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p285 The Munich carnival season, that period between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, was celebrated by common consent with dance and mirth, with flaming cheeks and flashing eyes, and with all sorts of public and private entertainments. The carnival of 1914, in which I, the still youthful academic professor from Freising, alone or in company with Adrian, took part, has remained in my memory, a vivid or rather a portentous image. It was indeed the last carnival before the beginning of the four-year war which has now been telescoped with the horrors of today into one historical epoch; the last one before the so-called “first World War,” which put an end for ever to the idyll of aesthetic guilelessness in the city on the Isar and its dionysiac easy-goingness -- if I may put it like that. And it was also the time in which certain individual destinies in our circle of acquaintance unfolded before my eyes, and, almost unheeded outside our circle, led up to naked catastrophe...
There follows a very detailed account of the lives of the Rodde sisters, which I really don’t see the point of. In short, Clarissa is on her way out of town in pursuit of a career on the stage, which she would seem to be ill suited for.
The younger, Inez, in search of a suitable bourgeois marriage and life, is courted by a Dr Helmut Institoris, an “instructor in aesthetics and the history of art at the Technical Institute in Munich, where he lectured on aesthetic theory and the history of Renaissance architecture... a bachelor from a solid Wurzburg family, in expectancy of a good inheritance... he belonged to those men who prefer in marriage to have all the economic power in their hands and to have their wives dependent on them.” Unfortunately, Inez responds to being wooed by Institoris by falling in love with Rudi Schwerdtfeger.
I think I can save us all a lot of reading and typing by saying that Inez is a sort of Anna Karenina while Institoris is an academic Karenin, and Rudi a musical and weak willed Vronsky (while also a determined suitor of Adrian). Okay, he isn’t at all like Vronsky, but Inez’s relationship toward him is vaguely similar to Anna’s toward Vronsky. Except that in this case Inez is the seducer (are you noticing a pattern here?) and Rudi the seduced. And if the heavy handed hints Zeitblom keeps dropping are any indication, poor Rudi may be headed for as dire a fate as Anna.
And that is chapter XXIX
From "Postscript" - by Diane Ackerman
p304 When scientists, philosophers, and other commentators speak of the real world, they’re talking about a myth, a convenient fiction. The world is a construct the brain builds based on the sensory information it’s given, and the information is only a small part of all that’s available... Physicists explain that molecules are always moving: The book in front of you is actually squirming under your fingertips. But we don’t see this motion at that molecular level, because it’s not evolutionarily important that we do. We’re given only the sensory information crucial to our survival.
...In an odd way, one-celled animals may have a more realistic sense of the world than higher animals do, because they respond to every stimulus they encounter. We, on the other hand, select only a few. The body edits and prunes experience before sending it to the brain for contemplation or action... Not everything we feel is felt powerfully enough to send a message to the brain; the rest of the sensations just wash over us, telling us nothing. Much is lost in translation, or is censored, and in any case our nerves don’t all fire at once... The body’s quest isn’t for truth, it’s for survival.
Our senses also crave novelty. Any change alerts them, and they send a signal to the brain. If there’s no change, no novelty, they doze and register little or nothing. The sweetest pleasure loses its thrill if it continues too long. A constant state -- even of excitement -- in time becomes tedious, fades into the background, because our senses have evolved to report changes, what’s new, something startling that has to be appraised: a morsel to eat, a sudden danger. The body takes stock of the world like an acute and observant general moving through a complex battleground, looking for patterns and stratagems. [Or like a novelist] So it is not only possible but inevitable that a person will grow used to a city’s noise and visual commotion and not register these stimuli constantly. On the other hand, novelty itself will always rivet one’s attention. [Like Reality TV -- or the entertainment business in general] There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins. Whatever it is, it looms brightly, its edges sharp, its details ravishing, in a hard clear light; just beholding it is a form of revelation, a new sensory litany. But the second time one sees it, the mind says, Oh, that again, another wing walker, another moon landing. And soon, when it’s become commonplace, the brain begins slurring the details, recognizes it too quickly, by just a few of its features; it doesn’t have to bother scrutinizing it. Then it is lost to astonishment... Mastery is what we strive for, but once we have it we lose the precarious superawareness of the amateur... So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death. Many millennia from now, will we evolve into people who will perceive the world differently, employ the senses differently, and perhaps know the world more intimately? ...
p307 One of the most profound paradoxes of being human is that the thick spread of sensation we relish isn’t perceived directly by the brain. The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. [It does smell, though] All it receives are electrical impulses -- not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the oboe solo like the flight of a bird, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef -- just impulses. The brain is blind, deaf, dumb, unfeeling. The body is a transducer (from Latin, transducere, to lead across, transfer), a device that converts energy of one sort to energy of another sort, and that is its genius. Our bodies take mechanical energy and convert it to electrical energy... [but through a chemical process] When Walt Whitman said: “I sing the body electric,” he didn’t know how prescient he was. The body does indeed sing with electricity, which the mind deftly analyzes and considers. So to some extent, reality is an agreed-upon fiction. How silly, then, that philosophers should quarrel about appearance and reality. The universe will be knowable to other creatures in other ways.
Here is an interesting TED talk (this is repeated from my After Ryecroft blog) on reality and perception that does a wonderful job of showing how "reality is an agreed-upon fiction." Though I, at least, have to take the speaker's evolutionary math on faith... which feels as suspect as taking Descarte's confidence in God's reliability "on faith."
p308 ...In REM sleep, our brain waves range between eight and thirteen hertz, a frequency at which flickering light can trigger epileptic seizures. The tremulous earth quivers gently at around ten hertz. So, in our deepest sleep. we enter synchrony with the trembling of the earth. Dreaming, we become the Earth’s dream.
p309 It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. “For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. [Nobody ever thinks they're going to end up like Frou-Frou in Anna Karenina] It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
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