Tagged: quote

Core Professor Atema: Nerval’s Lobster

The Core presents an article by Mark Dery, in which he discusses Gérard de Nerval and his infamous “pet” lobster. Dery starts off by quoting Nerval himself: “Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take […]

Poem for the ending of the year

“Baccalaureate” by Archibald MacLeish: A YEAR or two, and grey Euripides, And Horace and a Lydia or so, And Euclid and the brush of Angelo, Darwin on man, Vergilius on bees, The nose and Dialogues of Socrates, Don Quixote, Hudibras and Trinculo, How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go,– All shall be […]

On the new digital culture

Beyond the sheer mental workload, our thoughts have acquired a new orientation. Of the two mental worlds everyone inhabits, the inner and the outer, the latter increasingly rules. The more connected we are, the more we depend on the world outside ourselves to tell us how to think and live. There’s always been a conflict […]

Analects of the Core: Beauvoir on female sexuality

Sexual initiation!  Not to be mentioned in our house! . . . I hunted in books, but wore myself out without finding the road. . . . For my schoolteacher the question did not seem to exist. . . . A book finally showed me the truth, and my overexcitement disappeared; but I was most […]

CC106: The monkeys are at it again

Do you see them? Those monkeys are banging away at their typewriters, trying to type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Every time there’s a problem involving randomness, the monkeys get called into action. But these are not your average monkeys. No, these are gedanken monkeys. They can madly type 24 hours a day, seven […]

Michel Houellebecq invokes de Tocqueville

Not long ago, I read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I am certain that if you took, on the one hand, an old-order Romantic and, on the other hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the development of democracy—taking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in the future, […]