Fred Jenkins > Recent Status Updates

"For in the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it."

la vérité ne peut pas se promener toute nue dans la rue.



cet homme qui semblait s'être donné pour tâche d'interrompre notre smmeil et de nous réveiller? Il avait ce pouvoir. Mais au nom de qui l'exerçait-il? (Is Zuber alluding to the Gospel of Matthew here?)

"To change the past is not to change mere single event, it is to annul all of its consequences, which tend to infinity. In other words: it is to create two histories of the world." ("The Other Dead")

This reminds me of John Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy: :there is more than one history of the world."

"Like all those who possess libraries, Aurelian felt a nagging sense of guilt at not being acquainted with every volume in his."

Ovid has an annoying habit of separating nouns and adjectives, often in consecutive verses, rather than the same line.

The Universal History of Iniquity did not really appeal. Ficciones is better. "Funes, the Memory" (just finished) reminds me that forgetting can be good. I wish my memory were better, but it would be a terrible burden to remember virtually everything in excruciating detail.

Comme une très haute montagne il ne se laisse pas découvrir dans son ensemble.

Zuber seems to be trying to answer the question of his title as much for himself as anyone else.

"Complexity shall be your excuse for inaction."

"But academics are by nature a solitary, sedentary lot. Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to sit at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire."

Jamais dépêcher.


Car il faut toujours remonter à la source. Après nous chaque génération s'engagera avec un matériel qui lui sera propre dans une nouvelle lecture de Gurdjieff.

So much of the first book of Metamorphoses is a prettied version of Hesiod (lacking the stark power of H), which itself is heavily dependent on Near Eastern creation and flood stories.

quis hoc credat, nisi sit pro teste vetustas?

"To complain two times about the same coffee is a clear indication of sleep. Eventually one time will be more than enough. This is a slow process."

"Meaning already exists. We are, as it were, surrounded by it, but our attention is elsewhere."

"Livira's experience had been that things people don't want you to talk about are generally true."

"Livira had often felt that the saving grace of rules was how much fun they were to break."

"Wishes granted were rarely the gifts they seemed. Any goose who believed otherwise hadn't listened to a story all the way to its end."

On the "Encyclopaedia Britannica-Eleventh Edition"

"People certified with degrees from what the world considers the best universities and colleges sometimes forget that we are all autodidacts, on our own in the endless attempt to patch over the extraordinary gaps in out knowledge."

From "Edward Gibbon":

"Through twenty years of labor, this chubby little man also proved that the first, if not the sole, criterion for a great historian is to be a great writer."

Why I prefer the older, classic historians to the bulk of today's professional historians.

From "Old Age and Other Laughs"

"Virtue consists of ordering a salad for lunch; disappointment, in eating it."

"Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples."

" If you think you are a genius, you probably aren't."

"Out of cowardice, fewer and fewer intellectuals and academics are prepared to go against the grain of their times."

After 45 years in American higher education, I can attest to the truth of the latter.

nemo est enim tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere.


γηράσκω δ’αίεὶ πολλὰ διδσσκόμενος.

quibus enim nihil est in ipsis opis ad bene beateque vivendum, eis omnis aetas gravis est.