A lunar tautology

Usually there is a summary “That’s that” finality to tautologies, whether used informatively or not;  stylistically, they are bare-bones.  But consider this:

Herod:  The moon has a strange look tonight. … She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman. … Does she not reel like a drunken woman?  She is like a madwoman, is she not?

Herodias:  No;  the moon is like the moon, that is all.

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

Here the barrenness of the pale white, plain round  far-floating body, is reflected in the unyielding tautological formula.



[For the essay to which the above is an appendix, see this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/05/informative-tautologies-updated.html  ]

Last-Light Tableaux

like

black    lakes

  troubled by

fantastic moons

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

The sun had sunk now  to the line of woodland;

all the opposing slope was already in twilight,

but the lakes below us   were aflame.

-- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

The Aging Brain

Alles Neue  ekelt mich an.

-- Wm. v. Humboldt, an Goethe, 1818

 

Du Einsamkeit    aus Alter und Verlust ...
Zuviel gelitten,   und zuviel gewußt
-- Gottfried Benn, “Abschied”

 

 

Du pillage

Der zureichende Grund dafür, daß jemand Mamas abkühlenden Apfelkuchen vom Fensterbrett mopst, ist nicht die böse Gier per se, sondern die Erreichbarkeit des Fensterbretts.

-- Diemar Dath, though it almost might have been Freud


[Update:  A hat-tip to our blogging colleagues at http://m759.net/wordpress/ , who have offered a mouth-watering illustration of that epigram, featuring our ancestors, the Orchard Thieves.]

*Another* Day that will Live in Infamy

Historians have long wondered, how, as late as December 1941, with a world war raging, and a litany of Japanese grievances against the U.S., the officers and sailors at our principal Pacific naval base  were all sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, the ships berthed cheek-by-jowl, an impossibly alluring target.

A secondary puzzle was, did FDR have any advance intel that such an attack was likely, but ignored it?   (Let us set aside the conspiracy-theory that he knew but let it happen.) If so, he would take a seat beside Stalin, who likewise had been remarkably lackadaisical with respect to Nazi Germany, which had been waging blitzkrieg, but from whom he felt safe, owing to the piece of paper known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.  Stalin actually did have warning, from Japan-based master-spy Richard Sorge, and quite precise warning at that:    “Der Krieg wird am 22. Juni beginnen, ” a message sent on 15 June.   This was ignored.

Toleja so ...

A lesser-known possibility is that Washington did receive warning of an impending sneak-attack, and indeed from Sorge’s circle.   A Comintern memoirist who had repeated contact with Sorge  writes:

Kurz vor ihrem Hochgehen in Tokio   gab die Gruppe “Ramsay” [i.e., Sorge] noch eine hochbedeutsame Meldung  an zwei Adressaten durch:  Moskau und Washingtron.  Gewiß gelangte sie auf auf den Schreibtisch Stalins, vermutlich nicht auf den Schreibtisch Präsident Roosevelts:  die Meldung, daß die Japaner  ohne Kriegserklärung  auf den wichtigsten Flottenstützpunkt der USA im Pazifik, Pearl Harbor, für Anfang Dezember  unter strengster Geheimhaltung  vorbereiterten.
-- Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (1978), p. 144

She goes on to state that Sorge’s Yugoslav coworker Branko Vukelić tipped off an American friend as to the impending attack, to no avail.

In any event, the lesson of 7 December was not promptly learned, for on 8 December, in the Philippines, another branch of the service was likewise caught with its breeches down.   Let Professor Wiki tell it:

Even though tracked by radar and with three U.S. pursuit squadrons in the air, when Japanese bombers of the 11th Kōkūkantai attacked Clark Field at 12:40 pm, they achieved tactical surprise. Two squadrons of B-17s were dispersed on the ground. Most of the P-40s of the 20th PS were preparing to taxi and were struck by the first wave of 27 Japanese twin-engine Mitsubishi G3M "Nell" bombers; only four of the 20th PS P-40Bs managed to take off as the bombs were falling.

A second bomber attack (26 Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" bombers) followed closely, then escorting Zero fighters strafed the field for 30 minutes, destroying 12 of the 17 American heavy bombers present and seriously damaging three others. Two damaged B-17s were made flyable and taken to Mindanao, where one was destroyed in a ground collision.

A near-simultaneous attack on the auxiliary field at Iba to the northwest by 54 "Betty" bombers was also successful: all but four of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron's P-40s, short on fuel and caught in their landing pattern, were destroyed No formal investigation took place regarding this failure as occurred in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. The Far East Air Force lost fully half its planes in the 45-minute attack, and was all but destroyed over the next few days, including a number of the surviving B-17s lost to takeoff crashes of other planes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_Campaign_(1941%E2%80%9342)

Thus, not only December seventh, but December eighth,  is draped in crape.

Murphy's epiphanies

Check these out:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/search/label/epiphany

Tautologies in action

A bare tautology like “Business is business”, as a free-standing statement, invite contentful interpretation via a “Gricean implicature” (specifically, the Maxim of Quantity).   The following is a syntactically more complex case, where the tautology is embedded in a subordinate clause:

Ever since self was self, nature been keepin’ folks off of red-hot stoves.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

The meaning is:  Common sense has been extant  from time immemorial.  Operationally, the (tongue-in-cheek) interpretation is:  Go back and back in time, sampling as you go. For each sample-point, verify whether  “self = self” holds at that time; and if so, then evaluate “Common Sense is in effect? Y/N”.   If the answer is Yes each time, then the corelation holds.

The sentence, for all its folksiness, has a kind of philosophy-class spin to it; the moreso as “self = self” calls up First-Order Logic with Identity.

[For the essay to which the above is an appendix, see this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/05/informative-tautologies-updated.html  ]

 

La pensée unique (American-style)

Je ne connais pas de pays où il regne moins d’indépendance et de véritable liberté de discussion  qu’en Amérique. … En Amérique, la majorité trace un cercle formidable autour de la pensée.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835), vol. I, p. 353