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The Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Phoenicians (to say nothign for the moment of ourselves) have by their own account an historical record rooted in tradition of extreme antiquity and stability. For all these peoples live in places where the climate causes little decay, and they take care not to let any of their historical experiences pass out of their memory. On the contrary, they religiously preserve it in their public records, written by their most able scholars. In the Greek world, however, the memory of past events has been blotted out.

-- Flavius Josephus

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I do not wish to bid farewell to Platonism (which seems icily remote) without making the following observation, in the hope that others may pursue and justify it: The generic can be more intense than the concrete. [...] The extreme example -- the person who falls in love by word of mouth

-- Borges, A History of Eternity

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Casares, Ocampo, Borges

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(There) ...is what Heidegger called the hope for authenticity—the hope to be one’s own person rather than merely the creation of one’s education or one’s environment.   As Heidegger emphasized, to achieve authenticity in this sense is not necessarily to reject one’s past. It may instead be a matter of reinterpreting that past so as to make it more suitable for one’s own purposes. What matters is to have seen one or more alternatives to the purposes that most people take for granted, and to have chosen among these alternatives--thereby, in some measure, creating yourself. As Harold Bloom has recently reminded us, the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self. Autonomy, in this un-Kantian and distinctively Bloomian sense, is pretty much the same thing as Heideggerian authenticity.  For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. That is why a literary culture is always in search of novelty, always hoping to spot what Shelley called “the shadows that futurity casts upon the present”, rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal.   It is a premise of this culture that though the imagination has present limits, these limits are capable of being extended forever. The imagination endlessly consumes its own artifacts. It is an ever-living, ever-expanding, fire. It is as subject to time and chance as are the flies and the worms, but while it endures and preserves the memory of its past, it will continue to transcend its previous limits. Though the fear of belatedness is ever present within the literary culture, this very fear makes for an intenser blaze.

-- Rorty, The Decline of Redemptive Truth

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According to Michel Serres, the only modern question is: what is it you don’t want to know about yourself?

-- Adam Phillips

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Similarly, konwledge of Greek might have withered away once again in the West. Instead it was the familiar scribal phrase: "Graeca sunt ergo non legenda" that disappeared from Western books, never to reappear. For Greek type founts could be cut, Greek grammars as well as "standard editions" of Greek texts could be issued. The duplicative powers of print fixed whatever was known in a more permanent mold, making possible the progressive recovery of arcane letters and ancient languages along with the systematic development of historical scholarhsip and its auxiliary sciences.

-- E. Eisenstein, "Clio and Chronos"

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All views of historical change are conditioned by how events have been recorded, stored, retrieved, and transmitted.

-- Eisenstein, "Clio and Chronos"

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Time as right and wrong time has the character of significance, the character that characterizes the world as world in general. It is for this reason that we call the time with which we reckon, which we leave for ourselves, world-time. This does not mean that the time we read from the clock is something extant like intraworldly things. We know, of course, that the world is not an extant entity, not nature, but that which first makes possible the uncoveredness of nature. It is therefore also inappropriate, as frequently happens, to call this time nature-time or natural time. There is no nature-time, since all time belongs essentially to the Dasein. But there is indeed a world-time.

-- Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology

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Accordingly, we should say that there are no new media, but one new medium, named the computer, the newness of which (according to Turing's proof) is that it can be all machines, and thus all media. -- Kittler, "What's New About the New Media?"

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"On n'a point besoin de faire dependre l'analyse mathématique des controverses métaphysiques."

√ (-1) is the phallus.

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Lawrence Alma-Tadema

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“Comets behave like cats,” Dr. Masi said. “They have a tail, and they do exactly what they want.”

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All philosophy, I told her, is based on two things only: curiosity and poor eyesight [...]. The trouble is, we want to know more than we can see. Again, if we could really see things as they are, we would really know something, but we see things other than as they are.

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Was habe ich mit Juden gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam -- Kafka

"What do I have in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself"

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An early letter to Max Brod sheds a very clear light on the genesis of this unusual aptitude. It comes from the year 1904, when Kafka was twenty-one years old; I call it the Mole Letter and quote from it as much as seems necessary for an understanding of Kafka's transformation into something small. [...] "While I was out on a walk my dog came upon a mole that was trying to cross the road. He kept leaping at him and wouldn't leave him alone, for he is a young dog, and timid. At first I was amused and liked especially the mole's excitement as he looked for a hole in the hard surface of the road, altogether desperately and ineffectually. But then suddenly, when the dog struck him once more with an outstretched paw, he shrieked Ks, kss, just like that. And then I thought—no, I did not think anything. I was simply in a state of delusion, because on that day my head was hanging so heavily that in the evening I noticed with amazement that my chin had grown into my chest."

The dog, let us note, the dog hunting the mole, was Kafka's dog; he was its master. For the mole who, scared to death, looks for a hole in the hard road, a hole in which to hide—he himself does not exist; the animal is afraid only of the dog, its senses are open only for the latter. But he, Kafka, so exalted above them, by his upright stance, his height, and his ownership of the dog, which could never threaten him, simply laughs at the desperate and ineffectual movements of the mole. The mole does not realize that it could turn to him for help; it has not learned to pray, and it is capable of nothing but its small screams. They are the only sounds that touch the god, for here he is the god, the supreme being, the zenith of power, and in this case God is even present. The mole screams Ks, kss, and the onlooker, hearing this scream, transforms himself into the mole. Without having to fear his dog, which is his slave, he feels what it is to be a mole.

-- Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial

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Das Tier entwendet dem Herrn die Peitsche und peitscht sich selbst, um Herr zu werden, und weiß nicht, dass das nur eine Phantasie ist, erzeugt durch einen neuen Knoten im Peitschenriemen des Herrn.

-- Kafka

The beast takes the whip from the master and whips itself, in order to become master, and doesn't know that this is only a fantasy, created through a new knot in the leather of the master's whip.

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The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives. (The pattern persists among some self-employed -- artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students -- today, and provokes the question whether it is not a 'natural' human work-rhythm."

-- E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism"

In which I learn of "St. Monday," whose rites may not be neglected!