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Icarus at home # 2
I have been thinking about St Augustine again and especially in relation to the internet because the big bad thing that is happening in the UK right now is libraries are being closed all over the country. As I sit in my own study, surrounded by books, I am torn between the idea that I could store then all on a Kindle or iPad and the real idea of books, where I can browse and shuffle my way through and pick up at random. Can you imagine St Augustine contemplating the world from behind a Kindle, some how I can't. Though I don't want to be a Luddite. I mean I think they may have their place - like on the beach. Then again I was always a beach reader but never read beach novels. Still, I do rather like this paining of St Augustine. Its by Vittore Carpaccio, 1502. This morning I reached up onto the shelves of my own library and caught a book I haven't read yet. Even though I bought it some time back - time has no way of offering itself back when it has been lost and that lost time might have been a time to read but no longer. But the book is called, Without Alibi, by Jacques Derrida and its not so much a book and more a collection of translated essays. But when I did dip in I was struck by something that brought my boy Icarus tumbling back, or at least the Ovid version of what was being said in his version of the tale and indeed the ellipses (that I like to think about). In "History of the Lie: Prolegomena", Derrida says, "No more than myth, fable and phantasm are doubtless not truth or statements as such, but neither are they errors or deceptions, false witness or perjuries... what matters here, in the first and last place, is thus the intention. Saint Augustine also underscored this point: there is no lie, whatever one may say, without the intention, the desire, or the explicit will to deceive... "He who does not know that what he says is false does not lie if he thinks it is true, but he does lie who tells the truth when he thinks it is false, because persons must be judged according to their deliberate intention." (St Augustine, "On Lying" p.60) - would I have managed to glean this from surfing the web or reading my Kindle? Rivers flow and rivers run though words and books and ideas, through whispered utterings and mutterings in the places where words are stored in order to break free in the shape of ideas and thoughts of life and love and ... rivers flow and rivers run... in ellipses...
I have been thinking about St Augustine again and especially in relation to the internet because the big bad thing that is happening in the UK right now is libraries are being closed all over the country. As I sit in my own study, surrounded by books, I am torn between the idea that I could store then all on a Kindle or iPad and the real idea of books, where I can browse and shuffle my way through and pick up at random. Can you imagine St Augustine contemplating the world from behind a Kindle, some how I can't. Though I don't want to be a Luddite. I mean I think they may have their place - like on the beach. Then again I was always a beach reader but never read beach novels. Still, I do rather like this paining of St Augustine. Its by Vittore Carpaccio, 1502. This morning I reached up onto the shelves of my own library and caught a book I haven't read yet. Even though I bought it some time back - time has no way of offering itself back when it has been lost and that lost time might have been a time to read but no longer. But the book is called, Without Alibi, by Jacques Derrida and its not so much a book and more a collection of translated essays. But when I did dip in I was struck by something that brought my boy Icarus tumbling back, or at least the Ovid version of what was being said in his version of the tale and indeed the ellipses (that I like to think about). In "History of the Lie: Prolegomena", Derrida says, "No more than myth, fable and phantasm are doubtless not truth or statements as such, but neither are they errors or deceptions, false witness or perjuries... what matters here, in the first and last place, is thus the intention. Saint Augustine also underscored this point: there is no lie, whatever one may say, without the intention, the desire, or the explicit will to deceive... "He who does not know that what he says is false does not lie if he thinks it is true, but he does lie who tells the truth when he thinks it is false, because persons must be judged according to their deliberate intention." (St Augustine, "On Lying" p.60) - would I have managed to glean this from surfing the web or reading my Kindle? Rivers flow and rivers run though words and books and ideas, through whispered utterings and mutterings in the places where words are stored in order to break free in the shape of ideas and thoughts of life and love and ... rivers flow and rivers run... in ellipses...
