Borges Labyrinth - drawn by hand

 

Jorge Luis Borges, Historia de los dos Reyes y de los dos Laberintos.

https://fairs.abaa.org/item/1383019410#gallery-3

A wolf by the ears

Tiberius said:

Cunctandi causa erat metus undique imminentium discriminum, ut saepe lupum se auribus tenere diceret.

— Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum, Lib.III Tiberius, 25

Before him, Terentius:

Auribus teneo lupum, nam neque quomodo a me amittam invenio neque uti retineam scio.

— Terentius, Phormio 506

Before Terentius, Solomon:

Sicut qui apprehendit auribus canem, sic qui transit impatiens et commiscetur rixae alterius.

— Prov. 26:17

Calculated Risk - Machiavelli

Né creda mai alcuno stato potere pigliare partiti sicuri, anzi pensi di avere a prenderli tutti dubbi; perché si trova questo nell’ordine delle cose, che mai non si cerca di fuggire un inconveniente che non si incorra in un altro. Tuttavia la prudenza consiste nel saper riconoscere le qualità degli inconvenienti, e nel pigliare il meno tristo per buono.

Different translations

Translation 1: Indeed, it had better recognize that it will always have to choose between risks, for that is the order of things. We never flee one peril without falling into another. Prudence lies in knowing how to distinguish between degrees of danger and in choosing the least danger as the best. (Donno transl.)

Translation 2: Never let any Government imagine that it can choose perfectly safe courses; rather let it expect to have to take very doubtful ones, because it is found in ordinary affairs that one never seeks to avoid one trouble without running into another; but prudence consists in knowing how to distinguish the character of troubles, and for choice to take the lesser evil.

Translation 3: No government should ever think that it can choose perfectly safe courses of action. Every government should expect to have to run risks, because in the ordinary course of events one never tries to avoid one trouble without running into another. Prudence consists in knowing how to weigh up troubles and choose the lesser ones.

Translation 4: In general, a ruler must never imagine that any decision he takes is safe; on the contrary he should reckon that any decision is potentially dangerous. It is in the nature of things that every time you try to avoid one danger you run into another. Good sense consists in being able to assess the dangers and choose the lesser of various evils.

The Prince, XXI

The past is a foreign country

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” ― L.P. Hartley,

Ventorum Flatus Navem Maxime Promovent - Francus Stypmanni

Social Media and the Right to Speak (Umberto Eco's view)

"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community [...] but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots."

Flesch–Kincaid Readability Score

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests
https://www.timetabler.com/reading/

Veritatem Temporis filiam esse

Truth is the Daughter of time:

Aulus Gellius (Noctes xii,11)  refers that:

If ... there were any who were neither so endowed by nature nor so well disciplined that they could easily keep themselves from sinning by their own will power, he thought that such men would all be more inclined to sin whenever they thought that their guilt could be concealed and when they had hope of impunity because of such concealment. But, said he, if men know that nothing at all can be hidden for very long, they will sin more reluctantly and more secretly. Therefore he said that one should have on his lips these verses of Sophocles, the wisest of poets:

See to it lest you try aught to conceal;
Time sees and hears all, and will all reveal.

Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.

Alexandria, A.D. 641

Since the first Adam who beheld the night
And the day and the shape of his own hand,
Men have made up stories and have fixed
In stone, in metal, or on parchment
Whatever the world includes or dreams create.
Here is the fruit of their labor: the Library.
They say the wealth of volumes it contains
Outnumbers the stars or the grains
Of sand in the desert. The man
Who tried to read them all would lose
His mind and the use of his reckless eyes.
Here the great memory of the centuries
That were, the swords and the heroes,
The concise symbols of algebra,
The knowledge that fathoms the planets
Which govern destiny, the powers
Of herbs and talismanic carvings,
The verse in which love's caress endures,
The science that deciphers the solitary
Labyrinth of God, theology,
Alchemy which seeks to turn clay into gold
And all the symbols of idolatry.
The faithless say that if it were to burn,
History would burn with it. They are wrong.
Unceasing human work gave birth to this
Infinity of books. If of them all
Not even one remained, man would again
Beget each page and every line,
Each work and every love of Hercules,
And every teaching of every manuscript.
In the first century of the Muslim era,
I, that Omar who subdued the Persians
And who imposes Islam on the Earth,
Order my soldiers to destroy
By fire the abundant Library,
Which will not perish... 

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, carefully, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions.

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work. 

Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own things. 

If you do a job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep your thoughts ... then your life will be happy.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been 

Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’

Remember that our efforts are subject to circumstances; you weren’t aiming to do the impossible. Aiming to do what, then? To try. And you succeeded. What you set out to do is accomplished.

Tell yourself: This thought is unnecessary. This one is destructive to the people around you. This wouldn’t be what you really think (to say what you don’t think—the definition of absurdity).

Text taken with some modifications from Gregory Hays' translation of Meditations.

Books of the Century Lists

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century 

The Stranger/The Outsider	Albert Camus
In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past	Marcel Proust
The Trial	Franz Kafka
The Little Prince	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Man's Fate	André Malraux
Journey to the End of the Night	Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway
Le Grand Meaulnes	Alain-Fournier
Froth on the Daydream	Boris Vian
The Second Sex	Simone de Beauvoir
Waiting for Godot	Samuel Beckett
Being and Nothingness	Jean-Paul Sartre
The Name of the Rose	Umberto Eco
The Gulag Archipelago	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Paroles	Jacques Prévert
Alcools	Guillaume Apollinaire
The Blue Lotus	Hergé
The Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank
Tristes Tropiques	Claude Lévi-Strauss
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley
Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell
Asterix the Gaul	René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
The Bald Soprano	Eugène Ionesco
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality	Sigmund Freud
The Abyss/Zeno of Bruges	Marguerite Yourcenar
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
Ulysses	James Joyce
The Tartar Steppe	Dino Buzzati
The Counterfeiters	André Gide
The Horseman on the Roof	Jean Giono
Belle du Seigneur	Albert Cohen
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez
The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
Thérèse Desqueyroux	François Mauriac
Zazie in the Metro	Raymond Queneau
Confusion of Feelings	Stefan Zweig
Gone with the Wind	Margaret Mitchell
Lady Chatterley's Lover	D. H. Lawrence
The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann
Bonjour Tristesse	Françoise Sagan
Le Silence de la mer	Vercors
Life: A User's Manual	Georges Perec
The Hound of the Baskervilles	Arthur Conan Doyle
Under the Sun of Satan	Georges Bernanos
The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Joke	Milan Kundera
Contempt/A Ghost at Noon	Alberto Moravia
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie
Nadja	André Breton
Aurélien	Louis Aragon
The Satin Slipper	Paul Claudel
Six Characters in Search of an Author	Luigi Pirandello
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui	Bertolt Brecht
Friday	Michel Tournier
The War of the Worlds	H. G. Wells
Se questo è un uomo, Survival in Auschwitz	Primo Levi
The Lord of the Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien
Les Vrilles de la vigne	Colette
Capital of Pain	Paul Éluard
Martin Eden	Jack London
Ballad of the Salt Sea	Hugo Pratt
Writing Degree Zero	Roland Barthes
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum	Heinrich Böll
The Opposing Shore	Julien Gracq
The Order of Things	Michel Foucault
On the Road	Jack Kerouac
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils	Selma Lagerlöf
A Room of One's Own	Virginia Woolf
The Martian Chronicles	Ray Bradbury
The Ravishing of Lol Stein	Marguerite Duras
The Interrogation	J. M. G. Le Clézio
Tropisms	Nathalie Sarraute
Journal, 1887–1910	Jules Renard
Lord Jim	Joseph Conrad
Écrits	Jacques Lacan
The Theatre and its Double	Antonin Artaud
Manhattan Transfer	John Dos Passos
Ficciones	Jorge Luis Borges
Moravagine	Blaise Cendrars
The General of the Dead Army	Ismail Kadare
Sophie's Choice	William Styron
Gypsy Ballads	Federico García Lorca
The Strange Case of Peter the Lett	Georges Simenon
Our Lady of the Flowers	Jean Genet
The Man Without Qualities	Robert Musil
Furor and Mystery	René Char
The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger
No Orchids For Miss Blandish	James Hadley Chase
Blake and Mortimer	Edgar P. Jacobs
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge	Rainer Maria Rilke
Second Thoughts/The Origins of Totalitarianism	Michel Butor
The Burden of Our Time	Hannah Arendt
The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov
The Rosy Crucifixion	Henry Miller
The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler
Amers/Gaston	Saint-John Perse
Gomer Goof	André Franquin
Under the Volcano	Malcolm Lowry
Midnight's Children	Salman Rushdie

Source Wiki

Philosophasters

A philosophaster is a “A shallow or pseudo-philosopher; a smatterer or pretender in philosophy”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

There's also a book by Robert Burton, of Melancholic fame, by the same name. The character names are funny, all of them charlatans in philosophy and theology:

Polypragmaticus, Pantomagus, Pedanus, Amphimacer, Theanus

Phrases from reading

Rembrandt: Philosopher in meditation

• Seneca: Genus dicendi mutatur per publicos mores (version of Whiterspoon). Regarding the involution of the spoken English.
• Ponite corda in verba Dt 32:45
• Res et verba Philippus; verba sine re Erasmus; res sine verbis Lutherus: nec res, nec verba Carolostadius; Table Talks DCCCII. 
• parum ordinavit, multa accumulavit referred Burton regarding those who write immethodically.
• Infelix operis summa, quia ponere totum nescit, unhappy that who's skilled in details, but not in the whole work, regrets Horace. BUT read next what Luther said:
• ...da ist kein divisio mehr, sed est punctum mathematicum, ibi (principles cannot fail there).  Et hoc est ... redigere omnia ad primum principium, id est, ad genus generalissimum. WA, Tischreden, (1) #312, p. 128. (Table Talk p. 42).
• Ad spem veterem, to the old hope, in the frontispiece of a roman monument. 
• a minori ad maius, reasoning from minor to major, similar to the qal wahomer.
• deductio ex sensibilibus: deduction from empiricals.
• adaequatio intellectus et rei: adequation of the intellect to things (correspondence). Or to paraphrase Hermann Lotze (Logica #130, p. 156), "thought follows reality". A frequent assumption (and fallacy) in science.
• Et cui assimilastis me, et adaequastis, dicit Sanctus? Is. 40.25
• Ex singularibus ad universalia, Luther table talk on Astronomy and Mathematics. p. 315
• pastione venti et re inutili, Ben Ezra's rendering of Ec. 1:14 quoted in Munsterus Hebraica Biblia Latina, p. 1573
• Cessante causa, cessat effectus. A. Tiraquelli. "effect follows cause with unerring certainty". White
• Ignorantia factis non iuris excusat. Sebastiano Medicis.
• concursio rerum fortuitarum, Cicero
• natura sunt immutabilia quoted in Petrus Santerna
• In obscuris, inspici solere quod, verisimilius est, aut quod plerumque fieri solet. Paulus
• “...eritque similis huic dies crastinus, imo major, excelentior valde... / erit sicut hodie, sic et cras, et multo amplius / eritque similis huius dies crastinus, multo celeberrimus” (Is.56:12 Tremellius/Vulgate/Chastellion)
• Patet hinc, certitudinem harum scientiarum unice dependere a certitudine ipsorummet principiorum, non a modo formandi conclusiones, quae omnes evidentissimo ratiocionio ex principiis deduci debent. Quae ratio est, cur Mathesis abstracta sit invictae certitudinis; Astrologia vana & futilis; Caeterae vero, mediae certitudinis inter utramque: quoniam talia sunt principia, quibus illae superstructuae sunt. Theses Miscl. XII J. Bernoulli, Opera p.233-234. 
• Parvus error in principiis, magnus in conclusionibus. Aristotle, De Caelo i, 5
• Parvus error in principiis, magnus in conclusionibus.
• Parvus error in initio magnus erit in fine. Aquinas
• Parvus error in principiis, maximum facit in conclusionibus. Aristotle acc. Albertus Magnus
• Parvus error in principio, magnus in fine est. Giordano Bruno, De Immenso, Innumerabilis et Infigurabilis II, i
• parvus error in principio intolerabilis sit in fine. Johannis Peckham, 
• Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Virgil (Georgics, 2.490). (Happy that who understands the causes of things)

The Child is father of the Man - the boy is the type of the man

William Wordsworth wrote:

My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold'

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Similarly 

• "The boy is the type of the man" 2T312
• “Bienaventurado el que fue joven en su juventud” Chejov, “El corresponsal”

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of Library

What might have had in common Jorge Luis Borges, the genial and perhaps the best writer of the XX century, with Ellen G. White, the Seventh-Day Adventist pioneer? Perhaps not much. However there are at least two things that they did share. Borges, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1899, had English Methodist paternal ancestors, a minister included. His Methodist grandmother, who emigrated to Argentina, had a library of considerable size, mostly populated by books in English. His fathers' library also had a significant amount of books. These libraries shaped his imagination as a boy and continued as a commonplace all his life. So much so that books and libraries are gravitational and ubiquitous components of his literature. Later in life he wrote a magnificent poem called "El Poema de los Dones" (The Poem of the Gifts) describing how he still was still surrounded by books, but as blind man now. In it he confesses that: 

I, that had always imagined Paradise as a kind of Library.

Ellen White, who was 71 years old when Borges was born, was raised Methodist. She didn't have an education even close to that of Borges. However, later in life she acquired considerable scholarship and became the most prolific female religious writer of all times. She conveyed unique insights of the spiritual world. In one of her passages she writes how Heaven will be like:

Heaven is a school; its field of study, the universe; its teacher, the Infinite One...There, when the veil that darkens our vision shall be removed, and our eyes shall behold that world of beauty of which we now catch glimpses through the microscope; when we look on the glories of the heavens, now scanned afar through the telescope; ... what a field will be open to our study!...There the student of science may read the records of creation ...In all created things he may trace one handwriting--in the vast universe behold "God's name writ large"...There will be open to the student, history of infinite scope and of wealth inexpressible... All the treasures of the universe will be open to the study of God's children. Education, 302-307.

There are thus at least two points of contact between Borges and White; the Methodist tradition on the one hand, and the passion for books on the other. One imagined (and hoped?) Heaven as a library, the other said that it was actually so.

I like to think that White's account of Heaven might have comforted Borges very much, had he read it. I also like to think that White would have been very pleased with the verse of Borges, had she read it. 

At least we might be comforted and pleased with such account and such poetic description of Heaven.