Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

1979

1979 1 January The crossed beams riding on the thatched roofs of ancient Japanese sanctuaries such as the Ise Shrine may be said to spell out the dynamics of the pitched roof. The ridge of the roof is, ambiguously, not only a peak but also a crossing. 4 January Franz Kafka's most uncanny device is the drab sobriety of reasoning and language in his style. One seems to listen to the report of a minor civil servant or shopkeeper talking sensibly about the problems of practical life; it is the mentality of husbandry and insurance. But within the events reported in this deadpan language seethes the tempest of paranoia. Quite different from the Expressionists, who explode colorfully all over the place, Kafka exhibits a gray container, ready to implode from infernal inner tension. The new middle-class civilization makes its entry with Kafka. He is beyond the uninhibited melodrama of the realists: Zola is still Racine, but Kafka reflects a different world. No wonder he identified so readily with small animals, rodents and birds, whose every motion is ac243 companied by vigilant circumspection. All those quick glances that go with the scratching and gnawing and pecking, all those constant provisions against mortal danger , are executed with the indifference of an office routine . It is the bourgeois version of the human tragedy. My father was the youngest of seven children, who had been born in a burst of fertility between 1859 and 1867. His mother, Julie, nee Meyer, lived from 1833 or 1834 to 1886; thus she was about twenty-five years old at the birth of her first child and about thirty-three when my father was born. Her husband, my paternalgrandfather, Julius Arnheim, lived from 1825 to 1883. He owned, I believe, a small stationery store in Berlin. Of those seven children, only two married, namely, the oldest and the youngest. The oldest, Max (1859— 1894), had one daughter, whom I vaguely remember. The youngest, Georg, my father, had four children. Three of my father's sisters died young, in their twenties or thirties. A brother, Paul (1863-1909), a bachelor, lived to the age of forty-six. The youngest sister, Margarete (born 1862), was a regular visitor at our home. I believe she fell victim to the Nazis in 1938. My father (1867-1943) died in Oakland, California, of a heart ailment at the age of seventy-six. My mother, Betty, nee Gutherz (1879-1966), died of intestinal cancer in Ueberlingen, Germany, where she had spent her last years near my oldest sister, Leni. Her two sisters, Erna and Alice, also died of cancer. Two of my sisters, Leni and Marie, were married but had no children. My child, Anna Heide, was born in 1934 in Rome to my first wife, Annette, nee Siecke, and died there in 1940 of Hodgkin's disease. My second eldest sister , Hilde, married to a physician, died in 1938 of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one. Her only child, Michael, is a dermatologist in California. He is the only consanguineous child of the four of us. 244 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT My second wife, Mary, nee Frame, was born in 1918; we were married in 1953. Our daughter, Margaret Nettinga, comes from Mary's first marriage and was born in 1947. 9 January One cannot use Albert Michotte's experiments on the perception of causality to disprove Hume's contention that causality is based on nothing better than the association between phenomena that follow each other habitually . What Hume denies is the physical reality of the relation between cause and effect. Michotte actually confirms this. He shows that causality is compellingly experienced in cases in which it does not exist physically; but he also shows that in perceptual experience causality is not based simply on association. It depends on factors inherent in the perceptual situation itself, such as relative speed, time intervals, direction of motion, and so forth. 14 January A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds. 15 January A monkey's ability to use tokens does not prove that he understands the nature of images. Tokens can be used simply as a means to an end...