In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens / 1949 - 2011

Dostoevsky asked if there was no God couldn't everything be permitted? Not according to Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative.

Books that Will Change your View on Life and the World

The Selfish Gene - by Richard Dawkins;

Guns, Germs, and Steel - by Jared Diamond;

The Grand Design - by Stephen Hawkins;

god is not Great - by Christopher Hitchens;

The Stranger - by Albert Camus; and

A Theory of Justice - by John Rawls.

A short poem about totalitarian dictatorships

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips

W.H, Auden1968

Who were the "three dead men" Steinbeck was referring to in East of Eden

"[W]hen a man dies -- if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man's property and his eminence and works and monuments -- the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil? . . . Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: "Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?"

I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great services to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone received the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead."

Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead.

There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now? How can we go on without him?"

One of my favorite Soviet composers; Myaskovsky

The Old Testament being very coquettish; Lot and his daughters

Free Will

My favorite explanation of free will in literature is done through the words of John Steinbeck's Chinese character of Lee in the great classic East of Eden.  In this soliloquyby Lee he explains to Samuel and Adam that in the old testament there are phrases such as 'Thou shalt' and 'Do thou' but the greatest is 'Thou mayest rule over sin'

"Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience.  And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt'.   Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be.  But 'Thou mayest'! Why that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice."

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare.  Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always.  Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels.  Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink.  Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.  Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shap.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept.  One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larken 1976

Einstein's view on Morality

"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously.  I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.  My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly.  I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem - the most important of all human problems."

- Albert Einstein (1947)

Satan's vision to Theodor

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.  Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!  Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prive their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angles painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crime, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

The Mysterious Stranger - Mark Twain (1916).

A great illustration of Nietzsche's philosophy of absolute freedom

Cello Concertos

The cello has been described as the closest sounding instrument to the human voice.

Here are a few of my favorite cello concertos:

Dvorak's Cello Concerto
Elgar's Cello Concerto
Bach's Cello Suites
Shostacovich's Cello Concerto

The Warshaw Concerto

The best insult in all of literature.

Oswald.  "What dost thou know me for?"

Kent.  "A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats;
    a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
    hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave;
    a lily-livered, action-talking, whoreson, glass-gazing,
    superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave;
    one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and
    art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward.
    pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom
    I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least
    syllable of thy addition."

- King Lear

The American Dream Begins . . .

"Let's remember the energy.  Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan.  The war-crimes trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all.  Atomic power was ours alone.  Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, steel workers - laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it.  And playing Sunday morning softball on Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war.  Our class started high school six-months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.  And the upsurge of energy was contagious.  Around usus nothing was lifeless.  Sacrifice and constraint were over.  The Depression had disappeared  Everything was in motion.  The lid was off.  Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together."

American Pastoral