Chateaubriand mentions eunuchs in his travels (1884)

François-René de Chateaubriand. Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris (originally 1884). Translated as Record of a Journey from Paris to Jerusalem and Back by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2011.

Three passages mention eunuchs:

During dinner, we received compliments from what in the Levant is termed the ‘nation’: this nation is composed of French merchants or the dependents of France living in the various Ports of Call. In Athens there are only one or two houses of this kind: they trade in oil. Monsieur Roque did me the honour of a visit: he had a family, and he invited me to visit, accompanied by Monsieur Fauvel, then he began to speak of Athenian society: ‘A foreigner settled for some time in Athens seemed to have felt or inspired a passion that was the talk of the town ... There was gossip about the House of Socrates, and chatter concerning the gardens of Phocion ... The Archbishop of Athens had not yet returned from Constantinople. No one knew if they would receive justice from the Pasha of Negropont (Chalcis), who threatened to exact a levy on Athens. To maintain a defence against sudden attack, the perimeter wall had been repaired; however everything was to be hoped for from the leader of the black eunuchs, the governor of Athens, who certainly had more credit with His Highness than the Pasha. (O Solon! O Themistocles! The leader of the black eunuchs as governor of Athens, and all the other cities of Greece envying the Athenians that emblem of happiness!) ‘...For the rest, Monsieur Fauvel had done well to drive out the Italian priest who inhabited the Lantern of Demosthenes (one of the most beautiful monuments in Athens), and give his place to a French Capuchin. The latter possessed good manners, was affable, intelligent, and received hospitably those foreigners who, according to custom, intended to visit the French monastery...’ Such was the gossip, and the subject of conversation in Athens: one can see that the world was continuing as usual, and a traveller who let it go to his head too much might be somewhat confused by meeting his village concerns on arriving in Tripods Street.

* * *

This changeability in human affairs is all the more striking because it contrasts with the immobility of the rest of nature. As if to mock the instability of human society, wild animals experience no alteration in their empires or change of habits. I saw, when we were on the Hill of the Museum, storks forming their battalion and taking flight for Africa. (See, for a description of Athens in general, most of the XV book of Les Martyrs, and the notes.) For two thousand years they had made the same journey, and were as free and happy in the city of Solon as they are in the city of the commander of the black eunuchs. From the heights of their nests, that revolution cannot reach, they have witnessed the race of mortals altering beneath them: while impious generations were raised over the graves of religious generations, the young stork has always supported his aged father (see Aristophanes: Birds: 1355). Let me halt these reflections by saying that the stork is beloved by travellers; she, like them ‘in the heavens knoweth her appointed times’ (Jeremiah 8:7). These birds were often the companions of my travels in the wilds of America; I often saw them perched on the Indian wigwams; finding them in a different kind of wilderness, the ruins of the Parthenon, I could not help but talk a little of my old friends.

* * *

Attica, with a little less wretchedness, offers no less servitude; Athens is under the immediate protection of the head of the black eunuchs of the Seraglio. A disdar, or commander, represents that monstrous protector amidst the people of Solon. This disdar inhabits the citadel, filled with masterpieces by Phidias and Ictinus, without asking what people have left these fragments behind, without deigning to leave the hut he has had built beneath the ruins of the monuments of Pericles: very occasionally the tyrant crawls mechanically to the door of his den; sitting cross-legged on a dirty carpet, while the smoke of his pipe ascends between the columns of the Temple of Athene, he casts his gaze stupidly over the shores of Salamis and the Sea of Epidaurus.

Neoliberalism in Colombia

In the introduction to Non-literary Fiction: Art of the Americas Under Neoliberalism, Esther Gabara (University of Chicago Press, 2022) says there were "initial experiments with these [neoliberal] social and economic 'reforms' in the Americas" beginning in the 1960s.

She refers to this article:

Norman A. Bailey. "The Colombian 'Black Hand': A Case Study of Neoliberalism in Latin America." The Review of Politics Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1965), pp. 445-464 (20 pages).

Gabara said that Bailey's article "celebrated the Brazilian military coup d'état of 1964 as the model for an aggressive campaign in Colombia. His pro-business, free-market hemispheric strategy was 'uniformly opposed to all forms of collectivism.'" (As Bailey said in the article, and Gabara noted.) A decade later, Milton Friedman would help General Pinochet in Santiago, Chile. Bailey, too, "was content to ally with repressive regimes, but state repression was just one tool in the broader violence employed to introduce, maintain, and expand these social transformations." Bailey continued to advise Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush regarding Latin America.

Gabara is interested in these neoliberal experiments related to how they "coincid[ed] with the radical experiments that ground histories of contemporary art."

The artists in the non-objectual art movement "abandoned historical distinctions between sculpture, painting, and theater" and tended away from museums. "They celebrated earth art, performance and body art, posters, media interventions and new media, work with found objects and trash, mail art, conceptualism, ephemeral installations, and popular cultural forms including religious rituals and samba."

"Fiction played a crucial role in these theories and practices of non-objectual art. Note the terms of Gullar's meditation on the relationship between 'obra e objeto' (work and object), artwork and world: 'The frame was the middle ground between fiction and reality; at once a bridge and a wall that protected the painting, the fictitious space, and made it communicate in fits with the real, exterior space.' This. narrative of non-objectual art breaking the frame is foundational in Brazilian art history, and Amor summarizes its widely accepted interpretation as a 'rejection of the fictional space of representation.' Yet Gullar writes that the non-object resides directly in 'real' space and 'transcends the space, not by eluding it (like the object), but by enfolding itself radically in that space.' That extension into space involves a broken frame and an active spectator: the primary operation of the non-object is to inspire the viewer's 'move from contemplation to action,' and so by extension to bridge fiction and reality. In an interview published not long after he had invited Gullar to his symposium, Acha also presented non-objectualism as an activity and a kind of fiction. In no-objetualismo, he states, 'I'm not interested anymore in the work of an artist, I am concerned with the process, with the invention.'"

"The disappeared victims of the military dictatorships, as well as of declared democracies such as Mexico, were the defining feature of the early neoliberal era and have governed debates over memory and justice since."

---

Bailey's article said:

In Latin America, three Neoliberal groups were founded in the 1950s, and about 40 in the early 1960s. (Bailey was writing in 1965.) He said these groups were "now covering all of Latin America except for Haiti and Cuba." They had formal organizational structures with a president, chairman, executive director, council members, and so forth.

The Neoliberals oppose "communism, socialism, and feudalism" as well as "totalitarian methods or...state invention in the economy" and support "the system of private initiative." (p. 448) One Neoliberal leader, Raimundo Emiliani Román, said in his pamphlet "El Camino a la Miseria" that "all socialism tends" to the idea "that no one owns anything, and the general distribution of poverty." (p. 464)

"The Neoliberal groups in Latin America converge on two common factors: their membership is overwhelmingly made up of businessmen (in the broadest meaning of the word) and professionals, and they are uniformly opposed to all forms of collectivism, whether of the right or the left, and in favor of the free market economy, although not necessarily in its pristine form. Within this general orientation, specific idea-systems espoused range from the philosophy of Ayn Rand through the strict market economics of a Ludwig von Mises or a Friedrich Hayck to the 'social market economy' of Wilhelm Röpke and Jacques Rueff. These differences lead to fissures and controversies within Neoliberalism, but heavy concentration of power and membership in the 'social' wing permits a fair degree of united action." (pp. 445–446)

Some groups focused on the "social and economic development in Latin America" (in the "long-range," considering its "entire direction") while others developed "aggressive attack policies" to buy time for the others to do their long-range work. Bailey categorized the groups' activities as either defensive, offensive, or a mix of both.

Of the defensive methods (p. 447):

• Civic action: "housing, health and community development...under the general theory of the 'socail function' of capital" with "two purposes: to improve the public image of private enterprise and to delay a violent upheaval until the economic process has carried society beyond the crisis peak."
• General education: "literacy campaigns, trade union leadership schools, and business schools"
• Capitalization: ""the effort to...give them [the workers] a clearly visible stake in the economic system. This is not merely a profit-sharing plan. It is, rather, an effort to create a larger class of proprietors in the belief that greater social stability will follow."

"Agents of the Neoliberals have been planted in many communist parties and movements of the Jacobin left." (p. 448)

"The most controversial of all direct action activities is the formation of antiguerrilla militias." (p. 449)

"Although feudalism as a formal social and economic structure is not as prevalent in Colombia as elsewhere in the continent, the feudal mentality very definitely exists as a political force. The movements of the Jacobin left and the Democratic left are strong, the former growing, the latter decaying. And finally, in 1960 Neoliberalism began to find its identity and flex its muscles. Its activities were initially highly successful, and this success set off a chain of reactions the end of which is not yet in sight." (p. 449)

"Colombia is legally tied to its two-party system, which means that both the Liberal and the Conservative parties are fragmented, and other groups must operate in a sort of political penumbra. The Neoliberals, basically democratic in philosophy, attempt to negotiate within the major parties and pressure them from the outside through the formation of private groups." (p. 449)

"As a further problem, the Neoliberals preach economic liberalism in a country where Article 32 of the Constitution itself states:

The State can intervene by law in the exploitation of industries or businesses, whether public or private, with the end of rationalizing the production, distribution and consumption of wealth or to give the worker the just protection to which he has a right." (p. 452)

Colombia doesn't have a powerful "feudal oligarchy," but

"feudalism is powerful as a mentality. The latest manifestation of the feudal-mercantilist mentality is the so-called 'dos brazos' theory of politics and economics. Under this theory, which has powerful and influential adherents in both legal parties and among the Christian Democrats, the State should intervene actively to set salaries and wages, fix quotas for various industries, and generally plan the entire economy, with direct planning in the public sector and indirect planning for the private sector (but with powerful sanctions for recalcitrant entrepreneurs). Following good corporative economic and political doctrine the 'dos brazos' theorists would organize the entire nation into 'gremios' which would then bargain with each other and the state. The magazine Arco is published by a group of men dedicated to these principles, and among others, this theory was expounded to the author by the General Manager of the Asociación Nacional de Industriales (ANDI), the industrial 'gremio.' This individual, interestingly, is in high favor with the small group of neo-Peronists clustered around the brilliant journalist, Alberto Zalamea, and his magazine and newspaper (both named La Nueva Prensa). There is an increasingly powerful Christian Democratic movement, the Partido Social Demócrata-Cristiano (PSDC), which holds ideas very similar to the 'dos brazos' theorists and the neo-Peronists. The PSDC intends to try to circumvent the legal prohibition of third parties by presenting candidates in 'Listas Populares Independientes,' and only nominally Liberal or Conservative. The Party was formed in August, 1959, and by July, 1963, had over 1200 militants throughout the country. It is particularly strong in Antioquia and the Valle. All of these groups are actively angling for military support, and some conspicuous army figures, although wary after the disastrous experience of Rojas Pinilla, are openly toying with a return to 'populist caesarism.' Within the Church 'social Christian' thinking is strong and gaining in strength, along with a still considerable segment feudally-minded (in the traditional mold, rather than the modern corporative mold) and a small Neoliberal wing centered around the lay organization, Opus Dei." (pp. 453–454)

"In the autumn of 1960 a group of twenty-five Colombian industrialists, businessmen, professionals and agriculturalists met and formed the Centro de Estudio y Acción Sociales (CEAS)." Its four objectives were to present the Jacobin left as dangerous; to campaign against Castro in Cuba and communism and in favor of the free market; to take "anticommunist and anti-Modern Left" actions, for example, by infiltrating labor unions; and "to attempt to alter the mentality of the capitalists towards a greater realization of their social responsibilities." (p. 455)

Over the following year, CEAS "spread, forming groups in other major Colombian cities through personal visits by members of the Bogotá group. These other Neoliberal centers are not branches of CEAS — once founded, they maintain their own policies, programs, and finances. The Fundación pro Bienestar Social was founded in Medellín in January of 1961. ... In February of 1961 the Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Económicos (IESE) was founded in Cali." (p. 458–9) "Efforts to establish a formal Neoliberal group on the Caribbean Coast (Barranquilla) have not succeeded, but informal cooperation exists in the distribution of literature and other duties." (p. 462)

"The Neoliberals are operating in Colombia in a general atmosphere traditionally unfriendly to capitalism. The Conservatives in the government of Valencia are paternalists and statists, and many are angling for alliances with the Jacobin left (the outstanding example of this is the Conservative political leader and former Minister of Labor, Belisario Betancur). This same government pressed successfully for the passage of the Ley Primera of 1963, with its governmental control of both wages and prices, and its list of fifteen financial statements which all companies are (theoretically) required to supply to the government weekly." (pp. 462–3)

Also:

"...Neoliberalism is causing a wrenching restructuring of Colombian politics and Colombian political and economic thinking. For the first time the philosophy of economic freedom is a topic of passionate interest and debate. For the first time the Jacobin left and the communists are faced with a group that has ideas equally strong and convictions equally fervent, and that does not balk at using effective methods to propagate them. In the citadel of political feudalism, the Laureanista Conservatives, an apostate group has joined the Neoliberals. The Democratic left (pushed particularly by its younger leaders) is moving towards alliance with the Neoliberals, and Colombia's presumptive next President under the alternation (his health and the military willing), Carlos Lleras Restrepo, appears to be sympathetic to this movement." (p. 463)

Having broad methods and reach, they are successful and aren't politically vulnerable at any "one centralized focal point." (p. 464)

What if a robot turns the whole world into paperclips?

In my novel, Most Famous Short Film of All Time, I mentioned Nick Bostrom and I definitely mentioned paperclips, but I did not know that Nick Bostrom has his own paperclip discussions. I completely missed that!

I learned it here today:

"Or a misaligned AI might (as in the famously absurd thought experiment of philosopher Nick Bostrom) turn the entire universe into paper clips because somebody told it to make paper clips and forgot to tell it that moderation in all things is best."
— "The Earthling: Out-of-control AIs are here," Nonzero, December 16, 2022

Although I admit that this was not my intended association, I declare it to be a valid interpretation of my novel. Paperclips do (as is explicit in the novel) cause the character to see ghosts. They may also indicate that the world is slowly turning into Paperclip Mountain.

Also

"The old man looked me over. Then he picked up a paperclip and unbent it to scrape at a fingernail cuticle. His left index finger cuticle. When he'd finished with the cuticle, he discarded the straightened paperclip into the ashtray. If I ever get reincarnated, it occurred to me, let me make certain I don't come back as a paperclip."
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Where upon I left the library and headed for the Baskin-Robbins.
She was still not back with the books by the time I returned, so I stood there at her desk with ice cream cone in hand. Two old men reading newspapers took turns stealing looks at this curious sight. Luckily the ice cream was frozen solid. Having it drip all over the place was the only thing that could have made me feel more foolish."
The paperback she'd been reading was facedown on the desk. Time Traveller, a biography of H. G. Wells, volume two. It was not a library book. Next to it were three well-sharpened pencils and some paperclips. Paperclips! Everywhere I went, paperclips! What was this?
Perhaps some fluctuation in the gravitational field had suddenly inundated the world with paperclips. Perhaps it was mere coincidence. I couldn't shake the feeling that things weren't normal. Was I being staked out by paperclips? They were everywhere I went, always just a glance away.
* * *
...what relationship could there be between skulls and paperclips?
* * *
Back at the apartment, I put away the groceries. I hung my clothes in the wardrobe. Then, on top of the TV, right next to the skull, I spread a handful of paperclips."
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Cryptomnesia, plagiarism, metafiction

Today, in my reading, I came across the word "cryptomnesia."

"In a much discussed 2004 article in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Maar announced his discovery that there was an earlier fictional nymphet named Lolita, who had appeared in a 1916 German short story by Heinz von Lichberg, and argued that Nabokov had probably read but subsequently forgotten the story during his years in Berlin. Thus, his later coupling of name and theme was a case of 'cryptomnesia.' With regard to Pale Fire and a particular short poem by Frost — which is not 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' — I claim neither 'cryptomnesia' nor, certainly, plagiarism, but rather a delicate but demonstrable network of inspiration and allusion. This discovery is both less surprising (every reader of Pale Fire knows that John Shade resembles Robert Frost) and more revealing, for it shows Nabokov in the act of conscious composition and similarly conscious camouflage."
— "Shades of Frost: A Hidden Source for Nabokov's Pale Fire." Abraham Socher, in Liberal and Illiberal Arts: Essays (Mostly Jewish), Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022. p. 123.

I knew I'd seen this word before, but where? I searched my computer for it. Ah, there it is, in a novel I published two months ago and which I'd edited and reread several dozen times.

In Most Famous Short Film of All Time, in a section called "Fog — Nothing," I quoted Heriberto Yépez:

"Memory is 'paratactic reordering' of images, says Heriberto Yépez, 'folkloric cryptomnesia,' 'an ars combinatoria of arbitrary signs.'"

In other sections in this novel, I'd discussed plagiarism. For example:

That word was my own insertion in my reexplication of what she said. Such paraphrasing avoids plagiarism but also leads to misrepresentation.

and

A Torah scroll is a copy. It is a painstaking hand-copy of another scroll which is itself a copy of another scroll. Across this lineage, not a single serif may change. The perfection of its plagiarism is what makes it valid.
But here is how it differs from other plagiarism: Copying isn’t enough. You are supposed to study and understand it. The two words at the exact center of the Torah are “darosh darash,” thoroughly investigated. Do your research. When you research, it’s not plagiarism.

and

Truth itself depends on plagiar-cism, yes? A common philosophical definition of truth is “correspondence theory,” meaning that a statement is true if it matches the world. And what is it to match, if not to be cis? Let’s give a better name to “correspondence theory”: plagiar-cism theory.

and

I do not plagiar-cise myself, except insofar as we are all plagiar-cisms of our parents, and perhaps we are plagiar-cisms of other concealed givens and revealed expectations. Do I plagiar-cise myself? Very well, then, I plagiar-cise myself.

and

I think to myself: “Todo lo que no es autobiografía es plagio,” said Pío Baroja. Apart from autobiography, everything is a plagiarism.

My novel also discusses metafiction: fiction that deliberately draws attention to how it is constructed as fiction, i.e., its frame and its content.

A word like "cryptomnesia" is exactly the sort of word one knows but forgets that one knows until one is reminded that one used it in one's own metafictional novel. In underperforming itself in memory, then breaking out of the memory cage, the word performs its meaning.

Quotes: Love

"But I don’t think it's love if the person disappears."
"I wouldn't say it's not love," he said. “But it's hard. That is a very painful experience."
Melissa Broder. The Pisces. London: Hogarth, 2018. p. 142.

"...love can never be between equals because love makes people unequal."
Adam Phillips. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. p. 162.

"...it is hypocritical, superficial and immoral, it is altogether wrong and unreasonable to attempt to idealize a love relationship with rules and formulae from those ideals that no longer are ideal and no longer have any real life. They are salt that has lost its power, and no matter how much of that kind of salt orthodoxy uses, it will not stop the rot."
Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen]. On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1924). Translated by Anne Born. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. p. 86-87.

"The world is too small for anything but love, but it is also too dangerous for anything but truth."
Willis Elliott. Flow of Flesh, Reach of Spirit: Thinksheets of a Contrarian Christian. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995. p. 224.

Love is simply the feeling that I am grateful to be here and I am grateful you are here too, even if you’re on my fucking nerves, which to be honest some of you are. One impact of a society that gives some people unquestioned right to all the resources and power is that it creates out of those people a population who cannot understand the sheer love of being alive, the love of gratitude, the love of satisfaction and serenity. Everything is too little for them. There is not enough action. The mere act of being is not good enough for them. It never can be.
"When I Get Home," Carvell Wallace, Medium, October 19, 2021.

"...sometimes love means being a vessel for somebody else’s pain. Not because love should mean taking on someone else’s pain, but rather that love makes certain kinds of pain more bearable and teaches us more than the love, the violence, and the story that birthed us. Love can makes us people with wings.
Prince Shakur. When They Tell You To Be Good: A Memoir. Tin House, 2022.

"Once we start to believe that love is corny or sentimental, though, we shut ourselves off from this spiritual way of experiencing other human beings. When seeing the other as an embodiment of the sacred is regarded as a quaint or overly romantic idea, hopelessly out of touch with the real world, or, worse yet, when caring about someone else automatically seems to threaten our emotional integrity and need for independence, we experience a spiritual deprivation that is just as intense, painful, and destabilizing as the loss of material security."
Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 65.

"Who actually knew what love felt like? Who said it couldn’t happen suddenly like that, like a fuckin’ realization?"
James Han Mattson. The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves. Little A, 2017. p. 193.

"Love is a thousand things, but at the center is a choice. It is a choice to love people. Left to myself, i get quiet and bitter and critical. i get angry. i feel sorry for myself. It is a choice to love people. It is a choice to be kind. It is a choice to be patient, to be honest, to live with grace. i would like to start making better choices."
Jamie Tworkowski. If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2015. p. 32.

"Love is perhaps the desire to hand on something which one cannot keep."
The main character, Ludwig, in Erich Maria Remarque's The Black Obelisk (1957). USA: Crest, 1958. p. 202.

'The Eunuch', a poem by Ralph Chaplin

Here's a poem, "The Eunuch," from the collection Bars and shadows: the prison poems of Ralph Chaplin. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1922.

The Eunuch

(To those who fight on the side of the Powers of Darkness)

ONCE a Eunuch by the palace
In the sunset s fading glow
Felt the soft warm breezes blow ;

Watched the fair girls of the Harem
Idly saunter to and fro.

Saw he beauty young and lavish
Fierce to lure man s every sense
(Grim the Eunuch stood and tense)

Laughingly the sparkling fountain
Mocked his bleak incompetence.

Came the Sultan from his hunting
Flaming with the zest of life ;
(Laid aside were spear and knife)

Came for wine and song and feasting.
Came to seek his fairest wife.

Opened then the marble portals.
Fragrant incense filled the air
(Sandalwood and roses rare),

While the girls with red-lipped languor
Scattered flowers everywhere.
Far away the fabled mountains
(Like some paradise of old)
Glowed with lavender and gold.

Tense the Eunuch stood and silent
Tense and sullen, tense and cold.

Now a quick impotent fury

Lashed him like a bronze-tipped cord.

Sprang he at the youthful lord.
Sprang again with blade all bloody . . .

(Famished lust and dripping sword.)

Night crept on all chill and ghastly.
Jackals trotted forth to bark,
(Murder shuddered, still and stark . .

By the palace ceased the fountain

And the whole grey world grew dark.

Elaine Castillo: 'White supremacy makes for terrible readers'

Elaine Castillo writes:

When I say that white supremacy makes for terrible readers, I mean that white supremacy is, among its myriad ills, a formative collection of fundamentally shitty reading techniques that impoverishes you as a reader, a thinker, and a feeling person; it’s an education that promises that whole swaths of the world and their liveliness will be diminished in meaning to you. Illegible, intangible, forever unreal as cardboard figures in a diorama.

* * *

The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.

Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now: Essays, Viking, 2022, excerpted in LitHub

Neither theism nor atheism

Sometimes we don't believe in God, but we believe in certain other people, and because those people believe in God, we believe in God too in a kind of proxy way.

'He can see things — strange things.' Shelly leaned close to me and whispered, 'Rosa tells me that Benni can see a little bit of God's hidden life.'

'Does God have a hidden life?' I asked.

Shelly snorted. 'George, where is your head? Everything that lives has a hidden life!'

'But you told me once you don't believe in God.'

'That's true. But I believe in Rosa!'

'So what does Rosa think that God does in his hidden life?' I asked.

'I have no idea,' he said with a shrug.

— Richard Zimler. The Incandescent Threads. Parthian, 2022.

---

"Jewish tradition calls this reality God, but that word is so heavy with question and misconception that I have mostly avoided using it. I am far more concerned about the nature of the encounter than I am about the term we use for its referent."

— Eugene B. Borowitz. Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew. (1991) Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. p. 114.

---

"An agnostic?" Barbara asked. "Isn't that someone who doesn't believe God can be understood?"

"Almost," said Bloomer. "What I think Ira's saying is that he's not even sure enough to be sure he can't know something. Ergo, he's not an agnostic."

— John R. Maxim. Platforms. New York: Avon Books, 2002.

---

On Pascal's Wager

I hadn't known until I saw this writeup from @friendlyatheist.com that Scott Adams announced a very transactional deathbed conversion to Christianity, which I find fascinating because it makes very clear what's wrong with Pascal's Wager *theologically*. www.friendlyatheist.com/p/scott-adam...

[image or embed]

— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) January 14, 2026 at 7:39 PM

Even with limited options, nevertheless, we can change

Charlie Jane Anders’ writing craft book Never Say You Can’t Survive isn’t a philosophy book, except that, well, take a look at this. Here, she talks about how characters can change. As writers and readers, we view their fictional world from the outside, and we also see that they have free will. Maybe we see things about the characters that they aren’t aware of about themselves. When the character has fewer options, they — and we — might perceive their situation as worsening. Still, despite their limited options, the character can change. Almost always, a breakthough is possible.

Here are three brief passages from the book:

Fiction can work all kinds of magic during horrendous times: inspire us to resist evil, expose the reality of the world, create empathy, and help us to understand complex systems from a vantage point that could be hard to reach in nonfiction. But the most powerful thing that fiction can do is show that people can change, and that we all have the potential to be different. That’s where I get a lot of my hope when everything around me feels hopeless.

* * *

Almost every story is some mix of character stuff and plot stuff, and the mix can vary from page to page and chapter to chapter. Character is action: people aren’t just a collection of feeling and opinions and habits, but rather the sum total of all the choices they take. Meanwhile, even the plottiest plotfest needs to have characters who we root for, or else none of the secret codes and countdowns will matter worth a damn.

* * *

I increasingly find it helpful to think in terms of ‘options become constrained,’ rather than ‘things get worse.’ It’s not so much that the situation deteriorates — it’s more like doors are slamming shut, and the protagonists have fewer and fewer courses of action open to them.

— Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories, Tordotcom (2021), Chapters 8, 9, 10

I appreciate philosophy wherever and in whatever format it appears.

Previously published July 8, 2022 to the Episyllogism blog. That blog is offline, so now this article is here.

I'd like to add this sentence from Benjamin Harnett's novel The Happy Valley (Serpent Key Press, 2022): "He then had what I'd call an accidental recovery — some people do everything right and still tumble into the abyss, others tumble into the abyss and then one day you find they have stepped up out of it, on the far side, wholly sound."

See also Philip Kinsher's 12 Character Archetypes to Know Before You Start Writing, BookBaby, July 11, 2023. These roles are:

• The hero
• The villain
• The mentor
• The trickster
• The guardian
• The herald
• The shape-shifter
• The sidekick
• The love interest
• The underdog
• The femme fatale
• The jester

If we don’t know what we’re promising, is the contract valid?

Do you read the internet’s endless pop-ups by which you’re asked to “consent” to “cookies” every time you visit a new website? You may know that “cookies” essentially mean you’re being tracked, and you may be aware that you’re passively receiving a report of this tracking rather than actively consenting to it. The tracking probably already started when you landed on the webpage and were first presented with the question, right?

You probably don’t read the pop-ups. I don’t. You probably don’t go to each website’s ten-page Terms of Service to learn more about the supposed rules of each individual webpage. I don’t. Reading those legal documents would require more effort than reading the brief article you showed up for.

We know we’re being tracked all the time, whether we actively consent or not. Why waste time reading documents that are designed to be impenetrable? Why try to memorize the stated legal differences between websites? Especially when those documents may be obsolete or false?

Shoshana Zuboff points this out in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2020):

"In many cases, simply browsing a website obligates you to its terms-of-service agreement even if you don’t know it. Scholars point out that these digital documents are excessively long and complex in part to discourage users from actually reading the terms, safe in the knowledge that most courts have upheld the legitimacy of click-wrap agreements despite the obvious lack of meaningful consent."
—Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

She explains how this may be a devolution or degradation of the original idea of a contract.

“Legal scholar Margaret Radin observes the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of such ‘contracts.’ Indeed, the sacred notions of ‘agreement’ and ‘promise’ so critical to the evolution of the institution of contract since Roman times have devolved to a ‘talismanic’ signal ‘merely indicating that the firm deploying the boilerplate wants the recipient to be bound.’ Radin calls this ‘private eminent domain,’ a unilateral seizure of rights without consent. She regards such ‘contracts’ as a moral and democratic ‘degradation’ of the rule of law and the institution of contract, a perversion that restructures the rights of users granted through democratic processes, ‘substituting for them the system that the firm wishes to impose. ... Recipients must enter a legal universe of the firm’s devising in order to engage in transactions with the firm.’”
—Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (citing Margaret Jane Radin's Boilerplate)

When we don’t act consciously, we aren’t using our free will, and then it’s hard to describe ourselves as “agreeing” or “promising.” In this situation, what is a contract? Is it only an assertion of power? Someone telling us: By reading this, you agree...?

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Previously published July 5, 2022 to the Episyllogism blog. This article is no longer on that blog, so now it is here.