contingent conversations (or: continuous self-doubt)

“His collections are the practical man’s answer to the aporias of theory” (1)




"And I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious and independent citizens "(2)

“she has radical and continuous doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered” […] “always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies and thus of their selves” […] “ continuous self-doubt” (3)



“He was austere with himself […] But he had an approved tolerance for others ; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds” (4)

“All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance” (5)



“Anything from the sound of a word through the color of a leaf to the feel of a piece of skin can […] serve to dramatize and crystallize a human being’s sense of self-identity. […] It can symbolize the blind impress all our behaving bear. Any seemingly random constellation of such things can set the tone of a life. Any such constellation can set up an unconditional commandment to whose service a life may be devoted – a commandment no less unconditional because it may be intelligible to, at most, only one person. “ (6)

« A supposer que Ruskin se soit quelquefois trompé, comme critique, dans l’exacte appréciations de la valeur d’une œuvre, la beauté de son jugement erroné est souvent plus intéressante que celle de l’oeuvre jugée » (7)


« Cicero says “I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than hold true views with his opponents”. It is a matter of taste to prefer Plato’s company and the company of his thoughts even if this should lead us astray from truth. Certainly a very bold, even an outrageously bold statement, especially because it concerns the truth. […] for the true humanist neither the verities of the scientist nor the truth of the philosopher nor the beauty of the artist can be absolutes; the humanist, because he is not a specialist, exerts a faculty of judgment and taste which is beyond the coercion which each specialty imposes upon us” (8)

“The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities, and without a life story.” (9)




« Situé hors du temps, que pourrait-il craindre de l’avenir? « (10)






10 contingent contributions
(1) Walter Benjamin - Eduard Fuchs, Collector & Historian
(2) Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
(3) Richard Rorty – Contingency, irony and solidarity
(4) Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
(5) Walter Benjamin The Task of the Translator
(6) Richard Rorty – Contingency, irony and solidarity
(7) Marcel Proust – Traduction de “la bible d’Amiens”
(8) Hannah Arendt – The Crisis in Culture
(9) Hannah Arendt – The Life of the Mind
(10) Marcel Proust – A la recherche du temps perdu

“we guess as we read, we create; it all starts with an initial mistake” (1)

This is a confession. I am guilty of a wrongful appropriation. For over a year I have unjustly enlisted a borrowed phrase as a private talisman to ward off distress. It was an error of projection and a sad case of not finishing reading a sentence.

But let’s put you to the test, dear reader. Let’s see whether you are as tempted as I was to project stoic acceptance into this phrase:

“People who have ceased to hope that they will be fully understood express themselves with something of the torment of the deaf mute” (2)

What kept on echoing in my mind was “people who have ceased to hope” - and I thought of it as people who have wisely shed unrealistic expectations and who therefore would no longer be anguished about being (mis)understood. Stoically consoling, somehow.
But I had completely ignored the subsequent “torment of the deaf mute” (3)…. I had not understood that “ceasing to hope” does not equal “ceasing to need” … And so I had blithely skipped the essential, tormented part of the phrase.

Let me warn you that I’m wrongfully appropriating again: the above are not my own coffee-cup and glass of water. I just found them like that, left behind on a café-table. I myself am a stolid tea-drinker, not a sophisticated, wired espresso-sipper. But somehow an espresso-cup seemed more glamorously melancholic than a sensible tea-mug, and hence also more suited to illustrate this post. (4)

Trying to get more words into the footnotes than in the main body of text
(1) Proust - La fugitive : « “On devine en lisant, on crée; tout part d’une erreur initiale […] Une bonne partie de ce que nous croyons, et jusque dans les conclusions dernières c’est ainsi, avec un entêtement et une bonne foi égale, vient d’une première méprise sur les prémisses »
(2) The art historian Max J. Friedlaënder when describing the portraits painted by Quinten Metsys (Flemish 16th C painter)
(3) I’m all the more not to be forgiven for ignoring the second part of that sentence, since one of my favorite books is “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson Mc Cullers. A poignant account of the appeal a deaf mute exerts on a set of lonely people in a small village in the American south. Each of them turns to the deaf-mute to express their hopes and anguishes – his silent smiling seen as proof of his understanding. (Whereas the deaf-mute in reality is rather politely puzzled by the emotional gushes of those people and in his turn ardently communicates in sign-language with the only other deaf mute in town, who is a simpleton addicted to sweets)
(4) a puzzling difference in image really, the one between tea- and coffee- drinking.

the last one to stay with us / le dernier de tous

It is not the most uplifting knowledge: the fact that we are utterly captive to physiological processes, not only in our obvious physical functioning, but also in our deepest sense of Self, in our thinking and feeling.

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

Tales of neurological dysfunctions are always harrowing – they seem so utterly without redemption or catharsis, unless … unless they’re told by a sensitive humanist as Oliver Sacks . As a clinical neurologist he has studied neurological deficits resulting in all kinds of devastating losses: “loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, ….” . As a sympathetic human being, as a humanistic writer he is interested in how the “person", the "human being” deals with these pathological aggressions. As he writes in the introduction to his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, there’s always “a reaction, on the part of the affected individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity”.

Anyone with lesser scientific credentials than Sacks might be dismissed as being naïve in this stubborn, humanist respect for a “self” which remains in the midst of physiological disintegration (1). As it is, his poignant stories show us human identity as both frail, utterly subject to illness and decay, and resilient. In a story about a man suffering from Tourette’s syndrome he asks rhetorically “How will, how can, the ego stand this bombardment? Will identity survive? Can it develop, in face of such a shattering, such pressures – or will it be overwhelmed, to produce a “Tourettized soul? ”. And yes, apparently identity can move beyond the pathology, for instance , in this story, through channeling the wild Tourette’s tics in brilliant jazz improvisations.

Or in the case of a man suffering from severe amnesia, living in a string of unconnected present moments, without any remaining capacity to form human bonds or even to hold a thought for longer than just a moment : “But if he were held in emotional and spiritual attention – in the contemplation of nature or art, in listening to music, in taking part in the Mass in chapel – the attention, its “mood”, its quietude would persist for a while and there would be in him a pensiveness and peace we rarely, if ever, saw during the rest of his life at the home."

It is quite moving (and consoling? ) to see how convinced Sacks is of the redemptive potential of art – which, in its free and disinterested appeal to our senses & sensibilities, seems to be able to concentrate whatever mental energies we may have left and thus to keep us from being at the mercy of “crude drives and impulsions ”. Sacks sincerely believes in the “undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, […] by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation” .

When the Self is Sniffing & Sneezing

But let’s move to less traumatic realms to test the behavior of our Self amidst physiological turmoil. Let’s take those instances when we’re just tired or hungry or feverish. Not only will we be cycling uphill less swiftly, but also may we be less likely to arrive promptly to the conclusion that 1 plus 1 equals 2. Unless we’re professional cyclists our sense of self will be hardly affected by the muscle-fatigue but how about that diminishment in the mental faculties?

Amongst the latter it seems that in particular Reason and Logical Thinking are the first to go under duress (2). Ah, Reason! That summit of human capabilities! Yes, but is it really integral to our sense of Self, to our Identity? Important, valuable and indispensable (3) as they are, Reason or Logical Thinking somehow seem like neutral qualities: though they unquestionably differentiate us, they do not really characterize us as a person (4). In a way it’s like with muscles – some people just have a more powerful apparatus than others. And mere swings in the sugar level, for instance, will affect the functioning of both Muscle and Logical apparatus.

Now, in any modern competitive environment one is definitely judged according to one’s Reasoning skills (these days less so on muscle power) and one cannot really afford any lapses in logical thinking. There will always be those specimens of the human race who prey on any perceived weakness and who will not fail to humiliate the hapless feverish & sneezing human, rejoicing in their own contrasting strength of mental grasp. (5) But thank god there are also those other specimens of the human race (and yet, they are too few) who show concern when someone is ill – who value and respect people for more than their Logical Skills.

But so, think of that hapless feverish human – who is dead tired, who cannot cycle, who cannot think logically: what kind of “I” is there still left, which Selves do still remain?

Well not the foreign language Selves at any rate (it takes only a simple cold or an empty stomach or a bit of stress to have me helplessly fumbling for words in any language but my own). Nor does the practical, problem-solving Self seem a very resilient persona (goes to show that is only an acquired trait - ready to go at the first spot of trouble - well, in my case, that is). But hopefully, yes hopefully, there does remain a courteous & affectionate Self, who treats people with love and respect. (6) And a feeling, intuitive Self? Oh yes definitely, no doubt, the feeling Self remains and perhaps even all the more so, when fever has dissolved all other, pedantically analytical and logical, Selves.

And truly, nothing like a slight fever to promote full immersion into an art experience – visual arts, I would say, or music – an immersion without reserve, without the distancing chaperone of logic. And though eloquency often fails me in such conditions of feebleness (no strength to compose a sentence let alone a full text, no energy even to read a longer text) I can still happily & feverishly tinker then with photos, perhaps I'm even all the more spontaneously and contentedly immersed in the visual , when not under the strains of reasoning. (7)

And when being ill, while not interested in food at all, I am still sensitive to the quality of light, to the slow dances of shadows, to far-off echoing sounds of playing children and humming birds, to the smell of rain, … Oh yes, under duress, that inner atmospheric barometer might be the very last one of my Selves to go ….

And there will always be Proust ...

But in matters of neurology and self-observation the last word of course has to go, yet again, to Proust (8) :

“For some moments, […] I stayed alone with this little inner person, who greeted the rising sun with a song. Of all the Selves which compose our personality, it are not the most apparent that are most essential for us. In myself, when ill health will have slain one after another, there will still remain two or three Selves, more enduring than the rest, notably a certain philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered in two works of art, in two sensations, a common element. But the last of all, I have sometimes wondered whether it would not be this little weather-fellow, like the one the optician at Combray had in his shop window to forecast the weather, and who, taking off his hood when the sun shone, would put it on again if it was going to rain. This little weather-man, […] I do think that in my final hour of agony, when all my other ‘selves’ will be dead and gone, if a ray of sunshine were to break through the clouds, while I am breathing my last breath, the little barometer-fellow will feel quite comfortable, and will take off his hood to sing: “Ah! at last, fine weather!”

Selves hidden in the footnotes

(1) Colin Mc Ginn in a NYRB review of Sacks’ latest book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain -
“ His implied message is therefore one of tolerance and understanding. […] The preservation of self: that could be the motto for all of Sacks's writing on neurological disorders. […] There is always an "I" there, someone to whom things matter; so long as there is consciousness at all, there is a subject of that consciousness. Even if you can't tell your wife from a hat, there is still a you that must deal with this disability. Ultimately, then, Sacks's clinical case studies are exercises in love and respect »
(2) A recent experiment showed that when sugar-levels are too low, people were less likely to take decisions based on logical thinking but would rather resort to Intuition, which apparently needs less glucose to operate. “It takes a lot of nervous energy to do logical thinking, whereas intuition takes very little (since intuition usually requires the mind to be free-wheeling or idling). When the nervous energy of the brain runs down then the mind switches off logical thinking”
(3) Is that enough of an ode to Reason? I really wouldn’t want to look like a reason-basher here!
(4) Because Reason is supposed to be objective/universal, not subjective?
(5) Personal note: I should learn to stay home from work when I feel ill – that heroic work-presenteism of mine only gets me into trouble – and besides, I hate being humiliated
(6) Well, one can always hope and try, but truth is: when I’m feverish and tired I often snap at people. Though on the other hand, I do seem to be more, um, softer or compassionate when I run a fever, more tolerant of human fallibility & frailty in general. My own feebleness as a source of affection for my “fellow creatures of chance’s kingdom” ?
(7) This ‘words versus visuals’ passage echoes another blog-discussion about analytical and distancing words versus ‘unthinking’ visuals --- the visual does seem to appeal to a more intuitive self, and feels less exhausting, requiring less disciplined, systematic reasoning.
(8) Proust - La Prisonnière p6 - « Pendant quelques instants […] je restais en tête à tête avec le petit personnage intérieur, salueur chantant du soleil […] De ceux qui composent notre individu, ce ne sont pas les plus apparents qui nous sont le plus essentiels. En moi, quand la maladie aura fini de les jeter l’un après l’autre par terre, il en restera encore deux ou trois qui auront la vie plus dure que les autres, notamment un certain philosophe qui n’est heureux que quand il a découvert, entre deux œuvres, entre deux sensations, une partie commune. Mais le dernier de tous, je me suis quelquefois demandé si ce ne serait pas le petit bonhomme fort semblable à un autre que l’opticien de Combray avait placé derrière sa vitrine pour indiquer le temps qu’il faisait et qui, ôtant son capuchon dès qu’il y avait du soleil, le remettait s’il allait pleuvoir. [.. .] je crois bien qu’à mon agonie, quand tous mes autres « moi » seront morts, s’il vient à briller un rayon de soleil, tandis que je pousserai mes derniers soupirs , le petit personnage barométrique se sentira bien aise, et ôtera son capuchon pour chanter : « Ah ! enfin, il fait beau »

heroic materialism (1)

Pensiveness did not yet surrender during the drive from Newark airport to NYC – a ghastly drive, through a grim industrial wasteland, in a battered cab with the radio tuned in to the Family Bible Radio Station.

But from the moment the beaming driver (whom I had over-tipped out of sheer relief to have safely arrived) pressed upon me a card with airwave and web coordinates of said Bible Station, my mind was forcibly switched into act/react mode.


I stumbled out of the cab into the revolving doors of the hotel – and was then efficiently processed through check-in via elevator into hotel-room - beamed up by colleagues, and out of hotel again into cab into traffic into tunnel onto business meeting out of meeting back to hotel out of hotel, hitting the crowded streets, plunging into ravines of flashing neon lights, eating in noisy restaurant - enthusiastically babbling with equally enthusiastically babbling & chattering waiters & colleagues & business acquaintances.

“ I hardly listened to that chatter [..] it didn’t give any food to the sort of musings I love […] the babbling would have needed to be very exciting indeed to revive my inner life during these mundane hours, hours during which I merely lived on the surface of my skin [...]” (2)

And thus each day speeded by – any reflective & pensive urges instantly evaporating in the day's whizz – seldom have I been swept along in such incessant stream of action & chatter & movement. Even during in-between moments spent alone in elevators, corridors and cabs, one is not left to one’s lonely wandering mind: beaming chattering people & lively colored images flash by on omnipresent little video screens (visual muzak).

Sleep-deprivation can induce a state of elation and manic energy. Perhaps that also goes for deprivation of reflection, a deprivation which brings on a state of innocent energy & verve & vigor. And is perhaps the key to materialist success.

The trick is just to keep moving. Never stand still – never look back – think ahead – plot purposefully – go for more. Work two jobs (like that taxi-driver, 8 hours as care giver at a nursing home and 7 hours as a taxi-driver). Or work at day and study at night (like that amazingly efficient secretary, scheduling and organizing at day, studying interior design at night). Go for it, found your own company and make billions (and keep working way beyond retirement age and get yourself a satellite connection on your yacht to control business at home while you’re sailing the Mediterranean (3) ).

It’s that heroic materialist dash that pulses everywhere – that drives New York on and upwards . And one feels both attracted and repulsed by it. Or rather, humbled, yes, perhaps I felt humbled (even humiliated?) by this triumph of vigor and verve – which is a complete refutation of what I stubbornly value: contemplation, pensiveness, reflective thinking. So, shall I convert? Shall I definitively trade in ponderous reflections for this irrepressible materialistic zest? Trade in contemplation for jolts & flashes & an incessant stream of impressions? (4)



After all, perhaps this is what humans are really wired for – the elation and concentration of the hunt, which has now evolved into this global economic video game. A game which keeps us all alert and active (and out of melancholia’s grasp...?).

So though I cannot but humbly admit the victory of materialistic verve & vigor – though medical science touts the beneficial effects of constant company & superficial social contacts as opposed to the morbid effects of lonely musing – though the material, tangible results of enlightened economic purposefulness are everywhere - though naïve philosophical ruminations & dreamy wanderings & a dilettante infatuation with art have gone completely out of social favor – still I willfully seek solitude to indulge in these useless pursuits.

And a measure of solitude can be found (even while trapped in a NY business trip), very early in the morning, when streets are not yet bustling, when waiters in diners are not yet vigorously obsequious (5) , when a few lines can be read in a clandestine book (6) .

Like in that friendly, engagingly shabby deli off Broadway, with the many steaming pots and pans waiting to feed famished commuters – with personnel still sleepy behind the counters – with its formica tables and chairs, yes there one did not feel out of place sitting alone at a table, behind a mug of tea, with a book. Or venturing into Central Park, enveloped in a morning haze – surrounded by silent skyscrapers, some stemming still from an era of weathered building materials which soothe the eye instead of rebuking it with flashy reflections.

The city never sleeps of course, so perhaps it’s indeed only at dawn that for a very brief while its pace slows down a bit – to prepare the leap from nocturnal frenzy into daylight activity.

And yet, the irony of this dazed NYC trip was, that in the end it did furnish me with unexpected insights into the nature of contemplation …. and made me understand my incongruous love for a 17th Century French painter of luminous Arcadian visions with an ominous twist (7).

Maybe those insights were gathered, precisely thanks to my sensory exhaustion and thanks to my woefully missing out (no time no time) on an exhibition of Poussin landscape pictures in the Metropolitan Museum . So in the plane back, seated next to a woman nervously zapping from canal to canal on the entertainment-system, and accompanied by the strident cries of an exhausted baby some rows further, I sought & found comfort in an illustrated review of the missed exhibit, “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions”. (8)




Coda: Arcadian Visions on the Plane

First I let my eyes linger on a reproduction of a delicious, tranquil landscape, bathed in a limpid morning light grazing the treetops and the roofs of an antique city glimpsed very far off in a hazy distance. A pretty and orderly landscape – a sight for sore eyes – such a relief, this stillness . …. .
But looking on, there’s more than prettiness there. It’s a landscape with grave monuments (9) and with a woman gathering the ashes of her killed husband. The gravity of history is there. Reminders of evil and suffering are there. This is an image that demands slowly unfolding attention, emotional engagement, full concentration.

And reading on, the author of the article tells me why these paintings are so fascinating and moving. Not merely because of their classical erudition (Poussin is no dull pedant) – not merely because of their formally abstract perfection. But rather because of Poussin’s “focus on the varieties of longing and dreaming”, because he painted “images of heavenly beauty out of disgust for the malignity of our times”.

These paintings were painted out of a yearning, the same yearning for repose and beauty as they quell in the viewer.

“they were meant in part to be places of mental repose, images to dwell on, and to dwell in, at least for a while. […] Longing is experienced in the very space of the painting, as the viewer rapt in concentration and full of yearning and expectation, travels mentally further and further into the picture. […]
Nonetheless, Poussin’s late landscapes rarely depict visions of a simple paradise; many contain reminders of evil, suffering and death” . (10)

So they are paintings inviting contemplation – so very different from the superficial jolts and flashes one is bombarded with in a city – so very different from say, even impressionist paintings. (11)
They are paintings offering relief, at least for a while, from the unrelenting stress of the inexorably sequential, implacably moving forward pace of life.

meandering footnotes
(1) "Heroic Materialism" is the title Kenneth Clark gave to the chapter dedicated to the 19th century in his book about western civilization throughout the ages. The chapter opens with an evocation of Manhattan Island. And then he writes about this ‘vision’: “It’s godless, it’s brutal, it’s violent – but […] in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself”

(2) « J’écoutais à peine ces histoires […] elles ne fournissaient aucun aliment aux rêveries que j’aimais […] il les eût fallu d’une qualité bien excitante pour que ma vie intérieure pût se réveiller durant ces heures mondaines où j’habitais mon épiderme, […] c’est-à-dire où je ne pouvais rien éprouver de ce qui était pour moi dans la vie le plaisir » Proust - Le côté de Guermantes

(3) real life testimonies gathered during this trip

(4) L’ Allegro versus Il Penseroso?

(5) I certainly appreciate courtesy and friendliness in waiters – but I hate the idea of buying human kindness. I feel embarrassed by the thought anyone would have to be friendly and smiling just to earn their tip. Though some do turn ‘subservience’ into an ironic art – the way that waitress in the fashionable restaurant danced around the table & smiled & cajoled & flirted with the male guests …. and all that with a dash of mockery …. Yep, hers truly was a first rate performance.

(6) To be exact: I managed to read four (4) non-business-related pages in five days.

(7) Poussin - French classicizing painter – one of his famous paintings “Et in Arcadia Ego” shows some shepherds and a wise woman musing over a tomb in an idyllic landscape (the mythical Arcadia) suffused with smoldering limpid light – The beauty of the landscape contrasts with the wistful, musing air of the figures, and with the title … “Also in paradise, death is present”

(8) April 17th issue of the NYRB – Andrew Butterfield : “The Magical Painting of Poussin”

(9) William Hazlitt as quoted by AB: “with the gravity of history stamped on the proud monuments of vanished empire”

(10) AB in NYRB

(11) AB : “since the triumph of Impressionism we have lost the habit of taking time to study paintings. […]” Much as I am susceptible to Impressionism’s charming delights, it is true that they merely skirt the surface and resist contemplation.

Pilgrimage / Pèlerinage

Reading Proust is of course a pilgrimage as such – and surely his soul lingers rather sous une haie d’aubépines (under a hawthorn hedge) than in a cemetery.

But still, his “little weatherman” might have loved the fleetingness of that shadow, appearing and disappearing with the itinerant sun & clouds.

A Tale of Two Brain Halves (1), or: Proust and the Hypothalamus

It was definitely an exciting week for Proust-lovers with a thing for popular science (2).

The press reported upon a neurological experiment (meant to relieve a patient from his eating disorder) whereby Deep Brain Stimulation of the Hypothalamus had unwittingly engendered a vivid memory recollection in the recipient of the stimulation. The patient gushed about how he remembered a long forgotten scene in a park with friends, how he recognized his then girlfriend, how he could even distinguish details of the clothes, and how everything was in full color. And when the stimulation was intensified, the remembered details became all the more vivid.

What was so particular about this déjà vu experience was that it was brought on by stimulation of a part of the brain not at all associated with conscious memory formation! The Hypothalamus is part of the limbic system and has to do with lowly hormones, with the control of primary body functions such as body temperature, hunger, thirst, fatigue …. and it is responsive to light and to olifactory stimuli.

Hmmm … primary body-functions … smell …. and involuntary memories …. Yes, this rather smells like Proust! Proust, who with obsessive attention recorded his sensations and moods and whose most moving pages describe sudden, involuntary déjà vu’s – forgotten moments resurrected by the taste of a cake dipped in tea, or by the stumbling on two uneven tiles, or by the sleepy movement of an arm reaching for the light switch. Moments of the past that had never been consciously stored up because the intellect had found them not important enough to mull over, truly forgotten moments brought back to life in full vivid reality by a simple bodily analogy. (3)

But so Proust might , in those thousands of pages with their many tantalizing intuitions about memory and the human mind, Proust might poetically have anticipated what neuro-science can now painstakingly disentangle? So the shoddy, imprecise right brain half is not only about frivolously fragmented make-believe and fantasy? Its intuitions can reach for the truth?

The fact that a poetical intuition seems thus vindicated by ascertainable, scientific fact is strangely moving – as moving as is the knowledge that all those forgotten moments of our lives are floating somewhere in our brain, just waiting for the right stimulus to spring back to life.

Yes, a knowledge almost as consoling as those Proust-passages themselves. Passages that wistfully meditate on the true happiness produced by involuntary recollections, a happiness which no methodical remembering, no looking at photos from our past could bring.
And these involuntary recollections make us happy in such a fresh, confident way, precisely because they bring back utterly forgotten, futile moments which are no part of our laboriously chewed over life-chain.

They make us happy, because the real paradises are the paradises we have lost …. (4)


Relegated to the notes: Proust-quotes and some internal warfare between the two brain-halves

(1) First of all, says the meticulous left brain-half, let’s get rid of the myth of the two brain-halves with their neat split up of mental faculties: logic, words, mathematics on the left and imagination, visual representation, creativity on the right. The two hemispheres share these faculties, it’s only a matter of different processing style: the left concentrates on details and step-by-step reasoning whereas the right goes for general connections and the broad picture. Well yes, smiles the right brain-half: so the notion of “two brain halves” is an excellent metaphor to compare and contrast different mental takes on things: the firm ground of an analytical fact based approach versus the tantalizing leaps of synthetical intuition.

(2) “ Proust-lovers-with-a-thing-for-popular-science”: typically specimens that are neither fish nor fowl – neither able to lose themselves in poetic or mystical raptures nor prone to conducting scientific experiments in their garage. Or perhaps rather: eternally ambivalent specimens – while reading Proust they reflect on the futility of literature – while making themselves useful at work by (eg) logically adding up figures, they lament the job’s lack of meaning and beauty. Also, these creatures are prone to fits of self-education resulting in a collection of popular science books, which they do always diligently start to read and from which they then at best retain some metaphors for understanding Life , but certainly never any useful facts for the practical business of living.

(3) Proust - Le Temps Retrouvé ( Time Lost Recovered? Lost time found again? I’m a lousy Proust translator ….)
Mais au moment où, […], je posai mon pied sur un pavé qui était un peu moins élevé que le précédent, tout mon découragement s’évanouit devant la même félicité qu’à diverses époques de ma vie m’avaient donnée […] , la vue des clochers de Martinville, la saveur d’une madeleine trempée dans une infusion, […]

But at the very moment that I put my foot on a tile that lay a bit higher than the previous one, my despondency vanished in front of the same kind of happiness brought, at different moments of my life, by the sight of the spires of Martinville, the taste of a Madeleine-cake soaked in tea. […]

(4) « Oui, si le souvenir, grâce à l’oubli, n’a pu contracter aucun lien, jeter aucun chaînon entre lui et la minute présente, s’il est resté à sa place, à sa date, s’il a gardé ses distances, son isolement […] , […] il nous fait tout à coup respirer un air nouveau, précisément parce que c’est un air qu’on a respiré autrefois, […] car les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus. »

Yes, if the memory, thanks to the forgetting, has forged no link whatsoever between it and the present minute, if it has stayed at its place, at its date in time, if it has kept its distance, its isolation [..] then it makes us suddenly breathe a new fresh air, precisely because it is an air we have breathed in former days, [..] because the true paradises are the paradises we have lost.

micro-economics

Great inventions, company-offices. Conceived to have us acting at our most rational, efficient and disciplined and thus pivotal in the western creation of wealth and order.

Yes, economic productivity demands impersonal spaces, air-conditioning, artificial light, clear objectives, formal organization charts, impersonal dress-codes. A whole universe set-up to squelch irrational human behavior and censor disruptive human needs.
Just imagine the dramatic plunge efficiency & productivity would take , should human sympathy intervene in the objective assessment of an employee’s worth, should personal likes and dislikes interfere with company-projects.
And imagine all the wasted time if people would bask in a shaft of sun-light instead of working calmly in a neon glow, if people would be gazing at the skies instead of their screens, would sniff the autumnal air instead of breathing air-conditioned nothingness.

Well yes, how to get people with the most diverse persuasions, sensibilities and interests working together efficiently, if not by subordinating the subjective and the personal to a system of shared rational calculations?
Gosh, I wouldn't even dare to rebel against so marvelous a system. Great system. Really.


But oh oh oh .... even after all these years … how often do I mumble this Proust-quote at my desk: “I was trapped in an alien reality, one that was not made for me and against which appeal was not possible” (*)

(*) "Je me trouvais dans une réalité qui n’était pas faite pour moi et contre laquelle il n’y avait pas de recours"