June 25, 2007
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For Anti-Christmas:
Object Lesson
"... the best definition
I have for Satan
is that it is a real
spirit of unreality."M. Scott Peck,
People of the Lie
"Far in the woods they sang
their unreal songs,
Secure. It was difficult
to sing in face
Of the object. The singers
had to avert themselves
Or else avert the object."-- Wallace Stevens,
"Credences of Summer"
Today is June 25,
anniversary of the
birth in 1908 of
Willard Van Orman Quine.Quine died on
Christmas Day, 2000.
Today, Quine's birthday, is,
as has been noted by
Quine's son, the point of the
calendar opposite Christmas--
i.e., "Anti-Christmas."
If the Anti-Christ is,
as M. Scott Peck claims,
a spirit of unreality, it seems
fitting today to invoke
Quine, a student of reality,
and to borrow the title of
Quine's Word and Object...Word:
An excerpt from
"Credences of Summer"
by Wallace Stevens:"Three times the concentred
self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self,
having possessedThe object, grips it
in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive,
once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation,
once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture,
this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent,
fully found."-- "Credences of Summer," VII,
by Wallace Stevens, from
Transport to Summer (1947)Object:
From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:
From Christmas 2005:
Click on the images
for further details.For a larger and
more sophisticaled
relative of this object,
see yesterday's entry
At Midsummer Noon.The object is real,
not as a particular
physical object, but
in the way that a
mathematical object
is real -- as a
pure Platonic form."It's all in Plato...."
-- C. S. Lewis
