A story about the Gibraltar skull, involving Darwin, always reminds me of how difficult it is to truly speak about the world as we see it. This incident, involving the skull, in a world-historic life such as Darwin's often reminds me of a line by V. S. Naipaul.
In 1864, Charles Darwin had been very sick for weeks. (He suffered various ailments for much of his adult life.)
To "see how I stand change", he and his wife, Emma Darwin arrived at 4 Chester Place in London where his sister-in-law Sarah Wedgewood lived.
[Charles & Emma]
It was a convenient location for Darwin because despite being sick, he could walk over to the Royal Botanical Society and the Zoological Society. In those months and past few years he was writing a book/monograph on climbing plants then.
A great conversation with Peter Salmon (who talks admirably fast!) on his wonderful biography of Derrida's works & public persona that has metastasized & fragmented, often disallowing for any meaningful coherence to emerge. traffic.libsyn.com/secure/philoso…
13. On Daya Krishna, who per Daniel Raveh was one of the most interesting philosophers (not just Indian philosophers) of the 2nd half of 20thC. A book that distills DK's last decade & his efforts to read through Indian texts imaginatively and critically. traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5587148690.…
14. At age 80, veteran China scholar Orville Schell has published his first novel. My Old Home: A Novel of Exile -- a bildungsroman from the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen in 1989. On the worlds fiction can open & change in modern Chinese history. chrt.fm/track/47257E/p…
Kind of surreal to take a photo of the singularly inspiring Bhagat Singh -- a revolutionary voice in 1920s India, who was hung by the British in 1931, at the age of 24 -- run it through the Heritage AI algorithm, and see him reanimated.
Swami Vivekananda probably would have laughed at such algorithmic efforts to reanimate photos, but as a great believer in the powers of science to improve material aspects of human lives, he would have probably wanted to understand the details of how it all works.
It was hard to find a quality photo of Lokmanya Tilak, but this worked. Tilak urgently deserve a new reappraisal as one of the founding fathers of the modern Indian mind. A reformist & revivalist of traditions, a believer in the power of mass media before most Indians could read.
9. If you are an American or a friend of America -- this conversation with the former head of Operations at MI6 is as explicit in threat assessment as it is fascinating on how the Chinese CCP went about becoming a technology hegemon from a backwater. sphinx.acast.com/intelligencesq…
10. What is the nature of trauma that amid conscripts of a colonizing force? An illuminating talk with Raphaëlle Branche [what a great interviewer Adam Shatz is!] occasioned by her book, Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie? (Daddy, What Did You Do in Algeria?) sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo…
11. I have often struggled to understand how various factions and demographics operate in Burma. A really useful chat with Thant Myint-U sheds light on that along with various open questions including the singular and complex role of Aung San Suu Kyi. sphinx.acast.com/talkingpolitic…
1. If you love cricket or have admired the writings of C. L. R. James -- a wonderful first of a three part series abt his life.
Derek Walcott on CLR James: "sentences of a great prose writer contain light, natural light...the feeling of approaching dusk." cbc.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_IDEAS_P/me…
2. On the extraordinary & violent rise Chinese intelligence and counterintel capacities under Mao (& Zhou en Lai) to the present when State Security divisions try to hoover up CPU/GPUs for supercomputers on American export control lists.
For 2021, a new thread of sentences, I have found of interest/provocative/moving
Read freely, quote happily, attribute with caution. For a similar thread from 2018-20, see below:
“I’d never say this in public – I still love beautiful books and believe in them.” -Jacques Derrida
“I have sometimes been troubled by a doubt whether what is true in one case may not be true in all. Then, when I have reached that point, I am driven to retreat, for fear of tumbling into a bottomless pit of nonsense.”
– Socrates (Plato, Parmenides)
“I perceive that in Germany as well as in Italy there is a great struggle about what they call Classical and Romantic, terms which were not subjects of Classification in England – at least when I left it four or five years ago.”