A song, a problem.

'… reading is one way to escape solipsism, which is a form of spiritual death.'

Mi tarro de café instantáneo me trata de usted, pero sin usa la palabra usted.

In search of reading material for Spanish practice, I stumble upon the thought of reading Epictetus, er, Epicteto. I find an edition that pairs the Manual nicely with a translation of an essay by Hadot.

In Spanish it has the same knotty, logical texture as always. The Enchiridion was about the only text I spent any time in grad school learning to read in Greek with my advisor the historian of ancient philosophy, so I feel a glimmer more of insight in this case into what translators have to confront to discover opportunities for colloquial constructions in a text so dense with the reversals and negations typical of opposition to non-philosophical, ordinary, ways of life. My Spanish is only a couple few months old. It thrives best in contexts with predictable connections asserted between (in Austin’s phrase) ‘medium sized dry goods’. Even though I know this text fairly well, well enough to ‘know what is supposed to be said’ at most points even when I’m unsure how the Spanish translator is saying it, the philosophical abstractness of the language is astringent enough, in words of such otherwise ubiquitous function, to shift everything into defamiliarized confusion. My tenuous hold on grammar is revealed, betrayed. But textual structure, pattern, prevails: when a phrase known to be important out of proportion to its casual introduction appears, like ‘reserve clause’, that alone is enough to lock the context back in place:

Sírvete únicamente del impulso que te lleva a la acción y de la rienda que permite la inacción, pero con suavidad, con moderación y con una cláusula de reserva.

When?

'… while each show needed an alien, the Fonz and Urkel come from entirely different planets.'

'… Greek and medieval science formed an art of accepting things as they are enjoyed and suffered. Modern experimental science is an art of control.

The remarkable difference between the attitude which accepts the objects of ordinary perception, use and enjoyment as final, as culminations of natural processes and that which takes them as starting points for reflection and investigation, is one which reaches far beyond the technicalities of science. It marks a revolution in the whole spirit of life, in the entire attitude taken toward whatever is found in existence. When the things which exist around us, which we touch, see, hear and taste are regarded as interrogations for which an answer must be sought (and must be ought by means of deliberate introduction of changes till they are reshaped into something different), nature as it already exists ceases to be something which must be accepted and submitted to, endured or enjoyed, just as it is. It is now something to be modified, to be intentionally controlled. It is material to act upon so as to transform it into new objects which better answer our needs. Nature as it exists at any particular time is a challenge, rather than a completion; it provides possible starting points and opportunities rather than final ends.

In short, there is a change from knowing as an esthetic enjoyment of the properties of nature regarded as a work of divine art, to knowing as a means of secular control—that is, a method of purposefully introducing changes which will alter the direction of the course of events. Nature as it exists at a given time is material for arts to be brought to bear upon it to reshape it, rather than already a finished work of art. Thus the changed attitude toward change to which reference was made has a much wider meaning than that which the new science offered as a technical pursuit. When correlations of changes are made the goal of knowledge, the fulfillment of its aim in discovery of these correlations is equivalent to placing our hands on an instrument of control. When one change is given, and we know with measured accuracy its connection with another change, we have the potential means of producing or averting that other event. The esthetic attitude is of necessity directed to what is already there; to what is finished, complete. The attitude of control looks to the future, to production.'

'The essay does not propose solutions to problems; it gives no directives, not even (really) any recommendations. That is not its point: it is definitely not one of the arts of control. The essay, as I have said, is a vehicle for exploring the shifting and plural ways of seeing the same thing, which are characteristic of any human individual who has not been robotized. It is a medium for self-knowledge. It is hard for us even to imagine a human life completely without the reflective desire for self-knowledge. Montaigne invented the essay as an art of acceptance in two dimensions: first, and primarily, acceptance of oneself as a potential friend, but also, secondarily, acceptance of the 'general law of the world'. Can one extract the essay as a form from its original context, cultivating the first of these goals, while rejecting the second? Why should that be impossible?'

'It is perhaps striking that from the moment the work becomes the search for art, from the moment it becomes literature, the writer increasingly feels the need to maintain a relation to himself. His feeling is one of extreme repugnance at losing his grasp upon himself in the interests of that neutral force, formless and bereft of any destiny, which is behind everything that gets written. This repugnance, or apprehension, is revealed by the concern, characteristic of so many authors, to compose what they call their "journal." Such a preoccupation is far removed from the complacent attitudes usually described as Romantic. The journal is not essentially confessional; it is not one's own story. It is a memorial. What must the writer remember? Himself: who he is when he isn't writing, when he lives daily life, when he is alive and true, not dying and bereft of truth. But the tool he uses in order to recollect himself is, strangely, the very element of forgetfulness: writing. That is why, however, the truth of the journal lies not in the interesting, literary remarks to be found there, but in the insignificant details which attach it to daily reality. The journal represents the series of reference points which a writer establishes in order to keep track of himself when he begins to suspect the dangerous metamorphosis to which he is exposed. It is a route that remains viable; it is something like a watchman's walkway upon ramparts: parallel to, overlooking, and sometimes skirting around the other path—the one where to stray is the endless task. Here true things are still spoken of. Here, whoever speaks retains his name and speaks in this name, and the dates he notes down belong in a shared time where what happens really happens. The journal—this book which is apparently altogether solitary—is often written out of fear and anguish at the solitude which comes to the writer on account of the work.

The recourse to the journal indicates that he who writes doesn't want to break with contentment. He doesn't want to interrupt the propriety of days which are really days and which really follow one upon the other. The journal roots the movement of writing in time, in the humble succession of days whose dates preserve this routine. Perhaps what is written there is already nothing but insincerity; perhaps it is said without regard for truth. But it is said in the security of the event. It belongs to occupations, incidents, the affairs of the world—to our active present. This continuity is nil and insignificant, but at least it is irreversible. It is a pursuit that goes beyond itself toward tomorrow, and proceeds there indefinitely.

The journal indicates that already the writer is no longer capable of belonging to time through the ordinary certainty of action, through the shared concerns of common tasks, of an occupation, through the simplicity of intimate speech, the force of unreflecting habit. He is no longer truly historical; but he doesn't want to waste time, either, and since he doesn't know anymore how to do anything but write, at least he writes in response to his everyday history and in accord with the preoccupations of daily life. It happens that writers who keep a journal are the most literary of all, but perhaps this is precisely because they avoid, thus, the extreme of literature, if literature is ultimately the fascinating realm of time's absence.'