'He had not been drawn to art casually. He had pledged his life to it.'

'T. W. Adorno has a precise formulation for the kind of shift I am suggesting here when he speaks in an essay on Bach of 'the emancipation of the subject to objectivity in a coherent whole of which subjectivity itself was the origin.' The subject is liberated from an impotent privacy into a world of material beings through the objectified form of the artwork. For the reader, such 'emancipation' derives not from some identification with the poet's feeling, but from the syntax of the work, from a particular arrangement of words which, like the conjunction of planes in a painting, produces a sense of materiality resistant to conventional grammars of thought and design. And, rather like the relation of abstract art to representational art, a language of 'objectification' amounts to a reconfiguring of the semantic field so as to accent particular items in a non-discursive way. Prominent features are inverted word order, indeterminacy or ambiguity attaching to pronouns, the emphatic use of prepositions to substitute for usual narrative markers, heightened attention to 'minor' parts of speech such as conjunctions, and a resulting disfigurement of anticipated speech-patterns. Such devices assure us that we are dealing not with a 'performance, a speech by the poet' but rather with 'the poet's self among things' and a 'thinking with the things as they exist'.'

'In comedy the defeated characters are primarily ridiculous, and we have to inquire what, in this connection, the essence of the ridiculous is. It seems to be, from the general experience of comedy, the being confined to a certain type of behaviour, conditioned to act a single part.'

'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?