More specifically concerning: isaiah berlin
an antique fashion shows
3 April 2017, around 6.49.
The cover was off-putting. A boy in a garden, glancing slyly back at an illicit meeting, in the unctuous watercolors so popular for mass market literary paperbacks of a certain age. I refer, of course, to a Penguin edition of First Love, translated by Isaiah Berlin, which, as a book, rather reminded me (not to […]
recursus
29 March 2021, around 8.01.
Isaiah Berlin makes a decision.
stalking horses and other specters
2 April 2021, around 5.31.
Paul Nash, Stalking Horse (black and white negative, 1941), presented by the Paul Nash Trust to the Tate in 1970 CC-BY-NC-ND. The experience in which we meet specters or let them come visit us remains indestructible and undeniable. The most cultivated, the most reasonable, the most nonbelieving people easily reconcile a certain spiritualism with reason. […]
right round
14 April 2024, around 10.23.
Anyone who refuses to grasp the fact that this book contains many traps and multiple, deliberately intended meanings, or who has not managed to find somebody possessing the requisite qualifications and skills not to get hopelessly lost in its pages, should immediately give up all ambition of publishing it in a foreign language, thereby leaving […]
the frond
22 May 2024, around 10.33.
Words are the living carriers of feeling – only pedants and scholars dilute them with analysis or kill them with devitalising formulae. A word is the stamp of life – the richer the better. —Isaiah Berlin (‘The Magus of the North’ in Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p. 396)
Adversaria (15)
30 June 2024, around 4.16.
‘To fail in everything, it is true, will always remain possible. Nothing will ever give us any insurance against this risk, still less against this feeling’ —Derrida (Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, p. 19) ‘He is constantly rediscovered and as constantly laid aside. He remains unreadable and unread’ —Isaiah Berlin (‘Vico: Philosophical Ideas’ in […]
gutsiness
12 August 2024, around 10.45.
…if we are to understand their world, we must try to project ourselves into minds very remote from our own and endowed with these unfamiliar powers. A world in which men naturally talk of the lip of a cup, the teeth of a rake, the mouth of a river, a neck of land, handfuls of […]