Babylon Revisited

            On Sunday I finally started writing my paragraph in response to the philosophy question for that week’s tutorial:

            It is absolutely possible to conceive of that than which no greater can be thought and yet to deny its existence as an entity in the actual world. The idea of not being able to think of something greater speaks of the limits of thought more succinctly than of “god”. It could be a greater thought to think beyond the limits of a deity. To conceive of eternal conscious existence, eternal pleasure or an eternal supreme being does not mean that these things exist as the greatest thing thinkable. It is curious that Anselm does not come out and say, “that entity than which no greater can be thought” since that seems to be what he is aiming for from the start. It is a limitation of the mind to settle for something specific at the limits of thought. Why would one’s greatest thought necessarily be of an entity? To conceive of omniscience is to try to approach omniscience but to conceive of an omniscient being is to try to contain omniscience. The greatest being that I could think of would be the ultimate me, which I can continuously approach in order to bring him into reality.

            I finished reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”. It’s a very well written story of a repentant man returning to the scene of his debaucheries in Paris a few years before. Now successfully in business in Prague he has come back to Paris to reclaim his daughter who is in the care of his late wife’s sister. She is reluctant to let him have custody of the girl because she blames him for her sister’s death during a time when they had both been partying irresponsibly. His handling of characters and dialogue is masterful but I especially like his descriptions of Paris because the father visits many parts of Paris that appear in songs that I’ve translated.

            I re-read Ernest Hemingway’s very short story, “Hills Like White Elephants”. I’d tackled it a first time just two days earlier but could make neither head nor tail of it. It took a second reading to understand that it’s about a man and a young woman on their way to an abortionist. He is insistent while at the same time claiming she doesn’t have to do it and she is reluctant but willing to do it to make him happy.

            I worked on my essay on Augustine’s argument against the sceptics.