by Lisa Lieberman

My favorite line from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), spoken by the late, great Eli Wallach, captures the essence of the Spaghetti Western. Here's Tuco, the Mexican bandit played by Wallach, taking a bubble bath in some half-destroyed hotel room, when a one-armed bad guy barges in, holding a loaded revolver in his left hand. The last time we saw this guy, Tuco had left him for dead after a shoot-out. He's been thirsting for revenge ever since, he says, and in the time it's taken him to find Tuco, he's learned to shoot left-handed. Blam! Wallach's character blows him away. “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk.”

Sergio Leone loved Westerns and the image of America they conveyed. You see this in his craftsmanship, the careful attention to detail, the gorgeous panoramas reminiscent of John Ford's best work. Even when Leone undercuts the conventions of the genre (as in the scene with Tuco and the one-armed bad guy), he pays them tribute, substituting his own, more nuanced myths for the old cowboy clichés. “Fairy tales for grown-ups,” he called them in an interview with Christopher Frayling.

Of course, Europeans are the grown-ups: worldly, cynical, not prudish about sex, more concerned with surface style, it must be said, than with the moral underpinnings of their heroes. Who is “Blondie,” Clint Eastwood's character in the film? We never learn his real name, where he came from, who his daddy was. A man of few words, he's unconcerned with social niceties, having no interest in women, good or otherwise, no long-range plans, dreams, or ambitions. He dresses well, however.

Clothes Make the Man

The trademark hat with tooled leather hat band. The poncho. In his later masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Leone put all of his actors in dusters like the one Blondie wears when Tuco is forcing him across the desert, kicking off a fad for the long, fawn-colored coats among trendy Parisians. But those dusters are really dusty. Compare the nice, clean hero of an American Western to his sweaty counterpart in one of Leone's films. At the end of a hard day's ride in The Searchers (1956), John Wayne's horse is pretty sweaty, but apart from needing a shave, Wayne himself is fresh as a daisy.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Just Wow! At every turn, and corner in Istanbul—you are bound to say—Wow.

The obvious example is, of course, at the Basilica of Aya Sofiya—built by Emperor Justinian in 537 AD. Legend has it, that Justinian wanted this magnificent Eastern Orthodox Church, in its beauty and scale to rival Solomon's great Temple. So that even Solomon would have been Wowed. Whether, Solomon would have been Wowed, or not, subsequent emperors, certainly were—And in 1204, the Aya Sofiya, was converted to a Roman Catholic Church, and then in 1453 the Ottoman Emperor was certainly wowed, because he appropriated the Basilica, and converted it into a mosque,—which it remained till 1935, when it was turned into a museum, for a Basilica and a church and a mosque, by the State of Turkey. The histories of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, were now showcased, and encapsulated in one space. Istanbul, is afterall, just that kind of an ‘and-and' place. The word Aya, in Greek means holy, and Sofiya means wisdom. Aya Sofiya: Holy Wisdom.

When I visited, the Museum of Aya Sofiya, again this Spring, I moved away from the hordes of tourists, to a quieter corner, and found there a small display of calligraphy. Here, I saw depicted, in a single stroke of ink, the Arabic letter pronounced as wow. Letters of the Arabic alphabet are used as symbols in Sufism, to signify a greater meaning of perfection.

The letter Wow, shaped like a bowed head, like a tadpole—like an embryo like a germinating seed, like the sun's millions of warm smiles on the waves of the water, takes just one stroke to create: one stroke, in a swirl like a strand of honey, dripping or a whirl—like a whirling dervish. It caught my eye, and reminded me of itself, in the thriving, pulsating streets, and cafes and mosques and later even on a friend's posting on facebook. Wow, wow, wow.

This letter Wow, has the numerical value of six, which also symoblizes perfection and resembles the number six as written in English. The Arabic word Wadood which begins with the letter Wow means love and is—one of the attributes of God. Thus, the letter Wow is shorthand for aspects of loving, in Sufi Orders. It symbolizes the sense of being spiritually elevated. And, the letter Wow is the first letter of how the word ‘and' is spelt in Arabic—Wa. Several verses of the Quran extolling love begin with words starting with the letter Wow. And so many of the verses begin with the word Wa meaning and. For example in the Chapter Al Buruj ‘And He is the Forgiving, the Loving, Lord of the Throne of Glory, Doer of what He wills.

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by Brooks Riley

Jean-Luc Godard once inscribed a picture to me with these words: “This is the surface, Brooks, and that’s why it’s deep.” At the time, I was skimming the surface, darting from one life experience to another without stopping to sink down or dive deeper—or give his jeu de mots much thought. While I always relished his love of word play in both English and French, this time I was suspicious of what sounded to me like a facile paradox.

As a man of cinema, Godard must first have thought of that great cinematic paradox, the flat screen and the depth of field that miraculously occurs when a film is projected onto it. In the photograph, he stands in front of a blank wall, very like the blank screen he would soon use for a shadow play to the opening bars of Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D Minor, defying the double-entendre of flatness and cinematic depth with a chiaroscuro ballet in front of the screen—a crane operator and his crane moving the camera and cameraman slowly up, over and then down again, a graceful pas de deux silhouetted against the flat white surface—a two-dimensional triumph.

How appropriate that this holy moment was filmed in the soundstage where the glitzy streets of Las Vegas had been built for Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart. The crew, borrowed for a Saturday from that bigger film, consisted of Italians—Vittorio Storaro and his Italian crew—and the hardboiled Hollywood mainstream pros who had seen it all—or thought they had. As Godard piped Mozart over the loudspeakers, and the camera rolled, a cathedral hush permeated the vast interior of the soundstage as the middle-aged, elegant crane operator began to move in front of the screen with the assurance of a dancer, or a man who knows his job. When the music faded out at the end, the hush prevailed. No one, not the crew, not the visitors, not the cast, had ever seen anything like it. It was surface magic, deep beyond words. Now I knew that his inscription made sense.

(As a 9-year-old with not enough movie experience I could easily have retorted, ‘This is the surface, Jean-Luc, and it’s a grande illusion,’ as I waited in vain for Marlon Brando to emerge from the back door of my local movie theatre after a showing of Desiree.)

Too often surface is a euphemism for superficial. But living on the surface makes it easier to be ubiquitous. The assumption that one has to dig or dive for treasures is not necessarily reliable. Analogies can also be arrived at by moving far afield over a surface, like the gerridae, those bugs who walk on water, always finding what they need on top, not deep down. Knowledge is like that body of water: You can dive down into it, but to see clearly, you have to rise to the surface.

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Parallel Universe

everything unknown returns to life
upon awakening in my bed supine in light
sun bequeathed day ignites a fire beneath
my blankets burn mind’s the filament of a lamp
upon awakening stupidity tumbles down a sheer of chance
small thoughts plunge they start an avalanche
the ground gives way beneath my feet
upon awakening where am I?
light ricochets from every wall
blind see deaf hear motion stills
minutiae interlock upon awakening
east and west do not collide they mesh
upon awakening bias stands upon its head
draining deadliness, its river Cocytus circles a sewer
upon awakening states recede decline abjure
the babble of all the varied words of god unite
upon awakening they steep in a cauldron of love
the clock’s a joke upon awakening
doors swing wide though no one knocks
upon awakening each ajar as each unlocks
windows blast from jambs upon awakening
lions lie with lambs every noise becomes a note
upon awakening every weight begins to float
even cacophony sings upon awakening
nothing is ever learned again by rote
upon awakening everything becomes
the final sacrificial goat

by JIm Culleny
8/31/14

by Charlie Huenemann

Now that every click we make is watched, archived, and meta-data-fied, it is time to start thinking seriously about a personal ethics of internet consumption. This goes beyond mere paranoia and worry over what others might think of what you're taking interest in. Each click is in fact a tiny vote, proclaiming to content providers that you support this sort of thing, and hope to see more of it in the future. And – as always! – we should vote responsibly.

It's too bad, really. Gone are the days where, with the adjustment of a couple of browser settings (“Privacy – on!”), no one could ever know that we were clicking away at all sorts of embarrassments, from naked people to celebrity gossip to stuff that might accurately be labeled as very nasty. It was a seemingly harmless way to let that little id go crazy and graze its fill. Content providers happily supplied the forbidden fruits and we gobbled them up.

Now the jig is up. Privacy settings are as effective as the dark vs. light lever on a toaster. But more significant than any embarrassment we may feel is the fact that our clicking is factored into incredibly effective algorithms which help to steer more of the same our way. And as more of us click on crap, more and more similar crap is generated for consumption, and the internet gradually expands into wall-to-wall crap.

Immanuel Kant's perspective on ethics might suggest to us a Categorical Internet Imperative: Click only on those links that you can at the same time will all your fellow citizens to click on. I don't know about you, but many times I feel that if everybody were just clicking on what I'm clicking on, our culture would be racing toward – well, to pretty much where we are these days, I guess: a few reliable sources of insight and information doing their best to compete with freak shows, bear-baitings, and adorable kittens attacking paper bags.

Not to say we have to be Prussian prudes, of course. Insight and information can come from surprising places, and we surely need clowns to tip us off balance and question ourselves. And there's nothing wrong with just plain old fun (as if anyone needs to be told that). But once we begin seeing our clicks as tiny votes, we begin to think about what sort of sustenance we are channeling into our own minds, and what sort of diet we are recommending to our neighbors. Let us dream a little: if all the clickers out there aimed more consistently toward “good stuff”, content providers would be competing to produce more and more of that stuff. Gradually, one hopes, we would witness the ebbing of the crap, and the waxing of a gloriously informed and inspired culture.

(Okay, that's crazy talk. But even a small shift in that direction would be to the good.)

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by Emrys Westacott

I dislike tipping. That is, I dislike the whole tipping system. As a card-carrying tightwad I can't honestly say I enjoy leaving tips, but that's not my point. My point is about the general practice, the social institution.

What set me thinking about this was a slightly unpleasant experience I had recently in a café in Quebec City. My wife and I had finished breakfast and after quite a long delay the waitress brought the bill. In Canada these days, as in Europe, it's normal for customers to pay using a portable credit card reader that is brought to the table. These reportedly reduce credit card fraud by eliminating the opportunity for dishonest wait staff to “skim” the credit card information while out of sight of the card owner. The bill is displayed on a screen along with various tipping options. These vary according to the machine, but a typical range of options is: 10%, 15%, 20%, custom tip, no tip. Usually I tip 15%, but on this occasion, partly because of the long delay in getting the bill, and partly because I felt the waitress had from first to last been unpleasantly condescending, I tapped the 10% button. She was looking over my shoulder (another thing I had against her), and immediately asked me if I was dissatisfied in any way with the service. Being taken by surprise, and also being a wimp, I answered “No.” She then told me that in Quebec it was normal to tip at least 15%. I said, “Oh, I didn't know,” and left the tip at 10%. If I'd been less of a wimp I would have explained my dissatisfaction and complained about her looking over my shoulder. Then again, if I'd been even wimpier I would have adjusted the tip according to her recommendation.

Tipping is a peculiar institution. Whether you leave a tip is optional, and there are many circumstances where you would suffer no adverse consequences (other than possible feelings of guilt) should you not tip: for instance, when you check out of a hotel, alight from a taxi, or eat at a restaurant you are unlikely to revisit. If we were nothing but little carbon-based bundles of rational self-interest, as some economists prone to abstraction have at times assumed, tipping would be much less common and might even never have become an established custom. In some places—Japan, Finland, South Korea, for instance–it isn't. And even in places like the US, where tipping is widespread, the conventions aren't especially consistent. Many people leave a tip for the person who cleans up their hotel room, but not for the person at the reception desk who checks them in and out. They add a tip for their hairdresser, but not for their dental hygienist.

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by Michael Lopresto

Chris Mortensen is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide. He thinks that the inconsistent hasn't been taken seriously enough in Western philosophy, that the masterpieces of Reutersvärd rub our noses in the inconsistent, and that Western philosophy and Buddhism are complementary. He's the author of Inconsistent Mathematics (1995) and Inconsistent Geometry (2010).

Firstly, what made you get into philosophy?

I think I was always interested in it, really—since high school, anyway. I was diverted for while into maths and physics during my first couple of years at university, before coming back to philosophy. I realised that if what you want to do is what you like doing, then philosophy is the thing to do. I still kept up with the maths subjects, but philosophy was more fun, and I was better at it.

Had there always been a lot of overlap between your interest in philosophy and your interest in maths?

There was, but one thing I noticed was that my logic lecturers would always motivate what they were doing. They would tell you why this was interesting, why there was a debate here. Whereas my maths lecturers on the other hand tended to be very pure and syntactical, leaving aside motivation much of the time. Some logicians are very pure – some of my best friends are very pure. But perhaps it is possible to be a bit too pure and syntactical in philosophy, it depends on what you are trying to achieve I suppose. Just pop down to the library and have a look at Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. It doesn't contain too much English (even though Russell excelled as a philosopher, as opposed to a logician).

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by Carl Pierer

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant states that an action has moral worth if and only if it is done from duty.Kant argues for his position by showing that morally right actions done from motives other than duty lack moral worth. He gives two examples:

The Shopkeeper always gives correct change. She does not care whether this is morally right or not. She is only faithful to her costumers because it ensures her making profit. Her sole motivation is self-interest and not duty.

The Philanthropist is kind because of a natural inclination. He just feels like being a morally good person. He too is not concerned with morality. Rather he behaves correctly because that is what he wants to do. He is lacking a feeling for duty.

It might be said that both actions lack moral worth since the agents are not concerned with morality at all. They do not care for whether their actions are moral. It is a happy coincidence that they are. Therefore, the agents do not deserve any moral credit. However, this argument does not prove Kant's claim conclusively. It only shows that actions lacking motivation from duty entirely are morally worthless. What if we understood Kant to mean that the action is only morally worthy if duty is the sole motivation?

Schiller's Joke expresses an intuitive resistance against this reasoning:

“The first speaker says: Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. Hence I am plagued with doubts that I am not a virtuous person.

And the reply is: Sure, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely. And then with aversion to do what your duty enjoins you.“

Intuitively, this sounds wrong. We are under no obligation to despise our friends. We can confidently like them and our friendly acts would still be morally worthy. This seems to refute Kant's claim that only actions done from duty have moral worth.

However, this objection differs from Kant's examples. Both the shopkeeper and the philanthropist lack motivation from duty entirely. All that drives them to do the morally right thing is self-interest or their natural character. Yet, the person who serves his friends with pleasure can at the same time still believe in his duty to serve his friends. So the case is: In addition to some non-duty directed motivation, the agents believe in their duty to moral behaviour. Do these actions have moral worth?

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

As a rule, I am wary of art installations. I am never sure if the form they take bear any relation to the political content they claim to espouse. Also, as a rule, I visit modern art exhibitions for their verbosity. The words speak to me of artistic intent that always races ahead, far in excess of its signifying objects. The intent itself I find to be of such beauty, nudging me with its faint hints of revolution and radical joy. Of course, it does worry me that I have to read the labels of things before I can calculate the impact they will have on my fervor and/or joy.

However, on the lowest rung of my pleasure-affording hierarchy lie modern art installations. I remember once visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and staring hard at a diagonal tube light mounted up on a wall. I also metaphorically bonked myself on the head for “Artist” not making the top three on the list of possibilities suitable to my eight year old self's artistic ability or lack thereof.

As I walked into Ai Weiwei's exhibition “Evidence” I thought to myself that I should maintain a healthy cynicism and a suitably controlled set of expectations about what a set of art installations ought to be able to evoke. In the late afternoon of a confusing Berlin summer, I got off the bus already flush with the pleasure of a scarily efficient public transport system, and walked down the lane to the spot on my Google map that said “Martin-Gropius-Bau”. The Bau is a startlingly beautiful building, all neo-Renaissance in its pastiche of dome, entryway columns, curlicued windows and shadowy moldings. Something already felt right. The sun shone bright and the clouds filtered out its strongest rays. I was suitably warm and the light was suitably right. Ai Weiwei in his entire grandfatherly wallpapered aura stared straight ahead and betrayed no amusement at my sudden and unexpected enthusiasm.

Ai Weiwei: Evidence, Stools, 2014, wooden stools; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

Across eighteen rooms of the Bau were spread all the works that were being curated under the title “Evidence”. Playing with the concept of both what “discovery” means to police and detective records, and the concept of empirical “evidence” as relating to crimes both contemporary and historical, the main items of this exhibit comprise found, made, and remade artifacts—touchy, feely, gritty physical objects. Most of them display familiar hints of the Ai Weiwei oeuvre. They offer confusing and paradoxical cues by playing with the material they are composed of, they are parts of a much larger story that they bear evidence to, and they are often directly related to aspects of the artist's life.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Governments should tax the production and consumption of junk entertainment like Angry Birds and The Bachelor to correct the market failures that encourage their overconsumption. As with tobacco and alcohol, the point of such sin taxes is not to prevent people from consuming things that are bad for them if they really want to. They are not like bans. Rather, such taxes communicate to consumers the real but opaque long-term costs to themselves of consuming such products so that they can better manage their choices about how much of their lives to give up to them.

At the heart of this proposal is the fact that high art – i.e. real art – like Booker prize winning novels and Beethoven is objectively superior to junk entertainment like Candy Crush and most reality TV. (For now, let us abstract from ‘middle-brow' entertainment like our new Golden Age of TV.) Some egalitarians of taste dispute the existence of any objective distinction in quality between pushpin and Pushkin and argue that the value of anything is merely the subjective value people put on it. I will humour them. The case for the objective superiority of art can be made entirely within a narrowly utilitarian -‘economistic' – account of subjective value: in the long run consuming junk entertainment is less pleasurable than consuming art.

At best, junk entertainment passes the time and brings us closer to death in a relatively painless way. At worst, passing a lot of time in this way makes us stupid by atrophying our abilities to appreciate anything more difficult. Hence the pejorative term ‘junk', for there is a strong resemblance between this sort of mental activity and eating cheeseburgers: the more cheeseburgers we eat, the less we enjoy each new one, and the fatter and more unhealthy we become. In contrast, art has the capacity not only to fill up the limited time we have in our lives, but in the process also to educate us in the enjoyment of its intellectual depths so that it produces more delight in us the more of it we consume. In economics terminology, the consumption of junk entertainment exhibits diminishing marginal utility and reduces our human capital while the consumption of art exhibits the opposite. Art is special.

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by Gerald Dworkin

Many of the quotations that appear in my e-reader Philosophy: A Commonplace Book are one-liners:

There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. —Beckett

Better latent than never. —Morgenbesser

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex. —Marx

But often the difference between a one-liner and a many- is arbitrary. Wilde's “I do all the talking. It saves time and prevents arguments” could have a semi-colon instead of a period and be a one-liner. Thus Shaw: One sees things as they are and asks why; another dreams things that never were, and asks why not. Or, as Nabokov put it: The difference between a therapist and the rapist is a matter of distance.

This brings us to the concept of an aphorism. Most definitions, wisely, do not use a precise measure of length or depend grammatical structure. Here are some typical definitions.

1) a pithy observation
2) a terse saying
3) a short phrase
4) a brief statement
5) a concise statement
6) a laconic expression

It was Nietzsche's aim to “to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.” But he was also brilliant at much shorter length. “All truth is simple…is that not doubly a lie?”

Obviously this pithetic character is at best a necessary condition but not sufficient. “Today is Monday” is pithy enough but lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Again, definitions try to supply the missing ingredient in different ways– “embodying a general truth”, “makes a statement of wisdom” , “astute observation”. The first of these seems, to us now, too weak. “Objects fall when unsupported” is both pithy and a general truth. But Bacon titled one of his books on the nature of science Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature.

For what it is worth, the word derives from aphorismos (greek) meaning definition. And indeed historically many aphorisms took the form of definitions. Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary being a prime example. ACADEMY. Originally a grove in which philosophers sought a meaning in nature; now a school in which naturals seek a meaning in philosophy. PHILOSOPHY. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

All of this is by way of introducing the reader to a particularly clever and astute practitioner of that current system of aphoristic communication knows as the TWEET. Now those inclined to resist all things contemporary may object that any message that may be as large as 140 characters cannot be an aphorism. (Joke interruption: I was asked the other day to supply a password with at least eight characters. I decided upon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) And those truly hostile may note that the definition of Tweet given first in all dictionaries is “A weak chirping sound, as of a young or small bird.” But the tweets I am bringing to your attention are both short and clever.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

I'm a total pushover when it comes to stories of connection. I am delighted by accounts of barriers breaking down and disparate people uniting in purpose, of ideas coalescing and theories fusing to reveal the common threads that underlie diversity. As I look back upon the history of physics, what reaches out and grabs me are the moments of unification when strands long thought separate are suddenly braided together in a whole that is stronger and more beautiful than the sum of its parts. Sometimes we uncover hidden affinities by exploring a motif repeated in apparently unrelated contexts; at other times, we are compelled by circumstance to form alliances with those we may have neglected, to put our heads together and come up with a solution acceptable to all. The conundrum of dark matter falls solidly in the latter category.

For several decades, cosmologists and astronomers had been growing progressively distant from their particle physics colleagues. As one group craned their necks further out into uncharted space, the other crawled deeper into the recesses of the atom. The disciplines began to seem as divergent as the scales upon which they operate, but there is a surprising resonance between the minute and the colossal. Even objects of cosmic proportions are built from subatomic particles. The discovery of dark matter was a reminder that no part of the universe can be completely understood by those who turn their backs on the rest.

Discussions of dark matter (and dark energy) are often front-ended by a startling admission of ignorance: the entire gamut of matter particles we conventionally study – quarks and leptons combined – forms less than 5% of the known universe. There is about five times as much dark matter out there, we are told, while the rest of the universe is made up of dark energy. But, since neither dark matter nor dark energy can be seen, how do scientists justify this shocking claim? An analogy might help. The mechanism of human vision is such that we see objects only when they reflect light. But if you find yourself in a pitch dark room, you don't immediately conclude that just because nothing is visible, the room must be empty. You simply realize that sight is no longer a reliable guide under these circumstances, and you must lean on sounds and smells, and touch (and taste?) to probe your surroundings. For lifeforms less dependent on vision, the darkness is multi-textured and alive with variety. Consider bats, for instance. Where we rely on light hitting objects and bouncing back, bats bank on sound. They emit high frequency calls, inaudible to human ears, and use the resulting echoes to construct a sonic map of their surroundings (the further an object is, the longer it takes for the echo to come back). The moral of the story is this: as long as there is a way for you to interact with an object, you can “sense” its presence.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

It's impossible for me to leave a place well. I used to think that I was merely bad at logistics and planning (and I am), but I manage to conspire against myself with such sinister competence that this explanation no longer seems viable. As the time to leave approaches my consciousness starts to fragment, and I become exhausted and flee into sleep. I wait too long to do things, unable to act unless I have killed my inertia with drink or other confusion, or distracted myself sufficiently that anything I do is useless. I spend hours on minutiae, reorganizing my book collection and cataloguing my kitchen equipment; they're happy hours, once I forget why I'm doing it.

Perhaps it's that leaving is quite obviously a rehearsal for death, disrupting even the faint illusions of permanence that spatial and environmental contiguity offer us. So is everything, if we have learned to listen to the philosophers and to live well, but of course we have not learned to listen and who has the time to rehearse for death these days?

I have trouble even with leaving hotel rooms and getting off of airplanes. I'm haunted by the sense that I've left traces of my self behind. Maybe in the shape of things: do I have my keys? has my wallet finalized the escape it has been plotting all these years? Perhaps these things I've left are important and their absence will make the self who leaves unviable. Eventually I get frustrated and resentful of the unreasonable claims of that future self but by then it is too late: I am nearly that future self and the instincts of self-preservation take over.

II

With leaving comes the return of beginner's mind, that flush of seeing things fresh as you did when you first arrived, of being once again surprised at the particularity of things, troubled by their contingency and delighted by the odd way the fragments of a world fit together (Louis Macneice's delightful “drunkeness of things being various”). As everyone knows by now, the only time it is truly possible to appreciate anything is when you are faced with its transience and, by then, it is too late and the moments are inextricably entangled with the melancholy of their endings. Sometimes, though, the melancholy parts to reveal intimations of an exuberant noonday joy, as when the sun stands still and makes the world bright and shimmering for a few moments before it begins to fall towards the horizon.

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by Eric Byrd

There's a subgenre of military memoirs produced by elderly emeriti, the crew-cut close readers of postwar English departments, who in late career published personal recollections of they and the other terrified teenagers who mostly fought World War Two. Alvin Kernan (Shakespeare editor, torpedo bomber crewman) is like Paul Fussell (Johnsonian, infantry officer) and Samuel Hynes (Auden biographer, Marine aviator). Seventeen year-old Kernan joined the Navy before the war, to escape the bleakness of Depression Wyoming: Ma and Pa down on the ranch, hard winters and harder times. Kernan's mother had a representatively difficult life. She killed herself while he was at sea. Home on leave, he inspects her grave “already collapsing and pocked with gopher holes”:

The World War I generation to which she, born in 1900, belonged was the first to leave the land, and with a little education, she married a soldier, moved to town, went to Florida, lost the money from the sale of her father's farm in the land boom, had a child, divorced, and began wandering—Chicago, Memphis, a ranch in Wyoming. She remarried, became a Catholic, and put a determined face on it all, but she was part of the first generation of really rootless modern Americans, moving restlessly by car about the country, emancipated socially and intellectually to a modest degree, but lost, really, without the supporting ethos and family that had protected people in the years when the continent was being settled. Alienation was the familiar state of my generation of Depression and another world war, but the old people had few defenses against it when it appeared.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos are the favorite writers of young Seaman Kernan. He could be one of their characters. As with Hemingway's Nick Adams, death-shaded excursions in the American wilds precede and forebode initiation overseas. And Kernan must have recognized his family in Dos Passos' panorama of the wandering and the unmoored, the war-mobilized, the desperately migratory. The down but not out, bumming the freights, going to sea, following work; displaced but for all that able to dream of landing somewhere better:

Returning from out baseball game, we came alongside the ship and began to send sailors up the gangway. At that moment another landing craft came up carrying officers, including the executive officer of the Suwanee—a small, dark, mean man—who stood up in the bow, dead drunk, shouting in a loud voice to the officer-of-the-deck, “Get those fucking enlisted men out of there and get us aboard.” Protocol was that officers always take precedence in landing, and our boat shoved off immediately, circling while the officers staggered up the gangway after their afternoon drinking in the officers' club. The gap between enlisted men and officers in the American navy during WWII was medieval. Enlisted men accepted the division as a necessary part of military life, but it never occurred to us that it in any way diminished our status as freeborn citizens who, because of a run of bad luck and some unfortunate circumstances like the Depression, just happened to be down for a brief time. “When we get rich” were still words deep in everybody's psyche. But the exec's words, “those fucking enlisted men,” spoke of deep and permanent divisions. He obviously really disliked us, and his words made shockingly clear that he, and maybe the other officers he represented, had no sense that we had shared great danger and won great victories together.

Dos Passos' Three Soldiers, in a paragraph.

Beyond the charm of the Lost Generation atmosphere, the virtues of Crossing the Line are its swift pace and concision of evocation. No episode lasts longer than is necessary to make the essential impressions—usually Kernan's fear and awe (at times laced with boyish glee) before the military juggernauts whose savage collisions he is witnessing. Kernan did not set out to reconstruct the birth of his literary consciousness, or find the boy in the vitae. Quite the opposite. Seaman Kernan is a small animal in a world of threats. He thinks with his gut, senses through the soles of his feet.

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by Josh Yarden

I posted a story last month about biblical metaphor, entitled “What Fruit Grows on the Tree of Knowledge?” The class discussion I related there continues with this question from a student:

“When you said that the Tree of Knowledge is not an actual tree, didn't you just make up a story that's completely different from the one in the Book of Genesis?”

“Ok, let's get back into to the mythical garden.”

“So, you're saying it's all just a myth?”

“It's not just a myth. When I say a text is mythic, I don't mean that it is false. I mean that the power of the story is in the way it reflects experiences that happen over and over again in our lives. That's how people in different cultures over thousands of years can relate to these essentially human stories. We do know for a fact that the story has existed for millennia, and it has had a powerful and a memorable impact on our society. That makes it real, whether or not the events happened as described.

“Ok, but that doesn't explain whether or not the tree of knowledge of good and bad is an actual tree.”

“You can decide for yourself, but keep in mind that Torah does not claim to be ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.' There aren't enough details in these brief stories to suggest that any of them are full accounts of actual events, but they do contain enough symbolism to be read on three levels: the myth, the moral and the metaphor.

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by Matt McKenna

At the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, there is much rejoicing by the citizens of the noble planet of Xander after their having been saved by the film's titular ragtag bunch of lovable anti-heroes. What is interesting to note, however, is how unconcerned the individuals on Xandar are by the troubling labor dynamics made apparent in their pyrrhic victory against the evil tyrant, Ronan the Accuser. Consider that a mere five “Guardians” (three humanoids, a tree, and a raccoon) were required to protect the Milky Way, a galaxy containing three hundred billion stars and, in the Marvel canon anyway, is so utterly teeming with bipedal life forms that one can't even land a spaceship on a random abandoned husk of a planet without running into at least one English speaking vigilante/mercenary/henchman who has dedicated her/his/its life to finding one lost relic or another. For goodness sake, just imagine the sheer number of plots against freedom-loving Xandarians that would arise in such a galaxy. And yet, Marvel's Milky Way apparently only requires a handful of part-time crime fighting goofballs to prevent evil from running roughshod over the forces of its PG-13-themed justice. Though it may sound as if I'm suggesting this implausibly small cosmic police force is a plot hole in Guardians of the Galaxy, it is precisely this miniscule ratio of guardians-to-villains that constitutes the film's most salient point about the real world: In our Milky Way as in Marvel's, the good jobs of the future will be dominated by a lionized elite few.

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