Wow. So somehow, in spite of fighting perpetual grogginess all weekend, this one managed to edit his thesis proposal presentation notes for Tuesday, and translate a page of The Apology into English, which leaves only a page (or two to three hours work) to complete before Thursday. 'Had been feeling a bit off by the end of Friday's reading of Henry V, but hadn't expected to be fighting the urge to sleep for the two following days, after taking most of that day off; I'd been drinking tea like a fiend simply to keep on top of things, which I completely failed at on Saturday, regardless. Most of that day was whittled away watching anime, while waiting for wakefulness to find its way to me. Both J. and E.G. made it to the Friday festivities, though, which was a treat. J. in particular was quite chipper and stole the scene as she played the part of most of the French scoundrels and damsels to the hilt; it made a heart glad to see her enjoying herself so much!

Metta has been given as the meditation object for the week, which has proven... challenging. The first stage tends to trip this one up more than the later ones. Extending loving-kindness to someone loved, or even to someone "challenging", forever proves more natural than to certain others.

'Shall need to stop-by the barber on another day; they apparently close on Sundays now. 'Did manage to pick-up a few odds and ends, though, including some much needed socks, printer-paper, and a new night-shirt, all at a bargain. Three more papers to grade, and two to account for...

(Original article by Cullen Murphy at The New Humanist...)

"The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith inherited more than the Inquisition’s DNA and its place on the organisational charts. It also inherited much of the paper trail. The Inquisition records are kept mainly in the palazzo itself, and for four and a half centuries that archive was closed to outsiders. Then, in 1998, to the surprise of many, the Vatican decided to make the archive available to scholars.

Any archive is a repository of what some sliver of civilisation has wrought, for good or ill. This one is no exception. The archive may owe its existence to the Inquisition, but it helps explain the world that exists today. In our imaginations, we offhandedly associate the term “inquisition” with the term “Dark Ages”. But consider what an inquisition – any inquisition – really is: a set of disciplinary procedures targeting specific groups, codified in law, organised systematically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, backed by institutional power and justified by a vision of the one true path. Considered that way, the Inquisition is more accurately seen not as a relic but as a harbinger.

The opening of the archive at the Vatican is one more development in what has, during the past several decades, become a golden age of Inquisition scholarship. Until the appearance of Henry Charles Lea’s magisterial History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, in the late 19th century, most writing about the Inquisition had consisted of bitter polemics by one side or another. In recent years, using materials newly available in repositories outside the Vatican, and now including those of the Holy See itself, historians throughout Europe and the Americas have produced hundreds of studies that, taken together, revise some traditional views of the Inquisition..."

(Original review by Ron Rosenbaum at Smithsonian Magazine...)

"...The arrest of Eichmann, chief operating officer of the Final Solution, reawakened the question Why? Why had Germany, long one of the most ostensibly civilized, highly educated societies on earth, transformed itself into an instrument that turned a continent into a charnel house? Why had Germany delivered itself over to the raving exterminationist dictates of one man, the man Shirer refers to disdainfully as a “vagabond”? Why did the world allow a “tramp,” a Chaplinesque figure whose 1923 beer hall putsch was a comic fiasco, to become a genocidal Führer whose rule spanned a continent and threatened to last a thousand years?

Why? William Shirer offered a 1,250-page answer...

"“We are strong and will get stronger,” Hitler shouted at them through the microphone, his words echoing across the hushed field from the loudspeakers. And there in the flood-lit night, massed together like sardines in one mass formation, the little men of Germany who have made Nazism possible achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and minds—with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems—until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd."

Shirer’s contempt here is palpable, physical, immediate and personal. His contempt is not for Hitler so much as for the “little men of Germany”—for the culture that acceded to Hitler and Nazism so readily. In Shirer one can see an evolution: If in Berlin Diary his emphasis on the Germanic character is visceral, in The Rise and Fall his critique is ideological. Other authors have sought to chronicle the war or to explain Hitler, but Shirer made it his mission to take on the entire might and scope of the Reich, the fusion of people and state that Hitler forged. In The Rise and Fall he searches for a deeper “why”: Was the Third Reich a unique, one-time phenomenon, or do humans possess some ever-present receptivity to the appeal of primal, herd-like hatred...?"

(Original article by John Gray at Prospect Magazine...)

"In accepting that illusion could be productive, Freud was retracing the steps of Schopenhauer’s errant disciple Nietzsche. At the same time Freud was making a decisive break with a dominant strand of Enlightenment thinking. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, who developed the idea in his book After Virtue (1981), Nietzsche brought the Enlightenment to a close by showing that the project of a morality that rested solely on human will was self-defeating. MacIntyre’s argument has the merit of recognising that Nietzsche was an Enlightenment thinker—rather than the crazed irrationalist of vulgar intellectual history—as well as one of the Enlightenment’s more formidable critics. It was Freud, however, who made the more radical break with Enlightenment thinking. Even if he confines its scope to the absurd figure of the Übermensch, Nietzsche remains a militant partisan of human autonomy. Freud, by contrast despite almost everything that has been written about him—aimed as much to mark the limits of human autonomy as to extend it. His words of advice to a patient indicate how much his thinking diverged from the view of open-ended human possibilities that is asserted adamantly today: “I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would be for me. But you will see for yourself how much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. Having restored your inner life, you will be better able to arm yourself against that unhappiness.” The tone of this injunction—with its use of the language of fate, prohibited among progressive right-thinking people—could not be further from contemporary ways of feeling and thinking...

...In a well-known passage at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declared: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…” What is most in demand at the start of the 21st century, in contrast, is consolation and nothing else. Enlightenment fundamentalism—the insistence by writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that our salvation lies in affirming a highly selective set of “Enlightenment values”—serves this emotional need for meaning rather than any imperative of understanding. Like the religions they disparage, but with less profundity and little evident effect, the varieties of Enlightenment thinking on offer today are balm for the uneasy soul. The scientific-sounding formulae with which they appease their anxiety—the end of history, the flat world, the inexorable but forever delayed process of secularisation—are more fantastical than anything in Freud’s “gloomy mythology..."

(Original review by Steven Pearlstein at The Washington Post...)

"...Always the intellectual provocateur, Ferguson also means to challenge the insidious dogma, now ascendant on university campuses, that holds that the “triumph of the West” was nothing more than a self-centered fiction concocted by European and American scholars to justify centuries of brutal colonialism and oppression. And while he stops short of arguing that the West’s decline is inevitable, he warns that it has become a real possibility that could unfold rather quickly.

While the basic outline of Ferguson’s argument is sound, the book itself is something of a disappointment. It reveals the strains on an ambitious academic who has churned out nine books in 13 years, all while hosting five series for British television, holding down two appointments at Harvard — one in the history department and one at the business school — and part-time fellowships at Stanford and Oxford, and writing a regular column for Newsweek. For the past eight years, he has also been working on a biography of Henry Kissinger.

The result of this prodigious over-scheduling is a book that is a mishmash of disconnected and sometimes contradictory riffs held together by faulty logic, inapt metaphors and clever turns of phrase. Instead of presenting himself as the well-read and widely traveled polymath he genuinely is, Ferguson comes off as an intellectual showoff who couldn’t be bothered to edit his own ideas..."

Good laird, this brain of mine be tired! This evening marked the end of the weekend's Way of Shambhala level. III, meditation retreat, thereby concluding a rough total of fifteen hours of meditation and discussion. Just to make things fun, a date with a girl by the name of Jen was crammed into Saturday night as well. She'd contacted me through one of those dating sites, and, as she was both cute, and a dancer, I decided to meet with her after the day's practice had ended.

The date wasn't so great; not bad per se, but a little tried. She has some issues with nervousness and anxiety -- by her own admission -- and it showed through. She spoke a little bit too loudly, a little bit too quickly, and was projecting a defensive persona to some extent. It took a bit of time to get past that, and to get a sort of personal connection going. Nevertheless, she hinted strongly that she'd like to go out dancing, and so I invited her to come out next Friday. It seems unlikely that anything will come of it, but I was feeling rather open after umpteen hours of meditating, and didn't figure on there being any harm in a second date; we're both clear on not looking for anything serious from each other, at any rate.

The meditation weekend was much more engaging, but rather difficult to write about... We sat a lot. We also breathed quite a bit... There were tea breaks, and discussions, and a small dinner at the end. Sort of difficult to engage an audience with that sort of stuff, isn't it? Well, the specific meditation practice which was the focus for this level, was directed towards direct or simple perception of the surrounding environment, with a recourse to mindfulness of breath as an anchor in the face of discursive or narrative thought. There's likely a much shorter Tibetan or Sanskrit term for that, but unfortunately, it's not known to me.

Simply put, the purpose is to mind one's senses of one's environment while withholding the habitual mind's tendency to impose narrative upon whatever or whoever happens to be around. Essentially, to with-hold the imagination and mental formations from what one comes into contact with. Oh yes, and there's all the fun watching your thoughts fly off to Oz every other minute, while you're simply trying to pay a moment's direct attention to the room you happen to be sitting in...

Anyways, too tired to write any more at the moment. 'Have to translate a page or two of The Apology tomorrow, and meet E.G. for a coffee after discussion groups.

Update: Finally finished the main section of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which leaves only the postscript, which Prof. Poirier once described to us as "a complete capitulation to the empiricists". Am also mostly over J's cold bug, have the first class of Greek Prose Authors tomorrow morning, and have a date with a younger woman we'll call Lemur on Saturday night. That will be right after my meditation retreat, at the Raw Sugar Café on Somerset. And, there's also another coffee-date in the making with a certain Twisteuse, a Québecoise and Ph.D. candidate of roughly my own age. And coffee with E.G. next Monday, after the tutorial groups.

And this one ought again to try having a coffee or drink with J, sometime soon, as the cold made it necessary to cancel on the pitcher we were supposed to split with Adrian this afternoon. We'll need to talk sometime soon.

(Currently going through another cold. 'Picked this one up off of J, who was sneezing fits this past Friday. Apparently, it's a different strain from the one which found me in Montreal, given that I've been given no reprieve from any of the symptoms.)

And so here's what transpired on my New Year's Eve -- in a nutshell as it were, as I really wonder if I'd get the time and energy to fill anything larger, and it really would be good to commit more memories to writing than I have been:

This year was the first in a very long time that I hadn't spent the Eve and the Day in Montréal, among family, friends, the Dove, or some combination of those. I had been back for Christmas, and spent a couple of nights crashing on Allie's couch (and caught my last cold of the year off of boogerie little Gabe on the way out). But, after the brief stopover at my Grandparents, I was dropped-off at homebase in Ottawa.

While it was very nice to have the house to myself, and to have as much peace and alone time as I did (while I love my room-mates, I did need some time alone), I did, on the other hand, miss the birth of my niece, Virginia, on the 28th. It also meant ringing in the New Year in the nation's capital, when most of my friends, including J.B. and J.E, were out of town; while J.E. and I had intended to get together before she caught her flight back to Toronto, she herself was suffering through a head-cold that took her on her birthday/Xmas. She did have a safe trip back, though, which is great (it was her first flight ever!) and was reunited with her dau a day or a few later, I believe; the ex had custody over part of the holidays, and so Leila spent part of the time elsewhere, and the paternal gradparents'. Back in T.O. or Windsor, was it?

Thus, at any rate, I did not spend New Year's Eve at Cat's Corner in Montreal, as on so many previous years (when somebody, such as myself, took the initiative to organize it). But, my friend and former room-mate, Sven, did put together something at the Atomic Rooster up on Bank Street: a blues and swing dance.

Long story short ('still have to fit it in the nutshell, after all), it was quite a decent night. Sven was a bit hopped-up on cold medication for a good bit of the night, but that didn't impede his DJing duties. I got a free piece of strawberry cheesecake out of the deal, after Manuel and Tara-Lee left early, had a couple of pints, and quite a slow dances. Two young women, were sorry to see me leave early (I intended to be home around midnight, in case somebody from my family called).

One in particular, N, was very appreciative, and very sorry that I left before midnight. I was in such a rush, and so set on my course, that it didn't occur to me until I was half-way across town that she likely would have happily shared a kiss at midnight. Ah well. I'll likely be running into her again the next time I'm out dancing; we'll see how that stands. The other girl, A, who apparently works at the Second Cup on Laurier, was also a bit disappointed, which surprised me a bit. She might have been playing hard to get, I suppose.

'Didn't quite make it home before midnight, as I missed the connecting bus out of Greenboro. But, I did manage to send off a few celebratory text-messages. First to J, at midnight, then A-M, then J.E, G.T, F.S, E.G, and a whole slew of others. 'Even received a few back, though J. didn't get hers until she got back into town. The last event of the evening was a Skype call from F.S&A. -- whom I didn't even know were back in town -- and that's about all I recall off hand... Must go off and fold laundry now, and pray to Asclepius that I'll be able to breathe through my nose tonight.