Quotes from Baudelaire's "The Painter of Modern Life"

In Charles Baudelaire, a flâneur is a man who walks the city in order to experience it. Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of a flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding the urban phenomena and modernity.

It is perhaps in his 1964 book The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays that the flâneur comes to life, and is understood as someone who experiences the city while being incognito. In other words, this passionate observer is at the very center of the world, and is yet unseen of the world.

Some quotations:

On the passionate idler:

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer, it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world. Such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. 

On childhood recaptured at will:

But genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

On the cup of oblivion:

But the evening comes. The witching hour, the uncertain light, when the sky draws its curtains and the city lights go on. The gaslight stands out on the purple background of the setting sun. Honest men or crooked customers, wise of irresponsible, all are saying to themselves: 'The day is gone at last!". Good men and bad turn their thoughts to pleasure, and each hurries to his favorite haunt to drink the cup of oblivion. 

Thoughts?

JP

A Philosophical Morning

Today I had a Philosophical morning.

With a cup of coffee on my left hand and the keys on the other, I silently walked out of the green and yellow building where I live, with a desire to retreat before giving a two hour lecture on linear algebra. At that time, the Sunday morning still had most of my neighbors caught in undisturbed reveries, except from a middle aged man that was cheerfully jogging along with his puppy, who seemed equally inspirited for motion. Albeit I had noticed his presence in the beginning, I did not keep up the sight so as to exchange glances, which would have preceded a courteous, however cold salutation.

I deliberately let him walk in front, as I slowly made my way to the end of the street to witness once again the transformation of a place that used to be a beach with gray sands and marine debris, into a landscape that Godfrey Reggio himself would have captured for a movie like Koyaanisqatsi. The vast and infertile monochromatic landscape was only discontinued by the presence of bright orange, robust and metallic caterpillars in rest position, but that would keep delving the soil the next day at a time no later than the sunrise. The sky, however, was rather clear and poorly populated by puffy clouds at the distant horizon; a picture that Baudelaire would have not been fond of, but that would have awakened the muse of painting to inspire Piero Della Francesca.

I sipped again my cup of decaf which was almost empty, while I graciously acknowledged how lucky I was to be alone in front of the thought provoking scenery. My feet were hanging from a small cliff, and my position in front of the void was similar to that of fishing. Then I thought to myself: here I am, in words of Deresiewicz and Thoreau, fishing in the Walden pond of my own nature, baiting hooks with darkness. Contrary to common intuition, there were no trout or bass bites (or their metaphorical counterparts for that matter) in this fanciful recreation. I would say it was rather the idle receptiveness to the world the actual scene produced in my head that betrayed the impulse of providing peace and tranquility. The latter did not last much, as a loafer suddenly parked her bike close to me, probably to quench her whim for contemplation, or to take a quick look to the latest works in the neighborhood regarding coastal geotechnics.

Perhaps I should not have blamed the slight interruption of her bike brakes for pinching the bubble of my temporary absent mindedness, as a snowball of petty concerns was only seconds away from jostling me with extraordinary vim. The reason for this intermission is something I have yet to fish, but I am prone to believe it is due to a learned awareness of the world, where the sensitive attention is demanded at all times, in other words, an idea of control. At this time there was no coffee left, and I decided that it was about time to head back to the normal course of the day. Quickly, I found myself putting my feet back to the ground, and turning around facing the street where I had come from. I realized that only a few minutes had really passed, and that it was about time to walk to the house where I was going to give the lecture on the fundamentals of vector analysis. Apparently, the tight agenda of four Business Management students and their understandable aversion to geometry, were the factors that exhorted them to hire this engineer who never thought of doing this      kind of work, after being on an oceanographic expedition in the Artic Circle.    

On recommended readings

I strongly recommend the following readings:

• The art of travel by Alain de Botton: An awesome book on introspection while traveling. De Botton creates trips where the tour guides are thinkers or writers such as Baudelaire (one of my all time favorites), Flaubert, Van Gogh and Ruskin.

• The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing by Richard Dawkins: This is a collection of good writing by professional scientists, not excursions into science by professional writers. Contains very small, nontechnical articles.

• The disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz. "Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers" This is a highly recommended reading.

• Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science
  by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. He starts with Heisenberg's definition of beauty as “the proper conformity of the parts to one another and the whole”, and then ponders about the value this concept of beauty has in science. (Simplex sigillum veri. Pulchritudo splendor veritatis)

• Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar – Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein. My rating for this book 5/5. I love reading it and writing important ideas on my moleskine.

I have gotten all the items from the list online for free: Google with patience (library.nu being a good site)

Flying over hurricanes

Hurricane Irene is about to reach the Bahamas. This is a satellite picture (current as of AUG 23rd 09:39pm ET)

I was curious about current passenger airplane pathlines across this hurricane. I wanted to see if there was a significant deviation from a regular (loxodromic) path. Turns out that there isn't, as this picture shows for the flight from American Airlines (Boeing 737-800 AAL 1555), scheduled from Miami Intl (MIA) to Luis Muñoz Marín (SJU), retrieved also at the same time of the previous screenshot:

What is intriguing is that even though airplanes can fly above the hurricane, there are unusually high clouds associated with hurricanes (namely Hot towers, pic below) that can protrude from the troposphere.

I don't know Aeronautical Meteorology, but I would not be comfortable on that plane.

Edit: Introverted intuition at its best.

Pitfalls on phone instant messaging

I am truly impressed to see the amount of people here subscribed to Blackberry products. I think that the main attraction of this is the Blackberry Messenger that uses a Personal Identification Number or PIN. While I like the idea of instant messaging, I find its connection to a specific device quite enslaving. I wonder why most people, after having instant messaging with MSN messenger, Yahoo, or Google Talk which are independent of the device, just open a new Blackberry account that they cannot retrieve from another non Blackberry phone. For me, it seems that belonging to the BB network for the sake of belonging stems probably from a desire of a sense of importance, and an attempt to fit in. 

I am not against Blackberry per se though. I do not have one, but if I had, I would keep using the instant messaging I have used before. Besides, I am not sure if I want to be available 24 hours to everybody, unless it's nuclear family or so... just weird to me.

Far from surprising, the new Live Profile PIN has been launched to do the same with non-Blackberry phones. Now Androids and iPhones have more chatting options available for them, and most of the Blackberry users I know also use this new PIN. All this seems counterproductive for me. I think that belonging to a plethora of social networks and using multiple instant messaging options may create a false idea of being connected and engaged, when in reality the attention is being dispersed and the communication channels, in the best case, are duplicated.