I said to myself, I says, "Suppose they shouldn't be fast married, 'cause the words are contrairy?" and my head went working like a mill, for I was allays uncommon for turning things over and seeing all round 'em; and I says to myself, "Is't the meanin' or the words as makes folks fast i' wedlock?" For the parson meant right, and the bride and bridegroom meant right. But then, when I come to think on it, meanin' goes but a little way i' most things, for you may mean to stick things together and your glue may be bad, and then where are you? And so I says to mysen, "It isn't the meanin', it's the glue."
George Eliot, ‘Silas Marner’, Part I, chapter 6
Unbeknownst to most people there is not a single accepted way of telling the time, but several different scales running concurrently. The differences are usually small, but the scales can be as much as 30 seconds apart and the gap between them is growing steadily.
Aircraft navigation systems tell a different time from the watches of passengers, pilots and air traffic controllers. Experts are warning that this could spell disaster ...
The International Telecommunications Union - the global body that agrees time standards - is taking the issue seriously and has set up [a] working group to advise what to do ...
The problem arises because the Earth cannot keep time as accurately as modern atomic clocks, which count the steady shaking of atoms. These atomic clocks replaced the motion of the Earth as the world's official timekeeper in 1967. The pull of the moon is gradually slowing our planet down, so every now and then our clocks are halted for a second to let it catch up ...
To add to the confusion, [the global positioning system used for navigation] uses yet another timescale.
It includes the leap seconds added until the GPS clock was set in 1980, but has ignore those added since. This means GPS time is now running 13 seconds ahead of coordinated universal time - which includes all added leap seconds and to which most clocks on Earth are set - but is some 19 seconds behind international atomic time, which is based on atomic clocks and ignores leap seconds.
David Adam, The Guardian, June 26 2003. Full text at the Guardian website.
There is a growing sense that 'Arianism' is a very unhelpful term to use in relation to fourth-century controversy. There was no single 'Arian' agenda, no tradition of loyalty to a single authoritative teacher. Theologians who criticized the Creed of Nicea had very diverse attitudes to Arius himself, and part of the continuing difficulty of identifying the main lines of Arius' theology arises from this fact. 'Arianism' is the polemical creation of Athanasius above all, who was determined to show that any proposed alternative to the Nicene formula collapsed back into some version of Arius' teaching, with all the incoherence and inadequacy that teaching displayed.
Rowan Williams, ‘Arius’ (2nd edition), p. 247.
If God is not an individual, God does not compete with us for space; if God is not an individual, God's will cannot be adequately understood in the terms of self-assertion or contest for control in which so much of our usual discourse of will is cast.
Rowan Williams, ‘Arius’ (2nd edition), p. 267.
I suspect Jacques Herzog and Rem Koolhaas like to see themselves as the Picasso and Braque of contemporary architecture, towering over their peers in the same way that the two cubists once monopolised painting, ‘roped together like mountaineers for the final onslaught on the summit’, as Braque put it ....
Between them, they have transformed architectural debate - Koolhaas by trying to get people to focus on an urban landscape that is changing with dizzying speed; Herzog by inventing a dazzling series of building types and ways of building that sustain a whole school of followers.
Deyan Sudjic, The Observer. Full text at the Observer website.
The bizarre libretto was written by Emanuel Schikaneder, an actor-singer-impressario who knew Mozart through their membership of the same Masonic lodge (the one Haydn had belonged to). It was primarily because of this Masonic connection that Mozart agreed to help Schikaneder secure the success at his Theater auf der Wieden that he needed to escape financial ruin. Both men agreed that a Singspiel would best suit his company of singing actors and that Schikaneder should set Liebeskind's "Lulu oder Die Zauberflöte", a fairy tale that had been published in 1786.
Matthew Boyden, ed., 'The Rough Guide to Opera', 3rd edition, p. 111.
According to the French film director Jean-Luc Godard, Janine Bazin, who has died aged 80, was "a star who lit up the history of cinema". For some years, she lived in the reflected glory of her husband, the influential film critic and theorist Andre Bazin. After his premature death in 1958, at the age of 40 - and tragically missing the French new wave which he had helped instigate - Janine carried on the Bazin flame by co-producing the unequalled television series Cineastes De Notre Temps.
Both Janine and Andre also played a major role in the life of Francois Truffaut, who, as a teenager, had been abandoned by both his mother and his stepfather. The director looked on the Bazins as his adoptive or spiritual parents, and acknowledged that they had saved him from an unproductive and self- destructive life....
In 1964, still heady from the first years of the new wave movement, in which Truffaut was a leading figure, Janine, with Andre S Labarthe, produced Cineastes de Notre Temps, mostly hour-long programmes which focused on the significant film directors of the day. Wonderfully eclectic, they assumed the audience had a reasonable knowledge of the subjects. The aim was to reveal, through the appropriate cinematic approach, the special climate created by each filmmaker.
Sometimes, these programmes were made in the style of the interviewees - the Sam Fuller programme, for example, consisted of rapid fire shots, while the Robert Bresson was austere with Francois Weyergan's questions being far longer than the answers given by the master.
Often, well-known directors paid homage to their idols. Among the most famous were Jean Vigo by Jacques Rozier, Carl Dreyer by Eric Rohmer; there was a memorable meeting between Fritz Lang and Jean-Luc Godard, directed by Labarthe, and Jacques Rivette on Jean Renoir, the patron saint of the new wave. These programmes are still treasured by cineastes and cinephiles all over the world...
In 1980, a new series called Cinema De Notre Temps began with Janine Bazin and Andre Labarthe again as producers. Among the more recent contributions have been One Day In The Life Of Andrei Arsenevich, Chris Marker's film on Andrei Tarkovsky, a self-portrait by Chantal Akerman, and others on Rohmer, John Cassavetes and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Ronald Bergan, Guardian, June 17 2003. Full text at the Guardian website.
Too often theologians I think of as parasitical want to jolly things up with a quite mistaken and idolatrous account of how theology makes a difference, hoping to find for themselves a purchase on something to say that others cannot, a particular difference that their theism makes to our ordinary routine ways of explaining things. They will derive little comfort in such hopes from Thomas Aquinas. For him, to say that the world is created adds nothing at all to our information about the kind of world we have got. As Thomas, who thought the world is created, said in reply to Aristotle, who thought that it is not, the difference between a created and an uncreated world is no difference at all as concerns how you describe it ... and so to say that the world is created makes not the least difference to how you do your science, or your history, or read your literatures; it does not make that kind of particular difference to anything. The only difference it makes is all the difference to everything.
Denys Turner, ‘How to be an Atheist’, pp. 20-1 in ‘Faith Seeking’
I sympathize with any Christian theologians who think that, in their proper concern to defend the divine ‘transcendence’, they should go in for maximizing gaps between God and creatures to an infinite degree of difference; but I think it not helpful to put it this way, and that if they insist on doing so, they should consider how, consistently with such a strategy, they will approve of Augustine's fine words:
‘But you, O Lord, were more intimate to me than I am to myself.’ - tu autum eras interioro intimo meo (Confessions, 3.6.7);
for Augustine's sense of the divine ‘otherness’ is such as to place it, in point of transcendence, closer to my creaturehood than it is possible for any creatures to be to each other: for creatures are more distinct from each other than God can possibly be from any of them.
Denys Turner, ‘How to be an Atheist’, p. 18 in ‘Faith Seeking’
It is indeed extraordinary how theologically conservative some atheists are, and one might even speculate that atheists of this species have an interest in resisting such renewals of Christian faith and practice as would require the renewal of their rejection of it. I suppose it must be upsetting for atheists when the target of their rejection moves; for in so far as a moving Christian target does upset the atheist, it reveals, depressingly, the parasitical character of the rejection. So a static atheism can have no wish for a moving theism.
Denys Turner, ‘How to be an Atheist’, p. 7 in ‘Faith Seeking’
Many of the newcomers are likely to have higher inflation than the existing members for years to come, because of the so-called Balassa-Samuelson effect. (As productivity and incomes in the poorer countries catch up with those in the rest of the Union, prices of non-traded goods will rise relative to traded ones.)
‘The Economist’, 7 June 2001. Full text at the Economist website.
On today's big question, the euro, he has no doubts at all. He is a long-time and fervent advocate of joining and suggests there "is a sixth test that really needs to be at the centre of the cabinet discussion, and that is, what are the risks of not joining?"
Jackie Ashley, Guardian, June 9 2003. Full text at Guardian website.
In the nineteenth century, Americans showed little regard for America's indigenous inhabitants, taking their land and harrying them ever further westward before huddling them into reservations. So ruthless was this conduct that it evoked the admiration of Hitler who declared that the Germans should 'look upon the [East European] natives as Redskins"
Ian Gilmour, review of ‘The Palestinian People: A History’, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal: ‘Observer Review’, 8 June 2003. Full text at Observer website.
A survey of references to "holy spirit" in the NT reveals that despite its frequent use in Luke-Acts, the concept remains peripheral compared with the absolute use of pneuma, "spirit". Not until the post-NT period, and as a result of the formulation of pneumatological dogma in 381 CE, does the concept of "holy spirit" move to the centre of Christian theology.
F. W. Horn, Anchor Bible Dictionary, volume III, p. 261.
Lately I reread The Seven Pillars [of Wisdom]. I feel a sort of reverence for that book - for that man [T. E. Lawrence] - which it is hard to describe. To live such a swift life of action & yet not simplify everything to the point of inhumanity - to let the agonizing complexities of situations twist your heart instead of tying your hands - that is real human greatness - it is that sort of person I would leave everything to follow.
Iris Murdoch, letter to Frank Thompson, 24 November 1942, quoted by Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Life’, p. 151
I loved you once in silent desperation.
Shyness and envy wracked me numb with pain.
I loved you once. God grant such adoration
So true, so gentle, comes your way again
trans. Frank Thompson. Quoted by Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Life’, p. 150
The fourteenth-century philosopher John Buridan is famous for his ass: the hungry ass which, when presented with two equally delicious helpings of hay, is unable to choose between them and so dies of hunger. In fact, Buridan's ass is not found in the philosopher's writings, and was probably invented by an opponent to illustrate the absurdity of Buridan's theory that human choices are determined by the best alternative that is presented to the will by the understanding. The will, says Buridan, is free, but only in so far as the intellect is free to apprehend a plate of nachos (say) as being more satisfying and hence preferable to a plate of rotten eggs.
David S. Oderberg, review of John Buridan, ‘Summulae de Dialectica’. Times Literary Supplement, June 6 2003. Full text at TLS website.
Coppola decided to try to push Martin Sheen to another level of performance, beginning with the first day's shooting, in a scene that depicted Willard alone in his room at a Saigon hotel ...
August 3, the day of the shoot, was Sheen's thirty-sixth birthday. By his own admission, he drank and smoked too much, and he wasn't in good physical condition ... He was emotionally fragile, as well. Earlier in the shoot ... he had brooded about the poverty he'd seen in the streets outside his hotel in Manila, where pigs ran around freely, chased by children without teeth ...
Coppola was aware of Sheen's emotional state, and he believed that if he pushed him in the right direction, forcing some of his inner turmoil to surface on-camera, he might be able to draw out the Willard in Sheen ...
Prior to shooting the scene, Martin Sheen drank so heavily that, by his own admission, he was barely able to stand when the time came for him to do the scene. Believing that Sheen was in a state where his innermost feelings might be explored, Coppola began to prod his actor.
"He would tell Martin, 'You're evil; I want all the evil, the violence, the hatred in you to come out' ", recalled a crew member. "You tell that to a guilt-ridden Irish Catholic and he hasn't a chance ... It was devastating."
When cameras rolled, Sheen was highly charged emotionally, barely in control. As instructed, he walked to the hotel room's full-length mirror, admired his seminaked body, and, in a moment of improvisation, lashed out at his image with a vicious karate chop, shattering the mirror and cutting his hand. Coppola offered to halt the shooting, but Sheen insisted on continuing. With his own blood running freely and the cameras capturing every moment of his private agony now bursting to the surface, Sheen turned in an astonishing performance, his rage and despair so real that Eleanor Coppola feared that Sheen might actually attack her husband or the cameramen. By the time the scene had ended, Sheen was collapsed in a heap on the floor, naked, his body smeared with his own blood. He wept uncontrollably, tried to persuade the people in the room to sing "Amazing Grace" with him, and begged them to pray with him. The incident left Coppola and the camera crew visibly shaken.
Michael Schumacher, ‘Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmakers' Life’, pp. 212-213
No one retains so many jubilant traits of the kid moviemaker, or has inspired darker comments. Robert Evans, his colleague on The Godfather and The Cotton Club, has recently said of Coppola: "He's an evil person ... a direct descendant of Machiavelli's prince. He is so seductive, so brilliant [at] bringing people in[to] his web, he makes Elmer Gantry look like Don Knotts."
David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Fourth Edition, p. 176
While it is true that Bernard Williams saw her in the 1950s, together with Michael Dummett, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and David Pears, as a valuable mainstream Wittgensteinian, and Dummett himself felt that she was always held in great respect, others, watching her courageously developing her own original views, thought her ‘exotic’ in the sense of unassimilated. Philippa Foot: ‘We were interested in moral language, she was interested in the moral life ... She left us, in the end.’Isaiah Berlin declared her in a private boutade a ‘lady not known for the clarity of her views’. To her developing Platonism he and a few others would later declare themselves ‘allergic’.
When recognition of her philosophic originality finally came, it would be from a less provincial tradition, one more open to Continental Europe and mostly working in North America: John McDowell, Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor, Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum, Mark Platts. After Schools in 1955 Taylor went on to do an Oxford D.Phil., and found Iris tremendously helpful in two ways. Firstly, she herself was daring to explore those interesting philosophical issues declared out of bounds; secondly, the sheer quality of her listening when he visited her to try to sort out his confused ideas ‘was extraordinary; that and her questions. It helped enormously.’ He found much of what she wrote helpful and suggestive. She was a leading ‘role model’ to him and others trying ‘to break out of the post-positivist analytic box’, a teacher to whom he owed much; while John McDowell would in the 1970s read and re-read The Sovereignty of Good and declare himself pervasively influenced.