The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise

The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise

• The paradox of Zeno of Elea, as James indicated, is an attempt upon not only the reality of space but the more invulnerable and sheer reality of time.
• Zeno is incontestable, unless we admit the ideality of space and time. If we accept idealism, if we accept the concrete growth of the perceived, then we shall elude the mise en abime of the paradox. Would this bit of Greek obscurity affect our concept of the universe? - my reader will ask.

A Defense of Basilides the False

• In this melodrama or serial, the creation of the world is a mere aside. An admirable idea: the world imagined as an essentially futile process, like a sideways, lost glimpse of ancient celestial episodes. Creation as a chance act.

An Overwhelming Film

• At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances. (A possible corollary, foreseen by David Hume, Ernst Mach, and our own Macedonio Fernandez: no man knows who he is, no man is anyone.) In a sotry by Chesterton - The Head of Caesar, I think - the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.

Our Poor Individualism

• The world, for the European, is a cosmos in which each individual personally corresponds to the role he plays; for the Argentine, it is a chaos.

The Enigma of Shakespeare

• Sir Francis Bacon said that the human mind is not a perfectly flat mirror but a slightly concave or convex mirror, which distorts reality. He claimed that man is prone to error, and he called the errors to which we are prone 'idols":
  • Idola tribus (idols of the tribe) - Common to the whole human race. Some minds not the affinities between things and others tend to notice or exaggerate the differences, and the scientific observer must observe himself and correct this inclination to not differences or resemblances
  • Idola specus (idols of the cave) - Each man, without knowing it, is prone to a certain type of error - eg antisemitism or philosemitism. In examining a subject he will subordinate his estimation of it to his likes or dislikes.
  • Idola forum (idols of the marketplace) - Language is not the work of philosophers, but rather of the people. Language was not created to be a description of truth, it was created by arbitrary and fanciful people, and is continually leading us into error.
  • Idola teatri (idols of the theatre) - All scientific systems, including his own, go not from the general to the particular, but from the particular to the general - replace the real world with a world that is more of less fantastical, or, in any case, simplified. No Marxist or other theorist sees reality, only a theater or representation of reality.
  • English has, for common concepts, words of Saxon origin, and for intellectual matters, it has words derived from Latin. These words are never precisely synonymous, there is always a nuance of differentiation.
  • A good part of Shakespeare's charm depends on this reciprocal play of Latin and Germanic terms
  • It may help to be a little distracted in order to write a masterpiece. It may be that the intention of writing a masterpiece inhibits the writer, makes him keep a close watch on himself. It may be that aesthetic creation should be more like a dream, a dream unchecked by our attention. And this may have happened in Shakespeare's case.

Blindness

• According to the Socratic phrase, who can know himself more than the blind man?
• A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from 8 to 12 and from 2 to 6. Whoever is a poet is always one, and continually assaulted by poetry. I suppose a painter feels that colors and shapes are besieging him. Or a musician feels that the strange world of sounds - the strangest world of art - is always seeking him out, that there are melodies and dissonances looking for him. For the task of an artist, blindness is not a total misfortune. It may be an instrument. Fray Luis de Leon dedicated one of his most beautiful odes to Francisco Salinas, a blind musician.
• A writer or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason, I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.