progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

@megaherb @lexipenia Lots of Romantic irony in our house

@megaherb @lexipenia (full disclosure; one of those former UChicago people I'm now married to)

@megaherb @lexipenia When I started grad school at Berkeley I met a couple former UChicago people who ran an informal version of that workshop in a cafe, and it did more for me intellectually than any official seminar I ever took, bar one. The Realistic Spirit was an important book for me in those years too.

@nicole If it makes you feel better, I learned “opsimath” ten seconds ago and I’m 44!

@nicole nooo! Um, at least we don’t have a limit on chlorine?

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."

@zunguzungu That’s right, it’s Paolo and Francesca really early on. He has no idea what bummers are coming!

OMG the Soylent is versioned. Do they patch it for vulnerabilities??

@nicole My house is full of bagels, every time I walk past the fridge they lean out and say “yoo hoo” 🙁

@zunguzungu Does Dante actually get a nap at any point in the Commedia? That’s like a really long day

If the date on the flyleaf is accurate, the European war had just started or was just about to start. Either way, young Don's own country would have a couple more years in the Spartan position of standing by.

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.