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February 2025

loose leash

7 February 2025, around 14.26.

My mind wanders from the moment, chasing down fragments and details, irrelevant to action, much as the dog likes to pause and sniff each frond and spore of the sword ferns that line the forest path. The vet at emergency services explains, in great detail that really contains no detail, the nature of the dog’s injury – a tear of the cranial cruciate ligament. ((We do not learn until the meeting with the surgeon, that the crux here is the crossing of the two ligaments in the joint, which is again neat, but not helpful for decision-making.)) The vet, tidy and a little tired, assumes no real knowledge of the particulars of canine anatomy, which is the efficient choice, and the distinction of cranial/caudal rather than anterior/posterior snags my attention (cauda, -ae, f., tail, my brain supplies unhelpfully). Thus, when I should be paying full attention to the breakdown of the estimate of the significant costs required to return the poor creature to near normal mobility (with the caveat that the other leg is likely to suffer the same injury in the next twelve months), I am instead thinking about how seldom lately I meaningfully encounter Latinities in daily life (usually, too, in a legal or medical context, which does not add to the attraction). The exception being Spinoza’s Ethics, for which I occasionally dabble with the original, although I am generally content to remain cribb’d in translation. This leads me to ponder, as the vet describes the potential surgery (which has since become actual), the affect of sorrow, tristitia, which Spinoza defines (I think) not as sadness per se, but as the reduction of the ability to act. The dog, then, is suffering the affect of sorrow, for she can no longer gambol as once she did; I suppose I, too, am suffering the affect of sorrow, but mostly I just feel a bit sad about it.

now you’re cooking

24 February 2025, around 7.36.

A handy reference for reading fiction that involves detailed descriptions of baking, roasting, and other oven-based cookery.

the shattered mirror

26 February 2025, around 4.04.

The last time I read Goce Smilevski’s Conversation with Spinoza, I had not read Spinoza. I was not particularly interested in Spinoza. I was interested in Balkan fiction. I suppose I still am interested in Balkan fiction(s), but I am also, now, more interested in Spinoza. It was thus something of surprise to find, when returning to Smilevski’s novel, that most of the parts I liked best were essentially quotations from or paraphrases of Spinoza’s works (mostly his Ethics, but also the letters). What I had thought was art, was in fact life.

I also found that my understanding of Spinoza had been shaped by the novel. The sense of the potential for a queer reading, the hazy mental image of Spinoza’s sketchbook, the power of cross-communication (the weight of meaning that cannot be shared, but that must be shared – I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Now I can go on.): I cannot tell how far these were my own reactions to reading the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise and how far they were recollections of the novel. What I had thought was life, was perhaps art.

At the end of Conversation with Spinoza, Spinoza visits his childhood home, which is occupied by a stranger, and is asked to look into the mirror that had reflected so many of the preoccupations of his youth. For some reason this recalls the image, which I’m certain I’ve read recently but cannot quite place, of a broken mirror, each fragment of which reflects not a part but the whole of the image. ((I think this is from an essay by Dubravka Ugrešić, but I haven’t been able to find it.))

Adversaria (23)

28 February 2025, around 4.27.

‘Men may come and men may go, but the truth of the multiplication table does not budge’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 29)

‘The carer, after all, also eats, wears clean clothes, washes herself. The more you read, the more Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be describing a radically sane life, rooted in the hour-by-hour reconciliation of responsibilities and pleasures, acts required and desired in the short and long term for the welfare of household, community and self’ —Sarah Moss (My Good Bright Wolf, p. 237)

‘But a single word is likely to say too little, or too much, or both too little and too much in different ways’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 49)

‘Fashion and the zeal of the literati would have us think that the specialist can to-day be spared, or degraded to a position subordinate to that of the seer. Almost all sciences owe something to dilettantes, often very valuable view-points. But dilettantism as a leading principle would be the end of science. He who yearns for seeing should go to the cinema’ —Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, p. 29)

‘It is better to be a man of calm wisdom than a fluttering fool, and better for one’s intelligence to be dry and bright than to be a victim of moist emotions; nevertheless the foolish and dissolute have their roles to play in the ever shifting universe, like everything else’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 109)

‘In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudæmonistic, not to say hedonistic, admxiture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational’ —Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, p. 53)

‘It is a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is quite easy to conceive of a person lunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goether, who all were men, it appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbors’ —Julien Benda (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington, p. 61).