Saturday, August 17, 2019

He That Filches from Me My Good Name


FastCompany: “We’re living in a digital world—one where screens dominate our time. The average American adult spends three hours and 43 minutes on mobile devices, according to 2019 research by eMarketer. This doesn’t include the time spent on a computer at work or parked in front of the television at home. It’s easy to find an app or software platform to help you do run your life, making paper and pen feel old-school. But paper products offer advantages that tech does not. Here are five times when you should choose analog over digital…”

 SOUNDS LIKE THE “CRAZY ALT-MEDIA” SCOOPED THE TRAD MEDIA: Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It.


CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: 14 FBI Officials Leaked to the Media, Only Four Were Fired, Judicial Watch Reveals.


Meet the next generation of entrepreneurs. They’re all over 65. MIT Technology Review – Meet the next generation of entrepreneurs. They’re all over 65. “…That’s why Kamber created Senior Planet, a tech-themed community center that preps seniors to hack their way through a world conspiring to keep them sidelined. The glass door reads “Aging with Attitude.” With its sleek grays and wood tables, it rivals the WeWork next door in the Chelsea district of Manhattan… The post-60 set is here for many reasons. By and large, they do not want your wearable panic buttons and fall detectors, thankyouverymuch. They’re here for the free classes and camaraderie, to learn to find the photos their daughter is putting on Facebook, to grok the smart lock system their apartment building is installing whether they like it or not (and mostly not). They want to plug back into a world in which “technology has run them over,” as Kamber puts it. Roughly one in five arrive wanting to use technology to work and make money—whether because they’ve gotten bored with retirement or to turn a passion into a side hustle. They want Etsy and Instagram, Google Suite and Microsoft Word. They want to process payments on PayPal, and build a Wix website, and email video clips for acting auditions. They want to open stores aimed at older people like themselves, and launch magazines for curvy women, and drive around Harlem in their own dog-grooming van. They may want to reach their goals even more than younger folks do, because when you get to a certain age, “your horizon is shorter—your dreams become more critical and urgent,” Kamber says…”
 


On the cover of the notebook he kept while imprisoned on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana, French Army Capt. Alfred Dreyfus transcribed in English a passage spoken by Iago in Act III, Scene 3 of Othello:

“Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.”

Dreyfus was falsely accused of passing intelligence about artillery parts to the Germans and arrested for treason in 1894. Three months later he was convicted in a secret court martial and sentenced to life in exile. I knew the history but Michael Burns in Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945(1991) fleshes out Dreyfus the man as opposed to the more familiar Dreyfus, victim of French anti-Semitism:

“‘They’ll have me whipped for speaking true,’ laments the Fool in King Lear, ‘Thou’lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace.’ Dreyfus’s private language of protest and desire began to echo that of the literary characters who shared his exile. The Fool, the old king, Othello, Banquo, Polonius, and the Prince of Denmark became, with their creator, ‘immortal friends’ who Dreyfus described ‘sleeping on the bookshelf’ of his cell, always ready to be invited down for a conversation.”

Burns devotes seven pages to Dreyfus’ tastes in books. He read Shakespeare first in French and then haltingly in the original. He read Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Ibsen, the memoirs of Chateaubriand, Napoleon and Madame de Staël, various scientific and literary journals. Burns tells us Dreyfus’ wife, Lucie, served as his “reference librarian,” until French officials refused to forward the packages she shipped. Dreyfus then ordered books with the stipend his wife was permitted to send him. Burns writes:

“Dreyfus did not simply ‘reread’ the authors he had known as a student, he confided in them and read them anew, with an eye for language that captured his own plight and with a desire to both break the boundaries of Devil’s Island and articulate the measure of his despair.”

Foremost was Shakespeare, “the humorous, passionate, sympathetic Shakespeare the prisoner ‘never understood better than during this tragic epoch,’ and who, like Dreyfus, may also have turned to Montaigne as a source of inspiration.” In a letter to his wife, Dreyfus said of the lines from Othello quoted at the top, “Yes, the wretch who stole my honor has made me poor indeed.” Given Dreyfus’ devotion to books, it seems fitting that novelist Emile Zola and his 1898 open letter J’accuse! helped start the process that lead to Dreyfus’ acquittal in 1906. He left Devil’s Island and returned to France in 1899. Burns writes:

“Shakespeare provided a fresh vocabulary to relieve the monotony of the prisoner’s prose, but more important, he introduced into the ‘silence and solitude’ of Devil’s Island other intrigues, other stories of foul play, false hearts, and human courage, which helped Dreyfus feel less alone.”


'The Imaginary Nail a Man Down for a Sufferer'



We don’t expect profundity from youth; passion, yes, but not deep wisdom, the sort that more often takes a lifetime of learning and loss to acquire, if ever. But just as old men are often fools so can young men be prodigies of understanding. The obvious proof of this unlikely truth is John Keats. In hisMarch 23, 1819 letter to Charles Brown, written seventeen months before his death at age twenty-five, Keats writes:

“Imaginary grievances have always been more my torment than real ones—You know this well—Real ones will never have any other effect upon me than to stimulate me to get out of or avoid them.”

A genuine grievance focuses our attention and rallies us to a solution. We take our medicine or cram for the test, but how do you fix a lifetime of laziness and lousy choices? Keats goes on:

“This is easily accounted for—Our imaginary woes are conjured up by our passions, and are fostered by passionate feeling: our real ones come of themselves, and are opposed by an abstract exertion of mind. Real grievances are displacers of passion. The imaginary nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him up into an agent.”

Keats suffered but seldom played the role of sufferer. About one point he was mistaken: “Real grievances are displacers of passion.” On the contrary, people are forever getting passionate about difficulties, especially when they wield no power over them. That accounts for most of human history.


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