मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, September 06, 2022

Cogito, Ergo Sum: What About Helena Jans, René Descartes' Maid


A A. C. Grayling, ‘Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius ‘,2006:

“.....Descartes was without question a man of scientific bent. On Sunday 15 October 1634 he wrote in the flyleaf of a book that on that day he had conceived a child with the serving maid Helena Jans in the room he rented in the house of an Englishman called Thomas Sargent in Amsterdam's Westerkirkstraat. The confidence of this announcement—it proved true-—is striking. Baillet was in a dilemma, having thus to report his hero's commission of the sin of fornication with a maidservant, and not just that but the subsequent production of a bastard child; so he ascribed the aberration— as he thus implied it to be—to Descartes' scientific interest in anatomy.

In the register of baptisms in the Reformed Church at Deventer (no Catholic church being available), on 7 August 1635, the arrival was recorded of Francine, daughter to Helena Jans and "Rener Jochems" (Rener son of Jochems). There is no evidence, documentary or circumstantial, that Descartes married Helena Jans, but later enemies who were Catholics accused him of apostasy because he had married a Calvinist in a Protestant church, the claim doubtless being a fabrication from the fact that he had his child baptised in such a church.

And as it happens, Francine was not an illegitimate child despite the fact that Descartes did not marry her mother, for the law of the United Provinces stated that it was enough for children to be legitimate that their fathers acknowledged them....

..... Glimpses of Descartes as a family man are few but tantalising, and in respect of Helena Jans a little ambiguous. In a letter written in August 1637 he set out arrangements for Helena and Francine to join him in new lodgings. His hostess was, he wrote, perfectly happy to have the little girl (Descartes referred to her as "my niece") to come and live with him, "and that we would easily agree on the price because it was indifferent to her whether she had one child more or less to take care of" As Descartes' hostess was in need of a servant he also suggested that Helena hasten to leave her present employment "before St. Victor's Day," this being the traditional date for hiring and firing servants, and to come to work where he was lodging.

What this suggests is that Descartes and Helena did not live as a couple, although they liked to be together if they could, and that he was fond of his little daughter and wished to have her with him. If Helena worked as a maid in the house where Descartes and his "niece" lived, Helena could be near her daughter and she and Descartes could continue to engage, pace Clerselier's pieties, in anatomical experiments, without marrying or openly living in sin....”
 



“’Cogito, ergo sum’ is all very well for you, but what about me?”  

 
Artist: James Stevenson, The New Yorker, March 2017

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