This case came into English through D.T. Suzuki, who rendered it, "Think not of good, think not of evil, but see what at
this moment thy own original face doth look like, which thou
hadst even prior to thy own birth."
Yeats, the big kook, loved Suzuki's essays and made this out of them. (This was in his late sixties, around the same time he submitted to a "Steinach operation," aka a vasectomy thought to increase rejuvenating hormones.)
60 hours till the operating room.
Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate) case 23. What's translated here (by Blyth) as "Original Self" is 本來 "original" plus 面目 "face," a phrase also in the Platform Sutra attributed to the Sixth Patriarch. Google wants to translate 本來面目 from modern Chinese as "true features" or "true colors."
Young Don's notes on Thucydides are more philological, but he wrote "cf. Nazi Germany" next to the Corinthians warning the Lacedaemonians about the Athenian national character:
"Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life... to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others." [1.70]
Young Don's notes on the Oresteia:
Woman like man
night like day
tragedy like joy
fire + darkness
Eumenides: Orestes saved because matter is not blood. Cf. Aristotle's idea of form & matter.
Orestes goes mad: the charioteer image p. 261
Appearance & Reality, p. 67
Depends upon assumption that there's a dichotomy.
Ulysses, p. 69, again, 123
In 2006 I decided that instead of studying what I was supposed to be studying, I wanted to learn ancient Greek. I went to Black Oak Books in north Berkeley and found a Loeb Oresteia and an Oxford Thucydides; Berkeley is a good town for this. On my way to the register I opened the covers and, there on the flyleaf I saw "Don Davidson," Harvard '38 and '39.
This is what happens to the libraries of eminent philosophers after they change state.
I was googling for a pic of the Antikythera mechanism and it came out of my brain as "Ankylotheria device," which you don't need to try yourself because it's a big nada. No corroded gears, no crooked beasts! Pleistocene on the brain I guess.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pleistocene/comments/xcf5iz/an_ancylotherium_picking_some_ripe_and_juicy/
Latter-day Austro-Hungarian civil servant; THE WARM SOUTH, 2020 Northern Calfornia Book Award (https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781948072038/the-warm-south-a-novel.aspx); web developer; lapsed academic; bad at Zen; 🏳️⚧️