Noticed today in Edmund Wilson's The Thirties, edited by Leon Edel, chapter "Washington, 1934":
[My infected nose became worse, and I had to go to the hospital. There I added to my discomfiture by reading Hegel's Philosophy of History.]
Given the quantity of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky that Wilson had read or was shortly to read, a bit of Hegel doesn't sound that bad.
The New York Times, writing a few weeks ago of a new documentary on Leonard Cohen, mentioned a phrase occurring in one of his songs, "the foothills of old age". I did not read the article through, or with full attention. But it appeared that the writer, or somebody the writer interviewed, found the phrase telling.
It occurred to me that there is an expression in Homer relating thresholds to old age, γήραος οὐδός. I found that the version of Liddell and Scott available at the Perseus project regards the phrase as meaning "the threshold that is old age", the threshold, that is, leading out of life. Autenrieth's Homeric lexicon supports this reading, as does Cunliffe's. So do the notes to the Oxford World Classics edition of The Republic. On the other hand, an abridged Liddell and Scott on the shelves says "the threshold or verge of old age". W. B. Stanford leaves the question open in the notes to his edition of The Odyssey.
The majority reading--that of the unabridged Liddell and Scott, Autenrieth, and Cunliffe--is distinctly less comforting. It brings to mind Byron's reply to birthday wishes from Thomas Moore: "D--n your nel mezzo cammin--you should say 'the prime of life,' a much more consoling expression." Certainly Stanford's reading is much more consoling.
Over the last several weeks, I read A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, as time and energy allowed. It offers a closely argued adaptation of the social contract theory, in opposition to the utilitarian ethics that had dominated English--or English-speaking--social thought since the days of Smith and Hume. There are pages that read as if something had been obscured in the revisions for the second edition; but the fault is likely in my reading. It will be a while before I return for a second reading, though, for A Theory of Justice takes up 500 pages before the index.
During some of this time, I found myself wanting to read, yet without the energy to concentrate on Rawls. One of the books I looked into was The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael F. Holt. This book runs to 950 pages before the notes, not quite 40 for every year of the party's existence, 1833 through 1856. It makes a curious contrast to A Theory of Justice, for while Rawls tells us how a constitutional democracy might arrive at just rules and execute them, Holt tells us how one such democracy operated: with a concern for power and patronage at least as strong as its concern for abstract (or any other) justice. One must keep track of Hunker Democrats, Barn Burner Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Native Americans (not the people who were here before Columbus), canal board and customs house patronage, and so on. It is not the easiest book to read through. It is not dense with argument and inference, rather it is crammed with facts, not always organized in proportion to their importance.
On Friday, I noticed a blog post by Tim Bray on the deficits in machine learning (ML). One of the cases he mentioned was Google's occasional tendency to place wanted emails in the Spam folder. On reading this, it occurred to me that I had recently found an email from a friend in the Spam folder. I had then marked that email as not spam, or anyway moved it to the in box, and hoped this would serve as a hint. I checked, though, and found seven such emails going back about three weeks.
Having moved these back to the in box, I had a look at the Gmail settings. It turns out that there is an option under "Filters and Blocked Addresses" to provide an email and use the setting "Never send it to Spam." The lesson seems to be that Gmail users should periodically check the Spam folder, which holds messages for one month only, and that they should remember that "Filters and Blocked Addresses" can be used to add never-blocked addresses.
It has been quite a while since I last read through Middlemarch, and when I think of the book it is more likely to be in connection with electoral shenanigans than with anything else. Yet I remember that somewhere in Henry Adams's letters he wrote to a friend that he, Adams, was turning into a dreadful Casaubon, taking George Eliot's unfortunate cleric, author of the projected Key to All Mythologies, as the type of the pedant.
The other day, I followed up a reference in Peter Green's Antioch to Actium to see where exactly one finds the attribution to Callimachus of the dictum "big book, big evil." The note says Athenaeus 2.72a. Of the Perseus project's three versions of Athenaeus's The Deipnosophists, the first had the corresponding numbering. But where one expects items at Perseus to be "chunked" by book, or by chapter or (if Biblical) verse, the first version of The Deipnosophists on Perseus, is by "casaubonpage". This was something of a surprise.
It appears, though, that the "casaubonpage" takes its name from the French philologist Isaac Casaubon (1579-1614). Wikipedia says that the editing of and commentary on The Deipnosophists was Isaac Casaubon's magnum opus. Judging from what I see on Perseus, either the commentary was large or the pages were small.
