[ilds] Tunc 1.1 - the "thinking weed"

[James Gifford]

Hi Bruce

On 2016-05-14 8:52 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
 > 2.  Re Charlock as “thinking weed,”

I'm not sure if "weed" carried the same meaning in the UK at the time 
(others??  Peter...).  Isabelle Keller-Privat has described the phrase 
as "stand[ing] for the rhizomatic impulse," but I think it's actually a 
quotation from Blaise Pascal (I've always associated it with Hans Jonas 
who paraphrased it in some of his comments on the Gnostics):

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a 
thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A 
vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were 
to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, 
because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has 
over him, the universe knows nothing of this." (Pascal, Pensée X)

The follow up from Jonas is that this burdens humanity with being 
conscious and even self-conscious in an unconscious, unthinking 
universe...  I invariably think to Otto Rank, Ernest Becker, and the 
modern Terror Management Theory paradigm in that stream.

I'm away from my desk though, I so I can't check if Pascal's word is 
"roseau" in the original or something else for "reed" vs. "weed." 
Anyone?  I do have the Jonas handy:

"As a thinking reed [man] is no part of the [universal] sum, not 
belonging to it, but radically different, incommensurable, for the res 
extensa does not think, and nature is nothing but res extensa -- body, 
matter, external magnitude. If she crushes him, she does so 
unthinkingly, while he, being crushed, is aware of being crushed. He 
alone thinks, not because of but in spite of his begin a part of 
nature.... Thus that which makes man superior to all nature, his unique 
distinction, mind, no longer results in a higher integration of his 
being into the totality of being, but on the contrary marks the 
unbridgeable gulf between himself and the rest of existence." (Jonas 117)

I think of Charlock as the "thinking weed" in precisely this sense, and 
anticipating /Monsieur/ as well as looking back across the deep anxiety 
over mortality across Durrell's works ever since the ankle bone in /Pied 
Piper of Lovers/ (the protagonist Walsh's first recognition that he'll 
one day die too).

In other words, like with the Dostoevsky epigram that points to an 
anti-utopian theme in the novel paired with an unreliable narrator, we 
have the problems of rationality, reason, consciousness, 
self-consciousness, and alienation -- that's not bad for an epigram and 
the first paragraph, really...

 > 3.  Re ruins and architecture: the importance of
 > the Parthenon (p. 35; 2.1) and Stonehenge (p. 250;
 > 5.2).  Caradoc writes a history of architecture
 > (p. 240; 5.1).  Maybe this is just part of Durrell’s
 > Romantic Classicism (cf. Rose Macaulay’s /Pleasure
 > of Ruins/ [1953]—the two were friends), but he
 > spends a lot of time on ruins, reminiscent of
 > Cavafy’s “black ruins of my life” in the translation
 > of “The City” at the end of /Justine./

I think this might need a serious discussion on its own.  And I'd need 
to have the book in front of me to make any real comment!

All best,
James