“The Connection”

A thought-provoking piece of nonsense by Russian absurdist poet Daniil Kharms:

Philosopher!

  1. I am writing to you in answer to your letter which you are about to write to me in answer to my letter which I wrote to you.
  2. A violinist bought a magnet and was carrying it home. Along the way, hoods jumped him and knocked his cap off his head. The wind picked up the cap and carried it down the street.
  3. The violinist put the magnet down and ran after the cap. The cap fell into a puddle of nitric acid and dissolved.
  4. In the meantime, the hoods picked up the magnet and hid.
  5. The violinist returned home without a coat and without a cap, because the cap had dissolved in the nitric acid, and the violinist, upset by losing his cap, had left his coat in the streetcar.
  6. The conductor of the streetcar took the coat to a secondhand shop and exchanged it there for sour cream, groats, and tomatoes.
  7. The conductor’s father-in-law ate too many tomatoes, became sick, and died. The corpse of the conductor’s father-in-law was put in the morgue, but it got mixed up, and in place of the conductor’s father-in-law, they buried some old woman.
  8. On the grave of the old woman, they put a white post with the inscription “Anton Sergeevich Kondratev.”
  9. Eleven years later, the worms had eaten through the post, and it fell down. The cemetery watchman sawed the post into four pieces and burned it in his stove. The wife of the cemetery watchman cooked cauliflower soup over that fire.
  10. But when the soup was ready, a fly fell from the wall, directly into the pot with this soup. They gave the soup to the beggar Timofey.
  11. The beggar Timofey ate the soup and told the beggar Nikolay that the cemetery watchman was a good-natured man.
  12. The next day the beggar Nikolay went to the cemetery watchman and asked for money. But the cemetery watchman gave nothing to the beggar Nikolay and chased him away.
  13. The beggar Nikolay became very angry and set fire to the cemetery watchman’s house.
  14. The fire spread from the house to the church, and the church burned down.
  15. A long investigation was carried on but did not succeed in determining the cause of the fire.
  16. In the place where the church had stood a club was built, and on the day the club opened a concert was organized, at which the violinist who fourteen years earlier had lost his coat performed.
  17. In the audience sat the son of one of those hoods who fourteen years before had knocked the cap off that violinist.
  18. After the concert was over, they rode home in the same streetcar. In the streetcar behind theirs, the driver was the same conductor who once upon a time had sold the violinist’s coat in a secondhand shop.
  19. And so here they are, riding late at night through the city: in front, the violinist and the hood’s son; and in back, the driver, the former conductor.
  20. They ride along and don’t know what connection there is between them, and they won’t know till the day they die.
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Kettle Logic

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recalls “the defensive argument of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle to him in a damaged condition”:

In the first place, he said, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second, it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, he had never borrowed the kettle from his neighbour at all.

“But so much the better,” Freud notes. “If even one of these three methods of defence is recognised as valid, the man must be acquitted.”

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Arrogance

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In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the residents of Meryton consider Mr. Darcy arrogant, proud, and conceited because of his reactions to village people. Of Elizabeth Bennet he says, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.” Later, when she spurns his proposal, he tells her directly, “Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”

The trouble is, he’s right — Darcy is educated, intelligent, wealthy, and handsome. He is superior to the people he’s judging, even according to their own standards. University of Minnesota philosopher Valerie Tiberius asks, what then is arrogance?

“Henry Kissinger, for instance, is by all accounts a highly arrogant person, but his intellectual talents are considerable, and all philosophical accounts of the good life for human beings assign such talents an important role. … So if Darcy and Kissinger believe that they are doing pretty well by the standards of human excellence, it is not obvious that they are wrong, and their arrogance must therefore consist in something other than a false belief.”

(Valerie Tiberius and John D. Walker, “Arrogance,” American Philosophical Quarterly 35:4 [October 1998], 379-390.)

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The Little People

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In medieval chess, each of the eight pawns was associated with a commoner’s occupation. From king rook pawn to queen rook pawn:

  • Laborer (farmer)
  • Smith
  • Notary
  • Merchant
  • Physician
  • Innkeeper
  • City watchman or guard
  • Ribald or town courier

The merchant stood before the king, the doctor before the queen.

Jacopo de Cessolis used the game as the basis for a series of sermons on morality — he says that a philosopher invented the game to show his cruel king “the maners and conditicions of a kynge of the nobles and of the comun people and of theyr offices and how they shold be touchid and drawen. And how he shold amende hymself & become vertuous.”

(From Christopher Kleinhenz’s Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, 2004.)

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Primate Wanted

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The ACLU found John Scopes by running a newspaper ad seeking a teacher willing to test the law about teaching human evolution in the classrooms of Tennessee. From the May 4, 1925, edition of the Chattanooga Times:

We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test case can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job. Distinguished counsel have volunteered their services. All we need now is a willing client.

Scopes wasn’t a biology teacher but had filled in for one using a textbook that accepted evolution, and that was enough to set the “monkey trial” moving forward.

Strangely, the disputed textbook was the one that Tennessee required its high school teachers to use that year. Clarence Darrow later quipped in his autobiography, “It seems strange that the Dayton school board did not adopt the first and second chapters of Genesis as a modern textbook on biology.”

| History · Science & Math · Society

Hateful Patients

In a 1978 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist James E. Groves categorized the patients “whom most physicians dread”:

“Dependent clingers” escalate from normal requests for reassurance to “repeated, perfervid, incarcerating cries for explanation, affection, analgesics, sedatives and all forms of attention imaginable.” They may have severe, even life-threatening disorders, or they may have no discernible illness at all.

“Entitled demanders” use “intimidation, devaluation and guilt-induction to place the doctor in the role of the inexhaustible supply depot.” They may even try to control the doctor by withholding payment or threatening to sue.

“Manipulative help-rejecters” appear almost smugly satisfied, returning “again and again to the office or clinic to report that, once again, the regimen did not work.” When one symptom is relieved, another appears in its place.

“Self-destructive deniers” show “unconsciously self-murderous behaviors, such as the continued drinking of a patient with esophageal varices and hepatic failure.” These patients “seem to glory in their own destruction. They appear to find their main pleasure in furiously defeating the physician’s attempts to preserve their lives.”

“Admitted or not, the fact remains that a few patients kindle aversion, fear, despair or even downright malice in their doctors,” Groves wrote, noting that the medical literature had largely failed to address this problem. “Emotional reactions to patients cannot simply be wished away, nor is it good medicine to pretend that they do not exist.”

(James E. Groves, “Taking Care of the Hateful Patient,” New England Journal of Medicine, April 20, 1978.)

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Child Abuse

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Nominative determinism is the theory that people gravitate toward occupations that reflect their names. In 1994 New Scientist noted that a new book, Pole Positions: The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet, had been written by one Daniel Snowman, and that another, London Under London: A Subterranean Guide, received just two weeks later, had been written by Richard Trench. Psychologist Jen Hunt of the University of Manchester pointed out an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology whose authors were A.J. Splatt and D. Weedon.

If the theory is valid, then the naming of children is more momentous than we think. Harry Truman’s vice president, Alben William Barkley, above, was originally named Willie Alben Barkley, and contended that no one named Willie Alben could be elected superintendent of the county poorhouse. He changed his name to Alben William.

“In fact,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I think one of the graver shortcomings of my long career as a lawmaker was my failure to introduce a bill making it mandatory for parents to postpone the naming of their children until the youngsters are old enough to pick out a name for themselves.”

| History · Language · Society

Seeking

On July 19, 1695, this notice appeared on page 3 of a weekly London pamphlet:

A Gentleman about 30 Years of Age, that says he had a Very Good Estate, would willingly Match himself to some Good Young Gentlewoman that has a Fortune of 3000l. or thereabouts, and he will make Settlement to Content.

It’s believed to be the world’s first lonely hearts ad. The pamphlet’s publisher, John Houghton, wrote, “‘Tis probable such Advertisements may prove useful.”

(Francesca Beauman, Shapely Ankle Preferr’d, 2011.)

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The Robben Island Notebooks

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Sentenced in 1964 to life in prison, anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada got permission during his confinement to pursue a history degree through the University of South Africa. He used his access to books and writing materials to compile a series of secret notebooks in which he recorded quotations that inspired him. Together they form what used to be called a commonplace book — a series of personal memoranda that, taken together, illuminate the spirit of the compiler:

Ofttimes the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die. — Vittorio Alfieri

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. — Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University Defined (1873)

One owes respect to the living; but to the dead one owes nothing but the truth. — Voltaire

The triumph of wicked men is always short-lived. — Honore de Balzac, The Black Sheep

(Form of oath-taking among Shoshone Indians is:) The earth hears me. The sun hears me. Shall I lie?

Conrad wrote that life sometimes made him feel like a cornered rat waiting to be clubbed.

Nobody knows what kind of government it is who has never been in prison. — Leo Tolstoy

Leve fit, quod bene fertur onus. (A burden becomes lightest when it is well borne.)

To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. — Sun Tzu

Verba volant, scripta manent. (The spoken word flees; the written word remains.) — Ancient Roman adage

(Peter Ustinov explains why he reads so much:) “If you’re going to be the prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is to make sure it’s well furnished.”

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. — Bertrand Russell

Altogether “Kathy” compiled seven notebooks over 26 years, drawing not just on his study materials and smuggled newspapers but on 5,000 books donated to the prison library by a Cape Town bookstore. Finally released in 1989, he went on to become a member of Parliament after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 and served as President Nelson Mandela’s parliamentary counsellor until 1999.

One of his former warders, Christo Brand, told him, “I was supposed to be your master, but instead you became my mentor.”

(Sahm Venter, ed., Ahmed Kathrada’s Notebook From Robben Island, 2005.)

| History · Quotations · Society

Face Value

Suppose that Schweitzer and Gandhi are equally saintly and that Green and White are equally unsavory characters with long criminal records. Suppose that on separate occasions Green gratuitously slaps Schweitzer in the face, Schweitzer gratuitously slaps White in the face, and Gandhi gratuitously slaps Schweitzer in the face. If guilt were proportional, not just to the offence, but to the moral uprightness of the offended party, then Green would incur more guilt and liability to punishment than would Schweitzer. For since Schweitzer is worthier than White, Green’s failure to show respect for Schweitzer was more grievous than Schweitzer’s failure to show respect for White. Similarly, Gandhi’s action would be more culpable than Schweitzer’s. In fact, I think we are more apt to consider guilt as directly proportional to the nature of the offender than to the nature of the offended party. Schweitzer’s action in slapping White is, if anything, more culpable than Green’s action in slapping Schweitzer. In view of Schweitzer’s long-standing habits of self-control and moral behaviour, we should expect more from him than from Green who has never developed these habits. Similarly, we should expect more from Gandhi. Nor would we say that Gandhi’s act was more culpable than Schweitzer’s. We might even have some inclination to be less outraged at Gandhi, since he was at least ‘picking on someone’ of his own moral stature.

— Marilyn McCord Adams, “Hell and the God of Justice,” Religious Studies 11:4 [December 1975], 433-447

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