'As if America could banish history, could make of the condition of immigrancy not something to escape from but something to aspire to, as to the native human condition.'

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?'