)

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  “By 1870, British coal consumption exceeded 100 million tons. This generated about 800 million calories of energy, enough to supply the energy requirements of a preindustrial society of 200 million adults. The actual British population in 1870 was 31 million, but this energy was generated by only 400,000 miners.”

  —Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Vol. 2)

• 2012-09-30

  “Human language must have been used for countless generations in such intimate, closed, context-bound communities, whereas it has only been used by schoolmen and jurists, and all kinds of context-evading conceptual puritans, for a very small number of generations. It is a very puzzling fact that an institution, namely human language, should have this potential for being used as an ‘elaborate code,’ in Basil Bernstein’s phrase, as a formal and fairly context-free instrument, given that it had evolved in a milieu which in no way called for this development, and did not selectively favor it if it manifested itself. This puzzle is on a par with problems such as that posed by the existence of skills (for example, mathematical ability) which throughout most of the period of the existence of humanity had no survival value, and thus could not have been in any direct way produced by natural selection.”

   —Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism

• 2012-09-21

  “‘At the moment when the Sbiri seized me,’ [Mazzini] tells us in his autobiography, ‘I had matter enough for three condemnations upon me: rifle-bullets, a letter in cipher…; a history of the three days of July, printed on tricoloured paper, the formula of the oath for the second rank of Carbonari; and, moreoever (for I was arrested in the act of leaving the house) a sword-stick. I succeeding in getting rid of everything. They had all the inclination, but not sufficient capacity for tyranny. The long perquisitions made in our house led to no dangerous discover.’ Why should a young man of respectable family, in comfortable circumstances, encumber himself with these ridiculous properties, and expose himself to the unwelcome attentions of authority? He was living under a government which, as governments go, was not really intolerable: it did not levy ruinous taxation, it did not conscript soldiers, it did not maintain concentration camps, and it left its subjects pretty much to their own devices… It is not here that we must seek for an explanation of young Mazzini’s behaviour. It is rather to be found in Mazzini himself, in a spiritual restlessness which he shared with his generation… The restlessness of this generation surrounded those legendary times of the Revolution and the Empire with a haze of glory, and the political methods which they introduced had now the glamour and headiness of the forbidden.”

  —Elie Kedourie, Nationalism

• 2012-08-29

  Today, many of the most high-status jobs for the well-educated make a virtue of intensity and commitment. Investment banking boasts 80-hour work weeks; Teach for America’s emotional crucible results in a high burnout rate; and jobs in the political sector spawn articles like Anne-Marie Slaughter’s cri de coeur. Have a Type A personality? These jobs are ready to push you to (or past) your limit, and isn’t that what excellence is all about?

  There’s a word for people who turn over their entire waking life to one cause, and willingly sacrifice the possibility of a family for the opportunity to serve: monks (or, more archaically, oblates). Just like the driven twenty-somethings of Rosin’s article, monks and nuns have made a commitment so total that it precludes marriage. But in the case of vowed religious, the form of their service is meant to be elevating, not just useful. I seldom hear people claim that spreadsheets are good for the soul. Even for people doing high intensity work for the public good (the teachers, the social workers, the public interest lawyers, etc.), the form of their work may still be deadening.

  Most careers aren’t vocations, so we need space outside them to grow and love. It’s possible to make a short-term decision to put life and relationships on hold, in order to make a high-intensity commitment to a cause (this is the model for the oft-touted national service draft), but it’s unhealthy to let these crisis-mode jobs give shape to your life.

  — The Sad Secular Monks | First Things (via ayjay)

  Source: ayjay

• 2012-08-28

  “The inflation in neighbouring Hungary, the worst in recorded history and far exceeding that of 1923 Germany, peaked at 5 quintillion (5^30) paper pengos to the dollar—meaning that by the time the pengo was replaced by the forint in August 1946 the dollar value of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation was just one-thousandth of one cent.”

  Tony Judt, Postwar

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  After WWII:

  “There were no bridges across the Seine between Paris and the sea, just one left intact across the Rhine”

  Tony Judt, Postwar

• 2012-08-07

  Three of Saul Bellow’s dreams

  “Dream I: I identify Tolstoy as the driver of a beat-up white van on the expressway. I ask the old guy at the wheel of this crumbling van what he can do to keep his flapping door from banging against the finish of my car. When he leans over to the right I see that he is none other than Leo Tolstoy, beard and all. He invites me to follow him off the expressway to a tavern and he says, ‘I want you to have this jar of pickled herring.’ He adds, ‘I knew your brother.’ At the mention of my late brother I burst into tears.

  Dream II: A secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese characters on my penis. For this reason my life is in danger. My son Greg is guarding me in a California hideout from the agents of a pharmaceutical company, etc.

  Dream III: I find myself in a library filled with unknown masterpieces by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and others. Titles I have never seen mentioned anywhere. In shock and joy I open a volume by Conrad and read several pages, sentence after sentence after sentence in the old boy’s best style, more brilliant than ever. ‘Why in the hell was I never told about this?’ I ask. Certain parties have been holding out on us. I am indignant.”

  From a letter to Martin Amis of December 30, 1990.