Clippings

Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

Needless to say, the manufacture of elephants is no easy matter. They’re big, first of all, and very complex. It’s not like making hairpins or colored pencils. The factory covers a huge area, and it consists of several buildings. Each building is big, too, and the sections are color-coded. Assigned to the ear section that month, I worked in the building with the yellow ceiling and posts. My helmet and pants were also yellow. All I did there was make ears, The month before, I had been assigned to the green building, where I wore a green helmet and pants and made heads. We moved from section to section each month, like Gypsies. It was company policy. That way, we could all form a complete picture of what an elephant looked like. No one was permitted to spend his whole life making just ears, say, or just toenails.

In 1830, Augustus De Morgan wrote that “no word or sign of arithmetic or algebra has one atom of meaning,” so that their interpretations should be open and arbitrary, not restricted to ordinary numbers and magnitudes. By 1840, Duncan Gregory had added that these symbols could represent operations, not just numbers. Building on this, in 1847 George Boole used algebraic symbols to represent members of a “set”… Not only did Boole show the close relation of logic to mathematics, he also emphasized that the form, rather than the content, of the symbols is crucial. For this reason, Bertrand Russell credits Boole with having discovered pure mathematics, “the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century.”

…in one play the palace of Lord Hosokawa, in which was preserved the celebrated painting of Daruma by Sesson, suddenly takes fire through the negligence of the samurai in charge. Resolved at all hazards to rescue the precious painting, he rushes into the burning building and seizes the kakemono, only to find all means of exit cut off by the flames. Thinking only of the picture, he slashes open his body with his sword, wraps his torn sleeve about the Sesson and plunges it into the gaping wound. The fire is at last extinguished. Among the smoking embers is found a half-consumed corpse, within which reposes the treasure uninjured by the fire. Horrible as such tales are, they illustrate the great value that we set upon a masterpiece, as well as the devotion of a trusted samurai.

“How stupid, how stupid!” thought Ryabovich, looking at the running water. “How unintelligent it all is!”

[…]

The water was running, he knew not where or why, just as it did in May. At that time it had flowed into a great river, from the great river into the sea; then it had risen in vapor, turned into rain, and perhaps the very same water was running now before Ryabovich’s eyes again. . . . What for? Why?

And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovich an unintelligible, aimless jest. . . . And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how Fate in the person of an unknown woman has by chance caressed him, he recalled his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meager, poverty-stricken, and drab. . . .