Friday, February 07, 2025
Thursday, February 06, 2025
They Don't Need Reminding
Wednesday, February 05, 2025
Sustainable Scum
Tuesday, February 04, 2025
À l'orange
Monday, February 03, 2025
On the Tragic
The stylistic whims of Peter Wessel Zapffe extended to idiosyncratic use of italics and quote marks, as well as to occasional footnotes querying the grammar; all of which the reader of Ryan Showler's translation has been mercifully spared. Latin phrases are unpatronisingly retained and conveniently glossed, while the English is clear and concise; although the usage of the pronoun one requires some acclimatisation. Whether or not this results from the translator's rendition of a Zapffean quirk will take a better and braver scholar of Riksmål than I to determine. Many of the references are from Scandinavian and German sources, and therefore possibly not widely known or readily available to English readers; but the translator has been compassionate enough to include an index, which the original did not.
Some of On the Tragic is heavy going, at least for the philosophically untrained; and there is a lengthy legalistic digression (Zapffe was also a jurist, as well as scaling mountains merely geological) which may try even a philosophical patience. But all through the book Zapffe drives home his points with sharp little parables, among which the antlers of the Irish elk, the tree destroyed by its best fruit, and the cats stranded on an isle of jumping beetles are merely three of the most memorable. No less worthy of mention is the theorist who seeks to sum up and transcend his two hundred predecessors only to find himself classified as Theorist No.201.
The analysis and classification of tragedy in its many variants and combinations culminates with an examination of tragic literature and criticism, including detailed and interesting readings of Prometheus Bound, the Book of Job, and Hamlet. I was gratified to observe that Zapffe reached a conclusion similar to my own concerning a certain resident of Pandora's box. In Job Zapffe finds "a fanatical will to intellectual honesty, and a poet who combines the ability to give his abyss-deep hatred of God a dazzling satirical form with cascading cosmic pathos ... a blasphemous masterpiece;" while in Hamlet he sees a great man whose ruinous "tragic flaw" is not a vice like Macbeth's ambition or a weakness like Othello's jealousy, but the very strength and virtue of his moral and intellectual courage.
Ryan Showler and Peter Lang deserve our gratitude. No philosopher with a name like Peter Wessel Zapffe should be allowed to languish in obscurity, any more than he should be permitted to escape becoming a humourist.
Sunday, February 02, 2025
Our Intimate Companions
Saturday, February 01, 2025
By Grace of Nigel
Friday, January 31, 2025
Upon This Rock
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Never Again, Unless Decidedly Expedient
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
His Majesty's Most Humble and Devoted Servant
Who do not scorn to change their mind;
And I, who have new eyes to see,
Must now let greatness fall on me.
In former days, in flush of youth,
I did not know His holy truth;
Though He was nice and fair of mind,
I slandered Him in speech unkind.
I called Him bully, I confess;
A danger to the world, no less.
His dynamism did not move me,
Nor worshipped I His energy.
My words were ill-judged, wrong, and loose,
And I have only this excuse:
That my perspective could not boast
The plummy perks of this my post.
Mine eyes now see in purer light
That turns all gaudy orange white;
And when He holds me close - well, well!
So clean, so fresh, so rich the smell!
Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring