Again, off work early today but not as early as Tuesday or Monday. It helped to get me to the courthouse. I got there at 2:30, read a little of Alfred Kazin on William Faulkner, and left for home around 4:10. I got back here at 5. The cat was on the front step. I walked down to McClure's for food.
Back here for dinner and then at getting my email culled. I got two, or three posts done. No other writing.
MW called.
Music downloaded included Billy Lee Riley.
Some reading I wanted to pass along that I thought did not merit a full post follow.
‘I was thrilled and shocked’: images raise hopes of return of wild jaguars to the US
The art of doing nothing: have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture?
What niksen most strongly illustrates, though, is the pull towards philosophies that come from other countries. We live in an age where many of us can do almost anything we want, more so than at any other time in history. But it turns out what we really want is for someone who knows what they’re doing to make it OK for us to follow our instincts. Hygge is a real thing and the Danish arguably do it best. But they do not have the monopoly on cosiness or candlelight. Fika is a beautiful tradition. But Sweden is not the only place in the world where you can eat cake and drink coffee. Similarly, you don’t need to be Dutch or know the word niksen to do nothing, you can just … do it. And there’s no way of doing nothing the wrong way. Completely predictably, I discovered that my definition of nothing is pannenkoeken (pancakes) after all.
Allen County Public Library Pages & Voices Podcast - Celebrating Local Authors (that is Indiana writers!)
Eugène-François Vidocq and the Birth of the Detective By Daisy Sainsbury
Vidocq’s tale — one of con man turned detective, poacher turned gamekeeper, the criminal who became a criminologist, and later a best-selling writer — captured the imagination of his contemporaries. He inspired many of the greatest writers of his time, providing the model for Vautrin in Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1865), and Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin. If Vidocq continues to fascinate today, interpreted onscreen by the likes of Gérard Depardieu and Vincent Cassel, audiences are still deciding what to make of him. Was he an opportunist crook who took advantage of the radical political upheaval of post-Revolution France to reinvent himself in the emerging power structures of his day? Was he a law-enforcement reformer, with a strong sense of civic duty, who laid the groundwork for modern policing, forensics, and intelligence-gathering methods?
When I finally read Thomas Hardy, I was knocked over. So, I had to read Norma Clarke's review Sue Bridehead Revisited: Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses by Paula Byrne. He still seems strange and more interesting than Dickens or Trollope.
Are we free to change the world, as the book’s title suggests? To answer the question, we need to go back to that Jerusalem courtroom. At one point during the trial, Eichmann invoked duty, as if to say that mass-murdering Jews was okay because his bosses told him to do it. If Eichmann had read Kant, as he claimed he had, he clearly hadn’t understood him. ‘Kant’s whole ethics amounts to the idea that every person, in every action, must reflect on whether the maxim of his action can become a universal law,’ Arendt wrote in On Humanity in Dark Times. ‘In other words … it really is the complete opposite, so to speak, of obedience … In Kant, nobody has the right to obey.’
Across the decades, that sentence resounds: ‘nobody has the right to obey’. Not Eichmann, not anyone blaming others for their own failings. We are free only to the extent that we are capable of disobeying. Kant discovered, Stonebridge tells us, that it is only because we can think (which seems to boil down to reasoning about what we ought to do) that human freedom and dignity are possible.
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