Aristotle on what is good (Rhetoric, Book 1 - Chapter 6)
The following is a more detailed list of things that must be good.
Happiness, as being desirable in itself and sufficient by itself, and as being that for whose sake we choose many other things.
Also justice, courage, temperance, magnanimity, magnificence, and all such qualities, as being excellences of the soul.
Further, health, beauty, and the like, as being bodily excellences and productive of many other good things: for instance, health is productive both of pleasure and of life, and therefore is thought the greatest of goods, since these two things which it causes, pleasure and life, are two of the things most highly prized by ordinary people.
Wealth, again: for it is the excellence of possession, and also productive of many other good things.
Friends and friendship: for a friend is desirable in himself and also productive of many other good things.
So, too, honour and reputation, as being pleasant, and productive of many other good things, and usually accompanied by the presence of the good things that cause them to be bestowed.
The faculty of speech and action; since all such qualities are productive of what is good.
Further — good parts, strong memory, receptiveness, quickness of intuition, and the like, for all such faculties are productive of what is good.
Similarly, all the sciences and arts.
And life: since, even if no other good were the result of life, it is desirable in itself.
And justice, as the cause of good to the community.
The patient process of Nature was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection … all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.
—Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)
Urban living has always tended to produce a sentimental view of nature. Nature is thought of as a garden, or a view framed by a window, or as an arena of freedom. Peasants, sailors, nomads have known better. Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise.
John Berger, “The White Bird” (1985)
One could call Alex’s situation a journalistic cautionary tale, but it is also a prime example of what happens when place and character collide to create drama unique to a specific historical moment. By situating the novel in the internet and portraying it as an actual place (rather than just a portal to email and Google) Grose accurately depicts how one’s online existence can come to feel more authentic and important than life in the “real” world.
Alizah Salario on Sad Desk Salad / Is the Internet the Novel’s Saving Grace? / Los Angeles Review of Books
Perhaps writing opens up a parallel universe into which, one by one, we’ll move all our dearest memories and rearrange them as we please.
Perhaps this is why all memoirists lie. We alter the truth on paper so as to alter it in fact: we lie about our past and invent surrogate memories the better to make sense of our lives and live the life we know was truly ours. We write about our life, not to see it as it was but to see it as we wish others might see it, so we may borrow their gaze and begin to see our life through their eyes, not ours.
” André Aciman / Alibis
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.
The “postcard” is here a literary genre that presupposes three things: the presence of its author in a particular place, brevity, and randomness of content.
A Postcard From Bali / Karaoke Culture / Dubravka Ugresic
The Duration of Life by The Brothers Grimm
When God created the world and was about to determine the duration of life for all the creatures, the donkey came and asked, “Lord, how long am I to live?”
“Thirty years,” answered God. “Is that all right with you?”
“Oh, Lord,” replied the donkey, “that is a long time. Think of my tiresome existence carrying heavy loads from morning until night, dragging bags of grain to the mill so that others might eat bread, only to be cheered along and refreshed with kicks and blows! Spare me part of this long time.”
So God had mercy and gave him eighteen years. The donkey went away satisfied, and the dog made his appearance.
“How long do you want to live?” said God to him. “Thirty years was too much for the donkey, but you will be satisfied with that long.”
“Lord,” answered the dog. “Is that your will? Just think how much I have to run. My feet will not hold out so long. And what can I do but growl and run from one corner to another after I have lost my voice for barking and my teeth for biting?”
God saw that he was right, and he took away twelve years. Then came the monkey.
“Surely you would like to live thirty years,” said the Lord to him. “You do not need to work like the donkey and the dog, and are always having fun.”
“Oh, Lord,” he answered, “so it appears, but it is different. When it rains porridge, I don’t have a spoon. I am always supposed to be playing funny tricks and making faces so people will laugh, but when they give me an apple and I bite into it, it is always sour. How often is sorrow hidden behind a joke. I cannot put up with all that for thirty years!”
God had mercy and gave him ten years. Finally man made his appearance. Cheerful, healthy, and refreshed, he asked God to determine the duration of his life.
“You shall live thirty years,” spoke the Lord. “Is that enough for you?”
“What a short time!” cried the man. “When I have built a house and a fire is burning on my own hearth, when I have planted trees that blossom and bear fruit, and am just beginning to enjoy life, then I am to die. Oh, Lord, extend my time.”
“I will add the donkey’s eighteen years,” said God.
“That is not enough,” replied the man.
“You shall also have the dog’s twelve years.”
“Still too little.”
“Well, then,” said God, “I will give you the monkey’s ten years as well, but you shall receive no more.”
The man went away, but he was not satisfied.
Thus man lives seventy years. The first thirty are his human years, and they quickly disappear. Here he is healthy and happy; he works with pleasure, and enjoys his existence. The donkey’s eighteen years follow. Here one burden after the other is laid on him; he carries the grain that feeds others, and his faithful service is rewarded with kicks and blows. Then come the dog’s twelve years, and he lies in the corner growling, no longer having teeth with which to bite. And when this time is past, the monkey’s ten years conclude. Now man is weak headed and foolish; he does silly things and becomes a laughingstock for children.
It was fundamental to Wittgenstein’s thinking – both in his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in his later work Philosophical Investigations – that not everything we can see and therefore not everything we can mentally grasp can be put into words. In the Tractatus, this appears as the distinction between what can be said and what has to be shown. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” runs the famed last sentence of the book but, as Wittgenstein made clear in private conversation and correspondence, he believed those things about which we have to be silent to be the most important.
Ray Monk / Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Passion for Looking, Not Thinking (New Statesman / August 2012)
The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present of absent) communicate without words.
” Italo Calvino / Six Memos For the Next Millennium / 1988
Siri Hustvedt On Reading:
I discovered ironies in Middlemarch I had not fully appreciated before, no doubt the product of my advancing age, which has been paralleled by the internal accumulation of more and more books that have altered my thoughts and created a broader context for my reading. The text is the same, but I am not (Pg. 137)
Openness to a book is vital, and openness is simply a willingness to be changed by what we read. (Pg. 138)
Reading is not a purely cognitive act of deciphering signs; it is taking in a dance of meanings that has resonance far beyond the merely intellectual. (Pg. 139)
Reading is creative listening that alters the reader. (Pg. 140)
From Living, Thinking, Looking, by Siri Hustvedt. Picador, p. 133. 2012
This essay was originally published in Columbia; 49 (2011)
