A word of advice...

"Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." --PJ O'Rourke

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."
-Jorge Luis Borges

man in black

When I breeze into that city, people gonna stoop and bow.
All them women gonna make me, teach 'em what they don't know how.

tribute

So it goes.

Portrait

Some quick ideas on "Portrait", mostly for Amy and Colleen. When Stephen is discussing his "aesthetic philosophy" with Cranly, Stephen develops a connection between art/beauty and truth/perception that allows his philosophy to influence not just his art but his life. Relationships between art and truth in his argument hinge on a rejection of the objective as the vehicle for truth, and rely on the relationship between beauty and perception to establish a framework for understanding what is true.

Look at it like we've set up our binary lists in the past:

art/beauty
truth/perception

Wittgenstein maintained in his argument in "Lecture on Ethics" that such a thing as objective observation exists and that it can accurately describe the state of reality and therefore can be a vehicle for propositions that are true. If an observation is taken to mean an act of perception, Stephen seems to be rejecting this idea (rejecting, even though this book was published before Wittgenstein's time) by questioning this sort of analogy: perception is to truth as beauty is to art. The analogy is challenged when Stephen considers art as a way of understanding perception and beauty as a way of understanding truth. I don't have time right now to work with this any more right now because I have to go to a wedding. Hopefully it will be beautiful. Any thoughts?

A Warning

"Of many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body."