February 15, 2005
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Answer
“Are you now, or have you ever been?”
– Question posed to Philip Johnson,
entry of Feb. 12“In the case of the Cartesian
question, the answer is affirmative, and metaphysics has produced, in
the four hundred years since, nothing much better than this. It is
not only interesting but supremely practical. What could be more
useful than having the means of convincing oneself that one exists
whenever the question should arise?”– Rebecca Goldstein,
Properties of Light“… a nightshirted boy trying desperately to awake from the iridescent
dizziness of dream life. Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a
book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I
believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the
incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass
from one state of being to another.”– Vladimir Nabokov,
Transparent Things“Le terme
que l’on traduit par dédicace est en japonais ekô, littéralement ‘se tourner vers’. Il est composé de deux idéogrammes, e qui signifie ‘tourner le dos, se tourner, revenir en arrière’ et kô, ‘faire face, s’adresser à’.”
Rebecca
GoldsteinFor more on Goldstein, see
The New York Times,
Feb. 14, 2005, and
Eight is a Gate,
Dec. 19, 2002.
