–Imagine two parallel worlds so alike that they would have been exactly the same, were it not for one line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. One world has, “I am thy father’s spirit;” the other, “Ich bin dein Papas Spook.” The former world does not know of the latter line; nor the latter know the former’s.
So what? The point is that both readings and their respective commentaries lurk as possible, because Hamlet‘s complexities are multiple.
–Adorno starting an opera on Tom Sawyer, Picasso painting Buffalo Bill Cody, Sartre preparing a screenplay on Freud, Benjamin Britten facing the prospect of becoming a bandmaster (or Samuel Beckett a commercial airplane pilot), Coleridge and fellow poet Robert Southey planning an egalitarian community on shores of the Susquehanna, Goethe’s ideas to clean up the streets of Venice, Kafka drafting rules for a socialist workers’ cooperative, and Abraham Lincoln and Hedy Lamarr securing their respective patents–all are connected. By me.
Even though the concatenated clauses have not appeared before or been considered as such. You can’t test the real-time I make.
–We’ve over-invested in economic growth on the premise that it takes us further. But good-enough betterment goes even further. The 19th century French poet, Lamartine, wrote “Utopias are often just premature truths”—which is the shortcoming I have in mind: Stopping short at progress is premature. It lacks betterment’s yes-but grounded in the complexities now.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 