Etymology learned from Hannah Arendt.
March 20, 2009
– Company, “men who eat bread together”
– Armut and Arbeit come from the same root, in German.
– Arendt references Kluge’s Etymologishes Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache in a footnote, and now I am set upon Davis Library’s PF3580.K5 1989.
All I do in German class is ask, “Hat das Verb stimmen etwas mit die Stimme zu tun?” or “Wie schön ist das Unterschied zwischen Umwelt und Umfeld; wir sagen nur Environment!” or “Warum hat Geschlecter das Wort schlecht drin? Weil Sex ist immer etwas schlectes?”
“Unsere kleine Linguistin,” says Frau Christina, “dass weiss ich nicht, aber gute Frage.”
All this rain is killing me.
March 19, 2009
“Slyly Zeus created a thunderstorm, changed himself into a little cuckoo, and, pretending to be in distress, he flew into Hera’s arms for protection. She pitied the wet little bird and hugged it close to keep it warm, but all of a sudden she found herself holding mighty Zeus in her arms instead of the bird. Thus Zeus won Hera…”
– D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
churchill gems.
February 22, 2009
“To his Military Cross he added the unique distinction of having been shot through the heart, and living happily ever afterwards wtih the bullet in him.”
- Winston Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm
nevertheless, a wonderful song.
January 16, 2009
“Now let your pleasure be your guide / I crown and mitre you over yourself.”
- Vergil, to Dante, at the end of the Purgatorio
“Do what you feel now! / Electric Eel now! “
- MGMT, “Electric Feel”
collect: more facts from Milton
January 9, 2009
- the Ranters, a religious sect in 1650’s England, “believed that an individual attained perfection through sinning. The aim was enact a sin as ‘no-sin’”
- the Diggers, another sect, “grew corn, parsnips, carrots and beans” on common land; their leader “had received a simple but revolutionary message in a trance: ‘Work together, Eat bread together.’”
- after the monarchy was restored in 1660, “the government ordered the exhumation and posthumous execution of key leaders from the republican years.”
Fascinating.
things to look up, having read The Abolition of Man, OR, things I am not yet: a scholar
January 7, 2009
- pons asinorum
– Ruksh
- obiter dicta
– Traherne
- Rta
– Olaf Stapledon
- “loved, and been well nurtured in, his mother tongue”
- Ferum victorem cepit
– H.C.F.
- Goethe’s approach to nature
- Martin Buber
- Paracelsus
- T/F: a basilisk only sees by killing.
collect: chapters 1 & 2
January 5, 2009
At the Library on a whim (namely: checking out a copy of Hans Christian Andersen after a walk in the woods), hanging back by the new book display, my eye fell upon:
and so, naturally, I got it.
Gems gleaned so far:
- a “buttery” is “a place to store provisions, and to get something to eat”
- John Milton “when he went to school, when he was very young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till 12 or one a clock at night, & his father ordered the maid to sit up for him,” according to his brother, Christopher.
- a student would keep a “commonplace book…akin to a scrapbook or notebook,” in which on collected “letters, pithy quotations, scraps of poetry, ‘recepits’ for medicines and goods, notes for accounts, prayers – indeed any piece of information that could be useful to the owner in the future.”
- translation was known as “englishing”
- when the plague hit London and everyone left town, “Old women were employed, for a pittance, to visit the houses of the dead and report back on the cause of death.” They were known as ’searchers.’
zitate.
November 1, 2008
“Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose ones’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Steet names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and the little streets must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers of my school notebooks.”
“Among the caryatids and atlantes, the putti and pomonas, which in those days looked on me, I stood closest to those dust-shrouded specimens of the race of threshold-dwellers – those who guard the entrance to life, or to a house. For the are versed in waiting. Hence, it was all the same to them whether they waited for a stranger, for the return of the ancient gods, or for the child that, thirty years ago, slipped past them with his schoolboy’s satchel. Under their tutelage, the Old West district became the West of antiquity – source of the west winds that aid the mariners who sail their craft, freighted with apples of the Hesperides, slowly up the Landwehr Canal.”
- Walter Benjamin, Tiergarten, Berlin Childhood around 1900
