150. Original sin

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Vertigo - the last of Dr. K

As much as I'm enjoying the commentary on Candide, I feel myself more in need of commentary for Vertigo. At the end of a passage about Kafka spending some time at a sanatorium in Riva, we get this tale of "Gracchus the huntsman" arriving in a "barque with masts of an inconceivable height and sails dark and hanging in folds" after an endless voyage. While this -- whatever it is -- is associated with Kafka, the reader who knows the next part of the book will recognize in this passage another huntsman, here we have, "...in the Black Forest, where he was on guard against the wolves which still prowled the hills at that time, he went in pursuit of a chamois -- and is this not one of the strangest items of misinformation in all the tales that have ever been told? -- he went in pursuit of a chamois and fell to his death from the face of a mountain..."

And in the next section is the other story about,

...Hans Schlag the huntsman of whom it was said that he hailed from other parts... that he had managed extensive hunting grounds in the Black Forest... 
...

...Schlag the hunter had been found dead a good hour's walk beyond his hunting ground, on the Tyrolean side of the border, at the bottom of a ravine...

And the narrator, as a child, has the body of this huntsman delivered to him on a sledge instead of a barque. And since we had just had our only sex scene in this book, between Schlag and a blonde barmaid, I suppose that makes her the "chamois."

What this means, I have no idea.
 

Candide 

"Voltaire's Escape from Pascal" by Ernst Cassirer

p167 {"Pascal tormented Voltaire, as Montaigne had tormented Pascal." The epigram is by Raymond Naves (Voltaire l'homme et l'oevre: Paris, 1942...)...

To a remarkable degree... [Montaigne, Pascal, and Voltaire] were preoccupied with a single problem, that is the relation between faith and reason, which is in effect the question of original sin. This had been the crucial controversy between Erasmus and Luther; it would be the theme of conflicts between Calvinists and Arminians on the Protestant side, between Jansenists and Jesuits within the Catholic party. Its importance is obvious. For if man's reason, no less than his will, is fatally corrupted from birth, his only hope of understanding himself or the world lies in supernatural faith. In opposition to this crucial point, all the Enlightenment philosophers united; and Voltaire, perhaps in part because the brother whom he hated was a Jansenist, powerfully impregnated with the doctrine of original sin, focused his criticism of the doctrine on its foremost Jansenist exponent, Blaise Pascal...}

The section that follows, written by Cassirer, is interesting enough, but I don't have the patience to work through the minutia of Christian theology. It's all interpretation of the shadows on cave walls to me. But Dostoevsky would be all over this.

I'm thinking the reason I ignored Dostoevsky for so long is that, while The Brothers Karamazov does a wonderful job of expressing the reality of existentialism, he himself stands outside existentialism in the philosophical tradition delineated above. I don't know (or care) what he thought of the Jansenists, but he would have opted for any of these traditions over Nietzsche. 

That said, "original sin" can be restated as our separation from nature (see also Prometheus) and this is a subject I am interested in. The problem is that it is very hard to tackle this topic from within the web of Christianity. There is always too much of the a priori (as was mentioned in the previous post, I think) which stands in the way. It's like trying to come up with a Christmas season budget with someone who still believes in Santa Claus.

My day 

I'm having a good day. An old friend's son is answering some arcane (inane?) questions about Quantum mechanics (spin, for example) and I'm dodging phone calls from Realtors about the unit for sale in our building. It seems that the Venn diagram for Realtors and People Who Prefer to Chat on the Phone Instead of Writing Emails would be a simple circle. But thanks to call screening, I can bend them to my will.

Here are the advantages of communicating by email (texting is similar):

Because it's asynchronous, both parties do not have to be free at the same time.

There is a paper trail you can refer back to when anyone gets confused about what was said.

You can easily dispatch the same information (answers to questions) to other interested parties.

It takes less time, as you don't get bogged down in pleasantries.


On the other hand, (Re: My Day) I discovered the doctor I'd been seeing before I was covered by San Francisco's single-payer health plan, doesn't accept Medicare insurance. But this is mitigated by the fact that he is also retiring this summer. This wasn't a complete surprise -- I'm also worried about losing our electrician and even the painter we liked so much, before we need them again. I suppose it would be considered discrimination if you specified you wanted to be seen by younger health care professionals so you don't outlive their careers.

Next - 151. CBF and Sisters