Abide with me, fast falls the eventide

“The hardest thing is re-learning to make split decisions again, like when you’re driving you can’t just stop and think, it’s much better and safer to just make the wrong decision quickly then it is to slow down and not be able to decide, and it’s taking a while to relearn that mindset”

I mean, I genuinely don’t know, are there a lot of right-wing fascists in Italy who think the unification was a mistake and want to return to the time before Italian nationalism?

One of the earliest and most intellectually interesting Fascists, the futurist leader Marinetti, lionized the automobile as a way of inculcating fascism on basically exactly the same grounds Adorno is doing here, the only real difference is that Marinetti thought that fascism was a good thing.

I had to restrain myself from rushing out into the street to help him on the grounds that I might well get run over by one of the oncoming cars; there are two shrines to people who were run over crossing the street within walking distance of where we were.

Traffic simply maneuvered around him; drivers were probably feeling that if they stopped for him, they’d get rear-ended so people in the lane he was standing in just swerved into the other lane a little bit.

Once there was a break in traffic I ran over and helped him get his stuff to the sidewalk.

How else to describe this process but as one of pure functionality, which does not tolerate freedom of conduct? The car will move down the street; to interrupt that motion is to put your life at risk, so the people surrounding this old man find themselves at least unwilling, and quite likely actually unable to stop and help him reach a safer island.

And the notes above about cars are a really good example of how this thinking can go further! And if you understand the point after reading the car examples, well then try to apply that same logic to the other examples! Does that tell you anything?

Speaking of Vʔ in closed syllables, the word being translated as Unicorne in Job 39:9-10 in this 1611 KJV is רֵים rêm, and six of the nine times it shows up in the Hebrew Bible it's actually spelled רְאֵם rəʔēm instead—that is to say, it was originally *riʔm.

'Unicorn' is an interesting choice of translation, particularly given that three of the times the word shows up the text is talking about its horns, plural. E.g. Deuteronomy 33:17:

בְּכוֹר שׁוֹרוֹ הָדָר לוֹ וְקַרְנֵי רְאֵם קַרְנָיו בָּהֶם עַמִּים יְנַגַּח יַחְדָּו אַפְסֵי־אָ֑רֶץ וְהֵם רִבְבוֹת אֶפְרַיִם וְהֵם אַלְפֵי מְנַשֶּׁה׃ bəkôr šôrô hādār lô wəqarnê rəʔēm qarnāw bāhem ʕammîm yənaggaḥ yaḥdāw ʔapsê-ʔāreṣ, wəhēm ribəbôt ʔeprayim wəhēm ʔaləpê mənašše. The firstborn of his bull—majesty is his!     His horns are the horns of a rəʔēm; with them he gores the peoples     all together to the ends of the earth; such are the myriads of Ephraim,     such the thousands of Manasseh.”

The KJV (or actually the Coverdale Bible, which these parts go back to) isn't the first to use 'unicorn' to translate rəʔēm: the Septuagint mostly uses μονόκερως 'one-horned' (once, it uses ἁδροὶ 'stout ones'), which the Vulgate calques as unicornis in four cases. E.g. Psalms 22:21 (21:22 in the Vulgate's numbering):

σῶσόν με ἐκ στόματος λέοντος καὶ ἀπὸ κεράτων μονοκερώτων τὴν ταπείνωσίν μου Salva me ex ore leonis, et a cornibus unicornium humilitatem meam.

In the remaining instances, the Vulgate uses rhinoceros (borrowed from Greek ῥινόκερως 'nose-horned'):

πρωτότοκος ταύρου τὸ κάλλος αὐτοῦ κέρατα μονοκέρωτος τὰ κέρατα αὐτοῦ ἐν αὐτοῖς ἔθνη κερατιεῖ ἅμα ἕως ἐπ᾽ ἄκρου γῆς αὗται μυριάδες Εφραιμ καὶ αὗται χιλιάδες Μανασση Quasi primogeniti tauri pulchritudo eius, cornua rhinocerotis cornua illius in ipsis ventilabit gentes usque ad terminos terrae. Hae sunt multitudines Ephraim et haec millia Manasse.

Obviously people were confused about what kind of animal this was supposed to be. Akkadian has an obvious cognate rīmu, and the Babylonians were kind enough to depict one on the Ishtar Gate:

Rīmu is generally translated as 'wild bull' because your average Assyriologist doesn't know what an aurochs is, but it's an aurochs. They went extinct in the ANE and the eastern Mediterranean somewhere during the first millennium BCE, and it's very likely the Septuagint translators, in Egypt and the southern Levant, never saw one. Knowing only what was in the text—the rəʔēm is an animal whose defining features are (1) strength and (2) horns, both greater than a bull's—they took a punt.

It's actually not clear what they had in mind with μονόκερως; Aristotle, in his History of Animals and Parts of Animals, twice calls both "the Indian ass" and "the oryx" μονόκερως, and it's not particularly clear what he meant by that either. Probably they did know about rhinoceroses, and Jerome certainly will have—his rhinoceros all but certainly refers to an actual rhinoceros and not a mythical animal.

"Manuscript" is intentionally vague. I've focused on literary texts from a relatively small geographical area because of my own area of expertise, but you don't have to! Details for my selection below.

… Without such immediate qualitative existence, “those relations with which science deals, would have no footing in existence and thought would have nothing beyond itself to chew upon or dig into” (Dewey, 1985a, p. 75). Immediately experienced qualities are the natural starting point and end point for inquiry—they provide the indication of a problem in need of resolution, and the sense that such a problem has been adequately understood and resolved. Without them, all intellectual activity and inquiry would be nothing more than shots in the dark, since applicability to them is “the ultimate test of their validity” (Dewey, 1985g, p. 247). …

The descriptions Dewey gives of qualitative experience, beyond cognitive functions and processes, usually are negative (for example, it can’t appear as such in discourse) or consist of evocative and imprecise terms (“obdurate, self-sufficient, wholly immediate, neither a relation nor an element in a relational whole, but terminal and exclusive” (Dewey, 1985a, p. 74)). This point was made by Bertrand Russell in his contribution to the first volume of The Library of Living Philosophers, devoted to the work of John Dewey, in which he complained that “we are told very little about the nature of things before they are inquired into” (Russell, 1939, p. 139). Dewey replied that to attempt to positively characterize the nature of things before inquiry conceptualizes them would be “completely contradictory to [his] own position” (Dewey, 1985f, p. 31). This is because “telling is… a matter of discourse, and … all discourse is derived from and inherently referable to experiences of things in non-discursive experiential having;—so that, for example, although it is possible to tell a man blind from birth about color, we cannot by discourse confer upon him that which is had in the direct experience of color” (ibid., p. 31). Although we can inquire into, conceptualize, and communicate about immediate experience, “one person cannot communicate an experience as immediate to another person” (ibid., pp. 30, emphasis added). The thing communicated will, by necessity, be an object of discourse—a cognitive object known rather than had. If one person wants to induce a similar immediate qualitative experience in another person, his only option is to “invite that other person to institute the conditions by which the person himself will have that kind of situation the conditions for which are stated in discourse” (ibid., pp. 30–31).

Like, no shit, you're not going to make a novel or a play or a movie or whatever that spontaneously inspires the people to rise up and makes government leaders yank hard on the levers of policy. And the people who expect that this will happen are very silly.

But art - especially in aggregate - is a really excellent tool for changing people's values and interests, in a vague broad overarching way. It tells them which things are worthy of aspiration and which things are detestable. It makes behaviors and situations seem normal or abnormal. Which is all to say, if you want to think of it as a weapon, it's like unleashing a plague: it works on an uncomfortably slow timescale, and you can't quite control where it goes or exactly who gets affected, but it can sure leave the world looking pretty different in its wake!

So you're wondering what historical materialism is and you've read GA Cohen, who says that Marx is a technological determinist but this doesn't seem right so you ask some Marxists and they say that's not right at all. So you say okay and you read a little Marx and what the Marxists are actually saying and they tell you that history is determined by the base relations. You say that doesn't seem right at all, it sometimes seems like the superstructure determines the base. So they say you're not understanding correctly: the base and superstructure determine each other. And you think to yourself before saying out loud that this is really trivial. But they clarify that the base more fundamentally determines or constrains the superstructure. So you say you don't know what that means. And they explain how societies are constrained by needing to meet basic needs like food, shelter, etc. So you say okay, that seems generally true but there might be some exceptions and the explanatory power of that principle seems a lot weaker than the principles theorists use to motivate materialist histories of wars and art and science and religious upheavals. And they say well it's really supposed to cut off a kind of whig 19th century style history where ideas as abstract entities play a causal role and there's an outsized place for genius. And you say like Hegel? And they say yeah like Hegel. And then you say maybe genius does sometimes have an interesting role in the development of history. So you bicker for a bit about this and they tell you to read some Soviet historian of science and you say okay I will that sounds interesting. And so you read about the various technical demands that led to the Newtonian revolution and it seems interesting but you're not really persuaded. So you say to the Marxist let's pick this up again some other time.