@Bookworm Thanks @GarethRees for your immensely clarifying answer. As you point out, @Spagirl basically had it. However, she did not address one part of the question: the antecedent of "they". Kate's comment about that, and the comments of Tallus that unnecessarily introduced doctrine into the discussion, got me really confused.
I've upvoted both answers; on the general principle that askers should accept the answer that's most helpful to them, I would accept yours, but I also feel that if I had ignored Kate's and Tallus's comments (which I saw at the same time as I saw Spagirl's answer), I'd have understood what Spagirl was saying and accepted hers without needing to seek clarification.
So I guess I will leave matters as they are, unless you don't mind my accepting her answer.
I'm also wondering if I should flag the comments as unhelpful ... some of them (Kate's about the antecedent of "they", everything Tallus writes—it's evident he hasn't read the novel) are positively misleading. I also don't quite understand what Kate is contending here ...
... the claim appears to be that since she has read the novel several times, I shouldn't have a question about the meaning of a given sentence therein? That seems like a non-sequitur. Anyway, I'm very grateful to you for helping me out, I was quite lost.
I was trying to embed this ngram in this answer, right before the very last bullet point in the deets. I followed the suggestions here, but was unsuccessful; the Ngram drew a lot more lines than the requisite three when I tried. ?
@CowperKettle h'm, I'm not familiar with his work, and I can't get past the paywall, but I'll try again tomorrow. Thanks for the recommendation!
@CowperKettle ah. I didn't know it was a thing. Generally I have too much to read and spend too much time online anyway, so I'm glad when I run into a paywall as it saves me the time I'd've spent in reading whatever is behind it. :-)
George Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism was first published in 1891, fifteen years before Ibsen died in 1906. Shaw was Ibsen's most fervent champion in England, but his essay perhaps tells us more about Shaw himself than about Ibsen. Shaw conflated Ibsen's social realism with his own F...
@b_jonas Thanks for the feedback! My answer states that @PeterShor delights in irony. The impersonal nature of the web makes intentions hard to pin down, and this problem is exacerbated when the intention is ironic, since by its very nature irony depends on a discrepancy between what is stated and what is really meant.
All of which is to say that I am fully open to the possibility of some misunderstanding having occurred. I would not have the temerity to presume that the decline of which Professor Shor is afraid pertains to his mathematical abilities. I can barely put two and two together, so that would really be awful cheek on my part. So I focused just on what I can speak to, viz., his poetic achievements.
But as a mathematician yourself, you no doubt bring many insights to his work that I am incapable of. So I do hope you will write your own, alternative answer to @Randal'Thor's question. That would actually be really satisfying, where question, subject, and answer bring together the finest (if not the only) mathematical minds that I've encountered in this reading room.
Having read your comment here, I admit that it's a nice reading of the poem to think of it as a talisman to ward off any possible decline in Peter's mathematical abilities, not just his poetic ones, but I have no standing to discuss anybody's mathematical abilities, let alone Peter Shor's.
Gawd it's pretty amazing just to think of, isn't it. I get to interact with Peter. Effing. Shor. I've never told any of my friends here in Silicon Valley; who'd believe me? I barely can believe it myself.
> "My pulse is warm with thine old barley-bree, My head is light with pledging a great soul, My eyes are wandering, and I cannot see, Fancy is dead and drunken at its goal"
@verbose You're welcome. Part of the background, which I guess Pym assumes the reader will be aware of, is that it was not so long since priests were being prosecuted for wearing the biretta and other clothes not mentioned in the Ornaments Rubric of 1559—the case of John Purchas being most notorious as it went all the way to the Privy Council
@verbose That is something I personally should pay more attention to me. Too frequently I write sarcastic statements on the internet such that they might not be recognizable as sarcasm.
I'm not even that old, but I'm always scared of the decline of my health and abilities, both physical and mental. I'm not taking good enough care of my body, so I'm aging too fast. I'm not worried about the decline of mathematical abilities in particular, but I am not a university professor and my dayjob doesn't depend on having peak mathematical abilities, so that could be different for a researcher.
As for other mathematicians, I'm more worried that they might die than that they lose their mathematical abilities before that. We've lost Jiří Matoušek quite young, he was an amazing mathematical writer. And many of the other mathematicians that I look up to are much older than him and so more at risk of death.
I guess the same is true about writers or actors. Most of them keep writing or acting even while they're old.
I used to think that Halász Judit was younger than my parents, and that she'd never age, she'd just stay young forever. I was wrong on both counts. She is getting old, but she never stopped being an active singer and actor, and I don't think she will either until her death.
Many quote websites, as well as some sites about literature, attribute the following quote to J. M. Barrie:
Some of my plays peter out and some pan out.
This is pretty funny since he's best known as the creator of Peter Pan, but none of the sites I've found can pin down an exact source. Did he ...
@verbose While this is true, I hope we aren't embarrassing Peter Shor with all this discussion about him :-) It's been great to see him active in chat recently, as someone who IIRC kept mostly to the main site in previous years.
We should announce the Feb-Mar topic challenge ASAP; currently it's a tie between Katja Kettu and Uyghur literature.
@Randal'Thor Eh, he's prolly used to people fangirling by now. That said, you're right, we should keep this a safe space. How do I delete that comment?
@Randal'Thor I think EJoshuaS is really quite amazing, the way in which he supports the dispossessed simply by drawing attention to their literatures. (That's in re Uyghur literature, which I bet is his suggestion.)
@GarethRees Huh, interesting. Any relation to Samuel Purchas?
Also, how do you remember all these things. I can barely remember what I had for lunch (or even if I had lunch), and you coolly bring up stuff that happened in 1559 like it was yesterday.
That did cross my mind, yes. Or to be more accurate, what crossed my mind was that perhaps he was one of the Struldbruggs as Gulliver initially imagined they would be, not as they turned out to be in "reality."
@Tsundoku yes, when Gulliver first hears about them, he imagines that they will retain all their faculties and therefore be founts of wisdom and knowledge, made serene by their experience of the passage of centuries, but then ...
That reminds me of the Sibyl of Cumae (referenced in The Waste Land): > She was much fancied by Apollo who offered her anything in exchange for sex. She chose immortality and then didn’t keep her side of the bargain. But Apollo was not a God to be ripped off and when she looked at the Immortality Contract she found the clause: ‘Youth and Beauty not included’.
@verbose Non-mods can only delete chat messages within (2? 5?) minutes of posting. You could ask a mod to delete it, but I dunno if that's really necessary.
@Randal'Thor okay. I shall leave it to your discretion and/or judgment. Interesting that even room owners don't seem to be able to delete older messages. I feel so disempowered.
@verbose Reading some literature can also be an amazing way to learn more about a culture without the cost of a plane ticket and the hassle of finding somewhere to stay in a new country.
@Tsundoku It does, just not within in a single word: I suppose the triple hyphens need spaces around them to work properly. test
@Randal'Thor well I mean it's probably dangerous to go to the places EJoshuaS highlights, not to mention the carbon footprint.
I have given up pleasure traveling by air. I have a family obligation that takes me to Atlanta this fall, and I am rather upset that in fact I can't take a train from San Francisco to Atlanta ... not without its taking several days and changing trains in Kansas or some such place. I do miss one aspect of my childhood: if there were a family occasion (funeral, wedding, etc) across the country, nobody expected you to hop on a plane to show up.
@verbose Oh, I forgot you're an RO now. Then there's a way to get any message you don't like (not only your own) out of the room, although not to delete it entirely: from the "room▼" dropdown, select "move messages", then click on the unwanted message(s), then click "relocate", then type "trash" and select a suitable Trash chatroom to use as a dumping ground.
It struck me earlier this week that we haven't had any questions about Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels. I thought more people would be reading those due to the Reacher TV series. (The second season ended last week.) I guess everything is crystal clear in those books.
@Randal'Thor oh yeah I do remember that from the meta post you linked as part of our training. Thanks and apologies for forgetting! Anyway, I think Imma leave the decision about deleting or not to your judgment and/or discretion.
@verbose Sometimes we even learn more about cultures that don't even exist any more. If we ever get hold of a time machine, I'll nominate @Tsundoku to be our guide to ancient Sumeria.
@Randal'Thor But cultures that don't exist any more are easier to talk about, surely? Less complicated, fewer ethical quandaries. Like, if we discuss an Uyghur poet and the terms of the discussion turn out to be objectionable to the Chinese authorities, we might end up causing material harm to her or her family. Nobody's gonna care if we discuss whether the Sibyl and Tithonus would find each other's company consoling or maddening.
Sumeria was succeeded by the Akkadian Empire. Sumerian stopped being used as a spoken language around 2000 BC, but continued to be used in writing (a bit like Latin in Europe much later).
@CowperKettle That poem is not in my book of Keats' poems, even though it clearly should be, since it's better than quite a few of the poems in the book. Who decides what the canonical works for a given author are, and why did they ever let somebody with such a tin ear take the job?
I know a dentist named Perry. It is with some chagrin that I report he is not a periodontist. But then, he's not an Irishman, so perhaps it's unfair to ask him to go by Perry O'Dontist.
H'm I wonder if I can get away with publishing a critical essay comparing Sidney's romance and The Epic of Gilgamesh. I could call it The Countess of Pembroke's Akkadia.
In the first (1940) and the second (1965) edition of the Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book he states that a beginner active reader should read any book at least three times.
CHAPTER SEVEN
While you are in the stage of learning to read, you have to go over a book more than once. If it is worth ...
Many quote websites, as well as some sites about literature, attribute the following quote to J. M. Barrie:
Some of my plays peter out and some pan out.
This is pretty funny since he's best known as the creator of Peter Pan, but none of the sites I've found can pin down an exact source. Did he ...
What are some of the binary oppositions encountered when reading the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman?
