Useful Latin Phrases

These Latin phrases nicely sum up some useful expressions:

ex vi termini - by force of term

crux interpretum - a point in a text which is impossible to interpret

quod erat demonstrandum - that which was to be demonstrated (used usually in geometric proofs)

ex nihilo - out of nothing

ab initio - from the beginning

ad interim - in the time between

ad nauseum - until the point of nausea

eo ipso - by that very fact

I stumbled upon this by reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which contains a few Latin phrases, some quite humorous ones later in the novel. It was the hardest book I've ever read; not because of any syntactical characteristics or difficulty in understanding it, but because I felt like I related to Stephen Dedalus. He's not a glorious man to relate to, being not even as admirable as Leopold Bloom, but, nonetheless, each sentence about him sparked an ocean of thought in me (I like that. "sparked an ocean") Every line I read took me several minutes to finish because somewhere along the journey of each sentence, I got lost and ended up thinking of my own past loves, sins, and thoughts -- each of which in some way reflect Stephen's. Eo Ipso, (:D) the scant 150 pages took me more than a week and a half to finish. I loved the book and it was worth it. But, somehow I sort of wish I didn't relate to it as much as I did. I felt guilty relating to it, I suppose. Maybe that's the point.

Poignancy

How to Become a Man of Genius

If there are among my readers any young men or women who aspire to become leaders of thought in their generation, I hope they will avoid certain errors into which I fell in youth for want of good advice. When I wished to form an opinion upon a subject, I used to study it, weigh the arguments on different sides, and attempt to reach a balanced conclusion. I have since discovered that this is not the way to do things. A man of genius knows it all without the need of study; his opinions are pontifical and depend for their persuasiveness upon literary style rather than argument. It is necessary to be one-sided, since this facilitates the vehemence that is considered a proof of strength. It is essential to appeal to prejudices and passions of which men have begun to feel ashamed and to do this in the name of some new ineffable ethic. It is well to decry the slow and pettifogging minds which require evidence in order to reach conclusions. Above all, whatever is most ancient should be dished up as the very latest thing.

There is no novelty in this recipe for genius; it was practised by Carlyle in the time of our grandfathers, and by Nietzsche in the time of our fathers, and it has been practised in our own time by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence is considered by his disciples to have enunciated all sorts of new wisdom about the relations of men and women; in actual fact he has gone back to advocating the domination of the male which one associates with the cave dwellers. Woman exists, in his philosophy, only as something soft and fat to rest the hero when he returns from his labours. Civilised societies have been learning to see something more than this in women; Lawrence will have nothing of civilisation. He scours the world for what is ancient and dark and loves the traces of Aztec cruelty in Mexico. Young men, who had been learning to behave, naturally read him with delight and go round practising cave-man stuff so far as the usages of polite society will permit.

One of the most important elements of success in becoming a man of genius is to learn the art of denunciation. You must always denounce in such a way that your reader thinks that it is the other fellow who is being denounced and not himself; in that case he will be impressed by your noble scorn, whereas if he thinks that it is himself that you are denouncing, he will consider that you are guilty of ill-bred peevishness. Carlyle remarked: ``The population of England is twenty millions, mostly fools.'' Everybody who read this considered himself one of the exceptions, and therefore enjoyed the remark. You must not denounce well-defined classes, such as persons with more than a certain income, inhabitants of a certain area, or believers in some definite creed; for if you do this, some readers will know that your invective is directed against them. You must denounce persons whose emotions are atrophied, persons to whom only plodding study can reveal the truth, for we all know that these are other people, and we shall therefore view with sympathy your powerful diagnosis of the evils of the age.

Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.

28 December 1932

Bertrand Russel

I'm 18 years old.

Today

Today*, I read The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and Netochka Nezvanova by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Today, I slept at 10am and woke at 4pm. I assume that it was unhealthy. Today, I had fresh pork, from my own pig farm. It was delicious. Today, at 3am, I sweated from heat. It is India.

Today, I learned how beautiful T.S Elliot's poem "The Hollow Men" is. But, it was a perfectly ordinary day.

Edit: * Note that all references to the word Today, refer to Yesterday. It is 3:23 a.m. So I still feel like it's yesterday.

What I've Read

Well, it's vacation again. In fact, it is the last vacation I will ever have from high school. The last mandatory vacation of my life. Still, it feels mundane. I'm currently reading The Foundations of Arithmetic by Gottlob Frege, which is warping, rebuilding, and destroying (in that order) the way I view the world. Since I last wrote I read:

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Strange Pilgrims

One Hundred Years of Solitude

(All by Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Dance, Dance, Dance and The Vanishing Elephant by Haruki Murakami

Silence by Shusaku Endo

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Collector by John Fowles

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare

Nausea and Huis Clos by Jean-Paul Sartre

and before that is essentially time immemorial, but it contains another 10 or 15 books.

Notes on them: Coriolanus is the best Shakespeare tragedy. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is unforgettable. One Hundred Years of Solitude is beyond comment, but as Salman Rushdie said on the cover, it is the best book of the last fifty years, only perhaps Ulysses matches it in sheer literary vigour. And the rest of the books were also wonderful.

Classical Music

My favorite composers, in order:

1. Schubert

2. Faure

3. Rachmaninov

4. Paganini

5. Tchaikovsky

Collegiate Miracle

I've been accepted to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. It's expensive, so financial aid was applied for and gotten. It seems like the most wonderful school in the world; it's a lot like St. John's but without the rigidity of the great books program. Plus, they offer Russian as a second language, and an optional abroad year in Moscow or St. Petersburg. I have an obsession with Russia. I think I'll have huge amounts of fun, only bad thing is that the girl to guy ratio is 70:30. So there will be barely any guy friends...and probably the ones who are there will be emo-artsy poets who don't like to fight. Poetry/Emo/Artsy is all fine, but retaining some semblance of masculinity is important in a friend.