Category Archives: night thoughts

On the last night of the year

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Certainly, all calendars and all counting systems are arbitrary and inevitably meaningless, but today is December 31st and tonight is New Year’s Eve. One might wax nostalgic or maudlin or sad or happy or whatever, but most of that is meaningless as well. In fact, there is almost no meaning whatsoever in the fact that 2013 comes to a close this evening. I used to dread New Year’s Eve because I couldn’t find the merriment and fun that apparently everyone else felt so strongly. The end of the year also felt a little melancholy to me. I mean, looking at a frozen January from the bottom up seemed no treat–short days and cold nights punctuated with a bunch of snow didn’t seem like anything to look forward to. I never understood the reason to party on New Year’s Eve. Was it happy or sad? Or just what was going on. Were people trying to put something behind them? Or was this some irrational hope that the next year would be a sight better? Most years seem eerily similar, with highs and lows to be expected, so why do people expect anything any different. In the end, poetically, tragically, the changing calendar is a symbol of human hope, the ability to forget the past and to hope for a different future. Perhaps this is our greatest quality as a race–to bounce back from adversity and build a new future in spite of everything that we still drag along in our unopened baggage. Maybe the new year is a time when we dump the baggage, once and for all, and move on.

On the last night of the year

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Certainly, all calendars and all counting systems are arbitrary and inevitably meaningless, but today is December 31st and tonight is New Year’s Eve. One might wax nostalgic or maudlin or sad or happy or whatever, but most of that is meaningless as well. In fact, there is almost no meaning whatsoever in the fact that 2013 comes to a close this evening. I used to dread New Year’s Eve because I couldn’t find the merriment and fun that apparently everyone else felt so strongly. The end of the year also felt a little melancholy to me. I mean, looking at a frozen January from the bottom up seemed no treat–short days and cold nights punctuated with a bunch of snow didn’t seem like anything to look forward to. I never understood the reason to party on New Year’s Eve. Was it happy or sad? Or just what was going on. Were people trying to put something behind them? Or was this some irrational hope that the next year would be a sight better? Most years seem eerily similar, with highs and lows to be expected, so why do people expect anything any different. In the end, poetically, tragically, the changing calendar is a symbol of human hope, the ability to forget the past and to hope for a different future. Perhaps this is our greatest quality as a race–to bounce back from adversity and build a new future in spite of everything that we still drag along in our unopened baggage. Maybe the new year is a time when we dump the baggage, once and for all, and move on.

On ice fog and winter football

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The weather in central Texas has been a little bizarre this week. Don’t get me wrong, on Tuesday it was almost eighty, but today, Saturday, the high was twenty-seven, resulting in the rare, if not weird, phenomenon of ice fog–fog that forms when the dew point is below thirty-two. All of this on the day when Baylor football finally won the the Big XII title outright and closed, once and for all, its old football stadium, which is scheduled for demolition sometime during 2014. Has Hell finally frozen over? Everybody is asking. The football game was played under Minnesota rules–temperatures well below freezing, a wicked wind blowing from the northwest, flurries. Is there a colder past-time than watching a football game under winter conditions? The ice fog was testimony to frozen toes, numb fingers, and cold noses. The second game of the season, back in September, was played in the sun and the on-field temperatures had to be above 120F, so today, the last game at Floyd Casey Stadium, Baylor played a game at about a hundred fewer degrees than that. Ice crystals hanging in the air made the night a memorable one, to be sure.

On ice fog and winter football

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The weather in central Texas has been a little bizarre this week. Don’t get me wrong, on Tuesday it was almost eighty, but today, Saturday, the high was twenty-seven, resulting in the rare, if not weird, phenomenon of ice fog–fog that forms when the dew point is below thirty-two. All of this on the day when Baylor football finally won the the Big XII title outright and closed, once and for all, its old football stadium, which is scheduled for demolition sometime during 2014. Has Hell finally frozen over? Everybody is asking. The football game was played under Minnesota rules–temperatures well below freezing, a wicked wind blowing from the northwest, flurries. Is there a colder past-time than watching a football game under winter conditions? The ice fog was testimony to frozen toes, numb fingers, and cold noses. The second game of the season, back in September, was played in the sun and the on-field temperatures had to be above 120F, so today, the last game at Floyd Casey Stadium, Baylor played a game at about a hundred fewer degrees than that. Ice crystals hanging in the air made the night a memorable one, to be sure.

On time travel, universe ending paradoxes, and alternate time lines

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You may consider a note about time travel as frivolous, vulgar, or even foolish, but don’t kid yourself: if you could go back to your fourteen-year-old self with a bunch of hard-earned information about your future, you would. I have always said that time travel is not only improbable, it is impossible. The proof, however, is not really proof because you cannot prove a negative: just because we don’t think we have ever met a time-traveler, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We are obsessed with tales and stories of time-travel mostly due to our rampant nostalgia for the past and a yearning to correct all of the mistakes we know we made along the way. We know no one has ever come back from the future, nor has anyone ever returned to the past to alter the past. Only lucky people have ever won the lottery, but again, as far as we know–maybe the lottery winners were time travelers who were just pretending to be lucky when they knew the winning numbers all along. If someone were to travel to the past and change some major historical event–the sinking of Titanic, for example, and change the timeline–we would never know it, now, would we? Would a time traveler suffer a major trauma if they ran into their younger selves? Or would it be, simply, creepy? If I were a time traveler, I would go back to a time in American history, say the period between 1946 and 1963, get myself a Vermont farmhouse, and lead a quiet, undisturbed life, far from the noise of the maddening crowd. Or maybe the late 1890’s? I would never go back to the sixties or seventies, but the late seventies and early eighties, which were very anti-aesthetic, were an awful lot of fun. Sherman and Mr. Peabody taught me a very important lesson with their “Wayback” machine: the past is a distant country that we not only don’t understand, we idealize it all out of proportion. The past must be a closed book, or our daily reality would be an unpredictable chaos. If a coffee cup falls on the floor, the coffee spills, and the cup breaks. Hypothetically, the equations governing that particular accident may run both backwards and forwards, but the actual reality of the broken coffee cup is other: only glue will put it back together–it stays broken for all eternity. The obsession with time travel, either into the future or into the past, poses extreme ethical and moral dilemmas for the traveler. Changing the already established events of the past would alter the world in devastating ways, which is always the message of time-traveling movies, novels, and stories. If the time traveler accidentally killed a great-grandparent, would they instantly disappear? Or would they never have existed at all, unable to go back and kill that grandparent because they never existed at all? One could go crazy trying to understand the universe ending paradox of an impossible time loop. Yet, according to the equations both the past, present, and future all exist at once, indistinguishable from one another, but it seems that we can only access the present at any given moment. The impossibility of time travel is perhaps what makes it so much fun, so intriguing, such a conundrum. How I would love to tell my twelve-year-old self that everything will turn out fine and a bunch of other stuff about life that it took me forever to figure out.

On time travel, universe ending paradoxes, and alternate time lines

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You may consider a note about time travel as frivolous, vulgar, or even foolish, but don’t kid yourself: if you could go back to your fourteen-year-old self with a bunch of hard-earned information about your future, you would. I have always said that time travel is not only improbable, it is impossible. The proof, however, is not really proof because you cannot prove a negative: just because we don’t think we have ever met a time-traveler, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We are obsessed with tales and stories of time-travel mostly due to our rampant nostalgia for the past and a yearning to correct all of the mistakes we know we made along the way. We know no one has ever come back from the future, nor has anyone ever returned to the past to alter the past. Only lucky people have ever won the lottery, but again, as far as we know–maybe the lottery winners were time travelers who were just pretending to be lucky when they knew the winning numbers all along. If someone were to travel to the past and change some major historical event–the sinking of Titanic, for example, and change the timeline–we would never know it, now, would we? Would a time traveler suffer a major trauma if they ran into their younger selves? Or would it be, simply, creepy? If I were a time traveler, I would go back to a time in American history, say the period between 1946 and 1963, get myself a Vermont farmhouse, and lead a quiet, undisturbed life, far from the noise of the maddening crowd. Or maybe the late 1890’s? I would never go back to the sixties or seventies, but the late seventies and early eighties, which were very anti-aesthetic, were an awful lot of fun. Sherman and Mr. Peabody taught me a very important lesson with their “Wayback” machine: the past is a distant country that we not only don’t understand, we idealize it all out of proportion. The past must be a closed book, or our daily reality would be an unpredictable chaos. If a coffee cup falls on the floor, the coffee spills, and the cup breaks. Hypothetically, the equations governing that particular accident may run both backwards and forwards, but the actual reality of the broken coffee cup is other: only glue will put it back together–it stays broken for all eternity. The obsession with time travel, either into the future or into the past, poses extreme ethical and moral dilemmas for the traveler. Changing the already established events of the past would alter the world in devastating ways, which is always the message of time-traveling movies, novels, and stories. If the time traveler accidentally killed a great-grandparent, would they instantly disappear? Or would they never have existed at all, unable to go back and kill that grandparent because they never existed at all? One could go crazy trying to understand the universe ending paradox of an impossible time loop. Yet, according to the equations both the past, present, and future all exist at once, indistinguishable from one another, but it seems that we can only access the present at any given moment. The impossibility of time travel is perhaps what makes it so much fun, so intriguing, such a conundrum. How I would love to tell my twelve-year-old self that everything will turn out fine and a bunch of other stuff about life that it took me forever to figure out.

On translating

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Translating by definition is falsification and, ultimately, betrayal. Languages are not parallel so all translation is marked by what is lost, not by what is gained. All translators know this because it is their job to understand, interpret, and compromise as they switch a text or discourse from one language to another. There is no such thing as a literal translation, and all bilingual people understand this chasm between languages that cannot be bridged by translating. Translation is about changing a text is such a way that it might be understandable to people who don’t speak the original language. All translation is about loss. As I look at an English translation of Dante’s Inferno, I can only lament the loss of rhythm, sound, and rhyme. We get the “gist” of what Dante is saying about sin and shame, ego and pride, but his art as a poet is lost forever: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita. Translating and translation are about the translator turning a blind eye to the myriad and multiple meanings that cling to the original words and sacrificing the author’s creativity and originality so that the text might be accessible to others who fall outside the circle of the author’s language. Yet, translators prevail, get hired, and they do their jobs with little shame or humility. Translations are as ubiquitous as taxes and death. Could it be, all along, that translation is the world’s oldest profession? The problem, of course, is not translation, but the multiple languages the people of the world speak, that Tower of Babel from which we are doomed to inhabit forever. Yet, I am not in favor of making one language a required, dogmatic official language. The more common norm is for people to live in multilingual societies. Even today there are many areas of the world where people speak two, three, or even four languages according to the demands of the social situation. Being multilingual does not solve the problem of translation but it does eliminate the need for translation. If a person speaks Italian, reads Italian, then anything they experience in that language is self-explanatory even if the person’s first language might be German or French. Translation only occurs if the original language is a barrier to understanding the text, or conversation, or song. The only way to approach translation is to assume failure before you even start, and by assuming failure, the translator can only produce a new text which was inspired by the original. In a sense all texts are failed translations of other texts, and there exists no ur-text or Q manuscript which might have been original. Misreading, misunderstandings, ambiguity, mistakes, lacunae, accidents, double-entendre, obscurity, complexity, prejudice, bias, and misinterpretation all plague the translator who cannot avoid or evade his/her own human condition as imperfect translator. In the end, all translators must recognize their failure, ignore the imperfection of their work, and move forward to the next sentence with the understanding that failure is the best they can do. In a larger sense, this is the existential question of the human condition–translator as failure.

On translating

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Translating by definition is falsification and, ultimately, betrayal. Languages are not parallel so all translation is marked by what is lost, not by what is gained. All translators know this because it is their job to understand, interpret, and compromise as they switch a text or discourse from one language to another. There is no such thing as a literal translation, and all bilingual people understand this chasm between languages that cannot be bridged by translating. Translation is about changing a text is such a way that it might be understandable to people who don’t speak the original language. All translation is about loss. As I look at an English translation of Dante’s Inferno, I can only lament the loss of rhythm, sound, and rhyme. We get the “gist” of what Dante is saying about sin and shame, ego and pride, but his art as a poet is lost forever: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita. Translating and translation are about the translator turning a blind eye to the myriad and multiple meanings that cling to the original words and sacrificing the author’s creativity and originality so that the text might be accessible to others who fall outside the circle of the author’s language. Yet, translators prevail, get hired, and they do their jobs with little shame or humility. Translations are as ubiquitous as taxes and death. Could it be, all along, that translation is the world’s oldest profession? The problem, of course, is not translation, but the multiple languages the people of the world speak, that Tower of Babel from which we are doomed to inhabit forever. Yet, I am not in favor of making one language a required, dogmatic official language. The more common norm is for people to live in multilingual societies. Even today there are many areas of the world where people speak two, three, or even four languages according to the demands of the social situation. Being multilingual does not solve the problem of translation but it does eliminate the need for translation. If a person speaks Italian, reads Italian, then anything they experience in that language is self-explanatory even if the person’s first language might be German or French. Translation only occurs if the original language is a barrier to understanding the text, or conversation, or song. The only way to approach translation is to assume failure before you even start, and by assuming failure, the translator can only produce a new text which was inspired by the original. In a sense all texts are failed translations of other texts, and there exists no ur-text or Q manuscript which might have been original. Misreading, misunderstandings, ambiguity, mistakes, lacunae, accidents, double-entendre, obscurity, complexity, prejudice, bias, and misinterpretation all plague the translator who cannot avoid or evade his/her own human condition as imperfect translator. In the end, all translators must recognize their failure, ignore the imperfection of their work, and move forward to the next sentence with the understanding that failure is the best they can do. In a larger sense, this is the existential question of the human condition–translator as failure.

On wine

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Wine is a controversial beverage. Wherever you go, someone has an opinion, pro or con, about wine because it contains alcohol, and alcohol, for good or bad, has been the source of much pleasure and much pain throughout history. The secret to enjoying wine is to know how much to drink and when to stop, and never, I mean never, drink wine on an empty stomach. It will hit your blood like a steam roller and you will be toast in no time at all. Wine is best enjoyed with friends over food. If you are mixing your box of wine with cola and sitting alone on a park bench while you enjoy your toxic coctail, you might want to re-examine both your life and your career objectives. Wine should probably not be mixed with anything, especially if it is worth drinking. Sangría, a Spanish wine cocktail, is best enjoyed very sparingly for reasons which I think are obvious. A decent bottle of wine, white or red, to be shared by several people over dinner, is a unifying drink that can turn an average dinner into a totally delightful evening, enhancing the dining experience, bringing people together, relaxing the diners, and complimenting the food, especially if both food and wine are choosen carefully. Wine is one of those drinks that can either make your dining experience wonderful, or, conversely, make your life miserable if you have too much. There are worse things in the world than a wine hangover, but I don’t want to list any of them here because they are all disagreeable and nasty. Drinking alcohol has to be a personal decision based a series of social, ethical, religious, and moral consideration, and I admire those who make a decision and stick by it–if you don’t drink, great, if you do, understand the implications and live with them, but don’t be a high and mighty fence-sitter who hypocritally points fingers but then drinks in private. By the way, drinking in private is a sign that you might be joining the guy on the park bench with the box wine and two litre bottle of cola. This note is neither a condemnation of drinking nor is it a recommendation of drinking, but it is a discussion of wine. Many of my friends drink wine, and I have been known to sip spoiled grape juice on occasion. For me, food and win go together like Laurel and Hardy, like spaguetti and meatballs, like the Fourth of July and parades. When eating a steak (not a vegetarian, either), a nice strong glass of some velvety red wine is the perfect beverage companion, not that you couldn’t drink a glass of milk with your steak. When eating some beautiful piece of fish smothered in a clam and shrimp sauce, you must have a nice, light, glass of white wine in order to ensure a good digestive process–drinking water might make your tummy hurt. I’m not saying that water isn’t always the perfect solution–I drink plenty of water (yes, I admit it, even though water is so strong!)–but sometimes it’s not the best solution (water is a compound, not a solution, unless you dissolve something in it, and it stops being just a compound), and if you are a teatotaller, more power to you, pass the water pitcher. So sometimes I drink wine, just like the guests at the wedding in Cana.

On wine

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Wine is a controversial beverage. Wherever you go, someone has an opinion, pro or con, about wine because it contains alcohol, and alcohol, for good or bad, has been the source of much pleasure and much pain throughout history. The secret to enjoying wine is to know how much to drink and when to stop, and never, I mean never, drink wine on an empty stomach. It will hit your blood like a steam roller and you will be toast in no time at all. Wine is best enjoyed with friends over food. If you are mixing your box of wine with cola and sitting alone on a park bench while you enjoy your toxic coctail, you might want to re-examine both your life and your career objectives. Wine should probably not be mixed with anything, especially if it is worth drinking. Sangría, a Spanish wine cocktail, is best enjoyed very sparingly for reasons which I think are obvious. A decent bottle of wine, white or red, to be shared by several people over dinner, is a unifying drink that can turn an average dinner into a totally delightful evening, enhancing the dining experience, bringing people together, relaxing the diners, and complimenting the food, especially if both food and wine are choosen carefully. Wine is one of those drinks that can either make your dining experience wonderful, or, conversely, make your life miserable if you have too much. There are worse things in the world than a wine hangover, but I don’t want to list any of them here because they are all disagreeable and nasty. Drinking alcohol has to be a personal decision based a series of social, ethical, religious, and moral consideration, and I admire those who make a decision and stick by it–if you don’t drink, great, if you do, understand the implications and live with them, but don’t be a high and mighty fence-sitter who hypocritally points fingers but then drinks in private. By the way, drinking in private is a sign that you might be joining the guy on the park bench with the box wine and two litre bottle of cola. This note is neither a condemnation of drinking nor is it a recommendation of drinking, but it is a discussion of wine. Many of my friends drink wine, and I have been known to sip spoiled grape juice on occasion. For me, food and win go together like Laurel and Hardy, like spaguetti and meatballs, like the Fourth of July and parades. When eating a steak (not a vegetarian, either), a nice strong glass of some velvety red wine is the perfect beverage companion, not that you couldn’t drink a glass of milk with your steak. When eating some beautiful piece of fish smothered in a clam and shrimp sauce, you must have a nice, light, glass of white wine in order to ensure a good digestive process–drinking water might make your tummy hurt. I’m not saying that water isn’t always the perfect solution–I drink plenty of water (yes, I admit it, even though water is so strong!)–but sometimes it’s not the best solution (water is a compound, not a solution, unless you dissolve something in it, and it stops being just a compound), and if you are a teatotaller, more power to you, pass the water pitcher. So sometimes I drink wine, just like the guests at the wedding in Cana.