October 02, 2014
October 02, 2014
Continual Conversation With A Silent ManWallace Stevensb. October 2, 1879 The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die-- The broken cartwheel on the hill. As if, in the presence of the sea, We dried our nets and mended sail And talked of never-ending things, Of the never-ending storm of will, One will and many wills, and the wind, Of many meanings in the leaves, Brought down to one below the eaves, Link, of that tempest, to the farm, The chain of the turquoise hen and sky And the wheel that broke as the cart went by. It is not a voice that is under the eaves. It is not speech, the sound we hear In this conversation, but the sound Of things and their motion: the other man, A turquoise monster moving round.
Too, there’s Melville’s reply to Emerson’s lovely trope—
Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.Melville, writing across the bottoms of two pages and up the margin of another:This is admirable, as many other thoughts of Mr. Emerson’s are. His gross and astonishing errors & illusions spring from a self-conceit so intensely intellectual and calm that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name. Another species of Mr Emerson’s errors, or rather, blindness, proceeds from a defect in the region of the heart.
Bonfire of the humanities Public debate is afflicted by short-term thinking – how did history abdicate its role of inspiring the longer view? David Armitage and Jo Guldi aeon
The opportunity to array the longue durée against endemic short-termism has arrived with a vengeance. The most pressing problems of our time – for example, climate change, crises of global governance, the proliferation of inequality – have no simple solutions because they have such deep roots. But disentangling is what historians do. We are trained to balance different forms of data against each other, to be alert to the complexity of causality, to consider how long-term structures interact with short-term determinants. Where other social scientists value parsimony – the most stripped-down, cleanest explanation or analysis of a problem – historians prefer profligacy, a multiplicity of sources against which to calibrate causation and to foresee the conflicted futures arising from multiple contested pasts. Many adjacent human sciences, and even the natural sciences, have undertaken a historical turn of late. The era of big data is an age of proliferating evidence about the human and non-human past: statistical, verbal and physical, from massive verbal corpora of digitised texts, via tweets and climate data, to ice-cores, tree-ring data and the human genome. Some of our colleagues are even deploying the longue durée to undermine some of the most cherished illusions of their disciplines.
Beauty is momentary in the mind — The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. Wallace Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier
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