April 2012
7 tags
One should avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause, of admiring the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new positive order should replace the old one the day after, when the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising is over? It is at this crucial point that we encounter the fatal weakness of the protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself...
4 tags
“Far from being absurd, the idea that the Constitution is a living organism follows from the fact that the words used in writing the Constitution are underdetermined and dynamic and thus “living organisms” in the metaphorical sense in play here. In this respect there is nothing unique about the Constitution. It is a dynamic object because of the simple reason that word meanings are...
4 tags
“When I first learned what had happened on Utoya that day last July, I felt none of that distance. Despair welled up in me, wild and sudden. I wept. In the images from the island, there was light, and I knew that light — it was the light of a Norwegian fjord on a rainy day. The dark green pine trees by the water’s edge were well known to me, the gray-white bare-faced rocks and the sea, heavy...
4 tags
“Dream that my little baby came to life again - that it had only been cold &...”
– Mary Shelley, Journal, 19 March 1815
4 tags
“I can never cease for a second to have him [Shelley] in my heart and brain with...”
– Mary Shelley
3 tags
“The ungrateful world did not feel his loss, and the gap it made seemed to close...”
– Mary Shelley, preface to Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, 1824
Dear Anatoli,
If you ever read this, know that I miss you.
