Log24

A death last Sunday —

Meanwhile . . .

Amy Adams attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party 
at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on
Sunday, February 24, 2019, in Beverly Hills, California.

"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!" 

             — Under the Volcano

This post was suggested by the phrase "Froebel Decade" from
the search results below.

This journal a decade ago had a post on the late Donald Westlake,
an author who reportedly died of a heart attack in Mexico on Dec. 31,
2008, while on his way to a New Year's Eve dinner.

One of Westlake's books —

Related material —

"La Despedida " and "Finality indeed, and cleavage!"

Continues.

   "Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!" — Under the Volcano

"I am a skeptic to whom the idea that a benign God 
created us and watches over us is something between
a fairy story and a bad joke." 

— The late art critic Robert Hughes in Things I Didn't Know*

A followup to this afternoon's previous Amy Adams post—

"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!" 

             — Under the Volcano

     * Vintage paperback, December 2007, page 7

From "Crude Foyer," a Wallace Stevens poem—

In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique….

Whatever Works —

Related comedy — Finality and Cleavage.

* TV series starring the above actors. See Wikipedia.

Last night's Saturday Night Live —

Related material— See  Cleavage.

Background— Yesterday evening's Star Quality as well as earlier posts on Horseness and Mysteries of Faith.

(Click to enlarge.)

Intercultural Documentation

From this date four years ago—

Cleavage Term

“… a point of common understanding
between the classic and romantic worlds.
Quality, the cleavage term
between hip and square, seemed to be it."

— Robert M. Pirsig

Cleavage Term

Snow is mainly remembered as the author of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).

According to Orrin Judd, we can now see “how profoundly wrong Snow was in everything except for his initial metaphor, of a divide between science and the rest of the culture.”

For more on that metaphor, see the previous entry, “The Line.”

I prefer a lesser-known work of Snow– his long biographical foreword to G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. The foreword, like the book itself, is an example of what Robert M. Pirsig calls “Quality.”  It begins with these words:

“It was a perfectly ordinary night at Christ’s high table, except that Hardy was dining as a guest.”

The Line

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 6 (italics are mine):

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.”

The Sophist, by Plato:

STRANGER – We are far from having exhausted the more exact thinkers who treat of being and not-being. But let us be content to leave them, and proceed to view those who speak less precisely; and we shall find as the result of all, that the nature of being is quite as difficult to comprehend as that of not-being.

THEAETETUS – Then now we will go to the others.

STRANGER – There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence.

THEAETETUS – How is that?

STRANGER – Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body.

THEAETETUS – I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are.

STRANGER – And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.

THEAETETUS – True.

— Translated by Benjamin Jowett

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 18:

“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…

The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane

hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”

What Pirsig means by “quality” is close to what Yagoda means, in the previous entry, by “style.”