In a pinch, I could live here.

Spotify and “corporation-centered design."

If you want a year’s worth of ideas to explore, just read the most recent issue of Sam Arbesman’s newsletter. My head is almost literally spinning!

Ah. The emails are coming.

Naomi Girma is the William Saliba of the USWNT. ⚽️

Re: this David French column on why what Christians do matters more they what they (claim to) believe, I think of this sentence from George Eliot’s story “Janet’s Repentance”: “Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”

Guadalcanal, Terrence Malick, Emerson, Horace.

If, as I said in my previous post, to confront another soldier in war is to confront yourself, then … isn’t that other soldier … you? Yes. Necessarily. 

It is this necessity that produces a constant hum of meditation in Malick’s The Thin Red Line: “Maybe all men got one big soul,” thinks one of the soldiers.

Many of the voiceovers in this movie are clearly identified soliloquies: Nick Nolte’s Col. Tall, for instance, or Elias Koteas’s Captain Staros. But three characters in this movie — Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), and Private Train (John Dee Smith) — have distinct Southern accents, and it’s not always easy to tell their voices apart. And I think that is intentional. That is, these thoughts are not supposed to be identifiable with one soldier. They are the thoughts of all the soldiers. (I suspect it matters that all of these speakers are privates, the lowest rank — the ones not differentiated from their neighbors by holding command.)

Sometimes their voices are identifiable. It is Private Witt, the central character in the film, who speculates that all of us share a soul — what Emerson called the “Over-Soul”: 

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. 

But I believe, as some of the more attentive viewers of this film have argued, that the character we hear from most often, in voiceover, is Private Train, whom we see at any length only twice: Once as the soldiers are approaching the island, confessing his fear, and once as they are leaving the island, saying that he has had a lifetime of experience already and has earned some peace. Surely in these points as in others he speaks for his colleagues. One big experience for C-for-Charlie Company; one big soul. 

(Private Train also has a tattoo on his upper arm, which reads: 1 JOHN 4:4. For those of you keeping score at home, that verse reads: “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” We may return to this.) 

But the Over-Soul is bigger than what can be held on an American troop ship. One of those American soldiers says to a Japanese soldier — see the image at the top of this post — “Where you’re going you’re not coming back from.” And it’s true. But it’s equally true of the man who speaks those words. What you say about your enemy you say about yourself, whether you know it or not.

When I hear that sentence I think of a poem by Horace. David Ferry’s translation follows.  

Aequam memento (Odes II.3) 

It does not matter at all whether you spend Your days and nights in sorrow, Or on the other hand, in holiday pleasure, Drinking Falernian wine

Of an excellent vintage year, on the river bank. Why is it, do you suppose, That the dark branches of those tall pines and those Poplars’ silvery leafy

Branches love to join, coming together, Creating a welcoming shade? Have you not noticed how in the quiet river The current shows signs of hurry,

Urging itself to go forward, going somewhere, Making its purposeful way? By all means tell your servants to bring you wine, Perfumes, and the utterly lovely

Too briefly blossoming flowers of the villa garden; Yes, of course, while youth, And circumstance, and the black threads of the Sisters Suffer this to be so.

You are going to have to yield those upland pastures, The ones you bought just lately; You are going to yield the town house, and the villa, The country place whose margin

The Tiber washes as it moves along. Heirs will possess all that Which you have gathered. It does not matter at all If you are rich, with kings

Forefathers of your pride; no matter; or poor, Fatherless under the sky. You will be sacrificed to Orcus without pity. All of us together

Are being gathered; the lot of each of us Is in the shaking urn With all the other lots, and like the others Sooner or later our lot

Will fall out from the urn; and so we are chosen to take Our place in that dark boat, In that dark boat, that bears us all away From here to where no one comes back from ever.

Recent listening: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s wondrous Fifth Symphony. ♫

That admirable journal Current has posted its own list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far and if you think I’m linking to that because a couple of my books are mentioned I am so offended.

The excellent folks at Reclaim Hosting are doing an upgrade today that is not supposed to affect access to my site (ayjay.org, blog.ayjay.org) — but, alas, my site is down.

The story of the Nisei linguists — who served in the Second World War as translators, interpreters, and intelligence officers, while their parents were imprisoned in internment camps — is a remarkable one. James C. McNaughton’s book about them is available as a PDF here.

Umbrella

Craig Mod on Tokyo: “The saving grace is that Tokyo has a distinct advantage over other cities in that it extends, effectively, infinitely in most directions that aren’t the ocean (and even there, we’ve added quite a bit in the last hundred years). And is ultra-connected by perfectly-functioning public transportation. So you’re seeing what used to be more centralized ‘cultural texture’ move east and west — out to Kuramae, Kiyosumishirakawa, Gakugeidaigaku, Itabashi, and more; not unlike the Brooklyn migrations from a Duane-Reade-and-Citibank-infested Manhattan in the naughts and 2010s. But for me, one of the great joys is wandering the central neighborhoods of the city, those abutting the ‘Hills’ and mega-developments, finding those rare streets still replete with homes and shops of a city that once was. Finding one of those four-hundred baths. There are still common relationships to luxuriate in, even as the towers loom.”

My multi- and super-talented friend Catherine Woodiwiss, who’s always doing something fascinating, has just launched a newsletter.

One of my retirement dreams is to get skilled enough at web design to do with my site something half as cool as what Roger Strunk has done with his.

My series of posts on the battle for Guadalcanal, and artistic representations thereof, has reached its fourth installment.

As I noted in my previous post, the peculiar nature of the Guadalcanal campaign creates a kind of narrative frame — the arrival by sea, the fighting, the departure by sea — that any account of the campaign is bound by. This traversing of emptiness surrounding a tragic agon. 

I think it was Jakob Burckhardt, in his famous book The Greeks and Greek Civilization, who first identified the agon — the contest or competition — as “the paramount feature of life” in ancient Greek civilization. 

Thus after the decline of heroic kingship all higher life among the Greeks, active as well as spiritual, took on the character of the agon. Here excellence (arete) and natural superiority were displayed, and victory in the agon, that is noble victory without enmity, appears to have been the ancient expression of the peaceful victory of an individual. Many different aspects of life came to bear the marks of this form of competitiveness. We see it in the conversations and round-songs of the guests in the symposium, in philosophy and legal procedure, down to cock- and quail-fighting or the gargantuan feats of eating. In Aristophanes' Knights, the behaviour of the Paphlagonian and the sausage seller still retains the exact form of an agon, and the same is true in Frogs of the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades, with its ceremonial preliminaries. The way that life on all levels was influenced by the agon and by gymnastics is most clearly illustrated by Herodotus' account of the wooing of Agariste (VI.126). Cleisthenes of Sicyon announced at the Olympic games, where he had just won the victory in the four-horse chariot race, that he invited applicants for his daughter's hand. The wooing, itself an agon, is a kind of mirror image of the mythical wooing of Hippodamia, daughter of Oenomaus. Thirteen suitors came forward, all personally outstanding and of high birth; two were from southern Italy, one Epidamnian, one Aetolian, one Argive, two Arcadians, one from Elis, two Athenians and one each from Euboea, Thessaly and Molossus [in Epirus). Cleisthenes had a stadium and a palaestra prepared for them, kept them with him for a year and tested their courage, temperament, upbringing and character; he accompanied the suitors to the gymnasium and observed their behaviour at feasts. 

(This book, assembled from Burckhardt’s lectures, was published after his death in 1897 and against his will. The early modern period was his area of specialization, and he did not think himself qualified to publish a book on the Ancient Greek world. But the idea got around, to Burckhardt’s annoyance, thanks to a former colleague: “The mistaken belief that I was to publish a history of Greek culture derives from a work of the unfortunate Professor Nietzsche, who now lives in a lunatic asylum. He mistook a lecture course that I used often to give for a book.”) 

The agon is a kind of domestication and confinement of the battle encounter, of the confrontation of people who are determined to kill one another. The ancestor of the agon, and in a way its heart and soul, is the confrontation of Hector and Achilles in the 22nd book of the Iliad. Perhaps the most important thing to be said about the agon as depicted by Homer that it is only secondarily a competition with your enemy, with the Other; it is primarily a contest with yourself. 

Homer makes this abundantly clear through one distinctive element of the encounter between Hector and Achilles. Recall that Achilles has returned because of his grief and guilt at allowing his dearest friend Patroclus to enter the battle wearing his armor. Hector has taken that armor from the dead body of Patroclus and is now wearing it. Meanwhile, Achilles has had new armor made for him by Hephaestus, including a great shield. In my introduction to Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles I describe what Hephaestus has made: 

In Homer's poem, the shield is complexly figured, but at the heart of its depiction is a simple contrast. First, there is a world of peace, in which the arts (both the artes mechanicae and the artes liberales) may be cultivated: dancers and acrobats and musicians appear there, well-cared-for fields of crops, vineyards full of ripe grapes, and herds of animals domesticated for human use. Evil things happen in this world: two lions kill a bull; a man has killed another man. But herdsmen watch over their cattle to limit the ravages of wild beasts; and in the city of peace judges determine a penalty for murder, a penalty that the angry family of the slain man agree to. Such agreements are what make a city peaceful. But none of these arts and agreements obtain in the second city, the city of war; there, all is sacrificed to the cultivation of a single “art”: that of killing. 

All through the Iliad Hector is depicted as a reluctant warrior. In Book VI he tells his beloved wife Andromache that he has learned to fight in the front ranks of the Trojans — he does it because he must, to protect the city he loves; but fighting does not come naturally to him, as it does to Achilles, who doesn’t know what to do with himself when he’s not fighting.

So when these two men met on the field of battle, what do they see? Hector sees the world he loves, the world of peace and art and hot baths, with war only an interruption of that better human story; and Achilles sees his own armor, the armor of the ultimate warrior. Each confronts himself, and this is the essential character of the agon. 

In Malick’s The Thin Red Line, this is what battle does to the men: it forces each of them to confront himself. Again and again that confrontation is revelatory.  

Harry R. Lewis: “Today’s AI-giddy techno-optimists and techno-pessimists might heed Henri Poincaré’s caution: ‘The question is not, “What is the answer?” The question is, “What is the question?"‘The humanities have pressed the great questions on every new generation. That is how they differ from the sciences, a literary scholar once explained to me; humanists don’t solve problems, they cherish and nurture them, preparing us and our children and grandchildren to confront them as people will for as long as the human condition persists. Our hope for the beneficial development of AI rests on the survival of humanistic learning.” (Harry Lewis is a computer scientist.)

Rachel Haywire: “The fediverse is boring! The trade-off for the freedom that the fediverse offers comes at the cost of excitement and engagement. Its decentralized nature has resulted in fragmented and disjointed communities, lacking the cohesion necessary for meaningful connections. The promise of escaping the echo chambers of centralized platforms has led to a barren environment plagued by inactivity and disinterest.” This, though perhaps overstated, points to a genuine problem.

A fantastic post by Sara Hendren — AKA @ablerism — on how universities ought to, but do not, signal their various social obligations and purposes through architectural diversity. The build world as a guide and frame for the complex experiences of young people.

This meditation by Ryan Burge on the closing of the church where he has been a pastor for many years is deeply sad. The poem for such moments is Frost’s “The Oven Bird.”

A while back I noted that some enthusiastic recent writing about the great Guy Davenport doesn’t really give you a sense of how uniquely strange it is to read him. Well, that deficiency is remedied by Mark Clemens in this exceptionally acute essay.

Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier:

The [CrowdStrike] catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. […] This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing — as opposed to personal computing — a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable — at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability. 

A reminder that presentism is perhaps an even bigger threat to our economic infrastructure than it is to our common culture.