Nulla Dies Sine Linea: Bad Medieval Latin?

No day without a line. Should it be nullus dies sine linea?  I don't know. The maxim in the form nulla dies sine linea entered my vocabulary circa 1970 from my study of Kierkegaard. The Dane had taken it  as the motto for his prodigious journals in the sense of 'No day without a written line.' I made the maxim my own, and long has she presided over my rather less distinguished scribbling.

Edward the Nominalist, whose Latin is better than mine, writes,

I spotted your post today, and wondered about the gender of ‘dies’. It is one of the only fourth declension nouns to have masculine gender, at least in the singular, which has caused misery to generations of Latin students. Technically it should be ‘nullus dies’, e.g. Nullus dies omnino malus / no day is altogether evil, unus dies apud Dominum sicut mille anni et mille anni sicut dies unus / one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day etc. 

But the formulation is quite common, so I did some digging. It originates with a story by Pliny (Plin. Nat. 35.36) about the Greek painter Apelles, who apparently was steadfast in practicing his art. Pliny writes ‘It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered, never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other; a practice which has now passed into a proverb’. Note that this is not about writing, but painting! 

Although Pliny mentions the proverb, he never formulates it. The modern formulation seems to originate with the Latin of Erasmus and other late medieval writers, e.g. ‘Nulla dies abeat, quin linea ducta supersit.’ ‘Let no day pass by, without an outline being drawn, and left to remain.’  So the formulation may just be bad medieval Latin. Nikitinski (‘Zum Ursprung des Spruches nulla dies sine linea’,Rheinisches Museum 142: 430-431, 1999) has argued that if Pliny had formulated it, he would have written ‘nullus dies sine linea’

Nulla dies . . . alligatorVery interesting: the maxim pertained to painting before its use in connection with writing. Other extensions are possible. One can imagine an erudite cokehead abusing the phrase along with his nostrils.

Dr. Michael Gilleland is a bona fide classicist besides being an "antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon."  He offers a wealth of details and variant maxims here, but unless I missed it, finds no fault with the grammar of the nulla dies sine linea formulation.

True Whether or Not Aristotle (or Camus) Said It

Mark educated mindBe skeptical of all unsourced quotations. Where did the Stagirite say this?

Jumping ahead a couple of millennia, one finds the following bogus Camus quotation on several of those wretched unsourced quotation websites:

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is." ~Albert Camus

Having read and taught Camus, I can assure you that the above is not something he could have said in his own voice.  Did he put these words into the mouth of a character in one his novels or plays?

Paging Dave Lull.

 

UPDATE (5/6)

I had forgotten that I had already asked Dave about this and that he had already replied, in April of 2013:

I find no evidence that a statement of Camus' is translated thusly.  I won't bore you with the things that I did (buoyed by my high tolerance of boring activity) before I finally went to Google Books and did inauthor: "Albert Camus" searches using combinations of various keywords and short phrases from this so-called quotation and got no statement even close.  I even tried using Google Translate to translate it into French and then used combinations of various French keywords and short phrases and also got no statement even close.  I'm not surprised.  How about you?
Our hard-working researcher now provides us with the following:
 
From Giovanni Gaetani, “The noble art of misquoting Camus — from its origins to the Internet era,” Journal of Camus Studies 2015:
2) Camus a wise gambler after Pascal's example?
‘I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to
find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die
to find out there is’. 
Dozens of disoriented readers doubted at first glance of the reliability of this quote, but none of them was capable of solving the enigma: someone assumed that ‘maybe Camus wrote it on some private letters’, few others noticed the similarity with Pascal's wager on the existence of God. Unfortunately, the author of this quote is for sure neither Camus nor Pascal. According to Google, the actual spreading of this quote dates back to the early 2000s, when it firstly appeared in some American Christian sites25. In 2006, the Bishop T. D. Jakes even invented a ‘8 seconds prayer’ chain letter using this quote26. Anyway, I did not manage to understand how and why Camus is considered the author of this quote.

A Broad Coalition of the Sane

In a comment thread I wrote, 

We need a broad coalition of the sane which would include many libertarians, the few liberals who haven't lost their minds, and most conservatives, with each subgroup tempering its own tendency toward extremism.

Malcolm Pollack responded:

I used to hope for this, and believe it was possible, but now, to my sorrow, I just can't see how it is ever going to happen. With every passing day, and every tick of the demographic clock, we move faster and faster in the opposite direction, and I can see in America today nothing even remotely resembling a coherent political opposition on the Right. As I wrote in my letter to you, I think we have slipped past the 'event horizon', and all future timelines now must pass through the singularity. What form that will take, and what will come after, I can barely imagine — but I don't think it will be pleasant for anyone.

This was before the election of Trump. I wonder if Mr. Pollack is a bit more optimistic now.

Multi-Racial but not Multi-Cultural

The USA cannot help but be a multi-racial society, but if we cannot agree on a common culture for public purposes with English as its official language and the values of the founding documents as its foundation, then the end is in sight. But collapse takes time and those of us in our mid-60s, assuming we don't live too long, should be able to weather the storm without too much stress. 

Unfortunately, we no longer have the collective will to demand the assimilation without which immigration is a recipe for Balkanization.  Any sane person should be able to see that the values of Sharia are incompatible with American values, and that no Muslims should be allowed to immigrate who are unwilling to accept and honor our values.

But it may already be too late since we don't even have the 'logically prior' collective will to put a stop to illegal immigration and the flouting of Federal immigration law by so-called 'sanctuary' cities and other jurisdictions. First stop illegal immigration, then worry about assimilation in connection with legal immigration.

Once more: improper entry into the country is already a violation of the criminal code. When the mayor of a great city, New York, refuses to deport illegal aliens who commit such serious felonies as driving while intoxicated, then you know that there is precious little common ground left.

We cannot agree on this? Then what can we agree on?

We conservatives can blame ourselves to some extent. We lost ourselves in our private lives while the destructive Left had its way.  

Paradoxically, our appreciation that the political is a limited sphere has left us at a disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere. 

Maverick Philosopher 13th Anniversary

BV in PragueI look forward to tomorrow and the start of Year 14.  Operations commenced on 4 May 2004. 

Can you say cacoethes scribendi?

I've missed only a few days in these thirteen years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.'  Blogging for me is like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and playing the guitar and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to.  Some of us are just natural-born scribblers.  We were always scribbling, on loose leaf, in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, in journals daily maintained.  Maintaining a weblog is just an electronic extension of all of that. 

Except that now I conduct my education in public.  This has some disadvantages, but  they are vastly outweighed by the advantages.  I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, some in the flesh.  You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't snag some interesting fish.  The occasional scum sucker and bottom feeder are no counterargument.

I thank you all for your patronage, sincerely, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. I have a big fat file of treasured fan mail that more than compensates me for my efforts.

I am proud to have inspired a number of you Internet quill-drivers.  Some of you saw my offerings and thought to yourself, "I can do this too, and I can do it better!" And some of you have. I salute you.

And now some thoughts on this thing we call blogging.

1.  In the early days of the blogosphere, over 15 years ago now, weblogs were mainly just 'filters' that sorted through the WWW's embarrassment of riches and provided links to sites the proprietor of the filter thought interesting and of reasonable quality.  So in the early days one could garner traffic by being a linker as opposed to a thinker.  Glenn Reynold's Instapundit, begun in August 2001, is a wildly successful blog that consists mainly of links.  But there are plenty of linkage blogs now and no need for more, unless you carve out  a special  niche for yourself. 

2.   What I find interesting, and what I aim to provide, is a blend of original content and linkage delivered on a daily basis.  As the old Latin saying has it, Nulla dies sine linea, "No day without a line."  Adapted to this newfangled medium: "No day without a post."  Weblogs are by definition frequently updated.  So if you are not posting, say, at least once a week, you are not blogging.  Actually, I find I need to restrain myself by limiting myself to two or three posts per day: otherwise good content scrolls into archival oblivion too quickly. Self-restraint, here as elsewhere, is difficult.

Here is my definition of 'weblog':  A weblog is a frequently updated website consisting of posts or entries, usually short and succinct, arranged in reverse-chronological order, containing internal and off-site hyperlinks, and a utility allowing readers to comment on some if not all posts.

'Blog' is a contraction of 'weblog.'  Therefore, to refer to a blog post as a blog is a mindless misuse of the term on a par with referring to an inning of a baseball game as a game, a chapter of a book as a book, an entry in a ledger as a ledger, etc.  And while I'm on my terminological high horse: a comment on a post is not a post but a comment, and one who makes a comment is a commenter, not a commentator.  A blogger is (typically) a commentator; his commenters are — commenters.

There are group blogs and individual blogs.  Group blogs typically don't last long and for obvious reasons, an example being Left2Right.  (Of interest: The Curious Demise of Left2Right.) Please don't refer to an individual blog as a 'personal' blog.  Individual blogs can be as impersonal as you like. 

3. I am surprised at how much traffic I get given the idiosyncratic blend I serve. This, the Typepad version of MavPhil, commenced on Halloween 2008.  Since then the site has garnered 4.2 million page views which averages to 1,352 page views per day.  In recent months, readership is around 1,300-1,700 page-views per diem with various spikes some up to 4,000 in a day.   Total posts: 7,486.  Total comments: 10,159.

4. How did I get my site noticed?  By being patient and providing fairly good content on a regular basis.  I don't pander: I write what interests me whether or not it interests anyone else.  Even so, patience pays off in the long run. I don't solicit links or do much to promote the site. 

Blogging is like physical exercise.  If you are serious about it, it becomes a daily commitment and after a while  it becomes unthinkable that one should stop until one is stopped by some form of physical or mental debilitation.

Would allowing comments on all posts increase readership?  Probably, but having tried every option, I have decided the best set-up is the present one: allow comments on only some posts, and don't allow comments to appear until they have been moderated. 

Word of the Day: ‘Delope’

Wikipedia: 

Delope (French for "throwing away") is the practice of throwing away one's first fire in a pistol duel, in an attempt to abort the conflict.

Some days I half-seriously think that dueling ought to be brought back. Some liberal-left scumbag slanders you, you challenge him to a duel, and then there is one less liberal-left scumbag in the world.  That would be a fine 'upshot,' no?

(Interesting side-question: should it be one fewer liberal-left scumbag? But 'one less' sounds fine to my highly sensitive ear.)

Schopenhauer undermines the philosophical foundations of dueling in the section on honor in the fourth chapter of his The Wisdom of Life, entitled "Position, or A Man's Place in the Estimation of Others." Schopenhauer is among the most penetrating of the commentators on the human predicament. No one can consider himself educated who has not read him.  He writes beautifully, drawing on vast erudition.

Where did I find 'delope'? In a piece by Roger Kimball entitled Trump Critics Exude Desperate Political Nihilism. It ends thusly:

In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein warned that “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it.” There is a kindred sort of madness about the anti-Trump stalwarts. They are held captive by a picture. Reality had to be a certain way. Trump had to be a certain way: a sort of repository of everything small, and mean, and malevolent.

His unforgivable tort was to act normally, conventionally. Sure there were the tweets—they were something the Left could love to hate—but in a larger sense his behavior has been. . . presidential. Issuing executive orders, nominating judges and justices, encouraging legislation to further the agenda he had outlined on the hustings, generally doing things to keep the promises he had made. Trump’s opponents keep telling us how “angry” his supporters are. But their hysterical behavior reminds me of nothing so much as the famous duel between Settembrini, the suave humanist, and Naphta, the Jesuit radical, in Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain. When Settembrini delopes, Naphta screams “You coward” and shoots himself in the head. I sometimes think some of our more extreme anti-Trump crusaders are only a few adjectives away from that unfortunate eventuality. 

“No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures”

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95:

Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."

The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as if Camus was mining it for ideas. 

In a second footnote we read:

Camus adapted this quote into [his novel] The Fall: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; have I read that or did I think it, my dear compatriot?"

Camus knew the answer, but that didn't stop him from passing on both the thought and its formulation as his own. Is that unseemly for a novelist? Can one plagiarize in a work of fiction? An interesting question.

Gloria-cubana-serie-r-5-1bWhat the Johnsonian saying means interests me more.  Does it mean that no man preaches a  pleasure he does not practice? An example would be a high school teacher who preaches the pleasures of the life of the mind to his students but spends his leisure hours at the racetrack.  But on this reading the saying comes out false.

Or does it mean that no man indulges in a pleasure that he does not enjoy? This is true, and so this is what I take Johnson to be saying. Consider the pleasure of smoking a fine cigar, a La Gloria Cubana, say. No one indulges in this pleasure if he does not like cigars.

A hypocrite in his pleasures would then be a man who indulged in pleasures he did not enjoy.  But this is much closer to algolagnia than it is to hypocrisy.

Should we say that Johnson's aphorism is flawed? Well, it got me thinking and is insofar forth good.

It got me enjoying the pleasures of the life of the mind which I both preach and indulge in.

Books or Eternal Life?

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 94:

A priest who regrets having to leave his books when dying? Which proves that the intense pleasure of eternal life does not infinitely exceed the gentle company of books.

Come on, Al, be serious. Eternal life is an object of faith and hope, not of knowledge or sure expectation. The good padre regrets leaving the familiar and reliable pleasures that he knows and loves and is practically certain of, pleasures he need not have faith in or hope for, and is anxious over the wrenching transition that will pitch him headlong into Kingdom Come.

There are confirmed worldlings who simply do not understand religion. Camus is one of them.