ARCHIVE OF WORKING
WORDS
2004
SEPTEMBER 2004 Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well....Before reaching the final line, however, he / had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Perennial Classics, HarperPerennial, division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1998, pp. 447-448. Originally published in Argentina in 1967 as Cien Anos de Soledad. Translation originally published in 1970 by Harper & Row.
MAY 2004 If the point of leadership is to know where you're going, know and be able to communicate your values, and be disciplined enough to carry them out, then [George W.] Bush, like Moses, is a leadership genius....His leadership lessons, created over a lifetime, can provide the foundation for our own leadership genius.
Carolyn B. Thompson and James W. Ware. THE LEADERSHIP GENIUS OF GEORGE W. BUSH: 10 Commonsense Lessons from the Commander in Chief. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003, pp. 5-6.
APRIL 2004 When Bush took office in 2001, a parallel to Stuart and Bourbon arrogance quickly emerged in the new regime's insistence on ideological conservatism despite the lack of any such national mandate. Restoration drinks from its own special psychological well.
Kevin Phillips. AMERICAN DYNASTY: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004, p. 9.
2003
DECEMBER 2003 Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their natural rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.
Adam Smith. AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. Gen. Editors, R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Textual Editor, W. B. Todd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 84. This is a 1981 LibertyClassics edition, Indianapolis, IN, exactly reproducing the Oxford edition with minor corrections in 1979. Ursinus College library: 330/Sm5/1981/v.1.
SEPTEMBER 2003 Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humour was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important. (1948)
Ludwig Wittgenstein. CULTURE AND VALUE. Ed. by G. H. Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman. Tr. by Peter Winch. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 78e.
AUGUST 2003 And hence it is, that to feel much for others, and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent, affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety. As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it / is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or, what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.
Adam Smith. THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS; or, an essay towards an analysis of the principles by which men naturally judge concerning the conduct and character, first of their neighbours, and afterwards of themselves. To which is added, a dissertation on the origin of languages. New edition. With a biographical and critical memoir of the author, by Dugald Stewart. London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1853. First published 1759. Reprints of economic classics: New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966, pp. 27-28. Ursinus College Library: 170/Sm51/78122.
MAY 2003 Harmony...is only a distant accessory in imitative music: in harmony proper there is no principle of imitation. It insures pitch, it is true;....but it is from melody alone that this invincible power of impassioned accents arises; from it derives the whole power of music over the soul; devise the most learned successions of chords without admixture of melody, and you will all be bored after a quarter of an hour.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. JULIE, OR THE NEW HELOISE: Letters of two lovers who live in a small town at the foot of the Alps. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 6. Translated and annotated by Philip Stewart and Jean Vache. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, series editors. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997, p. 108. Ursinus College Library: 848.5/R762W/v.6.
APRIL 2003: The Saddam regime used [the Iraqi people's] resources to serve its economic and political interests often in cohort with the British, and American Administrations and the Iraqi people paid a price for that. Now America and Britain will directly benefit from the Iraqi oil and other resources.
The 24 million people of Iraq offer a huge market for American multinational corporations. Their lifestyle and their future will now be determined by the invading forces. It will be done in the name of Iraqi people, but once again we will see a revival of colonial past, something Great Britain has greater expertise in.
Dr. Aslam Abdullah, writing on ISLAMONLINE.NET, LIVE DIALOGUE, 12 April 2003. He is editor of two Muslim American papers, the monthly Minaret, published from Los Angeles, and the weekly Muslim Observer, published from Detroit.
FEBRUARY 2003: FROM THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK: "Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods....The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as 'This dog is free from lice' or 'This field is free from weeds.' It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically free' or 'intellectually free,' since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore...nameless."
George Orwell. 1984. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949, pp. 303-304. Ursinus College Library 823.91/Or9n.
JANUARY 2003: "The metamorphosis of aging alters belief systems, instinctual expression, memory, even the brain; indeed, the passage of time renders truth itself relative....It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all."
George E. Vaillant. ADAPTATION TO LIFE (1977), pp. 195, 197.
12 June 1999; last modified 29 March 2005 Richard P. Richter
2001-2002
2001
January 2001 "The text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations."
Roland Barthes. S/Z: An Essay. Tr. by Richard Miller. Preface by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974, p. 14.
February 2001 "The absolute antithesis, the atom (i.e., the Ego), which at the same time is a manifold (of contents of consciousness), is finiteness itself. It is for itself (in actuality) merely exclusion of its antithesis (the absolute Idea). It is its limit and barrier. Thus it is the Absolute itself become finite. Reflection in itself, individual self-consciousness, is the antithesis of the absolute Idea and hence the Idea in absolute finiteness."
Hegel, G. W. F. REASON IN HISTORY: A general introduction to the philosophy of history. Trans. with introduction by Robert S. Hartman. The Library of Liberal Arts. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953, p. 32. Ursinus College library: 901/H361
March 2001 "Not without some embarrassment did the advocates of the classical ideologies of the age of capital (organized socialism and institutionalized liberalism) realize one fine day that beyond the false appearances of ideological discord, they were bound together in a common discourse--a discourse of a power that operated now in the life-form of relationality and symbolic exchanges."
Arthur Kroker. "Parsons' Foucault." Arthur Kroker and David Cook. THE POSTMODERN SCENE: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986, p. 229.
April 2001 "Contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can)."
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Tr. and Foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 11.
May 2001 "There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off."
Thomas Henry Huxley. AUTOBIOGRAPHY. In Hardin Craig and J. M. Thomas. English Prose of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Appleton-Century, 1929, p. 615.
June 2001 "This is Nietzsche's materialism, or physiologism. The purpose of thinking is not to know the truth but to give pleasure to the body."
Stanley Rosen. THE MASK OF ENLIGHTENMENT: Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 86.
July 2001 "That technology-driven modernization of the world's economic life will go ahead regardless of the fate of a worldwide free market. Growing economic interconnectedness does not depend on the orthodoxies of the IMF. Only an ecological catastrophe can halt or retard it."
John Gray. FALSE DAWN: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. New York: The New Press, 1998, p. 23. Book is referenced in the "globalization" homepage.
August 2001 "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind".
Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY. 1848. Tr. Samuel Moore in cooperation with Engels, 1888. Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1987, 1999, 2000. http://csf.colorado.edu/mirrors/marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1840/com-man/index.htm
September 2001 "Osama bin Laden neatly illustrates two ironic but disturbing things about the way in which globalization and its opponents interact. The first, which might be described as terrorist specific, is that the same forces that have helped speed globalization--the end of the cold war, the spread of technology, the lowering of borders--have made life easier for maverick bombers.
"The second point is more general: Globalization's opponents, both violent and peaceful, have been among the cleverest exploiters of the process."
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. A FUTURE PERFECT: The Essentials of Globalization. New York: Crown Business of Random House, Inc., 2000, p. 277. Ursinus College Library: 330.9/M583 Book is referenced in the "globalization" homepage.
October 2001 "These evil deeds were the results of beliefs. If we do not comprehend those...beliefs, then all we will do is mourn our dead and heal ourselves back into the traditions of our complacence. History is asking more of this country than sorrow."
The New Republic Online. "It Happened Here." By the Editors. Post date 09.13.01 Issue date 09.24.01
November 2001 "The history of contemporary Islam...has been dominated by two major struggles: the first, the wars of independence at the turn of the twentieth century, when much of the Muslim world struggled to free itself from dominion of European powers; and the second, in the latter half of the century, the internal battle over religio-cultural identity and integrity associated with contemporary Islamic revivalism and the reassertion of Islam into public life."
John L. Esposito, "Contemporary Islam: Reformation or Revolution?" in John L. Esposito, Ed., THE OXFORD HISTORY OF ISLAM. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 643-644. Ursinus College Library: 297.09/Ox2.
December 2001 (1) "Globalization has become a major theme in the Arab media, and it is almost always raised in connection with American economic penetration. The increasingly wretched economic situation in most of the Muslim world, relative not only to the West but also to the tiger economies of East Asia, fuels these frustrations. Amerian paramountcy, as Middle Easterners see it, indicates where to direct the blame and the resulting hostility."
Bernard Lewis. "The Revolt of Islam." THE NEW YORKER 19 November 2001: 56.
December 2001 (2) The Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-i-Islami (Islamic Society) believed "that Islam was a comprehensive way of life and that the union of religion and the state (din wa dawla) was the God-ordained Islamic ideal."
John L. Esposito, "Contemporary Islam: Reformation or Revolution?" in John L. Esposito, Ed., THE OXFORD HISTORY OF ISLAM. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 653. Ursinus College Library: 297.09/Ox2.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."
First Amendment to The Constitution of the United States of America.
December 2001 (3) "Even if we assume that competition will not have a culturally homogenizing effect, cultural elements that are not compatible with modern institutions will be pushed to the margins of world society. This fact can strengthen the ethnonational and religious fundamentalist movements.... And therein lies a source of conflict for numerous societies, one that will not disappear any time soon. The expansion of such conflicts and the threat to world peace that they represent will be exorcized, however, if and only if market society succeeds in reforming itself, and thereby creates an integrative, modernized modern age that becomes attractive to most inhabitants of the earth."
Volker Bornschier. "The Civilizational Project and Its Discontents: Toward a Viable Market Society?" Journal of World-Systems Research, Vol V, 2, 1999, 165-185 http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr ISSN 1076-156X© 1999 Volker Bornschier
2002
January 2002 The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world."
Samuel P. Huntington. THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 217-218. Ursinus College Library 909.829/H926
February 2002 "So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.
"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
"Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."
Ludwig Wittgenstein. TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS. Tr. by D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1961, p. 147. Ursinus College Library 149.94/W784.
March 2002 "[Marx] attacked the moralists because he saw them as the sycophantic apologists of a social order which he felt to be immoral; he attacked the eulogists of liberalism because of their self-satisfaction, because of the identification of freedom with the formal liberty then existing with a social system which destroyed freedom. Thus, by implication, he admitted his love for freedom;...he hoped that the state would 'wither away'. Marx's faith, I believe, was fundamentally a faith in the open society."
Karl R. Popper. THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES. Volume II: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, p.200. Ursinus College Library 301/P817/1963/v.2.
April 2002 "The war [World War II]...has robbed us of our hidden terror, as terror can only exist if the forces of tragedy are unknown. We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. We are no longer then in the face of a mystery. After all, wasn't it an American boy who did it? The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we now have is a tragic rather than a terror situation."
Barnett Newman, "The New Sense of Fate." Quoted in Thomas B. Hess. Barnett Newman. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1971, p. 43. Ursinus College Library: 759.13/N462H.
June 2002 "In earlier times one could be an individual with a better conscience than one can today. People used to be like the stalks of corn in the field. They were probably more violently flung to and fro by God, hail, fire, pestilence and war than they are today, but it was collectively, in terms of towns, of countrysides, the field as a whole; and whatever was left to the individual stalk in the way of personal movement was something that could be answered for and was clearly defined. Today, on the other hand, responsibility's point of gravity lies not in the individual but in the relations of things."
Robert Musil. Tr. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1953, p. 174.
September 2002 "I have exposed myself as I was, contemptible and vile some times; at others, good, generous, and sublime. I have revealed my heart as thou sawest it thyself. Eternal Being! assemble around me the numberless throng of my fellow-mortals; let them listen to my Confessions, let them lament at my unworthiness, let them blush at my misery. Let each of them, in his turn, lay open his heart with the same sincerity at the foot of thy throne, and then say, if he dare, I was better than that man."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. THE CONFESSIONS OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU. The anonymous translation into English of 1783 & 1790 revised and completed by A.S. Glover, with a new introduction by Mr. Glover. New York: The Heritage Press, 1955, p. 496.
November 2002 "If I, when I am dead, shall have no consciousness, as some narrow-minded philosophers imagine, I do not fear lest dead philosophers should ridicule this my delusion. But if we are not destined to be immortal, yet it is a desirable thing for a man to expire at his fit time. For, as nature prescribes a boundary to all other things, so does she also to life. Now old age is the consummation of life, just as of a play; from the fatigue of which we ought to escape, especially when satiety is superadded."
--Cato speaking in Cicero's dialogue, "Cicero on Old Age."
Cicero's Three Books of Offices, or Moral Duties; also his Cato Major, an essay on old age; an essay on friendship; paradoxes; Scipio's dream; and letter to Quintus on the duties of a magistrate. Tr. Cyrus R. Edmonds. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855. Ursinus College library: 875.52/C485t, c.2, p.262. [This has to be one of the oldest books on the shelves of Ursinus's Myrin Library. It predates the founding of the college by 14 years.]
December 2002 "Put all the lessons of young people in actions rather than in speeches. Let them learn nothing in books which experience can teach them. What an extravagant project it is to train them in speaking without their having a subject about which to say anything; to believe that on the benches of a college they can be made to feel the energy of the language of the passions and all the force of the art of persuasion without interest in persuading anyone of anything! All the precepts of rhetoric seem to be only pure verbiage to whoever does not sense their use for his profit. Of what import is it to a schoolboy to know how Hannibal went about convincing his soldiers to cross the Alps? If, in place of these magnificent harangues, you told him how he ought to go about getting his principal to give him a vacation, be sure that he would be more attentive to your rules."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. EMILE, or ON EDUCATION. Introduction, Translation, and Notes by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979, p. 251.
12 June 1999; last modified 7
February 2003 Copyright © 2003 Richard
P. Richter
ARCHIVE OF WORKING WORDS: JANUARY 2000 TO DECEMBER 2000
January 2000
February 2000
March 2000
April 2000 (1)
April 2000 (2)
May 2000
"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN. Boston: Little Brown, 1997, p. 42.
June 2000
ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 94.
July 2000
Richard Feynman. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton. Princeton University Press, 1988.
August 2000
Karl Marx. CAPITAL: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Modern Library (Random House), n.d. Copyright 1906, by Charles H. Kerr & Company. Ursinus College library 331/M369c.
September 2000
G. W. F. Hegel. Reason in History: A general introduction to the philosophy of history. Trans. with introduction by Robert S. Hartman. The Library of Liberal Arts. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953, p. 24. Ursinus College library: 901/H361.
October 2000 "Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings....We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves."
V. S. Naipaul. A WAY IN THE WORLD. New York: Knopf, 1994, p. 11.
November 2000 "Irreversible Globalization Driven by knowledge, technology, and change, the world is linked in new ways; even the corner store has gone global. We have to develop new ways of thinking and acting globally and locally simultaneously. Globalization has driven multiculturalism, and our national and regional cultures are connecting as never before."
Robert Rosen, Patricia Digh, Marshall Singer, and Carl Phillips. GLOBAL LITERACIES: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Cultures. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. p. 17.
December 2000 "Judges too, even though their sentence be erroneous and illegal, must be allowed, for the sake of peace and order, to have decisive authority and ultimately to determine property. Have we original, innate ideas of praetors and chancellors and juries? Who sees not that all these institutions arise merely from the necessities of human society?"
David Hume. THE PHILOSOPHY OF DAVID HUME. Edited with Introduction by V. C. Chappell. New York: The Modern Library, Random House, 1963, p. 422. Ursinus College Library: 192/H882.