The first half of the twentieth century [on Egypt] saw the West overwhelm the East. High heels and two tones cluttered up marble steps; camelskin babouches rustled down. The country’s second half saw the reverse: silken slippers shuffling down, bare feet in army boots stomping up. To the cosmopolitans, their fall was a tragedy, an end to Cairo’s golden age. To the vast majority of Cairo’s people — those faceless folk — it was a hard won triumph.
in Sherifa D. Zuhur, Asmahan’s Secrets
One element of that evidence is the Qur’an’s manifest lack of clarity, despite its boasts to the contrary. Many words in this self-proclaimed clear Arabic book are neither clear nor Arabic. Philologist Gerd-R. Puin explains:
The Koran claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or ‘clear.’ But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible—if it can’t even be understood in Arabic—then it’s not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on. (Toby Lester, “What Is the Koran?,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1999)
Islamic apologists have been sanguine about the incomprehensible sections of the Qur’an: Allah knows what they mean, and their very presence indicates that the book was written by someone whose understanding is beyond that of ordinary mortals.
Robert Spencer, Did Muhammad Exist An Inquiry into Islams Obscure Origins
I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time… though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness not know what i mean.
Jab Van Ruysbroek
“The way of paradox is the way of truth.”
When I was a young man, I first heard Wilde’s epigrams on the lips of actors who knew exactly what effect they would have. I was startled by their elegance and confidence and therefore assumed their truth. Later, I began to notice how many of them relied on a slick reversal of a normal assumption or idée reçue. Then, in middle age, I began to doubt their essential truth, or even their moderate truth, or even their vestigial truth, and a fierce literary moralism set in.
Finally, I realised that the Wildean epigram (whether in dramatic or prose form) is actually a piece of theatrical display rather than any serious distillation of truth. And then, post-finally, I discovered that Wilde was aware of this all along. As he once wrote to Conan Doyle: “Between me and life there is a mist of words always. I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth.”
Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat
Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat is a delight, doubly so.
First, because it is really very witty, and surprises and delights with an entertaining anecdote and a well turned epigram on every page. And, secondly, because it treats of perhaps the last era — La Belle Epoque they call it in France — during which the now extinct animal, the connoisseur, was still alive. Indeed, it takes as its heroes three connoisseurs, and starts with their “aesthetic and intellectual shopping expedition” to London.
It is of course, significant, that two of the three were actively unemployed, i.e. had the time and the resources to devote to appreciation of art and culture. It takes years of devoted hard work to build familiarity with the extant oeuvre of any classical art and therefore years to develop the eye and ear, it takes a lifetime to master several. Which is why the connoisseur practically requires social injustice — not just unequal but unmeritricious income distribution. The connoisseur is not idle, but he is not productive.
The third of the three, the red-coat-man of the title, was unusual, in that he was a very busy and productive professional (surgeon, teacher, hospital director) with a packed social calendar and an active love life. Was he a connoisseur, also? His collection — auctioned off after his death; and the invitation by the other two to join them on the expedition to London; suggests he could at least play the part. But then some people are like that, their day seems to have many more hours than that of an average mortal.
As one reads, following the heroes’ interests has one constantly looking things up in wikipedia and art museum sights: painters, composers, poets, sights, the connoisseur’s reading par excellence. Delightful.
As the book progresses, it begins to draw into its narrative more and more famous French, English and American people – indeed, it is interesting that most of them were at one point featured in a sort of celebrity collecting card of the day. And as the cast of characters increases one begins to notice that, except for the poetry and prose they wrote, or music they composed, or art they consumed, these people were really not very different from my high school classmates. They were preoccupied with social standing, popularity and sexual gossip. Could it really have been all that exciting to be present at one of their salons?
Above: some paintings by Odilon Redon: I did not know this painter.
Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat
Three reasons why I am not going to.
First, COVID. People are not having themselves vaccinated. In your country especially (because of course they all know better). My grandpa is 85 years old. We have managed to avoid the plague so far. Should I now risk leaving this enclave and exposing myself to the uncouth?
Second, health. I have a health issue. I’d rather focus on it.
Third, but really main. Love affairs. In my experience they function like this: she shows leg; he loses control; relationship follows; the stairs begin. Stairs come in various sorts, non-exhaustively, from mismatch of expectations to mental illness. Been there, done that. Is the leg worth the risk? Is any leg worth it?
No. No leg is worth it. There is literature, art, philosophy, sciences, aesthetic experiences, internal life. Every other lady on Tinder writes: “I am sapio-sexual” (i.e. “the brain excites me”). That’s wonderful. But does this mean she has something to offer, something with which to excite my brain, or is she merely describing the sort of stimulation she needs to become sexually aroused? From experience, the case is the latter.
The woman shows the leg and expects to be entertained and worshiped on that basis.
This is my life in the last 5 days:
Workwise: a new intellectual challenge. Are you interested? Reading: I have read 6 books, 4 of them worth talking about. Shall we talk? I discovered a new painter (a woman painter, for once), see above; i studied local geology, it’s fascinating, duh; i had several intense aesthetic experiences (the green cove on the lake, the absolute peace on the top of the world) (“good for you”); i have cooked a couple really nice dishes (“not vegetarian”); and I ate them on new plates (“plates are plates, who cares”).
Really.
In the late afternoon, when the stairway was no longer blasted by the full fury of the sun, the Venerable Parakarma began his descent. By nightfall, he would reach the highest of the pilgrim renthouses; and by the following day, he would have returned to the world of men.
The Mahanayake Thero had given neither advice nor discouragement, and if he was grieved by his colleague’s departure, he had shown no sign. He had merely intoned, “All things are impermanent,” clasped his hands, and given his blessing.
The Venerable Parakarma, who had once been Dr. Choam Goldberg, and might be so again, would have had great difficulty in explaining all his motives. “Right action” was easy to say; it was not so easy to discover.
At the Sri Kanda Maha Vihara he had found peace of mind—but that was not enough. With his scientific training, he was no longer content to accept the Order’s ambiguous attitude toward God. Such indifference had come at last to seem worse than outright denial.
If such a thing as a rabbinical gene could exist, Dr. Goldberg possessed it. Like many before him, Goldberg-Parakarma had sought God through mathematics, undiscouraged even by the bombshell that Kurt Gödel, with the discovery of undecidable propositions, had exploded early in the twentieth century. He could not understand how anyone could contemplate the dynamic asymmetry of Euler’s profound yet beautifully simple e + 1 = 0 without wondering if the universe was the creation of some vast intelligence.
Having first made his name with a new cosmological theory that had survived almost ten years before being refuted, Goldberg had been widely acclaimed as another Einstein or N’goya. In an age of ultraspecialization, he had also managed to make notable advances in aero- and hydrodynamics—long regarded as dead subjects, incapable of further surprises.
Then, at the height of his powers, he had experienced a religious conversion not unlike Pascal’s, though without so many morbid undertones. For the next decade, he had been content to lose himself in saffron anonymity, focusing his brilliant mind upon questions of doctrine and philosophy. He did not regret the interlude, and he was not even sure that he had abandoned the Order; one day, perhaps, this great stairway would see him again. But his God-given talents were reasserting themselves. There was massive work to be done, and he needed tools that could not be found on Sri Kanda—or even, for that matter, on Earth itself.
He felt little hostility, now, toward Vannevar Morgan. However inadvertently, the engineer had ignited the spark; in his blundering way, he, too, was an agent of God. Yet, at all costs, the temple must be protected. Whether or not the wheel of fate ever returned him to its tranquillity, Parakarma was implacably resolved upon that.
And so, like a new Moses bringing down from the mountain laws that would change the destinies of men, the Venerable Parakarma descended to the world he had once renounced. He was blind to the beauties of land and sky that were all around him. They were utterly trivial compared to those that he alone could see in the armies of equations that were marching through his mind.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise
The Master of the Curators:
“We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.“We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other. All these I came to know, and I made safeguarding them my life’s devotion.
Gene Wolf, The Shadow of The Torturer
He fell to looking out of the window. It was grey and damp; there was no rain, but the fog still hung about; and low clouds trailed across the sky. The wind blew facing the train; whitish clouds of steam, some singly, others mingled with other darker clouds of smoke, whirled in endless file past the window at which Litvinov was sitting. He began to watch this steam, this smoke. Incessantly mounting, rising and falling, twisting and hooking on to the grass, to the bushes as though in sportive antics, lengthening out, and hiding away, clouds upon clouds flew by … they were for ever changing and-294- stayed still the same in their monotonous, hurrying, wearisome sport! Sometimes the wind changed, the line bent to right or left, and suddenly the whole mass vanished, and at once reappeared at the opposite window; then again the huge tail was flung out, and again it veiled Litvinov’s view of the vast plain of the Rhine. He gazed and gazed, and a strange reverie came over him…. He was alone in the compartment; there was no one to disturb him. ‘Smoke, smoke,’ he repeated several times; and suddenly it all seemed as smoke to him, everything, his own life, Russian life—everything human, especially everything Russian. All smoke and steam, he thought; all seems for ever changing, on all sides new forms, phantoms flying after phantoms, while in reality it is all the same and the same again; everything hurrying, flying towards something, and everything vanishing without a trace, attaining to nothing; another wind blows, and all is dashing in the opposite direction, and there again the same untiring, restless—and useless gambols! He remembered much that had taken place with clamour and flourish before his eyes in the last few years … ‘Smoke,’ he whispered, ‘smoke’; he remembered the hot disputes, the wrangling, the clamour at Gubaryov’s, and in other sets of men, of high and-295- low degree, advanced and reactionist, old and young … ‘Smoke,’ he repeated, ‘smoke and steam’; he remembered, too, the fashionable picnic, and he remembered various opinions and speeches of other political personages—even all Potugin’s sermonising … ‘Smoke, smoke, nothing but smoke.’ And what of his own struggles and passions and agonies and dreams? He could only reply with a gesture of despair.
Ivan Turgenev, Smoke
Oltre Mare 