Lingua franca et jocundissima

Prosody.

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How many scholars today are concerned with ultimate questions--the great puzzle of existence? Crawling around in the ant farm of academia, so many of us are forced to spend so much of our time on such narrow topics that we forget the mystery of the world that originally attracted us, like some invisible magnet, to the byzantine maze of knowledge. And in those moments in which we do manage, despite ourselves, to express a sense of wonder in writing, our colleagues bring us up short with sobering criticism, like a sharp slap on the face to an idle daydreamer

Greg Urban

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[Wiseman:] Do you often think of death? [Lévi-Strauss:] Often. [Wiseman:] With serenity? [Lévi-Strauss:] I don’t summon death, but I no longer see very clearly what my place in this world is.

“The Setting Sun,” an interview between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Boris Wiseman

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Love of truth is not a correct form of expression. Truth is not an object of love. It is not an object at all. What one loves is something which exists, which one thinks on, and which may hence be an occasion for truth or error. A truth is always the truth with reference to something. Truth is the radiant manifestation of reality. Truth is not the object of love but reality. To desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality. To desire contact with a piece of reality is to love. We desire truth only in order to love in truth. We desire to know the truth about what we love. Instead of talking about love of truth, it would be better to talk about the spirit of truth in love.

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

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I use 'minding' instead of 'knowing' to preserve the function of knowing as caring, or minding.

Sylvan Tomkins in Affect, Imagery Consciousness

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adorno seizing in his grave

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Away from home, my partner and I are on holiday on a resort on an island. Mealtimes bring everyone together. We enter the dining room, where we face many tables places alongside each other... I face what seems like a shocking image. In front of me, on the tables, couples are seated. Table after table, couple after couple, taking the same form: one many sitting by one woman around a 'round table,' facing each other 'over' the table... I am shocked by the sheer force of the regularity of that which is familiar: how each table presents the same form of sociality as the form of the heterosexual couple. How is it possible, with all that is possible, that the same form is repeated again and again? How does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present?

Sara Ahmed, ‘Queer Phenomenology’

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By day one walks around with a burned-out head — there are beautiful ruins everywhere there on the mountains and one feels one ought to become as beautiful, too...

Kafka, in a letter to Milena Jesenská

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"If all plots are plots against authority, that authority is precisely that which creates the scene of its own destruction, that all stories necessarily recount by their very existence the subversion of the father, of the gods, of consciousness, of order, of expectations, or of meaning.

Barbara Johnson, “Melville’s Fist”

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I have... at last laid my hands upon my philosophy of anonymity... freedom; which now I find makes it quite easy for me to take life much more strongly and steadily. I will not be 'famous,' 'great.' I wil go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded... October has been a bad month; but might have been much worse without my philosophy.

Virginia Woolf (10/29/1933 diary entry)

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Time’s impatience transforms everyday experience into the experience of a hierarchy of positions.

Jacques Rancière, “In What Time Do We Live”

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Digital technology obscures, in so many ways. It obscures at the interface level, by making complex tasks opaque behind seamless, glass-smooth interactions. And it obscures at the software level too, it is made of code, unreadable to most, inaccessible at source... The paradox of that invisibility, which I have been exploring for some time, is that while the digital defaults to illegibilty, it also renders that operation more legible to those who can read it, who do have access, because its logical nature, the nature of its operation, means it must be written down. Unlike previous forms of power, intention must be explicitly encoded into the machine. This intention can be hidden, but it’s always present. Neither good nor bad, nor neutral; invisible, but never wholly illegible.

James Bridle, “Homo Sacer”

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I beheld and still behold in anger and agony the eagerness of the world to throw piles of shit on those of us who want to savage or simply cannot help but savage the norms that so desperately need savaging.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts