Reviews and News:
Publius Decius Mus revealed.
* *
Phillip Lopate on Hemingway’s letters: “The publication of Ernest Hemingway’s complete correspondence is shaping up to be an astonishing scholarly achievement. We are already on the third of a projected seventeen volumes, minimum, which will include in their entirety every surviving letter, postcard and telegram sent by Hemingway. Meticulously edited, with shrewd introductory summaries and footnotes tracking down every reference, the series brings into sharp focus this contradictory, alternately smart and stupid, blustering, fragile man who was also a giant of modern literature.”
* *
Lost continent discovered: “An ancient lost continent is lying at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, underneath the island of Mauritius, according to a new study led by a geologist from South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand.”
* *
Eric Ormsby on the possibilities of a Muslim Enlightenment: “De Bellaigue’s title turns on a paradox. We seldom, if ever, think of Islam, at least in its current form, as exemplifying, let alone promoting, ‘enlightenment’. Yet his intention ‘is to demonstrate that non-Muslims and even some Muslims who urge an Enlightenment on Islam are opening the door on a horse that bolted long ago’. He goes even further when he states that ‘for the past two centuries Islam has been going through a pained yet exhilarating transformation – a Reformation, an Enlightenment and an Industrial Revolution all at once.’ This seems to me somewhat overstated. After all, one of the obstacles to any reformation within Islam is not solely the intransigence of its well-ensconced clergy, both Sunni and Shia, but also the simple fact that the emergence of Islam itself represented a reformation, at least in the eyes of its adherents. It grew partly as a reformation of what the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers saw as the distortions of monotheism present in both Christianity and Judaism. Many Christian doctrines, such as that of the Incarnation or the Trinity, scandalised early Muslims because they infringed upon the overriding conception of God’s absolute oneness.”
* *
A. E. Smith reviews Paul Goldberg’s novel The Yid: “How do we approach The Yid? Paul Goldberg’s surreal fable is about a small group of semi-geriatric Jews and their various hangers-on who set out on a quixotic mission to assassinate the aging Joseph Stalin before he can carry out a monstrous pogrom. It would be easiest perhaps to treat it as a polemic – an indictment of the hypocrisy, the cruelty and, of course, the Jew-hatred that underlay so much of the Soviet enterprise. Certainly, the rage is there. The novel vividly evokes the paranoia, the feral children orphaned by war and by the endless purges, the brilliant young artists who disappeared into ‘the gold mines of Magadan, the bogs of Narva…the Auschwitz sky.’ But Goldberg, a Soviet émigré himself, is too smart to leave it at that, and too good a writer.”
* *
Thief claims he threw stolen paintings worth $100 million in the trash.
* *
Essay of the Day:
What was so unique about Pascal? Ann Hartle argues in Modern Age that it’s this: He “rejects Aristotle, but he does not embrace modern reason; he breaks with medieval theology, but he does not separate philosophy from faith”:
“Pascal was fourteen years old when Descartes’s Discourse on Method was published in 1637. Like Descartes, Pascal was a great mathematician and scientist. At sixteen, he wrote an essay on conic sections, and later he worked out the foundation for the infinitesimal calculus, the integral calculus, and the calculus of probabilities, all in advance of the accomplishments of Newton and Leibniz. His study of atmospheric pressure resulted in what is known as Pascal’s Law. He also built the first computer, a calculating machine, which is still on display in a Paris museum. You may remember a programming language that was named for him. So, he was very much a participant in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.
“Pascal, like Descartes, believed that the medieval Scholastic approach to nature was gravely flawed. In this respect, he accepted the Cartesian break with the tradition of scientific inquiry dating back to Aristotle and carried through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. However, unlike Descartes, Pascal sees very clearly the limits of modern science and of the kind of knowledge that can be arrived at through the scientific method. For modern scientific reason, we do not know anything through a direct encounter between the mind and the world. Experience is not what is given to us by the world; it is structured by the categories of the mind and the rules of the scientific method. The center of philosophy shifts, then, from the contemplation of Being, including God, to the ‘I think’ that is the first principle of Descartes’s philosophy. In other words, modern reason is the reversal of the mind’s relationship to the world and the transformation of the meaning of truth. Truth is made, not discovered, by the mind.
* *
Photo: Crown Vista House
* *
Poem: Jane Hirshfield, “Amor Fati”
