Onvolledig Alfabet (Annelie David)
Dit ding zag ik op Boektopia liggen (waar voor de rest niet superveel lag), en was mijn eerste echte kennismaking met prozapoëzie. De schrijver heeft het over en tegen haar grootmoeder, die na de Oorlog moest vluchten uit Samland (deel van het tegenwoordige Kaliningrad). Zoals een woordenboek of encyclopedie is de tekst opgebouwd uit lemma’s. Elk lemma licht een woord toe uit de Samlandse taal die met haar oschâ’s gemeenschap fragmenteerde, en toont zo ook iets van het leven dat ze achterliet.
Qua stijl: De zinnen worden graag lang en nemen half onderweg soms grillige, spreektalige bochten. Klankherhalingen en ritmes komen en gaan in een stroom van toelichtingen. Het lijkt ergens op een naslagwerk, waar de volzin ook niet altijd primeert; alleen zijn de opgelijste feiten of gegevens hier herinneringen of gevoelens, dus niet zo kil allemaal. Het heeft wel iets, maar heb vaak het gevoel dat ik het nog niet allemaal ‘snap’ ofzo. Kijk er evenwel niet tegenop om het opnieuw te lezen.
Labyrinths (Jorge Luis Borges)
I like Borges a lot. I’d recently read Tlön online and recall having read The Garden of Forking Paths in uni (but in a hurry, so I didn’t internalise much of it), so when I saw a Penguin translation of Labyrinthes in an English bookstore I didn’t stop myself from buying it.
Usually, if I know the source language, then I prefer to read the original before a translation. I know this is originally in Spanish, which I can still read alright (and if I didn’t know, I could still have sensed the Spanishness of the text in the translation). But 1) I like physical books and didn’t have access to a Spanish one; 2) my Spanish isn’t that great either. I tried reading El Aleph in the original Spanish, and I got through it – but only with several dictionaries open on the other side of the screen. Relying on a dictionary gets tedious and makes me use it when I don’t really have to; if I don’t use one, I still lose the story here and there. Still, I intend read at least some of these in the original Spanish.
Anyway - I really like these stories, they’ve put weird new ideas in my head: about the infinite, the infinitesimal, identity, the perception and possibly the non-existence of time, the incomprehensibility of the human mind to itself… approached in many different ways and many different genres. Even with such themes, some of my favourites focus on relatively banal things: a fictional encyclopedia that starts a global hype (Tlön), a guy who got a brain injury when he fell off his horse (Funes the Memorious), a normal-looking coin that makes you think about nothing but itself (The Zahir)… I like that there doesn’t need to be a giant world-ending monster for someone’s sense of reality to break down. (Nothing against giant monsters who are into that, per se.)
De la terre à la lune + Autour de la lune (Jules Verne)
Il y a deux ans, je commençais à lire dans Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. Quelque part au milieu j’ai perdu mon livre (retrouvé dans le sac de mon vieil ordinateur portable après des mois). Ceci pour dire que De la terre à la lune n’était pas, dans le sens étroit, mon premier Verne. Mais enfin ces deux livres de la Lune m’ont plus attiré que celui de la Terre.
J’aime bien le style de Verne, pas trop élevé, doué d’humour et surtout de créativité. Quand même la lecture m’en a pris plusieurs mois. Largement ce n’était pas la faute du livre ; trop souvent je lis simplement trop peu. Toutefois j’avais parfois de la peine à le suivre : Plus la Lune s’approche, plus l’action cède aux chiffres et aux listes secs d’observations. L’impression me venait que cette histoire n’était qu’un prétexte pour aborder un sujet favori de l’auteur.
C’est là que Verne peut surprendre (en même temps qu’ennuyer) un lecteur de science-fiction moderne. Sans doute, il n’avait jamais l’intention de laisser alunir ses personnages ; il ne voulait que contempler la Lune d’une distance, bien que réduite. D’autres, comme H.G. Wells, n’imaginaient un tel voyage que pour imaginer des monstres extraterrestres, en négligeant d’y donner un arrière-fond aussi scientifique. Ici par contre, la science semble plus importante que la fiction : Verne ne s’en éloigne jamais trop. Si beaucoup de ses théories nous semblent dépassées aujourd’hui, tout était plausible pour ses contemporains.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (David Hume)
Been a while since I’d read philosophy. Saw Hume sitting in a bookstore and remembered a Discord interaction, wherein a Christian friend told me to “lowkirksixsevenuinely just read hume” because “[e]very atheist thinker whose not a new atheist is just copying hume”, so I took him (Hume) home.
I found myself more interested in the formulation of Reasoning and Habit in the earlier sections: it got at something inherent in human nature, something everyone can sort of feel for themselves. The later sections (especially X-XII) get less descriptive and more normative: there is a gap between human nature as Hume has just described it, and the behaviour of most humans in history. The style is very typical of the early modern period: sentences can get long and intricate. Still, I found most of it pretty clear.
In what follows I’ll write about what jumped out at me, without touching on everything that’s in the Enquiry (I don’t mention animal reasoning, the existence of things, occasionalism, etc.). It does not necessarily reflect my enjoyment of the text.
How David Hume (1711-'76) would have looked if he were a portrait
In billiards, you make balls hit other balls expecting them to move. Hume talks about why
The central idea of the enquiry is: we can’t truly know that a certain event will follow another event like we know 1 + 1 = 2; we can only remember what happened, and predict what will happen based on that past experience. So for all I know the Sun might not come up tomorrow, or this keyboard might turn into wood, or I might. But because all my past experiences of the world don’t involve such things, or are even contradicted by them, I should believe that they almost definitely won’t happen. We can’t know why or if things cause other things, but we can reflect on our experiences and conclude that they probably just do that.
This past experience can be applied to future events, but also to past ones that we didn’t experience. In the latter case, we’re also helped by testimony from others. This is because our experience teaches us what makes somebody more or less trustworthy as a witness reporting an event, especially a miracle. To Hume, a miracle is a violation of the laws of Nature. Even assuming the most critical, most honest, most intelligent source (like Tacitus, who wrote of how the goddess Serapis cured blindness through emperor Vespasian’s spittle), it would still be more likely that all witnesses were deceiving or deceived than that the laws of Nature herself were broken.
And sure, the laws of Nature were deduced from past experiences (of making hypotheses and doing experiments). But if you’re a scientist, you wouldn’t call something a miracle if it breaks the rules: you’d update the rules to account for it. That’s just learning from experience, adjusting your model to explain more data points. I’m not saying Hume’s entire reasoning falls apart here, only that he’s confusing his current best model of reality with the ‘laws’ of reality. If the latter resembled intuitions about billiard balls in Hume’s time, they don’t anymore: the fundamental principles of the world seem much less understandable to us now.
Hume is also quite picky with his examples of miracles, preferring traditions that his Anglican audience would already disapprove of: Muslim, pagan, Catholic and heretical… He even denies the Old Testament as a historical record, but carefully avoids the New one - while implying it wouldn’t hold up either. He seems to believe most people are, basically, stupid. ‘Barbarous’ and ‘ignorant’ places believe and spread more miracles, he says; conmen didn’t go to fancy places like Rome or Athens, but to Paphlagonia or Judah (no mention here of the miracle worker from remote Nazareth, only of the ‘superstitious’ people hated for rejecting his divinity).
What bothers me most is that somehow, the people Hume considers nearest to Nature should be least aligned with the faculties that, he says, Nature endowed humans with (reasoning and habit). Talk about violating the rules of Nature… See, I am an atheist - but if you’re gonna describe the mechanisms underlying human thought, then why does so much of our behaviour disagree with them? Do you have to come out of this specific educational machinery, from the right place and the right time in human history, to figure out thinking?
Hume seems to suggest most people just don’t think good, then stops thinking about it. But there are situations where all ‘rational’ behaviour fails to make a difference, and I still want to try something if it could avoid a terrible outcome. At worst, it’ll only make me feel more in control, and let me consider things more calmly afterward. I’m not talking about prayer, but I might as well be; plenty of theists know that they can’t know that God exists. A lot of them would agree that belief in God isn’t like belief in tomorrow’s sunrise. Between that and ignorance lies something else, less certain but more of some other adjective… Don’t know which, but not irrational.