"The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

"More volumes in the same vein were to follow during the course of years: Water and Dreams, Air and Revery, The Earth and the Reveries of the Will, The Earth and the Reveries of Rest, in which Bachelard was resolutely turning from the universe of reason and science to that of imagination and poetry."

-reads like a excepts from a Borges story

"Referring to Anna tersa Tymieniecka's book Phenomenology and science, we can say that for Minkowski, the essence of life is not "a feeling of being, of existence," but a feeeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space."

-where are we going? i often ask myself. yesterday i posed a question to sarah louis, "if you and the love of your life, were both set and well off, would you have a child? the baby would have to be born into this world." sarah louis, says she doesn't want a baby, and never gave me an answer. the recent phenomenon for me, is that today, there are more people living in cities than rural areas, it a new era now. the birth rate is traditionally negative in urban areas, what will happen now?

A Roman said to a shoemaker who had directed his gaze too high:

Ne sutor ultra crepidam.

Every time there is a question of pure subblimation, when the very being of poetry must be determined, shouldn't the phenomenologist say to the psychoanalyst:

Ne psuchor ultra uterum.

A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

From Karen Armstrong's Introduction

"I sympathize with Leigh Fermor, when he remarked one day to the Abbot what a blessed relief it was to refrain from talking all day long.  "Yes." the Abbot replied; "in the outside world, speech is gravely abused."  Our world is even more noisy than it was in the 1950's, when Leigh Fermor wrote this book:  piped music and mobile phones jangle ceaselessly, and silence and solitude are shunned as alien and unnatural.  We expect instant communication and seek knowledge at the click of a mouse.  We are also living at a time of competing certainties and religious stridency.  It is important to realize that there are more profound and authentic ways of being religious.  Very few of us can be contemplative nuns or monks, but we can learn to appreciate their way of experiencing the sacred and integrate something of this gentle, silent discipline into our own lives.  This gem of a book can help us to do just that."

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński

Travels with Herodotus

I walked around the city, copying down signboards, the names of goods in stores, words overhead at bus stops. In movie theaters I scribbled blindly, in darkness, the words on the screen, and noted the slogans on banners carried by demonstrators in the streets. I approached India not throughout images, sounds, and smells, but through words; furthermore, words not of the indigenous Hindi, but of a foreign, imposed tongue, which by then had so fully taken root here that it was for me an indispensable key to this country, almost identical with it. I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, this universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it. I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I was able to name: for example, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know. I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture.



I was leaving China, as I had India, with a feeling of loss, even of sorrow; but at the same time there was something purposeful about my flight. I had to escape, because a new, hitherto unfamiliar world was pulling me into its orbit, completely absorbing me, obsessing and overwhelming me. I was seized at once with profound fascination, a burning thirst to learn, to immerse myself totally, to melt away, to become as one with this foreign universe. To know it as if I had been born and raised there, begun life there. I wanted to learn the language, I wanted to read the books, I wanted to penetrate every nook and cranny.

It was a kind of malady, a dangerous weakness, because I also realized that these civilizations are so enormous, so rich, complex, and varied, that getting to know even a fragment of one of them, a mere scrap, would require devoting one's whole life to the enterprise. Cultures are edifices with countless rooms, corridors, balconies, and attics, all arranged, furthermore, into such twisting, turning labyrinths, that if you enter one of them, there is no exit, no retreat, no turning back. To become a Hindu scholar, a Sinologist, an Arabist, or a Hebraist is a lofty, all-consuming pursuit, leaving no space or time for anything else.

Whereas I had the urge to submit to such seductions, I also remained attracted to what lay beyond the confines of their respective worlds - I was tempted by people still unmet, roads yet untraveled, skies yet unseen. The desire to cross the border, to look at what is beyond it, stirred in me still.

The following passage appears in Herodotus's text:  Once their rebellion was out in the open, this is what they did.  The Babylonian men gathered together all the women of the city - with the exception of their mothers and of a single woman chosen by each man from his own household - and strangled them.  The single woman was kept on as a cook, while all the others were strangled to conserve supplies.

I don't know if Herodotus realized what he was writing.  Did he think about those words?  Because at that time, in the sixth century, Babylon had at least two to three hundred thousand inhabitants.  It follows, then, that tens of thousands of women were condemned to strangulation - wives, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, cousins, lovers.

Our Greek says nothing more about this mas execution. Whose decision was it?  That of the Popular Assembly?  Of the Municipal Government?  Of the Committee for the Defense of Babylon?  Was there some discussion of the matter?  Did anyone protest?  Who decided on the method of execution - that these women would be strangled?  Were there other suggestions?  That they be pierced by spears, for example?  Or cut down with swords?  Or burned on pyres?  Or thrown into the Euphrates, which coursed through the city?

There are more questions still.  Could the women, who had been waiting in their homes for the men to return from the meeting during which sentence was pronounced upon them, discern something in their men's faces?  Indecision? Shame? Pain? Madness?  The little girls of course suspected nothing.  But the older ones?  Wouldn't instinct tell them something?  Did all the men observe the agreed silence?  Didn't conscience strike any of them?  Did none of them experience an attack of hysteria?  Run screaming through the streets?

And later? ...  Did Babylon's nights terrify its men from that moment onward?  Did they wake in panic?  Did nightmares haunt them?  Were they unable to fall asleep?  Did they feel demons seizing them by the throat?

Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide - The Twentieth-Century Experience

Like their Nazi and Turkish colleagues, Japanese soldiers were "hardened for the task of murdering Chinese combatants and noncombatants alike." Quickly desensitized, the officers and soldiers of the Japanese armies killed Chinese for sport and for bayonet practice. "Soldiers impaled [Chinese] babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water," a medical doctor, Nagatomi Hakudo, recalled fifty years after his participation in Nanking's descration in 1937. He recalled the first test of his courage on the streets of Nanking when a superior officer gave him a sword and instructed him to kill bound Chinese captives. "I remember smiling proudly as I took his sword and began killing people."The Nazi charge d'affaires in Nanking was so horrified at the brutality of the marauding Japanese soldiers that he wrote to Berlin: "The Japanese Imperial Army is nothing but a beastly machine."The general in charge of the Japanese forces who commented the atrocities, Matsui Iwane (one of the twenty -eight leaders indicted, tried, and convicted after the war), noted, while the events were still taking place, "My men have done something very wrong and extremely regrettable."(Nazi diplomats in Nanking in 1937, repulsed by the killing orgy of the Japanese occupiers, provided safe haven for many Chinese as well as vigorously complaining to their government about Japanese cruelties.)Pol Pot, leader of the victorious Khmer Rouge forces (recently deceased before he could be brought to trial on charges of genocide), ordered his troops to commit genocide against nearly 2 million Cambodians - various ethnic, intellectual, and professional groups of "enemies" of the agrarian communist revolution. He reflected Hitler's views before the start of World War II. In late August 1939, Hitler remarked to a group of soldier just before Germany's unprovoked invasion of Poland: "I have put my death-head formations in place with the command recklessly and without compassion to seed into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?"Chap teuv is the Cambodian phrase for "taken away, never to be seen again."

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Albey

Wherever I traveled, I tried to listen to the actual speaker of languages under threat - the loyalist of minority cultures. How do people who know their language is endangered bear the weight of such knowledge? I wanted to see how far their defiance could stretch, and how easily resignation could take hold. I wanted to learn what step can be taken to sustain and strengthen a threatened tongue Above all, I wanted to test my own hunch that the looming extinction of o many languages marks a decisive moment in human history - a turning away from vocal diversity in favor of what optimists see as a global soul and others as a soulless monoculture. In the end, should anybody care that thousands of languages are at risk?

That's the central question I will attempt to answer in this book. But I have a confession to make. I work as a journalist, poet, and editor; I am not a professional linguist. Indeed, my knowledge of the entire discipline o linguistic is patchy and often cursory. These pages do not touch on constructional homonymity and depth-first parsers; such matters lie beyond my frame of reference. My defense is one of analogy. You don't have to be a theologian to talk of God; you don't have to be a veterinarian to describe cats. Besides, this book is not just about threatened languages but about the people who speak them. I beg the forgiveness of linguists for trespassing on their territory and perpetrating whatever blunders have found a home in these pages - and I would gently remind them that their own voices are unlikely to be heard on the subject unless they speak out in terms that are lucid, intelligible, and free from jargon.