"The weight of this sad time we must obey,/ Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." (Shakespeare. King Lear. 5.3) 「悲しき時の重みに我々は従うほかない/言わねばならぬことではなく、感じていることを語るのだ」
"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad;/ It wearies me; you say, it wearies you;/ But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,/ What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,/ I am to learn;/ And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,/ That I …
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing." (Shakespeare. Macbeth. 5.5)
"Die späten Nächte fürcht ich/ lang und klar./ Verbittert such ich jetzt/ im Park, was war. [I fear the late nights,/ long and clear./ I search bitterly now/ in the part for what was.]" (Thomas Bernhard. Unter dem Eisen des Mondes [Under t…
I was in Fashion Island. When a family (parents and two kids, I guess) passed by me, a younger kid held up something like a gift card to me. For a moment I hesitated. But he kept the left hand raised, saying nothing. He had a few more card…
"The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was." (Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night's Dream. 4.1) 「目は聞かない、耳は見ない、…
All the grading work is done! Although this may sound strange, my reading speed is fairly constant, whether I'm reading challenging theoretical texts or badly written student papers. Of course I don't read their papers as closely and slowl…
As I was grading exam papers in drinking coffee at OC Mix, a middle-aged guy spoke to me that he used those bluebooks in the 1970s and was surprised but really glad to see that we're still using them today.
I wondered for a long while why I had such a difficult time in teaching undergraduate courses and finally hit on an answer today: I do not remember any professors who impressed me so much so that my life had changed ever since. Well, there…
"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." (Shakespeare. Hamlet. 2.3) 「おお神よ、わたしは木の実の殻のなかに閉じ込められても、自分のことを無限の空間を統べる王で…
"...je ne savais même pas au premier instant qui j’étais; j’avais seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l’existence comme il peut frémir au fond d’un animal: j’étais plus dénué que l’homme des cavernes; mais alors le souve…
"Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau, Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe ? Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau !" (Baudelaire. "CXXVI. LE VOYAGE." in Les Fleurs du mal (1861).)
"To be up after midnight, and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes." (Shakespeare. Twelfth Night. 2.3)
Okay, I finally wrote about ten pages that, when properly polished and evidenced, might serve as a first rough draft of the prospectus and a part of the introductory chapter. I'm not at all happy with the quality of this fragment or free w…
"I don't believe that I believe in myself," not "I do believe that I don't believe in myself," probably best describes the dilemma I am in these months.
"Das Einzelne erweist sich immer wieder als unwichtig, aber die Möglichkeit jedes Einzelnen gibt uns einen Aufschluss über das Wesen der Welt." (Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 3.3421) [Again and again the solitary turns out …
"J’écrivais des silences, des nuits, je notais l’inexprimable. Je fixais des vertiges." (Rimbaud. Une saison en enfer.) 「沈黙、夜について、わたしは書いた。表現不可能なものを、わたしは書き記した。眩暈を、わたしは書き留めた。」(ランボー『…
"...quelque chose ici n'était pas dans l'ordre naturel et, à vrai dire, il n'y avait pas d'ordre mais seulement folie et chaos là où le fils était plus âgé que le père." (Camus. Le premier homme.) 「……何かがここでは自然の秩序から外れていた…