Influential reading
Castro has increasingly come to write with the tone of a man who addresses himself not to the present, but to the future – that is, he writes for History. This collection of short articles chronicles how Fidel’s take on President Obama shifted from early careful optimism to bitter disappointment.
“So far as I know, there is not in history record of anything so disgraceful to the human intellect as the modern idea that the commercial text, “Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,” represents, or under any circumstances could represent, an available principle of national economy. Buy in the cheapest market? yes; but what made your market cheap? Charcoal may be cheap among your roof timbers after a fire, and bricks may be cheap in your streets after an earthquake; but fire and earthquake may not therefore be national benefits. Sell in the dearest? — Yes, truly; but what made your market dear? You sold your bread well to-day: was it to a dying man who gave his last coin for it, and will never need bread more; or to a rich man who to-morrow will buy your farm over your head; or to a soldier on his way to pillage the bank in which you have put your fortune?”
Fantastic. What took me so long to discover Ruskin? Had I discovered him sooner, I would have discovered some of my own conclusions on the subject of Political Economy sooner, too.
There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature. Continue reading On Nature
Essence, knowledge and certainty.
In particular, I liked the essays ‘Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense’ and ‘Revolutions in Science: Some comments on the Theory of Relativity’.
“For it is not intrinsic clearness or coherence that make ideas persuasive, but connection with action, or with some voluminous inner response, which is readiness to act. It is a sense of on-coming fate, a compulsion to do or to suffer, that produces the illusion of perfect knowledge.â€
“If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.â€
Text: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16712/16712-h/16712-h.htm
Audio: http://librivox.org/some-turns-of-thought-in-modern-philosophy-by-george-santayana/
Awesome. I think.
Freud turns his cool gaze on man’s grapple with the inevitable.
One of both Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s favourite books. What, you need me to say more?!
Despite providing substantially more information on the inns and outs of breeding pigeons than you are liable to want, this really is quite a good read. It is surprising how little Darwin speculates on the actual mechanism of variation that leads to altered forms with novel elements.
