Friday, August 30, 2013

Updates to Essays


Click on the title  for the essay in full.

To “The Umbrella Man”:

Arthur Koestler, on the attitude of himself and his companions in Cloudcuckooland, up to the shock of September 1939, when they finally realized that the time of postponements and appeasements had finally passed:

They had lived so long under the sign of the Umbrella,
that they found it difficult to believe
that the age of the Sword had come.
-- The Scum of the Earth (1941, 2nd. edn. 1955)

[Anyone who is inclined to see a parallel with certain quite current events, is free to do so.]

To “De Amore”:

Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.
-- G.K. Chesterton, Manalive (1912)


Man to Matrimony:  Are you satisfaktionsfähig ?
Matrimony:  Aye;  and there is little else that is, here below.


The enigma of a woman’s heart,
finally espied  by a Private Eye,
for less than the price  of a Valentine …
This Rose
[Kindle]  [Nook]


On the extra profusion of different string theories, a mathematician remarks dryly,

It was hardly an idea calculated to appeal to a man with a taste for desert landscapes  … There are more than 10^500 versions of string theory  lounging indolently about.
-- David Berlinski,  The Deniable Darwin (2009), p. 532-3

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