Occasional Tales

Of the Force of Imagination. I find myself bored; whether it is with Montaigne’s handling of the subject or with Cotton’s translation, I don’t know; or it might be because of the apparently inability of the age to subdivide its monographs into sections, and employ paragraphs so that the work might be more coherent as a result. Perhaps I’m just tired and my interest in him will be rekindled in due course. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that Cotton’s translation bears much of the blame sometimes because, as I noted in the previous post, his rendering is overliteral and fails to satisfy the demands of English grammar (even allowing for differences between late 17th century English and that of the early 21st); other times because (although this is less obvious without examining the French) of his interpolations. For example, Montaigne says Resverie germaine à celle de quoy nous parlons. Jacques Peletier m’avoit faict ce present singulier. ( A daydream related to this thing we’re

Moby Dick? What a minnow. Reading Cotton’s translation of Montaigne is a little like going on a fishing expedition during which you’ve landed Leviathan and remark to yourself that you probably won’t see anything bigger until moments later you haul Jormungandr from the deep. Yes, not more than a few hundred words later, Essay XX produced this: I am not satisfied, and make very great Question, Whether those pleasant Ligatures with which this Age of ours is so fetter’d, and there is almost no other Talk, are not mere voluntary Impressions of Apprehension and fear, for I know by experience, in the Case of a particular Friend of mine, one for whom I can be as Responsible as for my self, and a Man that cannot possibly fall under any manner of Suspicion of insufficiency, and as little of being enchanted, who having heard a Companion of his make a Relation of unusual Frigidity that surpriz’d him at a very unreasonable time, being afterwards himself engaged upon the same Account, the Horror of

That's not a sentence, but an outrage. This evening I thought I'd resume reading Cotton's translation of Montaigne after a bit of a break from it over the past few days. I hadn't got far into Essay XX Of the Force of Imagination when I encountered this monstrosity of a sentence. (The prefatory statement is in brackets.) ( Simon Thomas was a great Physician of his Time:) I remember that hapning one Day at Tholouze , to meet him at a rich old Fellow’s House, who was troubled with naughty Lungs, and discoursing with his Patient about the Method of his Cure, he told him, that one Thing which would be very conducing to it, was, to give me such Occasion, to be pleased with his Company, that I might come often to see him, by which Means, and by fixing his Eyes upon the Freshness of my Complexion, and his Imagination upon the Sprightliness of Vigour that glowed in my Youth, and possessing all his Senses with the flourishing Age wherein I then was, his Habit of Body might, per

Addison vs. Locke. Near the start of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , Hume is talking about distinctions between abstract and practical philosophy, noting that more abstract philosophers tend to be forgotten. He says And Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten. Out of curiosity, and knowing that such a survey is of dubious accuracy at best, I put Addison and Locke into Google to see whose name is more frequently attested. The results are Addison, Joseph (essayist) 3,820,000 results Locke, John (philosopher) 1,870,000 results Of course, I have no way of telling whether anyone reads Addison for pleasure, or Locke for that matter, or whether the pair of them are only seen in fragments on the relevant courses at university which give no particular pleasure to anyone. Because I didn’t think that Addison counted as a philosopher, I’m not sure why he’s being mentioned beside Locke except as a means for Hume to parallel Cicero and Aristot

So much for quality control. I downloaded the 1743 edition of Cotton’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays from Google Books last night and found yet another instance of badly flawed copying from the University of Michigan. About thirty pages are missing from Volume I; about ten from Volume II; and three or four from Volume III. In Vol. II, a lot of pages are cut off at the top so that the page number or some text is missing. The first two volumes have quite a lot of colour images which frequently include the fingers of the copyist. Of the other editions I have, the 1711 is from Oxford, but the 1759 edition is also from Michigan. Volume I has a few missing and decapitated pages. Volume II starts well enough, but there are a lot of errors in the final 250 pages. Volume III has only trivial flaws relating to the margins of the pages. The problem is that there appears to be no way of informing Google about these problems. It’s possible to report illegible text, but not poorly done copying

But you can leave something behind. I’ve reached Montaigne’s nineteenth essay[ 1 ], That to philosophise is to learn to die . He seems to have been a little obsessed with death so that the essay is like his own version of the Consolation of Philosophy . I remember when I was a child that I thought I’d live forever. I knew even then that I wouldn’t, but death was such a remote idea, even after my grandma died, that immortality didn’t seem so unlikely. When I was a little older, I can recalling believing that there was nothing after death, which seemed more comforting than a belief in an afterlife which might be rather unpleasant. Perhaps it was the nascent atheist in me that was thinking such a thing. It hasn’t been until fairly recent years that I’ve been thinking about death again. It comes as a bother that I’ve found myself approaching middle age without feeling that I’ve achieved anything in life. The closest I come to such an achievement is my PhD thesis which will continue to gath

And I'm a bit bored. I've been a little busy of late to update Green Bamboo (the main one), and since I have nothing better to do with the blogspot version, I feel little compunction about boring the world with some trivia. I've mostly been occupied with reading Charles Cotton's translation of Montaigne's Essays. Actually, I'm reading the 1711 and 1759 versions with occasional forays into Florio's translation of 1603 and Hazlitt's 19th century edition of Cotton. I find that what is unclear in one is often clear in the other so that if I start my reading with the 1711 version, I'll eventually switch to the 1759 edition and then go back to 1711 again. I'm not sure exactly what the relationship between 1711 and 1759 is. Because the latter appears to be a revised version, it doesn't, strictly speaking, appear to be Cotton's translation any longer. I found one footnote discussing how Cotton misunderstood what Montaigne had written, and from

Where, Oh where can it be? As you can see, though not that it matters because I only post here occasionally, I’ve changed my template. But for some reason, I can’t see the blog. I’m hoping that a post will bring it out of hiding. However, I notice that some blogspot blogs aren’t appearing, which I’ll attribute to the volume of traffic resulting from the presidential elections in the US. Seems that Obama will probably be the next encumbent in the Big Chair. I don’t know about the Americans, but the rest of us won’t miss Ayatollah Dubya. I haven’t really paid much attention to the whole business because The Guardian has been bashing us over the head with the whole thing. It was foreign news and deserved a corresponding level of attention. But I get the impression that Obama is a bit humourless, a little robotic, but isn’t likely to stick his cigars in inappropriate places.