After the introduction Bloch begins with the dreams and ideals of the adolescent. The seventeen years old lad who fantasizes about a date with the most beautiful girl in town.

Somehow it nicely fits with Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1922) and his main figure Denis, twenty three years and desperately trying to be a (successful) writer…

‘Everything I Possess I Carry With Me’ (2009) portrays the deportation of German speaking Romanians to Russia during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as forced labor. Müller describes the journey of the seventeen years old boy Leo to a gulag in the Soviet Union in 1945. He is forced to stay in this labour camp until 1950.

This story is inspired by the memories of a poet (Oskar Pastior) but also by what happened to Müller’s own mother who was sent to such a camp when she was seventeen.

It is a grim story, about hunger and violence and indifference. When there’s hardly anything to eat, except some bread of a bad quality and soup with cabbage shreds, while you are doing hard physical labour, like digging coal and pitch, gradually men become ‘egotistical’. They can’t afford any sentimental feelings if they want to survive.

So we could ask ourselves, if people have survived such horrors, what have they been doing for trying to survive? Are they, in one way or another, guilty? Or, is this an inappropriate question…

“Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

Even knowing what Eliot is saying here, does not make me wise.
I think you can’t achieve wisdom consciously.
So, there seems to be a contradiction, because when someone is saying that he is wise,
he’s certainly not modest…

However, Aristotle himself did not know the word. He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle’s death, an editor of his works entitled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika”—“the after the physicals” or “the ones after the physical ones”. 

Throughout the centuries the meaning of metaphysics has been developed and today we consider the following sections as parts of the concept:   

Abstract objects and mathematics;

Cosmology and cosmogony;

Determinism and free will;

Identity and change;

Mind and matter;

Necessity and possibility;

Objects and their properties;

Religion and spirituality;

Space and time

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decrease,
His tender heir mught bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’st flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

  William Shakespeare 1564-1616 -  Sonnets and  ’A lovers complaint’ 

Translation to modern English:

We want all beautiful creatures to reproduce themselves so

that beauty’s flower will not die out;

but as an old man dies in time,

he leaves a young heir to carry on his memory.

But you, concerned only with your own beautiful eyes,

feed the bright light of life with self-regarding fuel,

making beauty shallow by your preoccupation with your looks.

In this you are your own enemy, being cruel to yourself.

You, who are the world’s most beautiful ornament

and the chief messenger of spring,

are burying your gifts within yourself.

And, dear selfish one, because you decline to reproduce,

you are actually wasting that beauty.

Take pity on the world or else be the glutton

who devours, with the grave, what belongs to the world.

in the interactions between scientists in the pursuit of their goals,

this book by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar is a real eye-opener.

Much of the mistakes that are made behind the screens is unknown to the public.

Scientists do blunder from time to time, sometimes good results happen purely accidental…

Philosophy of science shows it all.

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

William Blake 1757-1827

Songs of Experience (1794)  ‘The Sick Rose’

Back in 1917 Bobby Pettit wore the same look that Harry wears so well. Pettit was a skinny kid from Crosby, Vermont, which is in the United States too. Some of the boys in the company figured Pettit had spent his tender years letting that Vermont maple syrup drip slowly on his forehead.

Also one of the dancing girls in that 1917 company was Sergeant Grogan. The boys in camp had all kinds of ideas about the sarge’s origin; good, sound, censorable ideas that I won’t bother to repeat.

Well, on Pettit’s first day in the ranks the sarge was drilling the platoon in the manual of arms. Pettit had a clever, original way of handling his rifle. When the sarge hollered “Right shoulder arms!” Bobby Pettit did left shoulder arms. When the sarge requested “Port arms!” Pettit complied with present arms. It was a sure way of attracting the sarge’s attention, and he came over to Pettit smiling.

“Well, dumb guy,” greeted the sarge, “what’s the matter with you?”

Pettit laughed. “I get a little mixed up at times,” he explained briefly.

“What’s your name, Bud?” asked the sarge.

“Bobby. Bobby Pettit.”

“Well, Bobby Pettit,” said the sarge, “I’ll just call ya Bobby. I always call them by their first names. And they all call me Mother. Just like they was at home.”

“Oh,” said Pettit.

Then it went off. Every fuse has two ends: the one that’s lighted and the one that’s clubby with T.N.T.

“Listen, Pettit!” boomed the sarge. “I ain’t running no fifth grade. You’re in the Army, dumb guy. You’re supposed t’know ya ain’t got two left shoulders and that port arms ain’t present arms. Wutsa matter with ya? Ain’tcha got no brains?”

“I’ll get the hang of it,” Pettit predicted.

The next day we had practice in tent pitching and pack making. When the sarge came around to inspect, it developed that Pettit hadn’t bothered to hammer the tent pegs slightly below the surface of the ground. Observing the subtle flaw, the sarge, with one yank of his hand, collapsed entirely Bobby Pettit’s little canvas home.

“Pettit,” cooed the sarge. “You are…without a doubt…the dumbest…the stoopidest…the clumsiest gink I ever seen. Are ya nuts, Pettit? Wutsa matter with ya? Ain’tcha got no brains?”

Pettit predicted, “I’ll get the hang of it.”

Then everybody made up full packs. Pettit made up his like a veteran – just like one of the Boys in the Blue. Then the sarge came around to inspect. It was his cheery custom to pass in the rear of the men, and with a short, blugeon-like stroke or his forearm slam down on the regulation burden on the back of every mother’s son.

He came to Pettit’s pack. I’ll spare the details. I’ll just say that everything came apart save the last five segments in Bobby Pettit’s vertebrae. It was a sickening sound. The sarge came around to face Pettit, what was left of him.

“Pettit. I met lotsa dumb guys in my time,” related the sarge. “Lots of ‘em. But you, Pettit, you’re in a class by yourself. Because you’re the dumbest!”

Pettit stood there on his three feet.

“I’ll get the hang of it,” he manage to predict.

First day of target practice, six men at a time fired at six targets, prone position exclusively. The sarge passed up and down, examining firing positions.

“Hey, Pettit. Which eye are you lookin’ through?”

“I don’t know,” said Pettit. “The left, I guess.”

“Look through the right!” bellowed the sarge. “Pettit, you’re takin’ twenty years offa my life. Wutsa matter with ya? Ain’tcha got no brains?”

That was nothing. When, after the men had fired, the targets were rolled in, there was a gay surprise for all. Pettit had fired all his shots at the target of the man on his right.

The sarge almost had an attack of apoplexy. “Pettit,” he said, “you got no place in this man’s army. You got six feet. You got six hands. Everybody else only got two!”

“I’ll get the hang of it,” said Pettit.

“Don’t say that to me again. Or I’ll kill ya. I’ll akchally kill ya, Pettit. Because I hatecha, Pettit. You hear me? I hatecha!”

“Gee,” said Pettit. “No kidding?”

“No kidding, brother,” said the sarge.

“Wait’ll I get the hang of it,” said Pettit. “You’ll see. No kidding. Boy, I like the Army. Someday I’ll be a colonel or something. No kidding.”

Naturally I didn’t tell my wife that our son, Harry, reminds me of Bob Pettit back in ‘17. But he does nevertheless. In fact, the boy is even having sergeant trouble at Fort Iroquois. It seems, according to my wife, that Fort Iroquois nurses to its bosom one of the toughest, meanest first sergeants in the country. There is no necessity, declares my wife, in being mean to the boys. Not that Harry’s complained. He likes the Army, only he just can’t seem to please this terrible first sergeant. Just because he hasn’t got the hang of it yet.

And the colonel of this regiment. He’s no help at all, my wife feels. All he does is walk around and look important. A colonel should help the boys, see to it that mean first sergeants don’t take advantage of the boys, destroy their spirit. A colonel, my wife feels, should do more than just walk around the place.

Well, a few Sundays ago the boys at Fort Iroquois put on their first spring parade. My wife and I were there in the reviewing stand, and with a yelp that nearly took my hat off she picked out our Harry as he marched along.

“He’s out of step,” I told my wife.

“Oh, don’t be that way,” said she.

“But he is out of step,” I said.

“I suppose that’s a crime. I suppose he’ll be shot for that. See! He’s in step again. He was only out for a minute.”

Then, when the parade was over and the men had been dismissed, First Sergeant Grogan came over to say hello. “How do, Mrs. Pettit.”

“How do you do,” said my wife, very chilly.

“Think there’s hope for our boy, sergeant?” I asked.

“Not a chance,” he said. “Not a chance, colonel.”

Collier’s, July 12, 1941

Is the sublime a fact about nature or art, or both? Is the sublime a property of the work… or is it less in the work than in the soul or character of the genius who produces the work?

Or could we say that the sublime is an extraordinary experience brought about the power of the perceiver, and thus a testimony not to the work or to the author but to something in the reader?

‘Go on,’ I said, ‘let us hear your brief philosophy.’

‘What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student’s heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to attain it. For his part, the teacher recognizes and encourages the fire in the student, and responds to it by burning with an intenser light. Thus together the two of them rise to a higher realm. So to speak’. 

J.M.Coetzee, Summertime, Scenes from Provincial Life (2009) p. 163 London: Harvill Secker