well hello there, global announcement and a good book to read- but mostly – my facebook replacement, – www.mytribes.net is LIVE- don't join unless you want to evolve.
good morning !
also, if you are planning on having a normal facebook experience during the election week, and “the next 3 weeks” after that, padded out by an additional 2 weeks... you can probably wait about as long before expecting people to start forgetting about things again.
That aside, the coffee is hot- so please excuse me, while the party I am trying to reach is located across the desk.
Stuff's good man. Colombian Morning Here. https://www.unclejohns.coffee
Now, if you will please have a fantastic day, and make sure to tell one person about it, but offer to listen to their day first. :)
Cheers!
In closing I give you the first few paragraphs of the most interesting book I am reading- This is the first few paragraphs of the start of Chapter Seven..
CHAPTER 7
Tolerance and Commerce
Auerbach Reads Voltaire
- In the sixth of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734, but written a few years earlier) we come upon a famous page:
Enter the London Stock Exchange, that more respectable place than many a court; you will see the deputies of all nations gathered there for the service of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan and the Christian deal together as if
they were of the same religion, and apply the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt; there the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anglican accepts the Quaker’s promise. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies, some go to the synagogue, others go to drink; one goes to have himself baptized in a great basin in the name of the Father, through the Son, to the Holy Ghost; an-
other has his son’s foreskin cut off and Hebrew words mumbled over him which he does not understand; others go to their church to await the inspiration of
God, their hats on their heads, and all are content.
Erich Auerbach dealt at length with this text in his great book (Mimesis, 1946). His analysis opened with a word of caution: Voltaire’s “description of the London exchange was not really written for a realistic purpose.”
This is not an obvious statement, just as the notion of realism was not obvious to Auerbach.
Among the many variants of realism studied in Mimesis we find the modern form exemplified by the novels of Balzac and Stendhal, in which individual events and experiences are interwoven with impersonal historical forces. One such force is international commerce, mentioned by Voltaire in
his passage on the London Stock Exchange. Auerbach preferred, instead, to emphasize the intentionally deforming characteristics of a description which, Auerbach- by taking the details of the religious ceremonies out of their respective contexts, makes something absurd and comical out of them. This is, Auerbach observes, “the searchlight device” (Scheinwerfertechnik), typical of propaganda:
“Especially in times of excited passions, the public is again and again taken in by such tricks, and everybody knows more than enough examples from the very recent past. . . .
Whenever a specific form of life or a social group has run
its course or has only lost favor and support, every injustice which the propagandists perpetrate against it is half consciously felt to be what it actually is,
yet people welcome it with sadistic delight.”
This implicit allusion to Nazism crops up again immediately afterward in a bitter and ironic observation: “[Gottfried] Keller was fortunate in that he could not imagine an important change in government which would not en-
tail an expansion of freedom.” Mimesis, Auerbach wrote retrospectively, “is a book written in total awareness by a resolute man, in a determinate situation, at the beginning of the forties at Istanbul.”
With these words Auerbach was reiterating his own adherence to the critical considerations which he had worked out in reflecting on Vico’s Scienza Nuova.
More than fifty years have passed since the publication of Mimesis. The voice of Voltaire on the page discussed by Auerbach rings out today more powerfully than ever.
Yeh, its good. The above passage is from a book entitled :
“Threads and Traces” by Carlo Ginzburg.
I fully intend to read all of it, and I can't say that about many books.
- as observed from the new epoch