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.