Vagaries of the search function: “Sexxx”

Among the excellent functionality provided by the folks at Blogspot (a tip of the boater  to them  at this juncture) is their provision of the “Search Keywords” feature, for the better guidance of the blogger.

In the past few hours, two search-strings are recorded:

            review yau "the shape of inner space"

(All very well, par for the course.)   And, umm…

            sexxx

!  -- The seeker obviously intended to retrieve our morally blameless post,  “Dr J’s Sexxx Tips”, recommended especially for women and children (though not for members of celibate monastic orders).  But -- the wide world being what it is -- how could a search on this one bare string, amid all the cacophany of the public square, pull up our own small offering here?

I tried it, I googled that single word.  And, oh!  what a tumble, is my face red (along with other body-parts as well).   Page after page of… oh, my…. page … oh ….  page, oh … ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…..

Anyhow.  That is not the way to find this site.  Whether you’d eventually find it, I do not know; I gave up, exhausted, after several pages.

Rule of thumb:  If you wish to find Dr Justice’s wholesome crunchy goodness, while avoiding the vulgarities of the marketplace -- simply append “woodchuck” to any google search you do !    Thus,

            sexxx woodchuck

promptly brings up our own site at the very top of the list -- slots #1, 2, 3, & 4 !!

In fact, now that I try it, < review yau "the shape of inner space">, though penned with the best of intentions, doesn’t really work either.   Whereas

            review yau "the shape of inner space" woodchuck

brings up no fewer than seven hits for this site, on the very first page !  

So, you see how useful these humble loveable creatures can be.

~

[Update, the waning evening hours of September third]
Just a moment ago, a new search-term popped up:

        grommet world

This, no doubt in search of a satirical item on site-statistics and gaming the search engine (WHICH WE WOULD NEVER DO), which we posted way back in February;  amazing anybody remembers it.  Anyhow the point is -- the only search-strings that show up in the Blogspot report  are those that worked, that actually found this site on the strength of it.  So I tried it and, well, no such luck:  there's a lot of competition, seems the planet is pantingly avid for grommets;  I gave up after a couple of pages.  But!  In line with our secret formula above, already you are giving this a whirl:

      grommet world woodchuck

Bingo !   Right where you wanna be.

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~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update 24 Sept 2011]

These “search keywords” reports are endlessly fascinating.  They provide an intimate glimpse into the mental workings of this blog’s readers -- almost at an infralinguistic/subrational level, like the speech of dreams.   Here are some recent ways that surfers found this site (presented as written, misspellings and all):

transient global amnesia and derek parfitt

grommets galore

pronunciation of percipi

reasons and persons was memorized and chanted

parfit triple theory

integers in our world?

how are integers in our world?

caera racaille

is firefox evil?

jason barabba

metrization theorem

les causeries du lundi

search sexxx

wilders tuigdorpens

j.c. polkinghorne vs. thomas kuhn

battlefield fanfaire

"happy marinating" define

godel neuroscience

justice language xxx

neuroscience pornography marketing
wilders geert dans le journal 2011
topoi 

outreau justice

proctological argument for the non-existence of god

"percipi" prounciation

"new yorker" column fillers

"blind topologists"

countdown with mathematica

supraluminal neutrinos

babylonians again

milton "backward mutters of dissevering

grommet top curtain secrets

in caelo quae acta sint

pronunciation latin vade retro satana

gematria and semantics

Since the Commenting on this journal is remarkably sparse, this sort of thing is all I have to go by.  -- Some readers have reported that the blogspot software does not let them comment -- boo to the same folks we saluted before.   If you have something substantive that really needs to see the light of day, you can e-mail me at

davidjusticeblog@gmail.com

If your communication is sufficiently sparkling, or flattering, or mentions woodchucks in any way, I’ll go ahead and post it for you.

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~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update 25 IX 11]  Okay, OHH-kay; this one’s just weird.  Some Jerry -- and we have ways of finding out who you are -- found the site via this string:

      funporno.de

We seem to be getting the wrong reputation here, folks!   Topology -- woodchucks -- you name it !  That “porn” thing is just metaphorical!

It occurred to me that somehow our slyboots is gaming the system to pull me leg, putting in a searchstring that doesn’t really find the site  only somehow he barrels in anyway  and the string-hit registers in the stats.   But no, it actually works;  this is what you see:

Physics funporn ... Der Fall Rorty (Explication de texte) · Mind and Brain · NSDAP USA · Labor Day indeed · “Deconstructing Deconstructionism”

So, the French preposition does duty for the webdomain extension.

~     ~     ~

[Update 9 X 11]  Children, children, this has got to stop !

Several of you keep searching on “penes” -- well, benefit of the doubt, perhaps it is the Latin preposition you have in mind, in which case you have come to the right place.  But one of you -- and you know who you are -- just searched on

fizik pnrn galeri

Now that looks like the sort of spelling-distortion that spammers use to sneak past filters & firewalls.   Jimminy, get a girlfriend already !

[Update, Columbus Day, 2011]

All right that does it.  Someone just found this site, than which be none more chaste, via the following searchstring:

      sex sex sex xxx sexxxxxxx sex

No but I ask you!  --  Okay, we have ways of finding out who you are.  Chloe -- reposition the satellite, please.  Drill down … enhancing image….  There you are !  Stop what you’re doing !  Don’t you know that’ll grow hair on your hands?

[Update November sixteenth, 2011]
All right all right, you've read this far;  you've earned your all-day sucker.
Here are all the posts with the label "sex".  Enjoy.   But don't forget to wash your hands afterwards.

[Update 25 August 2014]  We are embarrassed to confess, that someone just found this post  by the following searchstring:

sexxxxxxx blogspot

This is very odd, since, to our knowledge, we have never in our born days written this word “sexxxxxxx”, so spelled.  Nor, really, do we desire readers who are too obsessively focussed upon that admittedly entertaining aspect of (church-sanctioned, faithful, monogamous, married) life.   We seek those who comprehend le gai savoir;  to them we offer such duple subjects as

sexxxx woodchuck

sexxxxx penguin

sexxxxxx topology

sexxxxxxx axiomatics (axxxiomatixxx)

sexxxxxxxx regressive strategy

sexxxxxxxxx minimalism

sexxxxxxxxxx Urysohn Metrization Theorem

sexxxxxxxxxxx  faux-naif

sexxxxxxxxxxxx  algebraic geometry

sexxxxxxxxxxxxx   Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften

sexxxxxxxxxxxxxx   Riemann Conspiracy

There.

The sagger sacked

Just occasionally, a company does the right thing.   But then they apologize:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/09/saggy-pants-get-green-day-singer-kicked-off-southwest-plane.html

Be sure to read the readers' Comments;  amusing and astute.

~     ~     ~

But hey -- that said -- *brilliant* music video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00ikilDxW4&feature=channel

Y'rock, dude; just keep your pants up, 'K ??

And -- love the drummer;  Pee-Wee Herman out of Kraftwerk.

Philosophy Pornography is Alive & Well at WaPo

I was actually kind of surprised to find a b.s.-free article on philosophical therapy, in the Local section of the Washington Post.   Journalisticos for that section favor rather the Blithering approach to most things;  indeed I have it on good authority that, in the press-room, a placard advises,

Ever  Blither

No doubt the fact that the profilee in this case was a former enlisted Marine, helped tamp down any three-hanky approach to the matter.   Such men (with whom it is my honor to work every day), when asked how they, purrrrrsonally, deeeeeply feeeeeel about all this, and would they pleeeease share their feeeeeeeeeelings with all the folks at home, are likely to answer, “I wouldn’t care to speculate, ma’am.”

This morning, however, that useful site aldaily.com  offers this at the top of its “Articles of Note”:

Struggling through unemployment? Try Taoism. Midlife crisis? Read Nietzsche. Philosophical counselors have the cure for whatever ails you..

One may be uncertain, at the outset, whether that slab of blather is intended as satire. (The bosses would just love it if the Reserve Army of the Unemployed would just shut up and take up Taoism.)  Unfortunately, as we have seen,  the aldaily is indeed much addicted to Physics Porn, so they may have meant it straight.  Anyhow, U B the judge:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/2011/08/18/gIQA7yxNXJ_print.html

Notice that the article appears in the sappy “Lifestyle” section -- not a good sign.  Anyhow, the thing starts off:

Patricia Anne Murphy is a philosopher with a real-world mission.

Murphy may have a PhD and an intimate knowledge of Aristotle and Descartes, but in her snug Takoma Park bungalow, she’s helping a broken-hearted patient struggle through a divorce.

We are far from the Stoa, in that snug Takoma bungalow.   Still, gigantic brains may be found in the unlikeliest places:

They’re like intellectual life coaches. Very intellectual.

Oh, very intellectual-- honor bright ! Yet with smart pants-suits  color-coordinated for the fall fashions !

They have in-depth knowledge of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist theories on the nature of life and can recite passages from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological explorations of the question of being.

Lengthy passages, too, from memory -- heck, recite 'em backwards! -- thus harmonizing with those Tibetan monks that chant the wisdom of the curry-munching philospher  while spinning their prayer-wheels.

And they use them to help clients overcome their mother issues.

(God help any mother whose children fall into the slimepit with Jean-Paul Sartre.)

Suffering from a midlife crisis? Try a dose of Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in his autobiography of creating an inner 25-year-old superhero in middle age.

Oh, Nietzsche by all means, that self-imagined Übermensch in a paper cape.  Not so good for your mother-issues, however; Nietzsche is well-known for the epigram “Goest thou to woman?  Do not forget thy whip.”  (Apparently his Mom was quite a handful.)

~

Now, you may think it churlish of us to notice an article in a “Lifestyle” section -- de minimis non curat vir -- and indeed, we would not have, save for its having been trumpeted by the Arts & Letters Daily, widely respected among the well-read.    Moreover, its pap is not anodyne.  As one reader tartly responded:

How could you write a whole article about using philosophy as therapy without citing ANY scientific evidence of its effectiveness? This is cargo-cult psychology, of which there is rather a lot. The APA easily allows people to set up their own divisions, and journals happily publish rubbish, but..... the planes don't land!  

And:

bartenders do this counseling thing better!

(Vox populi, vox dei.)

Murphy’s take on philosophy-porn

Our favorite pre-Conciliar amateur philosopher  and two-fisted gat-toting private detective  delivers himself of a harumph or two  here:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/2011/09/murphy-on-philosophy-porn.html

An antidote to philosophy porn

For a considerably more salubrious contribution to the philosophy of ethics, cf. a modest article in this morning’s Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/college-students-philosophy-program-brings-plato-and-buddha-to-a-md-prison/2011/08/26/gIQAq89QuJ_story.html

In this case, the moving spirit behind the activity is no sherry-slurping High Table professor, but a former heavy machine gunner with the U.S. Marines, who served his country in Iraq.  Semper fi, man;  semper fi.

Philosophy Porn

“…that hardy revengeful spirit which earlier writers had regarded as not inconsistent with the Christian profession.”

-- Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. I:  From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance (1907), p. 229.

It is one of the strengths of The New Yorker -- a magazine I have enjoyed weekly for the past half-century almost -- not simply to spray you with a bunch of articles, but to categorize these:  “Our Far-Flung Correspondents”, “A Critic at Large”, and so forth.  What then was my delight to see, in the current issue, an entry in the much less frequent category “Annals of Ideas”!  (Cf. our own ongoing series here.)  Specifically -- very promising indeed -- : “How to Be Good:  A philosopher’s quest for moral truth.” 

So far so good;  though qualms arise when we turn to the actual article, and find the summary:

An Oxford philosopher thinks he can distill all morality into a formula.  Is he right?

Already you can detect that telltale whiff of intellectual pornography, for those alert to such things.   (Predecessors skewered here and here.)  

Still, the reporter would seem to be well-qualified to tackle this task, since, as the bio blurb informs us, “She is working on a book about extreme virtue.”  (“Extreme virtue” is not something that you or I might aspire to, but it apparently is practiced by certain adepts.)

Derek Parfit, we learn, is “thought by many to be the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world”;  and though, to anyone of apostolic bent, “originality” is not really the prime ideal to be striven for in this area -- there is many a pop guru for that -- that was no doubt meant as a compliment.  And upon learning that “he became increasingly disturbed by how many people believed that there was no such thing as objective moral truth” (by “people”, the reporter probably means “professors”, but perhaps not), I was prepared to embrace a fellow warrior.

It turns out, however, that the man is a self-proclaimed atheist.  Well, fair enough;  we have alluded to  G.K. Chesterton and  C.S. Lewis, their admiring portraits of atheists doggedly devoted to the pursuit of truth, and saluted one ourselves.   God speed him on his quest, by all means;  but indeed, beginning from that premise, he is going to require some deep ideas indeed.

And these, alas, we never meet.   We learn instead that “He believed that he had little native talent for photography, but that by working hard at it he would be able to produce, in his lifetime, a few good pictures.” (Whether he succeeded, we do not know, as none are shown.)  We hear of his soul-wrenching travails:  “When he was in America, he was compelled to procure his own food.”  That saga has a happy ending, however, as we learn his inveterate favorite order at Thai restaurants (wait for it…. Curry!)  Once he went out -- the wag! -- and “bought three identical black suits” -- thus rivaling Arthur “Two-Sheds” Jackson for sheer loveable eccentricity. Uncharacteristically for The New Yorker, the article becomes downright fawning, as when it reports, with a straight face, that “he learned that Reasons and Persons” (this, not a prayer or a poem, but a full-length book) “was being memorized and chanted … by novice monks at a monastery in Tibet.”

At this point, you’re supposed to be moaning softly, lips parted, “I Want His Ba-by…”

-- Well, bushwah.  In the old days of the New Yorker humorous end-of-column fillers, this would have appeared under the headline “Chants We Doubt Ever Got Chanted by Legions of Tibetan Monks”.

Our present point is this.   It is only once a major thinker’s reputation had been established and understood, that such sartorial and gustatorial trivia  could be of any possible interest.   Those unable to understand Relativity -- whether the Special, or the General Theory, in either its tensorial or its later coordinate-free notation -- can still sigh over Einstein’s sweatshirts and shock of hair.  But… Parfit?  Surely few of the magazine’s readers can have pored through his books;  and the article has so far given us no real idea of what distinguishes him as a thinker.  Towards the end of the article, we are finally given a glimpse;  drums roll, lights dim -- but it is not encouraging:

Then, at last, he was in a position to propose his top-of-the-mountain formula, which he called  the Triple Theory:

An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.

(Try chanting that.) -- Dumbstruck at this insight, the Oxonian gentleman, in the very act of ravishing and then eating his grandmother, suddenly leaves off, and becomes a vegetarian.  ( Orthoëpic nota bene:  “Optimific” is not a typo;  it is the way you pronounce optimistic when your mouth is full of digestive biscuits.)

Whatever this all may mean, the stakes are high:

With his Triple Theory, Parfit believed that he had achieved convergence between three of the main schools of moral thought, but even this didn’t satisfy him.

(Stout fellow.) -- This is not philosophy, this is sciamachy, as when (in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”) the alien and the professor scribble dueling equations onto a blackboard  to show that they are each really really smart.

Of the rest of our philosopher’s thought, we are given barely a spoonful.  Sample:

            I am now inclined to believe that time’s passage is an illusion.

(Grant me leave to doubt the optimificity of that.)  -- This… delusion, is anyhow not “original”, having previously been put forth by certain crippled physicists.  At any rate he adds:  “I strongly want time’s passage to be an illusion.”   Now, that is telling.   He strongly wants to deny that framework without which free will, and purpose, and morality, fall to the ground.  To this creature we are to turn, for moral guidance?  Why not the Marquis de Sade?  -- And, do tell us, Professor:  Are you now inclined to believe that your much-gazed-upon navel  is an illusion as well ???

“Top-of-the-mountain” -- “Triple Theory” -- This is the language of People magazine, or of Oprah.  And indeed, it directly develops, that like these, which cater to the self-caressing, victim-licking, pruriently empathetic downswirl of our current culture, the present article (nestling in the venerable New Yorker like a maggot in meat) is interested in its fifteen-minute-famous philosopher, not as a thinker, but as a freak -- someone marginally more pitiful than our flabby selves.   Our very first introduction to the man is in the caption to his (ghoulish and overblown) photograph:

Derek Parfit has few memories of his past … a fact that he attributes to an inability to form mental images.

  And:

Parfit’s words … even in speech, all have a similar timbre -- it is difficult to distinguish them.

And: 

He had become, he realized, what psychiatrists call institutionalized.

And:

He had transient global amnesia … He didn’t remember getting married.  He didn’t remember having written his book.

And -- lest you imagine that a marriage, at least, lets him off a certain fashionable hook, for which Oxbridge has long been notorious -- we get some pulpy, purple prose describing his man-crush on Bernard Willams,  a noted adulterer and philosopher:

“Bernard was standing on the roof of King’s College with a kind of haughty, British, aristocratic look --“

(ooh!  ravish me! may I lick your tweeds?)

“-- you know, master of all he surveys, and all of Cambridge was shown below in the distance.

(How greatly do the townsfolk resemble ants!)

“And Derek said, ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’  I’ve seen that only once before, with a picture of Rudolph Nureyev.”

(And Nureyev, as we know, sure knew how to fill out a codpiece!)

However, mere bromance these days is not enough to get you on Oprah;  you also need to weep.  And so he does:

Williams died in 2003.  Even years later, Parfit would tell people over and over again how he had loved him.  He would break down in tears when he thought of how he had never been able to get Williams…

(into bed?  No : )

… to see what he saw about the truth, and how he never would.

The professed concern for “ideas” was just a sham -- a fig leaf or g-string for the reporter’s real concern, which is dish.  And when her subject has been squeezed for such juice as he may afford, she moves on to other quarry, like that new paragon for narcissists, the brainy-but-beautiful exemplar  familiar from the movies and Dan Brown:  in the present case, the author “well known … for writing The Skeptical Feminist” (already we can picture the jacket photo, in a get-up that, in better decades, would have brought a blush to the cheek of a tart, but which now is quite chic for professors), who

was teaching philosophy of science at the Open University.  She was very beautiful and very feminine.

Feminist, and feminine -- get it?  She’s got it all!  (Whether that combo would appeal to any actual guy, we leave to the reader;  but it is perfect for admiring yourself in a mirror.)

Artistically, this is tripe.  Morally, it is pornography.  And philosophically -- it is nothing,  just nothing at all.

*

Fortunately, a sort of antidote to all that is to be found between of covers of this same issue:  a very readable essay by Louis Menand, “Dwight Macdonald vs. middlebrow”.   The puff-piece on the curry-eating philosopher is an example of middlebrow, which Macdonald would have lanced.

Macdonald was an interesting character, characteristic of his place and time, straddling politics and the arts as now so few do.   He seems in general little remembered today -- I sought a bio in the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, but none was to be found; space being dedicated in preference to a different Macdonald, a certain Sarah Lawrence poetess, of whom we learn:  “Almost all the poems concern freakish people who have undgone amputation -- either physical or symbolic -- of a body part.”  -- Ach, back in the Oprahoid slime-pit, where we began.

[Update:  Menand has edited a collection of Macdonald's essays.  Reviewed -- albeit dyspeptically -- here.]
[Update, 23 October 2011:  Reviewed more genially here.]
[Update, 26 November 2011] A very informative review.

[Update 17 III 2012] Menand is an acute and wide-ranging critic, though something of a skeptic as regards the authenticity of the so-called "Lost Sonnet" of Saint Augustine -- while still conceding that it may well be "the greatest sonnet -- correction, the greatest poem -- ever written"  (at least, in the original Latin ...)

~     ~     ~

Palinode.

Have I been too harsh?

Anent the miscreants, not nearly harsh enough.  But any unintentional carom effect upon the honor of the grand old weekly, is to be regretted.

Let us therefore express our profound conviction, that the piece in question was approved for publication  during the August doldrums when all the senior staff were away in Maine.   It was approved by the doorman, and probably written by some homeless guy, who is still laughing.

Anyhow, as antidote, here is where I say very nice things about some very fine New Yorker writers:    here and here and here and here and here.

The point here is not to take exception to one particular thinker.  It is possible that the fellow has somewhere penned a splendid line or two (though the present sample seems sorely lacking in optimificalositaciosity).   The point is the degraded --and, here, degrading way, in which the media goes at such stuff.   It pretends to care, but does not care, what the thinker thinks, but only what she wears, or what he drinks.   In the same way:  Excellent work has been done in quantum field theory, but justice is by no means done to it by the standard presentations of physicists stumbling around with their little lanterns, in quest of the “God particle” (technically known as the Freaking Higgs Boson).

~     ~     ~

[Update 10 Jan 2012]
A photographer can make anyone look weird with the right (wrong) choice of light and lenses.
Usually they don't bother to freakify philosophers, but one such contemptible attempt can be viewed here:
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4071
Note: aldaily.com dignified this swill by featuring it as today's sole recommendation in the category "Essays and Opinions".

~     ~     ~

You can read a recent review of Parfit, by the ever-judicious Philip Kitcher, here.   Mercifully, it has nothing in common with the New Yorker takedown-cum-puff-piece.  A couple of excerpts:

On the face of it, the thought that morality should have a “supreme principle” is puzzling, for it is not obvious that our ethical life can be subsumed under any single formula. Some people worry about the idea that physical theory can be distilled into some mighty equation, taken to be the core of a “theory of everything,” but the field of ethics appears even less susceptible to such spectacular unification. If ten commandments are unable to suffice, how can we hope to manage with one?

Although the characterization of wrongness appears to involve three different tests, he claims that the three criteria give the same results—acts debarred by one would be ruled out by the other two. The point of exploring and offering all three is to reveal an unexpected convergence among three major traditions in moral thought. In an image he employs repeatedly, the history of ethical theory is described as a series of attempts to climb a mountain from different sides—and now that we are closer to the peak, it is possible to recognize that these are attempts on the same mountain and that the routes are coming together.

The three traditions of thought whose convergence Parfit wishes to affirm are consequentialism, Kantianism, and contractualism.

~     ~     ~

[Update 22 January 2012]

I have just begun to read an unusually well-written introduction to ethics, Simon Blackburn’s Being Good (2001).  And despite the New Yorker’s accolades to Parfit as “the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world”, Blackburn does not feel constrained to mention the blighter, neither in the index nor the bibliography.  

[Update May 2014]  In his peripatetic scamper through the capitals of world philosophy, in a valiant search for something illuminating to say about, literally, Nothing (“Why is there something rather than nothing,” is the topic of the book), the philosophically-trained science journalist Jim Holt arranges to go interview Derek Parfit.  Yet, though the reporter must travel all the way to England to do this, Parfit imposes a restriction on the interview  which newsman should be subjected to, and which even Ben Ladin did not have the chutzpah to demand:

He added that, since he was very slow in formulating his thoughts, he would prefer not to be quoted verbatim.  Instead, he would try to answer any questions I had about his written work  with a “yes” or “no” or some other brief response.

-- Jim Holt, Why does the World Exist? (2012), p. 223

(Sounds like a Turing Test.)   And this, note, for an interview broadcast live, where indeed the pressure of maintaining a snappy airtime  often trivializes discussion, and where the subject is his own work, which he has had a lifetime to think about, and approached by a deferential amateur in an attitude of near-reverence.

Accordingly, nothing of interest stems from the empty exercise of the interview itself;  undaunted, our author tricks out his report with quotations from Parfit’s previously published writings (something he could have done from home).   We are reminded of Edmund Morris’s desperate expedient, in his abortion of a biography of Ronald Reagan, where, confronted by the blank mind and depthless shallows of his subject, he filled things in with the imaginings of fiction.

The Honorable Atheist

In a recent post, I praised the book of Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (1997); and do here reiterate that praise.  Yet towards the end of that volume (pp. 129-131) he delivers himself of some most interesting musings.  In an observation recalling one we quoted previously from Michael Dummett, he embraces Rationalism, but sees that as leading inexorably on to Theism, and shrinks back.  Then, becoming suddenly quite strikingly autobiographical in what is otherwise a mostly patrician book:

I want atheism to be true. … It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief.  It’s that I hope there is no God!  I don’t want there to be a God;  I don’t want the universe to be like that.

Ecce homo.  Ich kann nicht anders.  Eppur’ si muove.

These are deep words, of honorable men; and poles apart from the snarky sneers of a Hitchens.   The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies him, as it did Pascal.

What God himself may think of such a plea, we cannot know.  But we know what Chesterton would think, because he stated it himself, in his novel The Ball and the Cross And we know what C. S. Lewis would think, because he told us, in his autobiography Surprised by Joy.

Anyhow, despite his understandable qualms, I do hope that Professor Nagel finds Paradise to his liking, because I’m pretty sure that that is where he is headed.

Poetological exegesis

Judging by the lack of resounding worldwide response, it would appear that the global literary community somewhat underestimates the depth and complexity of that last post, which indeed represents the cusp and culmination of the Western philosophico-poetic tradition of the past two thousand years.  It is a masterpiece of concision, expression, and empathy -- almost to the point of metempsychosis.  Scholars of comparative literature will already have noted the thematic consonance with that earlier masterwork, in which the empathetic process is caught in mid-flight, rather than in a state of perfection.

Note in particular the very different meanings of the first line and the third. 

The first is the hemipteran equivalent of the Cogito -- an existential epiphany as the monad is born into the world. 

The third line, by stark contrast, is addressed to the world at large.   The monad has accepted and introcepted the role and the being assigned him by his Creator, and presents himself as such to the rest of the Creation.  The response of the angelic choir, to this magnificent effusion, is omitted from the text of the poem, but is implied.

There are many levels to the next few lines, but to unfold them would take a lifetime.  At any rate, the final death-bed reflections are particularly moving.

*

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~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

~

Compare now as well, this pair, of superficially similar twins:

     monostich(XXIX)

versus

     monostich(XXX)

The first one, “word/less/ness”, is devoid of emotional or philosophical content.  It is really just a sort of jest in the direction of Minimalism, which is the theme of our sequence of Monostichs.   We posted it (if memory serves) as a sort of placeholder, simply to have something to put up that day, lest the blog grow stale.   We should probably have deleted it, did not its very shallowness point up the profundity of “de-sire / less / ness”,  its successor.

            Of desirelessness (technically:  anhedonia), I almost dare not speak -- you see, indeed, with what effort, or rather with what lack of force, the word was uttered in its monostichal setting:   each syllable simply washed outwards as you exhale (thus the whole word takes four full cycles of inspiration and expiration  to enunciate).   It is a state, so they say, sought-after by yogis or whatever they are -- deus avertat, for any Christian.   In my sloppy, soupy adolescence (no worse than yours -- not whining here), I wrote a pseudo-ballad, whose concluding line was

I wish I could feel some emotion

if only sorrow or disgrace.

(the first hemistich snarl-sung as in Dylan; the second recititivo).

This had not even the virtue of being original, being but a recycling of the classic (and jollier) “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all”.

It is a state  not of pain -- indeed it presupposes painlessness -- but of absence, absence of anything at all.  Not depression;  not indecision.   A state of calm, and lucidity.  Just only … you desire nothing.   And it is next door to Despair.

(“I want nothing.” -- G.K. Chesterton explores the terrifying triple meaning of this dreadful phrase, in his consummate story, “The Wrong Shape”.)

God shield us from the sins towards which we strive in our desires;  yet much more keenly, shield us, Lord, from such Desirelessness.

~

The relatively poor quality of Monostich XXIX (“Not up to his usual stellar standards”, later critics will shake their heads), I have revised it, thus:

            monostich(XXIX -- resartus)

(“Resartus” -- patched up.)   And what a difference !   Where XXIX had been purely passive, applicable to someone who simply clammed up, XXIX-bis is actively straining to express the ineffable.