Very often it is impossible to find any originator for an idea generated during discussion and critique. Its meaning changes repeatedly; it is adapted and be- comes common property. Accordingly it achieves a superindividual value, and becomes an axiom, a guideline for thinking.
--- Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and development of a scientific fact.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
--- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called “cliché”.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1987/brodsky/lecture/
“As with all of Perrault’s stories, the trouble with his “Cinderella” is that he took fairy-tale material—either Basile’s or some other “Cinderella” story known to him from oral tradition, or a combination of both sources—freed it of all content he considered vulgar, and refined its other features to make the product suitable to be told at court. Being an author of great skill and taste, he invented details and changed others to make the story conform to his aesthetic concepts. It was, for example, his invention that the fateful slipper was made of glass, which is in no other versions but those derived from his.”
--- Bruno Bettelheim. “The Uses of Enchantment.”
Then he had to sing a mass, and did not know one word of it, but the two doves sat continually on his shoulders, and said it all in his ear.
-- Grimm's Fairy Tales. The Three Languages.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/025.txt
Very slowly, from the sixteenth century onwards, a new theory of time began to emerge. Many of the arguments for it involve thought experiments: experiments we can work through in our minds. Philosophers asked, “What would happen to time if the stars stopped moving?”.
The first fully-fledged ‘absolute’ account of time emerged a bit later, in the 1640s work of Pierre Gassendi (trans. 1972, 384-8). He argued that time would continue to flow at the same rate, whether the stars stuttered or sped up. This means that time must be a necessary, real being, independent of other things in the universe.
In the 1650s, Cambridge philosopher Henry More independently developed another absolutism about time. More (repr. 1992, 487) also used thought experiments, arguing that if God annihilated the world, and then remade it, time would still pass. However, he puts a new twist on the nature of time.
More argues there was time before God created the material world, and there will still be time after it ends. This means time is eternal, unchanging - ‘never-fading’. This hints at the true nature of time: it is an ‘obscure sub-indication’ of God. More (1662, 164; VII: 2) claims that time is God’s eternal existence, his attribute of eternity.
--- Thomas, Emily (2021) 'Time Through Time: Its Evolution through Western Philosophy in Seven Ideas.', Think., 20 (58). pp. 23-38.
Food retailers in Paris before the Revolution were tightly controlled by numerous laws, and regularly engaged in turf wars. One small group discovered that pandering to the tastes of the wealthy indisposed (who we would today call ‘the worried well’) was a nice niche market that got them around some of the regulations. They produced small, appetite-tempting, easily digested dishes called restaurants. Not all restaurants were soups – there were delicate dishes of such things as eggs, ‘creams’ and preserves too – but soups were certainly the dishes most strongly identified with the restoration of health.
--- Soup, by Janet Clarkson. 2010.
One day, some urgent affairs obliging him to go from home, he went to a place where all sorts of birds were sold, and bought a parrot, which not only spoke well, but could also give an account of every thing that was done in its presence. He brought it in a cage to his house, desired his wife to put it in his chamber, and take care of it during his absence, and then departed.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5664/pg5664.html
A dream gave Elias Howe the inspiration for his invention of the sewing machine. He dreamt that cannibals surrounded him and prepared to cook him as they waved spears. When he awoke, he remembered the spears, which had holes in the shaft and moved up and down.
https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/elias-howe-sewing-machine-inventor-gets-little-help-beatles/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1354849
This portion of Chelmsford was renamed Low- ell after Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817), an American businessman who improved American spinning and weaving machines and founded the first mill in America where raw cotton was processed and converted into cloth in the same building. Lowell, Massachusetts, is significant to the history of American industrialization because the town was entirely based around mill life. The mills employed primarily female workers, who lived in local boarding houses, shopped at company stores, and engaged in company-approved leisure-time activities, making Lowell the first company town.
...
By 1836, Lowell was the home to over 17,000 people, most of whom were female mill workers. Work began at 5:00 a.m. and ended at 7:00 p.m., with two breaks lasting a half hour each. In 1834, the company announced it would cut wages. Women workers took to the streets in protest. Though the strike did not raise wages, it did provide female workers with strike experience. In 1836, owners once again announced that wages would be cut. Also, workers would pay housing and meals, which had previously been par- tially paid for by the factory, in full.
--- Welch R & Lamphier P.A., Technical Innovation in America. 2019.
And yet Archimedes possessed such a lofty spirit, so profound a soul, and such a wealth of scientific theory, that although his inventions had won for him a name and fame for superhuman sagacity, 4 he would not consent to leave behind him any treatise on this subject, but regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers to the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his earnest p481 efforts only to those studies the subtlety and charm of which are not affected by the claims of necessity.
...
For no one could by his own efforts discover the proof, and yet as soon as he learns it from him, he thinks he might have discovered it himself; so smooth and rapid is the path by which he leads one to the desired conclusion.
--- Plutarch, Marcellus: 17.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Marcellus*.html
But besides his massacres, the rest of Sulla's proceedings also gave offence. For he proclaimed himself dictator, reviving this particular office after a lapse of a hundred and twenty years. Moreover, an act was passed granting him immunity for all his past acts, and for the future, power of life and death, of confiscation, of colonization, of founding or demolishing cities, and of taking away or bestowing kingdoms at his pleasure. He conducted the sales of confiscated estates in such arrogant and imperious fashion, from the tribunal where he sat, that his gifts excited more odium than his robberies. He bestowed on handsome women, musicians, comic actors, and the lowest of freedmen, the territories of nations and the revenues of cities, and women were married against their will to some of his favourites.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Sulla*.html
“In a single century, on a piece of land that lay largely below sea level, and a population of two million, which amounted to little more than a rounding error in the continent’s total, the Dutch built a global empire, produced an improbable number of history’s greatest artists, scientists, and philosophers, and set the standards in economic and political practice that shaped the modern world.
”
--- Matthew Stewart. “The Courtier and the Heretic.”
Among the many innovations which Lycurgus made, the first and most important was his institution of a senate, or Council of Elders, which, as Plato says, by being blended with the "feverish" government of the kings, and by having an equal vote with them in matters of the highest importance, brought safety and due moderation into counsels of state. For before this the civil polity was veering and unsteady, inclining at one time to follow the kings towards tyranny, and at another to follow the multitude towards democracy; but now, by making the power of the senate a sort of ballast for the ship of state and putting her on a steady keel, it achieved the safest and the most orderly arrangement, since the twenty-eight senators always took the side of the kings when it was a question of curbing democracy, and, on the other hand, always strengthened the people to withstand the encroachments of tyranny.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Lycurgus*.html
And once one has used a copier, one tends to be hooked. Perhaps the chief danger of this addiction is not so much the cluttering up of files and loss of important material through submersion as it is the insidious growth of a negative attitude toward originals—a feeling that nothing can be of importance unless it is copied, or is a copy itself.
Various magazine articles have predicted nothing less than the disappearance of the book as it now exists, and pictured the library of the future as a sort of monster computer capable of storing and retrieving the contents of books electronically and xerographically. The “books” in such a library would be tiny chips of computer film—“editions of one.” Everyone agrees that such a library is still some time away.
( Read more... )
-- John Brooks. “Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street.”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeasmymeasure