execrable miscellany

In all honesty, I didn't realize that a young man in the grip of a dreadful family can break free only by starting one of his own. ... Aeneas had tired of carrying gloomy old Anchises for so long: with a heave of his shoulders [Nizan] dropped him flat on his back; he became a husband and father in great haste, in order to kill his own father. But fatherhood alone is an insufficient remedy for childhood. Far from it. The authority of the new head of the family condemns him to repeat the age-old childishnesses that Adam bequeathed to us through our parents. My friend knew the score: he wanted to strike a definite blow against the father who, in the passage from father to son, is repeatedly murdered and repeatedly revived. To do so, he would become a different person and, through a public discipline, would take care to avoid family quirks. —Sartre, "Paul Nizan" (1960), We Have Only This Life to Live (2013)

I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference and shall observe it. One day, I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experiment in this way, and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, I observe, that, in the history of mankind, there is never a solitary example of success,—taking their own tests of success. I say this polemically, or in reply to the inquiry, why not realize your world? But far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism,—since there never was a right endeavor, but it succeeded. Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!—it seems to say,—there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power. —Emerson, "Experience," Essays: Second Series (1844)

I have aged and words have aged with me: in my head, they are as old as I am. —Sartre, "Paul Nizan" (1960), We Have Only This Life to Live (2013)

   The essence of totalitarian prose is that it does not define, it does not deliver. It oppresses. It obstructs from above. It is profoundly contemptuous of the minds who will receive the message. So it does its best to dull this consciousness with sentences which are nothing but bricked-in power structures. Or alternately a totalitarian prose slobbers upon an audience a sentimentality so debauched that admiration for shamelessness is inspired. But then, sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. —Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (1966)

   Once, years ago in Chicago, I was coming down with a bad cold. By accident, a friend took me to hear a jazz musician named Sun Ra who played "space music." The music was a little like the sound of Ornette Coleman, but further out, outer space music, close to the eeee of an electric drill at the center of a harsh trumpet. My cold cleared up in five minutes. I swear it. The anger of the sound penetrated into some sprung-up rage which was burning fuel for the cold. —Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (1966)

   What is the Internet? As Evgeny Morozov argues, it may not exist except as a rhetorical gimmick. But if it does, it’s as much a thing we do as it is an infrastructure through which to do it. And that thing we do that is the Internet, it’s pockmarked with mortal regret:    You boot a browser and it loads the Yahoo! homepage because that’s what it’s done for fifteen years. You blink at it and type a search term into the Google search field in the chrome of the browser window instead.    Sitting in front of the television, you grasp your iPhone tight in your hand instead of your knitting or your whiskey or your rosary or your lover.    The shame of expecting an immediate reply to a text or a Gchat message after just having failed to provide one. The narcissism of urgency.    The pull-snap of a timeline update on a smartphone screen, the spin of its rotary gauge. The feeling of relief at the surge of new data—in Gmail, in Twitter, in Instagram, it doesn’t matter.    The gentle settling of disappointment that follows, like a down duvet sighing into the freshly made bed. This moment is just like the last, and the next.    You close Facebook and then open a new browser tab, in which you immediately navigate back to Facebook without thinking.    The hot fury of encountering yet another lowlife online. Of knowing how the argument ends (badly) but carrying it out anyway.    The sunburn of that fury hours later, the bleak shadow side of ha-ha “someone is wrong on the Internet” cartoon mockery in which you scowled through dinner, because you are a person and not a stick figure.    The comments, and reading them, and not reading them. Knowing that response and reaction responds and reacts to someone’s preferred idea rather than the ideas proffered. If you are a woman, knowing something much, much worse.    Notifications. Click me, read me, look at me, “like” me, buy me, contribute to me, respond to me, retweet me, for I am on the Internet.    Another day’s work lost to the vapors of reloads, updates, clicks, and comments. Realizing that you are hyperemployed by the cloud, that you are its unpaid intern. Wondering what you’d have accomplished if you had done anything else whatsoever. Knowing that tomorrow will be no different.    The weight and heat of your smartphone in your pocket, silently whimpering for you, a glass and metal kitten with a small, fragile body.    ...    We like to think that the Internet is made of video streams and quips and cat photos, and it is. But it is also made of the waves of sorrow of a thousand million acts like the ones mentioned above, all spilling onto shore, erosive. You’ll try to tell me that these are incidental properties, mere exhaust, the necessary but piffling downsides of a force of greater good. But I don’t believe you anymore. The opposite is just as convincingly true: whatever virtue we drink online we squeeze from a bitter and ever-thickening rind of sorrow. —Ian Bogost, "What Do We Save When We Save The Internet?" The Atlantic (15 May 2014)

[Braudel's] ambition was to catch in a single vision the widely stretched horizons of the Mediterranean and more recently of the entire world. He intended thereby to capture the fate of the world in a totalizing process that carefully avoided any philosophical a priori. Beyond all fragmentary knowledge and all the specialists, he felt that he was the master of that chaotic world he wanted to recreate for us. Without a doubt there was something gigantic in his ambition. He recognized no equal in his generation; he had only modest students who "do not understand him." An exception proves the rule, as always. One man had the audacity to be more famous than he and to incarnate his time better. Jean-Paul Sartre was the only one Braudel accepted as his superior. Of course, he conceded, "He was completely wrong as far as I am concerned, but he was engaged more brilliantly in French life." Sartre was the conscience of a generation, something Braudel never was because he was not involved in public life and because he was a worker entirely devoted to building that impregnable fortress, the empire of French historians. Braudel's fame has a good chance of being more solid because, in addition to the man and his works, the institutions that he ran, or reoriented, or created out of nothing will remain. Despite his positions so contrary to Sartre's, he recognized the latter's advantage. In the conclusion to his trilogy he discussed Sartre's position: "J-P Sartre can dream of a society where inequality will disappear and where no one will dominate over another. But no society in the real world has yet renounced that tradition or given up that privilege." For Braudel, there can be no society without hierarchy; that is an invariable. Hierarchy can change forms and evolve from slavery to serfdom to salary, but it remains the domination of some over others. In contrast to Sartre, he tried to demonstrate that human liberty is a narrow gate that gets narrower and narrower. —François Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales (1994)

... side by side with traditional narrative history, there is an account of conjunctures which lays open large sections of the past, ten, twenty, fifty years at a stretch ready for for [sic] examination.    Far beyond this second account we find a history capable of traversing even greater distances, a history to be measured in centuries this time: the history of the long, even of the very long time span, of the longue durée. This is a phrase which I have become accustomed to for good or ill, in order to distinguish the opposite of what François Simiand, not long after Paul Lacombe, christened "l'histoire événementielle," the history of events. The phrases matter little; what matters is the fact that our discussion will move between these two poles of time, the instant and the longue durée.    Not that these words are absolutely reliable. Take the word event: for myself I would limit it, and imprison it within the short time span: an event is explosive, a "nouvelle sonnante" ("a matter of moment") as they said in the sixteenth century. Its delusive smoke fills the minds of its contemporaries, but it does not last, and its flame can scarcely ever be discerned.    Doubtless philosophers would tell us that to treat the word thus is to take on a whole range of meanings and associations. It can occasionally bear witness to very profound movements, and by making play, factitiously or not, with those "causes" and "effects" so dear to the hearts of the historians of yore, it can appropriate a time far greater than its own time span. Infinitely extensible, it becomes wedded, either freely or not, to a whole chain of events, of underlying realities which are then, it seems, impossible to separate. It was by adding things together like this that Benedetto Croce could claim that within any event all history, all of man is embodied, to be rediscovered at will. Though this, of course, is on condition of adding to that fragment whatever it did not a first sight appear to contain, which in turn entails knowing what is appropriate—or not appropriate—to add. It is the clever and perilous process which some of Jean-Paul Sartre's recent thinking seems to propose. —Fernand Braudel, "History and the Social Sciences," On History (1980)

   All these realities of material life—food, drink, housing, clothes and fashion—cannot be so closely correlated that the relationship can be taken for granted. The distinction between luxury and poverty is only a crude classification, one that recurs all the time, but does not in itself provide the necessary precision. One cannot indeed say that all these realities are the product of constraining necessity: man certainly finds food, shelter and clothing because he cannot do otherwise—but he could choose to feed, live and dress differently. Sudden changes in fashion demonstrate this in a "diachronic" manner, and contrasts between different parts of the world, past and present, do so in a "synchronic" manner. In fact, our investigation takes us at this point not simply into the realm of material "things," but into a world of "things and words"—interpreting the last term in a wider sense than usual, to mean languages with everything that man contributes or insinuates into them, as in the course of his everyday life he makes himself their unconscious prisoner, in front of his bowl of rice or slice of bread.    The important thing, if one is to follow such pioneering works as that of Mario Praz, is to see both the material goods and the languages in an overall context: an economic context, of that there is no doubt; and a social context too, in all probability. If luxury is not a good way of supporting or promoting an economy, it is a means of holding, of fascinating a society. And those strange collections of commodities, symbols, illusions, fantasms and intellectual schemas that we call civilization must also be invoked at this point. In short, at the very deepest levels of material life, there is at work a complex order, to which the assumptions, tendencies and unconscious pressures of economies, societies and civilizations all contribute. —Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1 (1981)

   Delay in transit was a universal evil. Goods, money, and bills of exchange travelled in all directions, passed each other on the road, met up or had to wait for each other. Every commercial centre drew its livelihood from the complex and ever-changing circulation of goods, money, and bills of exchange, or to be precise from their mutual compensations. And these goods, money, and bills of exchange were caught up in a slow-moving flow that kept them a long time on the way. A merchant would naturally want to recover his capital as soon as possible, his vital stake in a game that was always ready to start again. There can be no doubt that the collapse of private banks in the sixteenth century was the result of their being too ready to place their clients' money in commercial pursuits that moved too slowly. If there was a panic or an emergency, payments could not be made within a few days, for the money was still on the road, a prisoner of the mortal delays of distance. —Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. I (1973)

So when I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. —Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. II (1973)