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Joubert’s Notebooks

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French Thinker Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)

To understand where we are today, I believe it is important to go back in time and read works written in the more distant past. In the middle of reading The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection (New York Review Books, 2005), I am confronted by the philosophical fragments of a man who never published during his lifetime. He kept copious notes, however, which were published after his death. During his lifetime, he was best known as Napoleon’s inspector general of French universities.

Following are a number of his maxims which struck my eyes as I was reading his book.

It is not facts but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything.

All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back.

What comes through war is given back through war. All spoils will be retaken, all plunder will be dispersed, All victors will be defeated and every city filled with prey will be sacked in its turn.

Clarity of mind is not given in all centuries.

When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others.

The only good in man is his young feelings and his old thoughts.

Everything is double and is made up of a soul and a body.

You have searched in vain, you have found nothing but envelopes. Open a hundred, open a thousand, you will always be stopped before opening the last. You think you have touched the essence when you take off the outer skins. You take the homunculus for the animal. But it is much deeper…. In each drop is a drop, in each point another point.

Crônicas: Part of the Game

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Brazilian Writer Hélio Pellegrino

Yes, I am still reading Clarice Lispector’s Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which runs to almost 800 pages. Tody, I am quoting a writer that Lispector in turn quotes in her Jornal do Brasil column for September 4, 1971, namely Hélio Pellegrino:

Living—ah, that difficult delight. Living is a game, a risk. Whoever plays can win or lose. The beginning of wisdom consists in accepting that losing is also part of the game. When that happens, we gain something extremely precious: we gain the possibility of winning. If I know how to lose, then I know how to win. If I don’t know how to lose, I win nothing, and I will always go away empty-handed. The eyes of someone who doesn’t know how to lose eventually grow rusty and blind, blind with resentment. When we come to accept with true and deep humility the rules of the existential game, living becomes more than good: it becomes fascinating. To live well is to consume oneself; it is to burn the coals of time from which we are made. We are made up of time, and this means we are a passing thing, movement without respite, finitude. The quota of eternity allotted to us is embedded in time. We need to search it out with ceaseless courage so that the taste of gold may shine upon our lips. If this happens, then we are joyful and good, and our life has meaning.

Obliscence

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The most interesting exhibit I saw yesterday at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City was about human memory. It honored Geoffrey Sonnabend who, in 1946, wrote a study entitled Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter.

Sonnabend’s thesis was that memory is an illusion. The inevitable outcome of all experience is not remembering, but forgetting:

We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability of its moments and events.

According to a summary by Valentine Worth available in the museum’s gift shop:

Sonnabend did not attempt to deny that the experience of memory existed. However, his entire body of work was predicated on the idea that what we experience as memories are in fact confabulations—artificial constructions of our own design built around sterile particles of retained experience which we attempt to make live again by infusions of imagination, much as the blacks and whites of old photographs are enhanced by the addition of colors or tints in an attempt to add life to a frozen moment.

It seems to make sense. I don’t know if I would read all three volumes of Sonnabend’s Obliscence, but I can see how many of my own memories have been encrusted by confabulations just as an old shipwreck is encrusted by layers of calcium carbonate and other concretions. Here is an illustration from his work that shows how complicated it gets:

Lucretius on the Nature of Things

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Titus Lucretius Carus (1st Century BC)

It’s not easy to read The Nature of Things by Lucretius. Not only does he attempt to summarize the philosophy of Epicurus and the science knowledge of his day (40-55 BC), but he did in in rhymed couplets, which in this edition are translated as heptameter (“fourteeners”).

Not to worry: If you press on, you will get the gist of what Lucretius writes, and you will encounter some great passages such as this one on the role of the gods in life:

If you possess a firm grasp of these tenets, you will see
That Nature, rid of harsh taskmasters, all at once is free,
And everything she does, does on her own, so that gods play
No part. For by the holy hearts of gods, who while away
Their tranquil immortality in peace!—who can hold sway
Over the measureless universe? Who is there who can keep
Hold of the reins that curb the power of the fathomless deep?
Who can juggle all the heavens? And with celestial flame
Warm worlds to fruitfulness? And be all places at the same
Time for all eternity, to cast a shadow under
Dark banks of clouds, or quake a clear sky with the clap of thunder?
What god would send down lightning to rend his own shrines asunder?
Or withdraw to rage in desert wastes, and there let those bolts fly
That often slay the innocent and pass the guilty by?

It is a far different world than hours. Instead of the Periodical Table of the Elements, Lucretius had earth, wind, air, and fire. You can see him bending in obscure directions to explain such phenomena as magnetism, thunder, earthquakes, and plagues. Yet one could not help but admire the ingenuity of an astute observer who had no notion of Newtonian Physics, let alone Quantum Physics, yet tried his hardest to explain what he saw.