nunia
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2005/11/04
文章: 2184
经验值: 5079
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm
This brings me to my comparative discussion Benoit Mandelbrot/ Susan Sontag that I truncated on the day Sontag died. I met both on the very same day, in New York, in October 2001. At the BBC studio where we were interviewed (separately) about our books, Sontag was told that I dealt in “randomness” and developed in interest in talking to me. When she learned by looking at my bio on the dust jacket that I was “in markets”, she gave me the look as if I had killed her mother. She turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, leaving me to the discomfort of having to speak without audience. It feels extremely humiliating to be speaking to someone’s back; it felt like the worst, most demeaning insult I ever had in my life. I swallowed my pride and, as I had an afternoon to kill, I forced myself to go to B&N get a copy of her book. I forced myself to enjoy her style, in spite of the frustration, and, after 4 pages, I was able to find it charming –but I kept wondering & introspecting: had I not had witnessed closed-mindedness and abject manners, how would my appreciation of the text turn out to be? (Levantine patricians used to be taught that manners > acts; it is worse to be rude to someone than try to murder him.) A few hours later, the exact opposite encounter in every possible sense of the word took place. That evening I met Mandelbrot at dinner, a meeting which should remain one of the most important episodes in my life (I finally found someone to talk to about randomness). I continue with an excerpt from The Black Swan.
When I first met Mandelbrot I asked him why an established scientist like him who should have more valuable things to do with his life would take an interest in such vulgar topic as finance. I thought that finance and economics were just a place where one learned from various empirical phenomena and filled up one’s bank account with f*** you cash, before leaving for bigger and better things. Mandelbrot’s answer was: “data , a goldmine of data”. Indeed, everyone forgets that he started in economics before moving onto physics and the geometry of nature. [Chap 16]
In The Black Swan, right after the section that I’ve just excerpted, I retold the Sontag episode and made a comparison between Sontag and Mandelbrot’s openness to ideas, a sort of comparative tableau of the literary intellectual v/s the scientist as a natural philosopher, etc. But I removed the part about Sontag on the day of her death, in December 2004, as it did not feel honorable & elegant. I remember rushing to my MS remove the section. I never put it back, never wrote about it –until now. Even then, >2 ¼ years later, I would have preferred to avoid tinkering with someone’s memory and I am only describing the frustration of the episode.
Oraisons funèbres All men have flaws, all men have some measure of greatness in them. By the confirmation bias (q.v.), you can write a panegyric or you can write a philippic of the very same person. But nowhere the beauty of sentiment is greater than with the eulogy, the funeral oration –the sanctification of someone’s memory, a sort of glorified look at the half-full side of the story. “Entre ici, Jean Moulin, avec ton terrible cortege!” (Malraux...you can see it on UTube!) Bossuet did close to 500 orations, only twelve of which were oraisons funèbres; these are the ones we use to learn elegant French prose. Beyond the eulogy and the funeral oration, the more subtle elegy has a noble tone to it. True, do I care about the truth or about the sacred? Both, of course. The most potent memory of my visit to Saint Petersburg was the sight of young girls dressed in Sunday clothes coming to put flowers in front of Pushkin’s memorial statue. My soft spot for Mitterand comes from his expertise in cemeteries –and his compulsive honoring of the dead (+ his obsession with Il deserto dei tartari). People who care care about the dead.
I wonder if there is a code of honor of what to say about someone when the body is still warm. I don’t like living in a world without elegance; I don’t like living in a world in which people speak ill of the dead, & thanks to the long tail & the tailor made web, I would like to construct my own world in way that fits my sense of ethics/aesthetics.
[Note 1: My Stand Againt Atheism. This, and many other things explain why I just cannot understand atheism. I just cannot. If I were to take “rationality” to its limit, I would then have to treat the dead no differently from the unborn, those who came and left us in the same manner as those who do not exist yet. Otherwise I would be making the mistake of sunk costs [endowment effect]. I cannot & I just do not want to. Homo sum! I want to stay rational in the profane, not the sacred.]
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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sipping through this notebook to kill the morning.
