Those Borges lectures look great, Ben. I'm excited to listen to them all. That sounds like a cool thesis topic, although I'm completely unfamiliar with that sort of philosophy. Didn't Wittgenstein do something with that. I know he did a lot with examining a philosophy of language. I'm trying to read his Blue and Brown books (they're apparently sort of intros into his hard stuff). Critical Theory could also be good for that sort of philosophy, but I haven't read any of that stuff.
I've also got some good quotes from Middlemarch:
"Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse;" (p. 60)
"'Why, my dear, doctors must have opinions,'" said Mrs Vincy, 'What are they there for else?'" - I particularly like that one!
"... for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them." (85)
"He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us" (152)
And what is, I think, the most stunningly beautiful passage in the entire novel (at least so far as I have read, which is to say, not so far).
Eliot writes about the banality of a scene she describes and justifies its inclusion in the novel.
"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like heraring the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity." (194)
Good to hear from you all.
Ben
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