John M. Patton of Virginia defended “the really harmless but apparently indecorous practice of wearing our hats” as a manifestation of the House’s resolute rejection of presidential meddlesomeness. “Regarding then this usage as merely ‘the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual’ freedom of this body from all executive control or interference, let us preserve it,” Patton declared on the floor. “And whenever, if ever, our executive magistrates shall attempt to employ any improper influence on this body, let us be found with our hats on.” ~ “The debate over the rule to ban hats on the House Floor,” September 14, 1837, Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives

A Mathematician’s Apology

It is plain now that my life, for what it is worth, is finished, and that nothing I can do can perceptibly increase or diminish its value. It is very difficult to be dispassionate, but I count it a ‘success’; I have had more reward and not less than was due to a man of my particular grade of ability. I have held a series of comfortable and ‘dignified’ positions. I have had very little trouble with the duller routine of universities. I hate ‘teaching’, and have had to do very little, such teaching as I have done been almost entirely supervision of research; I love lecturing, and have lectured a great deal to extremely able classes; and I have always had plenty of leisure for the researches which have been the one great permanent happiness of my life. I have found it easy to work with others, and have collaborated on a large scale with two exceptional mathematicians; and this has enable me to add to mathematics a good deal more than I could reasonably have expected. I have had my disappointments, like any other mathematician, but none of them has been too serious or has made me particularly unhappy. If I had been offered a life neither better nor worse when I was twenty, I would have accepted without hesitation.

It seems absurd to suppose that I could have ‘done better’. I have no linguistic or artistic ability, and very little interest in experimental science. I might have been a tolerable philosopher, but not one of a very original kind. I think that I might have made a good lawyer; but journalism is the only profession, outside academic life, in which I should have felt really confident of my changes. There is no doubt that I was right to be a mathematician, if the criterion is to be what is commonly called success.

My choice was right, then, if what I wanted was a reasonable comfortable and happy life. But solicitors and stockbrokers and bookmakers often lead comfortable and happy lives, and it is very difficult to see how the world is richer for their existence. Is there any sense in which I can claim that my life has been less futile than theirs? It seems to me again that there is only one possible answer: yes, perhaps, but, if so, for one reason only: I have never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own. Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created is undeniable: the question is about its value.

The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.

~ A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy (1940)

infinitetext:

Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, 1975.

From the April 2nd edition of The New Yorker, “After the Transition,” an excerpt from Robert Caro’s upcoming volume on the first half of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

The Decision As To What Constitutes a Breach Of This Freedom is Never Yours to Make

From Zunguzungu:

My internet-friend Brian (who I had the pleasure of meeting for coffee in Seattle in December) wrote this piece on revisiting Zucotti Park in NYC, the day before it would be (briefly) reoccupied:

“Once a physical space has been deemed contentious—a site where active dissent has taken place, and threatens to again—it must be closed off and policed by any means necessary…You are ostensibly “free” to walk into the park and sit down, and you’re free to relax in the thin sunshine, read a book, listen to music, or converse with friends and strangers. The police make a big display of letting this emaciated definition of freedom stand unchallenged, for the moment. Not everyone is immediately photographed or questioned or removed from the grounds. There might be months without beatings, arrests, or overt brutality. There might be any number of things you could do before the police suddenly decide that you’ve exceeded the limits of the permission they believe they’ve granted you as a citizen.

"The point is that, in such a space, the decision as to what constitutes a breach of this freedom is never yours to make. It’s the policeman who decides when your sitting becomes loitering, when your free speech becomes inflammatory, or when your right of assembly has transformed, through some bizarre alchemical process, into disorderly conduct. The definition of a police state is not restricted to acts of violence and terror. It must also be understood as that condition in which the police, the authorities who direct them, and the special interests they protect all work in tandem to invest the police with sufficient authority to make those decisions for every civilian in their purview. And again, this is something that many of us who have lived in different districts or whose skin may be of a different color often only come to know in relatively innocuous circumstances like this, where what has long been the brutalizing norm elsewhere extends its reach into those spaces that more naïve people had believed to be somehow outside of it.”

fsgbooks:

This is what Virginia Woolf sounds like. Kind of perfect, right?

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

VYSHINSKY: Accused Bukharin, were you with Khodjayev at his country place?

Bukharin: I was.

VYSHINSKY: Did you carry on a conversation?

Bukharin: I carried on a conversation and kept my head on my shoulders all the time, but it does not follow from this that I dealt with the things of which Khodjayev just spoke; this was the first conversation…

VYSHINSKY: It is of no consequence whether it was the first or not the first. Do you confirm that there was such a conversation?

Bukharin: Not such a conversation, but a different one, and also secret.

VYSHINSKY: I am not asking you about conversations in general, but about this conversation.

Bukharin: In Hegel’s Logic the word “this” is considered to be the most difficult word….

VYSHINSKY: I ask the Court to explain to the accused Bukharin that he is here not in the capacity of a philosopher, but a criminal, and he would do better to refrain from talking here about Hegel’s philosophy, it would be better first of all for Hegel’s philosophy….

Bukharin: A philosopher may be a criminal.

VYSHINSKY: Yes, that is to say, those who imagine themselves to be philosophers turn out to be spies. Philosophy is out of place here. I am asking you about that conversation of which Khodjayev just spoke; do you confirm it or do you deny it?

Bukharin: I do not understand the word “that.” We had a conversation at the country house.

~As quoted and discussed in Alain Badiou, Théorie du sujet, pp. 329-30.

Both public opinion and the police kept inventing new and more graphic ones, adding fuel to the fire without which there is no smoke. This was why we had outlawed the question, “What was he arrested for?”

“What for? Anna Akhmatova would cry indignantly whenever, infected by the prevailing climate, anyone of our circle asked this question.

“What do you mean, what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!”

~ Osip Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope

Jung Type Descriptions
INTP

loner, more interested in intellectual pursuits than relationships or family, wrestles with the meaninglessness of existence, likes esoteric things, disorganized, messy, likes science fiction, can be lonely, observer, private, can’t describe feelings easily, detached, likes solitude, not revealing, unemotional, rule breaker, avoidant, familiar with the darkside, skeptical, acts without consulting others, does not think they are weird but others do, socially uncomfortable, abrupt, fantasy prone, does not like happy people, appreciates strangeness, frequently loses things, acts without planning, guarded, not punctual, more likely to support marijuana legalization, not prone to compromise, hard to persuade, relies on mind more than on others, calm

favored careers:

philosopher, game designer, scientist, software engineer, freelance artist, research scientist, assassin, freelance writer, physicist, software developer, mathematician, geologist, computer scientist, philosophy professor, webmaster, slacker, medical researcher, painter, mortician, systems analyst, comic book artist, computer technician, website designer, scholar, archeologist, computer repair, forensic anthropologist, astronaut, researcher, historian, systems engineer, genetics researcher, astronomer, environmental scientist, egyptologist

source: INTP – Jung Type Descriptions

“Kairos. – In spite of the extreme confusion that reigns on the surface, and perhaps precisely because of that, our era is by its nature messianic.”

~ Tiqqun, “Theory of Bloom”

There’s something about the expressions on the faces of everyone in this photograph that I can’t stop looking at, the outreached hands of the man in the red hat…even the very last row of people, at the top of the photograph from left to right, seem transfixed. I wonder if in a different time this photograph wouldn’t be in dozens of Sunday newspapers.

via thepeoplesrecord: