natalia ilyin

Three days left until the Old Settlers' Ball, and because I have an unrealistic view of my powers, I have said yes once again to making too many other people's ball dresses. So here I sit, thinking thoughts about what I am going to teach next Fall in terms of design history and criticism, and sewing the bejeebers out of yards and yards of taffeta. The balanced life is the life we strive for. Histories and hierarchies, who did what when-- that's one side of the story. The other-- that unheralded long stitch of repeated experience that snicks through life like a machine needle, the continuing tale that folds in upon itself, that starts over and ends and starts over-- the sea swell of the unconscious upon which we plant yardsticks and measuring tapes and wonder why they never reach far enough, why they sink down out of sight. How shall I teach that?

For years my students have given me a bad time about my reading glasses and not without reason. I have a pair that I found on the bus. The perfect strength! Really nice ground lenses! I was thrilled when they showed up. But there’s a downside. They are old. Not old enough to be vintage or hipster or retro. No, just old and big and, well, to be frank, perhaps not that flattering. I have suffered through their gentle remarks for years. But today I am relieved of the burden of my insistence: today I happened upon a wonderful picture of Jane Jacobs. A fabulous picture. A brilliant woman. And something I had never noticed before. My exact bus glasses. I knew I liked her.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_snd-postmodern-financial-crisis.html

"...Postmodernism, which places itself “beyond good and evil,” beyond true and false, inhabits a cosmic bubble. It would be a good thing if fear of a universal crisis allowed us to burst the mental bubble of postmodernism—if it washed away the euphoria of our pious wishes and brought us once again to see straight. That may be no more than another pious wish. But we should not succumb, as so many did in the 1920s, to a catastrophic sensibility. Yes, history is tragic, as Aeschylus and Sophocles knew. And yes, it is as stupid as set forth in Aristophanes or Euripides. No roll of the dice and no act of God or of mathematically refined finance can abolish chance, corruption, or adversity; the providence of the stock market cannot save us any more than that of the state. Let these lines from Plato be inscribed at the entryway to future G-20 meetings: “Is there not one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged?—and that is wisdom.”

(André Glucksmann is a French philosopher.
His article was translated from the French by Alexis Cornel.)