Simone Weil on force

I started thinking about these sentences this afternoon:

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.

Simone Weil, The “Iliad,” or the Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956).

Force can take the form of a knee on a neck or a vehicle aimed at human beings in uniform. It can be directed against a person or a community. It can be the work of a lone wolf, as we now say, or a larger group, or the state.

One need not be a believer to be thinking these thoughts on Good Friday.

Imaginary word of the day

It came to me in a dream, in the form of an illustration of usage. I wrote the entry this morning:

winch∙ing \ˈwinch-iŋ\ n [prob. fr. Walter Winchell †1972 Am. newspaper columnist] (2021) : the public disclosure, as by a gossip columnist or other media personality, of an unfounded accusation, typically salacious or otherwise damaging, against a public figure <The jazz musician’s prospects were damaged by the ⁓ he received in the newspapers>

The arrival of this dream word is no doubt influenced by my watching the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, whose gossip columnist and destroyer of lives, J. J. Hunsecker, is modeled on Walter Winchell. The word lynching probably plays a part too. The murder of George Floyd: that was a lynching.

Other dream words
Alecry : Fequid : Misinflame : Skeptiphobia

“A dream sofa”

The narrator recognizes pieces of furniture from La Raspelière, the Verdurins’ rented country house in Douville. (Before that the furniture was with the Verdurins in rue Montalivet). He sees these pieces as “almost unreal,” bringing parts of the old salon into the present one, evoking “fragments of a destroyed world which seemed to be existing elsewhere.”

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003).

If this were an episode of Perry Mason, I’d now stand up in the visitors’ gallery and confess, “Yes, I posted those sentences. Yes, two long sentences, in a single day. I tried to stop myself. But don’t you see? I love that passage” — and then we’d break for a commercial. After which, I’d go back to reading Proust.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“That unreal part”

M. Brichot is a member of the Verdurins’ little clan of salonistes. The Verdurins, “the Patrons,” lived in the rue Montalivet until an accident (fire?) destroyed their house. They later rented a country place, La Raspelière, in Douville. Now back in Paris, they live in a townhouse on the Quai Conti. Brichot points the narrator to the far end of a room in the townhouse: “That might just give you an idea of what the rue Montalivet house was like twenty-five years ago.”

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003).

And now I’m thinking of places I can see again only in memory.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Fire is my informed guess. Mme Verdurin to a guest: “I don’t mind your smoking, of course, if it weren’t for the carpet, which is a very fine one. Not that that matters either, but it would catch fire very easily, I’m terribly afraid of fire and I wouldn’t want you all to be roasted alive just because somebody dropped a cigarette end.”]

Mary Miller on a billboard

In Effingham, Illinois, the heart of Illinois’s fifteenth congressional district, the Illinois Democratic County Chairs’ Association has rented a billboard to share Representative Mary Miller’s words with the world:

“Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”

That’s what she said, in Washington, D.C., on January 5, 2021.

From IDCCA President Kristina Zahorik:

Words matter, particularly from those who hold elected office. And when Mary Miller tried to excuse her comments about Adolf Hitler by accusing others of attempting to “twist her words” the IDCCA knew she needed to be held accountable for her finger-pointing defense. The residents of Mary Miller’s Congressional district need to know that Mary Miller thinks it is acceptable to cite Adolf Hitler to make a political point. The IDCCA hopes the voters remember her inexcusable comments, and hold her accountable as a public official and eventually at the ballot box.

You can see the billboard on the IDCCA’s main page.

All the Mary Miller posts
January 5 and 6 in D.C., with Mary Miller : The objectors included Mary Miller : A letter to Mary Miller : Mary Miller, with no mask : Mary Miller, still in trouble : His ’n’ resignations are in order : Mary Miller in The New Yorker : Mary Miller vs. AOC : Mary Miller’s response to mass murder : Mary Miller and trans rights

Fashionable parties

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“Mitigated”?

Odd phrasing from Deborah Birx, speaking to Sanjay Gupta:

“There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

I know that mitigate and mitigation are words common in COVID-19 discourse. But they always strike me as odd. Merriam-Webster gives these relevant meanings for mitigate : “to cause to become less harsh or hostile,” “to make less severe or painful.” But Birx is clearly not talking about palliative care. She’s not even speaking, really, about persons: “all of the rest of them” is deaths. You can’t “decrease” a person’s death, only a total number of deaths. Birx is speaking about death en masse.

A less evasive way to say it, “About a hundred thousand people died from that original surge. Hundreds of thousands more didn’t have to die.”

I lost my respect for Deborah Birx on March 25 last year. It never came back.

“One does have one’s standards”

With his “painted lips,” “mascaraed lashes,” and “papier-poudréd cheeks,” Baron de Charlus is a man who takes care with his appearance when out and about. But he hates to be seen in bed in the morning:

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003).

Twenty-five? As the Baron says elsewhere, he “shan’t see forty again.” And as the narrator points out, the Baron is “well into his sixties.”

All these years later, one can still buy Paiper Poudré.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Elaine’s A Tunes

Elaine’s A Tunes: Capricious Pieces for Beginner Violinists just appeared at Amazon. Elaine has written two blog posts — 1, 2 — to explain how she came to write these pieces.

She is, as she says, “engaging in commerce.”

The Blackwing clamp, 100 years old

The excellent blog pencil talk notes the March 29, 1921 filing of the patent for the clamp that became a distinctive feature of the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencil: Happy 100th anniversary, Blackwing clamp!