#4.2.1

[thesebloodydays]

🎵Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?🎵

[centrifuge-politics]

Brick Club 4.2.1

I started this chapter freshly annoyed with Marius but very quickly found myself realizing how blinded I’ve been by the authorial lens I’ve been peering through. I’m more annoyed now that it took me this long to strip away Hugo’s Romantic-colored glasses in regard to Marius. It was less what new information I gained and more I found the right combination of story elements, mixing the secret understanding-Marius-Pontmercy sauce.

The Gorbeau raid should have clarified some broader truths for Marius, even if it left him with a more numerous yet narrower set of questions than he had when he started. The thing is, he was happy with his nebulous fantasy of what could be, but when actually faced with real answers to real questions, he shuts down entirely. I was ready and able to castigate Marius for falling short of self-awareness yet again, but then Hugo kept talking.

“He had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labour; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.” Hello, alienation. Actual physical distance from alienating labor makes you realize how mentally and emotionally distant you had already been from it. You were only doing it because you needed the money, the capitalist demands of productivity were killing any outside satisfaction you may have gleaned from it. Hugo then claims: “Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie its pleasure. To replace thought by reverie is to confound poison with nourishment” and Marius is falling into such a trap. Ok, I’ll bite, I’ve criticized him for this very thing many times (and pointed out this is likely a byproduct of profound alienation and isolation). Hugo appears to agree, identifying reverie and labor as having an explicitly inverse correlation. But suddenly there’s a new flavor here, and it’s not working. Hugo not only claims correlation, but jumps to extrapolate causation: “Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to fall entirely from thought into reverie!” An excess of reverie must cause a lack of labor (which can only result in suicide or crime and, oh, I’ll get to that). Except…no, that isn’t how systems work. Individuals don’t allow themselves to be alienated, it’s an inherent aspect of the society they exist in. Hugo has picked out a thread and declared himself done, but I intend to sit here and pull it. Let’s talk about capitalism and mental illness.

This is going to be a Long Post(tm) as I try to construct an appropriate lens to view this chapter through. Light content warning for discussion of suicide (mostly in an academic and historic context) and talk of mental illness.

His attempted example of Escousse and Lebras becomes its own counterexample with little effort. Victor Escousse and Auguste Lebras were poets and playwrights who committed suicide together after their play, Raymond, was a failure, declared guilty of an “excess of reverie” by Hugo. Honoré de Balzac said, “Escousse and Lebras have died, like many young people, from the disenchantment of their time. They died because they found nothing to do in this world, in the midst of this society, as the last forty years have done to us.” Well, that’s kind of right but for all the wrong reasons. They didn’t have “nothing to do,” both writers were actively doing labor. They were barely twenty years old and had produced multiple works each. They both had invested their sense of self so deeply in their labor, that’s its failure became a failure of their very beings. This is doubly crushing in a (capitalist) system that primarily values you for your labor! I’d be fucking disenchanted. The problem is both Hugo and Balzac have the entirely wrong idea of what is the cause and what is the effect. Reverie and disenchantment aren’t affecting people’s labor, the system of labor is so alienating and exploitative that people are turning to suicide or crime as their only answer to society.

I emphasize the connection to labor because Hugo does so, but there’s a host of other social influences we could consider in interpreting this vague notion of reverie. Emilie Durkheim’s Suicide categorizes the motivations for suicide by degrees of social integration and moral regulation, and if I wanted to lean entirely into that, I could say revolutionary France is a petri dish of anomie, a societal state of low moral regulation, meaning society lacks a foundational set of norms, often due to rapid change on a societal level, good or bad. Anomic suicides are characterized by a sense of alienation and a lack of purpose and are common in the wake of significant social upheaval.

So...I said I was talking about mental illness and..I haven’t really. I mean, I have but I’ve mostly talked around it, alienation and anomie and bullshit. I’ve rewritten this section multiple times now, trying to find a way to ground this to Marius and to me, honestly. There’s a balance that needs to be struck between the social and the individual and mileage will vary. Hugo treats reverie like an actual drug, an external indulgence that you either partake in or not. It’s characterized too much as an individual weakness of character. Yet at the same time, Durkheim’s interpretation is too reliant on broader social explanations. Hugo is pretty dismissive of class, but we know now that mental illness disproportionately affects the working class. But it’s also a product of individual brain chemistry, my seratonin whatever doesn’t give a shit about about societal moral regulation. Ugh, I just don’t know what the right balance is and it’s impossible to filter that past my own experiences with mental illness. Maybe I’ve successfully presented some contextual space to move around in.

With all of this in mind, let’s look back to Marius without the easy excuses of voluntary reverie or even labor clouding our perspective. Marius is way ahead of us, having sampled and discarded meaningless labor entirely. “He had lost the capability of work, and of moving firmly toward a definite end, but he was more clear-sighted and correct than ever…His judgement, almost detached from hope, soared and floated aloft.” Marius isn’t high on the drug of reverie, he’s dissociating. The Romantic glorification of ecstasy and melancholy—“The soul which loves and which suffers is in the sublime state”—is disguising the fact that Marius is profoundly depressed (likely has been for awhile) and, having lost his few coping mechanisms, is spiraling. His father was wrong about Thenardier, Ursula The Lark may not be the innocent girl he thought she was, the facts of his carefully balanced world of possibilities have been overturned. If I were inhabiting Durkheim, I would peg Marius as the poster child of anomic suicide. The possibilities before him are so unbounded that they’re overwhelming and he’s lost every set of foundational values he’s ever held on to. Even the value of transcending values has turned on him, his decision to stay neutral in the Gorbeau raid weighing on him just as heavily as the prospect of having chosen a side.

The clearest indication of this is the very end of the chapter. Grasping for anything to hold on to, Marius comes across the Field of the Lark and, through the desperate logic of a depressed mind, decides this is Ursula’s field and substitutes his daily walks in the Luxembourg Garden with visits to this obscure field. “The whole mind condenses abruptly around one idea, and ceases to be capable of any other perception.” In this state, he clings to the unfixed ideal of The Lark even more than before, needing a touchstone that can neither be confirmed nor denied. Schrodinger’s coping mechanism.

[umeed-e-sehr]

4.2.1

Marius and how he comes to his moral decisions is still puzzling to me. His narrow focus on his debt owed to Thenardier despite him being a witness to the violent robbery that Thenardier orchestrated has very little effect on him. He borrows money after having thought really badly of borrowing money during his own voluntary poverty some time ago, but now feels no qualms about borrowing to give to someone else. Marius seems to have very different standards by which he would judge other people and which he applies to himself.

Of course, he is borrowing from Courfeyrac, who is a good friend in more ways than one to Marius ‘I have come to sleep with you’ Pontmercy, and someone who would never question where the money was going or ask for it back but paying it to Thenardier after he just committed a violent robbery seems wrong. I am also annoyed about Marius thinking that the villainous poor are worse than the villainous rich. 

He also doesn’t understand that he may be supporting a criminal in his activities? What is your moral code, Marius? He’s giving Thenardier money in prison, he’s involved in a transactional relationship with him, which is frustrating because Marius will do the same thing at the end of the book as well. He’s paying money to Thenardier each week, because of a perceived debt that his father owed but that debt wasn’t monetary in nature and so cannot really be paid with money, and Marius doesn’t really understand how to pay the debt. 

Also his father would not appreciate this, I’m sure. I think the bishop had somewhat of the right idea that it takes more than just giving money to change someone’s life, he was kind to Valjean as well when no one else had been and he kept being kind to him and giving him chances. Marius does not have that relationship with Thenardier to affect any change of that sort, he still won’t have that relationship at the end of the book, so it is really puzzling why he always decides to throw money at problems.

It is interesting that the narrative shrouds Marius in obscurity, uncertainty, darkness and having paths closed off to him, though he is still thinking more about the girl. He’s also only concerned about the girl and her father, because what he had assumed about them no longer holds true. Hugo also describes Marius’ daydreaming as something which has been taken to the extreme. A little daydreaming is good, but Marius has given up everything to daydream including work and has therefore become stagnant and stuck. It is interesting that without finding his love, Marius would be unable to come out of his stagnation and move towards progress, which is why it is not surprising that Marius did not notice or participate in the July Revolution, which Courfeyrac because of changing his house to come closer to the more political areas, almost certainly did. 

Hugo mentions that thought is useful, that has been a theme throughout, about contemplation being useful and compared to invisible work and also about the necessity for prayers. Marius has taken daydreaming about his love too far. She is compared to light and radiance for him, while he is currently in darkness and he is moving more and more towards dreams to the point of giving up everything else including work while moving back towards poverty. 

Marius is becoming more and more despondent about the girl and moving towards despair, resembling something of a depression, to the point of it being mentioned that ‘the day comes when you go out and drown yourself’, and also to mentions of two playwrights Escousse and Lebras who Donougher mentions made a suicide pact and killed themselves through suffocation. This seems to be a pretty heavy warning to Marius about his habits.

The field of lark is associated with pretty sinister happenings as well. Ulbach, a young man murdered a pretty young shepherdess because he was not able to marry her at the same exact spot Marius has chosen.

Also Marius Pontmercy is pretty goth to be walking in a deserted field at night where a murder also happened just for the association to the lark which he thinks might lead to her?    

[learningservicebuttmath]

I've been slowing setting up this lesson during prep and after school for a month. 18 posters with the outline. Students will graph the mascot and fill it in together in teams of 8ish

[intj-greenwords]

Tolstoy has only one TED talk.

And he will keep giving it as long as we keep listening.

[pokemonblog]

New Pokémon TV update version 4.2.1 now live on iOS, Android and other compatible devices

New Pokémon TV update version 4.2.1 now live on iOS, Android and other compatible devices:

The latest version of Pokémon TV is now available via web browsers and various set-top apps for Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV and Android TV-compatible devices. You can visit watch.pokemon.com or download the updated app on your TV-connected device today. What’s New in Version 4.2.1 (iOS) Bug fixes What’s New on Android Bug fixes Source: Pokemon.com

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[allmoddedapk]

Injustice 2 Mod 4.2.1 Apk [Unlimited Mod]

New Post has been published on https://www.allmoddedapk.com/injustice-2-mod-apk/

Injustice 2 Mod 4.2.1 Apk [Unlimited Mod]

Injustice 2 4.2.1 Mod Apk  – Injustice 2 Action Games with Data + Trailer + Regular Version + Immortal Mod Separately Offered

Injustice 2 Mod is the second version of the popular and exciting game of Injustice from the studio of Warner Bros., the well-known name for Android , released a few hours ago for free on Google Play, and again, as always, we decided as soon as possible. Time and for the first time in Iran Introduce yourself to the action and fighting game enthusiasts and rejoice you again! Injustice: Gods Among Us 2 continues the story of the previous version; in the first episode we saw Joker plant a bomb in Metropolis and poison Superman, killing the superhero Lois Lane and his son.

After this, Superman decides to set up his own dictatorship, and we see a confrontation between the Batman and Superman groups! Part two tells the story of Batman and his allies trying to get back to Earth. In the meantime, he must grapple with those who seek to revive the Superman regime, and watch for the new threat that has arisen. Batman, Superman, Aquaman, Supergirl, Gorilla Grad and Atracids are among the characters in the game!

[allmoddedapk]

Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team Mod 4.2.1 Apk [God Mod/Weak Enemy]

New Post has been published on https://www.allmoddedapk.com/captain-tsubasa-dream-team-mod-apk/

Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team Mod 4.2.1 Apk [God Mod/Weak Enemy]

Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team 4.2.1 Mod Apk [God Mod/Weak Enemy]

Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team is a popular and memorable Sports game from the KLab gaming studio for Android, which has been downloaded by Google users around the world for around 5 million times by now and upon your request. The latest update with the mods is available for download and is ahead of you! By installing Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team on your Android device, you can experience the mobile gamers with 3D graphics, the presence of Captain Subbas and other famous characters in the cartoon of footballers!

Choose your favorite and lovely football players from the football cartoon series and create a team of them, then race online with other users from all over the world, each of whom have a team for themselves, to play. Win victories and win medals! Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team’s Deathly Shots, Capt. Subbaja Ozora, Shoot the Bibi Kijurro Hyoga and all the extraordinary skills of the cartoon characters of the soccer players. There are also no interlaced, voices and screams! You will be able to live as a storyteller as a cartoon storyteller and enjoy the excitement! In the story mode, the game is when you’re still in the middle school and you’ll follow the story,