Schadenfreude and not

These are parts of a piece from a new NY Times Select blogger:

The Un-Schadenfreude

By Richard Conniff

…I was, to be sure, ashamed, not least because it was a recurring dream. But it also occurred to me that I was mired in a more or less universal feeling, rarely discussed and for which there appears to be no adequate word in English. “Envy,” for instance, doesn’t suffice for that peculiar blend of delight and crestfallen dismay when a friend triumphs. (I was in fact happy, even proud, of my friend’s success. But let’s not dwell on that.) The German language, that mother lode of vocabulary for obscure and debased emotions, gives us schadenfreude, for the thrill we feel when bad things happen to people who deserve it. But what I was feeling was more like the un-schadenfreude. Good things + good friends = pain (squared). Or as Gore Vidal once put it, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”

…       The Irish have long had a culture of “begrudgery,” belittling anyone who seems to be getting big …     The Germans of course also have a relevant word, missgunst, meaning unhappiness at someone else’s good fortune, with a corresponding note of bitterness.

But I’d like to argue that the un-schadenfreude is different, better, even beneficial, probably because I didn’t badmouth my successful friend to mutual acquaintances, or suffer in silence. Instead, I decided that the only way to shake off my recurring dream was to admit it to my friend and go visit the damned penthouse.

Me again! I can honestly say that I have felt un-schadenfreud, and more than once in 71some years of living. I have tagged this piece into my del.i.cious essay base.

More about “Truth” from Stanley Fish via NY Time Select

This is hardly a new insight. Thomas Hobbes put it this way in his “Leviathan” (1651): “True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things. And where Speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.” That is to say, our judgment as to whether an assertion is true or false will be made by seeing how it fits in (or doesn’t fit in) with other assertions the truth of which are, at least for the time being, warranted. We do not compare the assertion with the world but with currently authoritative statements about the world. The world itself – unmediated by any system of statements – is forever removed from us. As Richard Rorty says, in an update of Hobbes, “The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not” (“Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,” 1989). The world, Rorty adds, does not have its own language, does not make propositions about itself. We do that, and it is the propositions we hazard, not the world as it exists apart from propositions, that we affirm, reject, argue about and believe in.

More about Gutenberg

From an article by Jason Epstein, NY Review of Books retired:

Gutenberg was a Catholic entrepreneur who sold religious trinkets and printed indulgences before creating his famous Bible. He thought he could cure the schisms of the 15th century by distributing a uniform missal to all the churches of Europe. Instead, he helped create the Protestant Reformation.

Now that is something I didn’t know!

Dunkirk in 1940

The evacuation of soldiers from Dunkirk ended on June 4, 1940. By then my father hadn’t left Paris and we were still in France. It’s odd to read about Dunkirk at this time since I am reading so much about the Fall of France in ‘40 and the years leading up to that.

By June 14 German troops got to Paris and 9 days after that the Vichy government signed the armistice with Nazi Germany. We likely got onto an English warship around then. Eventually or by July 10 we got back to Canada after a short stay in pre-blitz England.

And the Tiannanmen massacre began this day in Beijing 1989! Also on 6/4 1940 the Battle of Midway began and on 6/6/44 the Allies landed on the Normandy coast returning to France.

June 4 was a busy day in History.