After-Orts #110
Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality. .... All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.
-- Meghan O'Gieblyn, in God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow.
-- Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to the Missouri abolitionist Charles D. Drake, 1863
(quoted in The New Anarchy, by Adrienne LaFrance, in The Atlantic, March 6, 2023)
He [Joachim] played Bach’s Sonata in C at the Bach Choir Concert at St James's Hall [London] on Tuesday [February, 1890]. The second movement of that work is a fugue some three or four hundred bars long. Of course you cannot really play [a ] fugue in three continuous parts on the violin; but by dint of double stopping and dodging from one part to another, you can evoke a hideous ghost of a fugue that will pass current if guaranteed by Bach and Joachim. That was what happened on Tuesday. Joachim scraped away frantically, making a sound after which an attempt to grate a nutmeg effectively on a boot sole would have been as the strain of an Aeolian harp. The notes which were musical enough to have any discernible pitch at all were mostly out of tune. It was horrible—damnable! Had he been an unknown player, introducing an unknown composer, he would not have escaped with his life.
— George Bernard Shaw, quoted by Joseph Szigeti in his book Szigeti on the Violin (Dover, 1979, p.126)
Szigeti’s book is available for free download here:
https://kupdf.net/download/joseph-szigeti-szigeti-on-the-violin_5af601f0e2b6f559078da69b_pdf