Idling

 In Anthony Kenny's translation of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, Book II, Chapter 1 I noticed the clause

in sleep the soul is not active but idling.

I think of idling as something that an automobile motor does at traffic lights. The OED shows that the verb "to idle" was in use long before it was applied to motors, in "idle over". Still, having driven a lot, it is hard for me to separate "idling" from the automotive sense. I think of The Waste Land, the violet hour when "the human engine waits/Like a taxi, throbbing, waiting." (I think that mechanics might call the throbbing a rough idle and prescribe some adjustments.)

The Perseus Project shows that the word that Kenny renders as  "idling" is "ἀργία", which Liddell and Scott do give as "idle". I suppose that "idling" is preferable here to "idle", as implying that the sleeping soul is doing something, for example dreaming.

 

Midgley Corner

 Early last year, I was walking on New Hampshire Avenue NW, approaching its intersection with 16th St. A woman on the sidewalk was photographing a bird, so i paused not to be in her way. Having paused, I looked at the Little Free Library to my left, and found The Essential Mary Midgley. Since I had had it in mind to read some Midgley, I took the volume along. I was not disappointed.

Yesterday nobody was obstructing my way there, but I stopped to look into the same Little Free Library. A cover with white and red lettering on dark background was hard to read, but proved to be Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature by Midgley. Of course I took it. My first dip into the book turned up a passage that I had read already; the passage reminded me why I taken it.

 There are a few books ahead of Beast and Man on my reading list, but I will read it this summer. I wonder whether I should make a practice of visiting this Little Free Library more often. For years I passed near it once or twice a week. 

Diction

 This week, a movie review in The New York Times astonished me with the assertion that a particular movie "packs profound gravitas". Somehow the expression does not carry conviction.

Then on Friday, a summary of a new book referred to "the enduring chill" that Biden loyalists cast over the Democratic Party. After thinking about this for a moment, I checked my copy of Flannery O'Connor's Collected Stories, and indeed "The Enduring Chill" is one. Did the writer use the expression from an old memory of the story? There is nothing in the story that at all bears on intimidation of a political party.

Lightly Clothed, or Not Clothed

 In The Blithedale Romance, the narrator relates the attrition of the city clothes brought to the country:

So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil,--"Ara nudus; sere nudus, "--which as Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt to astonish the women-folks.

Indeed the plan was Virgil's:  the expression occurs on line 299 on the first Georgic. T.E. Page, the spoilsport editor of the Macmillan edition of the Eclogues and Georgics, says that nudus here means "lightly clothed". Likewise Mather and Hewitt, editors of an edition of The Anabasis tell one that the Great King's concubine, fleeing gymnē when the camp was overrun, went "lightly clothed". One might suppose that the editors had previously had to correct sniggering schoolboys.

 The readings for the Third Sunday of Easter included a passage from John 21, telling of Peter tucking up his clothes and jumping from the boat to swim ashore. The Koine is gymnos, the Vulgate offers nudus. The current Lectionary, using the New American Bible, says that Peter was lightly clothed. But the Authorized, Revised Authorized, and the Jerusalem Bible all say "naked". Luther says "nackt". I am no scholar in these matters, but I would vote for the current Lectionary. For one thing, it apparently was an over-tunic that Peter tied around him.

 

Memory Consumption

 This past week I happened to notice that Chrome will show a tab's memory use when the mouse pointer is on the top of a tab. My work email tab used something like 800 MB. When I checked just now, the memory consumed was 431 MB, which seems a lot but is less startling. On the other hand, the home page of the Gutenberg Project, when first opened, uses less than 30 MB; opening a book will considerably increase this.

 The machine on which I write this has 24 GB of memory--that 400 MB Gmail tab amounts to less than two percent of the machine's memory. Still it is interesting for one who grew up in the days when megabytes of RAM were few and expensive to see this.

The Chicago Manual of Style

 Somehow I am on the mailing list of the University of Chicago Press, which informs me that the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style is now available. I was surprised at the number, but find that the last one I purchased, more than 40 years ago, was the 13th edition. At the time, I had the 12th edition (1969).

In those days, I worked as a copy editor, and the manual was one I used a good deal. I preferred it to the Government Printing Office (GPO) Style Manual. But I started to wonder about my reliance on it, when I encountered

Never mind the Manual--it isn't holy scripture; I haven't joined a religious sect and taken an oath to be ruled by a book.

in Jacques Barzun's essay "Dialogue in C-Sharp" (collected in A Word or Two Before You Go).

And now I think my copies of the Manual of Style are long gone. I have moved three times since I bought the 13th edition, we have lost books to plumbing failures,  I have occasionally and reluctantly purged my shelves, and no doubt the manuals were among those that were misplaced, drenched, or given away. The GPO Style Manual I know I had twenty years ago--I brought it to the office to show somebody the excerpt from John that leads off the foreign-language sections. But no such memory attaches to the Chicago manuals.

I have not edited for pay in many years. The books left over from those days are an early edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, Gowers's The Complete Plain Words, Graves and Hodges's The Reader Over Your Shoulder, maybe the Fowlers' The King's English. But the best practical advice, in some ways, appears in Stendhal's autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard, as the advice he wished that he had received from Count Daru when young and first working in the imperial bureaucracy:

When you have a letter to write, think well about what you want to say, and then about the shade of reproof or of command which the minister who will sign your letter will want to convey. When you've made up your mind, write boldly.

 

So Is Man Constituted

 The effect of the newly announced tariffs brought to mind a passage in Egon Friedell's The Cultural History of Modernity, about the relative effect of heavy taxation and religious persecution in motivating the Netherlands' revolt against Spain in the 16th Century:

 This is curious: but so is man constituted: he will suffer attacks on his freedom, his beliefs, indeed even his life sooner than on his income, his wealth, his business. In a similar way the Jacobins, whose administration remarkably resembles in its stupidity and barbarism the otherwise so different Spanish regime, brought on their own fall not through their suppression of all free opinion, their mockery of religion, and their mass executions, but through their attack on private property and their destructive effect on trade, industry, and the value of money. It was not their guillotines that brought them down, but their assignats

A Bit of Pedantry

Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article--the cover article, "Where Do Nazi Bones Belong?", about the work of the Volksbund, a German group that locates, documents, and reburies the remains of  German soldiers of World War II originally buried where they fell, in haste and without markers. The article has much of interest to say of this work, and of the conflicts that have arisen within the Volksbund between the more moderate members and those whose nationalism does not necessarily stop with the AfD.

However, I was brought to a stop by an account of a futile search for bodies in France. The soldiers supposed to have been buried near Meymac were said in the article to have been captured by the Macquis on June 8, 1945, "in the last days of the war." But June 8, 1945 was after the last days of the war in Europe, almost exactly a month after.

The magazine gives a picture of the author, who appears to be in his mid-forties at the oldest. I do not suppose the memory of World War II would have been the presence in his childhood that was in those of the baby boomers. Still, I'd have expected the editorial structure of the Times to include somebody who could more nearly identify the date of V-E day.

Bad Garlic

 During the last several years we have found what seems a high proportion of bad garlic. I consider garlic bad when it gets old enough to have shrunk in from the paper, so that its cloves take on a rubbery texture. I consider it worse when the clove is turning brown, worst when it has started to mold. We tend to use some garlic every week, so it is not as if we are letting a head sit for a month to molder.

This is not a failure in a single source. We buy garlic at the farmers market and at the grocery store. Both seem to sell us inferior garlic sometimes.

It seems to me that it was once less usual to find garlic gone bad. My recollection is of firm heads of garlic in the kitchen, ropes of garlic at friends' houses that looked firm. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps those ropes were in poor shape, and I discarded as much garlic then as I would now.

Lost

 In the chapter "Writing" of Reading and Writing, Robertson Davies wrote

The worst thing that can happen to a writer is to draw in upon himself and his work until he knows nobody except other writers; he is then reduced to the literary desperation of writing a book about a man who is writing a book, and when he does that we know he is finished.

On St. Patrick's Day 2006, near the Gallery Place Metro, someone from Solas Nua offered me the choice of one of two or three books by Irish authors, and I chose the novel There Is a House by Kieron Connolly.  I took it home, looked at it, and put in on the bookshelf. It stayed there a good while.

Recently I noticed it and thought that I might as well read it: it is about 200 pages long, and the pages are not large. I have read it, and think that in part it is subject to Davies's criticism. The theme of the narrator's writer's block is varied if not improved by chapters of convalescence from alcoholic benders. 

Having said that, I will say that I don't believe that Connolly knew only other writers, though I can imagine that this might be easier in Ireland than in some other countries (and might not imply an especially narrow circle of acquaintances). I will also say that if Solas Nua were to appear suddenly next week and offer me another choice of books, I might take one of Connolly's if one were in the mix.

Tangible Reality

 Last week, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section gave about 3/4 of a page to an excerpt from a book that concerns Joan Didion, the Mansons, etc. I read the excerpt distractedly, until I came to a sentence beginning "Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969..." That stopped me.

Just above my left ankle there is a scar from a mishap in the late summer of 1969. The reality that contributed to the wound was certainly tangible enough. There are plenty of other tangible encounters I remember from that summer that left no scar but were sufficiently pleasant, unpleasant, or in any case significant, to stay in the memory. I imagine that most humans born by 1963 can say the same.

If in place of  "barely tangible" the author wrote "multiform and confusing", I could understand the sentence. As it stands, I can't.

 

Timber

 While we were out walking on Sunday, my wife and I had the following exchange:

W.:,"What does 'Zimmer' mean in German?"
I: "room". 
W.: "What does Zimmermann mean?"
I: "Carpenter. Hmm."

 A look at the Grimms' dictionary shows that "Zimmer" derives from roots cognate with the English "timber", and originally applied to buildings of wood and to wood suitable for building, then to portions of such a building. So a Zimmermann would be just who one needed to build a Zimmer.

And I don't know why it occurred to my wife to ask.

 

 

Certificates, Again

 It turns out that our network manager signed us up for certificates for the period 2013 through 2026. Evidently this means that we are grandfathered in for the one-year certificate duration. One of his successors received and verified the request for 2025-2026, then sent me the certificate bundle. I have applied the certificates to most of the servers that need it: two are very slow to come up after the installation and restart of the processes, and so are waiting for an early morning.

Suddenly the weeks leading up to mid-March are much less stressful. We have another year to think about how we will manage with the three-month certificates.

Certificates

Web server certificates used to last one for three years, I recall. Our network administrator would send a request to GoDaddy, get back a certificate, and it would be up to others of us to install it, possibly with some change of format, on the assorted servers. I thought that the three-year span was convenient. It gave one enough time to forget the procedures, but with proper documentation that didn't matter.

At some point, GoDaddy shortened the life of certificates to one year. That was tolerable. Last year, I read that the standard length of certificates would be three months, and so it is. This is great if you can set up LetsEncrypt with the http challenge, and let the certbot take over. If you can't, then life becomes somewhat more complicated. I suppose that we will figure out the dns challenge instead. But I wish we didn't have to. Is it really plausible to suppose that a certificate can be defeated in one year but not in three months? And there are proposals to shorten the lifetimes still further. Oh, dear.

Present-Day American Usage

 Galen Strawson's The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume gives page numbers for its quotations from Hume in the manner (T 266) or (E 153), referring to particular Clarendon Press editions of Hume's works. It happens that I have the edition he uses for A Treatise of Human Nature, which in Part II, Causation in the Treatise, I did refer to at times. Having reached, Part III, Causation in the Enquiry, I went to find my copy, doubting I had the one used. I did not: I had an edition printed by Bobbs-Merrill.

Curiously, Bobb-Merrill printed it as An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. On page lv, "A Note on the Text" concludes

Spelling and punctuation have been revised throughout to conform to present-day American usage.

And so it has. For example the edition replaces with "insure" the "ensure" in

The poorest artificer, who labours alone, expects at least the protection of the magistrate, to ensure him the enjoyment of the fruits of his labour.

And of course it removes the "u" from "labour".

This strikes me as just wrong. It is well to impose present-day American spelling on present-day American authors; though Jacques Barzun thought otherwise about publishers' conventions, as he wrote in the essay "Dialogue in C-Sharp", collected in A Word or Two Before You Go...: Brief Essays on Language. But though Bobbs-Merrill's market consisted of present-day Americans, its author was not one. I have to think that anyone capable of following the arguments of An Enquiry can manage English or Scottish spelling and an older system of punctuation.

It is fair to say that the edition appeared in 1955. Quite likely practices had changed with twenty or thirty years at Bobbs-Merrill and comparable publishers.

Alloys

 In checking a term in Liddell and Scott, I was interested to see "pankalkeos" defined as "all-brazen", being used to think of "kalkos" (χαλκός) as meaning primarily "bronze". And indeed in the main article on "kalkos", the lexicon says that antiquity did not know what we call brass, an alloy of copper and zinc. But evidently the ancients were loose in their designations, sometimes using "kalkos" for unalloyed copper, sometimes for what we call bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. The Romans were likewise free in their use of "aes". No doubt the purchasers of metal products were quite precise in specifying what they wanted and in checking what they received, though.

"Brass" does not quite sound as impressive as "bronze". Partly I suppose this owes to I Corinthians 13, partly to the colloquial use of "brass" for money or for effrontery. But it was the term that earlier English made do with, and that is why the Authorized Version used "brass" for "kalkos". The OED's earliest citation for "bronze" in the modern sense is from 1739; and in 1755 Johnson used "brass" in his definition of bronze.

David Lodge, RIP

 Last week, the New York Times carried an obituary of David Lodge, who died on New Years at the age of 89. Going through Wikipedia's list of his works, I find that I have read four of his novels, including his most recent, Deaf Sentence, which appeared in 2006.

 Alvin Kernan's memoir In Plato's Cave states that Stanley Fish cheerfully acknowledged that Lodge had modeled the character Morris Zapp (Changing Places and Small World) on him. The Times says that Fish put a Morris Zapp nameplate on his office door at Duke. That seems to me to speak well for Fish's sense of humor, and for Lodge's touch.

Books and Fates

One sees here and there the tag "habent libelli sua fata", "books have their fates". They do, and it has seemed to me that more and more it is a very quick fate--the Homeric epithet "okumoros", swift-fated, seems to apply. The book that was everywhere in 2010 became a special order in 2020, and now is simply unavailable at most stores.

A look through the best-seller lists of other years shows that the process is not always unfair, that many books deserve their quick disappearance. But there are others that deserve to be on the shelves and stay. Having looked into Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, I thought it might be interesting to look into Lionel Trilling's novel The Middle of the Journey. The most likely local bookstore says that this is "not available"--NYRB Classics brought it back into print in 2002, but that was two dozen years ago. I gave a friend a copy of Hermann Broch's novel The Death of Virgil some years ago, but that also is not available. Well, Vintage brought it out 30 years ago. And apart from books never bought, there are those that one wishes to replace--lost by a loan, or to household disasters.

A textbook tells me that that the full clause is "pro captu lectoris habent libelli sua fata": books have their fates, according to the reader's ability. Fortunately, the ability of the reader is not fixed, and I have read with much interest books that I had set aside years before that as unreadable or uninteresting.