Patience

I do tend to lack patience; that supposed virtue. I am impatient; Is that a fault? Why do not the moribund and terminally self-satisfied not say: I lack impatience; I am unimpatient ...? It certainly seems to be the case with me that I, at least, am not unimpatient.

Some descriptions of southern European landscape

• The sun gobbles as the sky, ferociously bright and hot. The hungry sun, the lean and muscular sun.
• This tree is seven storeys tall. The detail of its million leaves would baffle any engraver.
• Dust blowzes over the road in spectral tan-coloured folds.
• The epilecting sunlight between and behind trees.
• The sky the colour in which seas and oceans are printed in atlases.
• The quality of shadow, rolled out slowly from this prone log by the sun, by the yard, for your inspection.
• Mountains tuck their tips into the pleats of the clouds.

Gravity

The celebrated Baudrillard quotation: God as the guarantor of 'the depth of meaning', the exchangeability of signification for significance. "But what if God himself can be simulated? That is to say, reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum." It bothers me that he says "weightless" there, instead of "massless". It bothers me a surprising amount. Presumably he doesn't mean "massless". Presumably he means "weightless". But it's a question. It is grave. It possesses gravity.

Heroic pity

Nietzsche again. I'm sure I'm very far from being the first reader of Nietzsche to be struck by the strange weighting of his anti-pity position. From Der Antichrist [7]:

Pity stands in the antithesis of the tonic emotions which enhance the feeling of life: it has a depressive effect ... pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends life's disinherited and condemned; through the abundance of the ill-constituted of all kinds which it retains in life it gives life a gloomy and questionable aspect.

The thing to do here is not to deny Nietzsche's premises, or to dissent from his anti-Christian perpsective; but rather to wonder how this position squares with the philosophy of heroism he is advancing. Pity here is deplored because it contradicts 'the law of evolution'. There is a misunderstanding of the way evolution works here, I think, but never mind that for a moment. Instead wonder: in what way is it the action of the noble, the elite, the best ("...in every noble morality it counts as a weakness...") thuswise timidly to accede in this evolutionary law? Is it not nobler to defy nature, whether or not such defiance is materially productive or not? To say, in heroic tones, "nature demands this hecatomb of the weak; but I chooose not to supply it"?

It may be possible to work out what I'm reading on holiday, right now.

The wind blowing

A breeze, or a gale, is merely particles in motion. This, after all, is what a wind is. But when we look at it from this perspective we see that existence as a whole is a wind. The big bang was a great stormwind blowing, and our cosmos is made from the eddies and tourbillons it has generated.

We Hyperboreans ...

The Hyperboreans were supposed to live 'beyond the north wind' ... usually imagined as a chilly windswept place (Hull, say). But beyond the north wind must mean that we've left the winds far behind us ... it really ought to be a place of unnatural calm.

Science and tragedy

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche characterises "science" as "a subtle form of self-defence against -- the truth". The learned Nietzscheans remind us that he means Wissenschaft here, not "what we generally understand by the word science" ... as if there's any general understanding of the word science!

So what is Nietzsche getting at here? For him, "the tuth" is the glimpse into the abyss, the glimpse that kills action; and actually by "science" he doesn't mean anything other than keeping busy (inquiring and experimenting and looking through telescopes and so on) as a means of distracting us from that glimpse. But I can't help feeling that science is a bad word for this sort of busy-ness; and that Wissenschaft is no better. Sometimes science busies you, true; but by no means always. A better word for 'busy-ness' is capitalism; and few inventions of man have been better at distraction than the consumerist production-consumption merry-go-round. Perhaps it would be better to rephrase Nietzsche, replacing "science" with "consumer capitalism"? That would at least invoke one pleasing irony, since many thinkers see capitalism precisely as contemporary tragedy ...

As for those who object to the paradox in Nietzsche's phrase ("science is a subtle form of self-defence against the truth") on the grounds that science and the truth are actually versions of the same thing ... well, "self-defence" records what happens when one power invades and overtakes another so as to render it identical. Science is a form of immune-system response; or it is the French Resistance trying to prevent the Nazis making Germany and France the same thing.