Domingo no mundo (80)

Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond, Lake Nemi, c. 1830.

Domingo no mundo (79)

Florinne Stettheimer, Flores com Afrodite, c. 1915.

Domingo no mundo (78)

Katsushika Hokusai, Flying Bird, c. 1830-50.

Domingo no mundo (77)

Ernest Martin Hennings,Taos Indian homeward bound, 1920.

Domingo no mundo (76)

James McNeill Whistler, Conversations under the Statue, Luxembourg Gardens, s/d.

Domingo no mundo (75)

Eliot Hodgkin, Five oyster shells, 1961.

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Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Cap d'Antibes, 1943.

Para difíceis contas

Domingo no mundo (73)

Gustav Adolph Henning, Girl reading, 1828.

It looked just the way it should

I remember the book itself—it looked just the way it should, having come down through a couple of generations. It was missing its tide page and cover, the pages had frayed edges and bore the yellowed prints of many fingers; it held a dried violet, a fly flattened over time, sums done in the margins and doodles executed in crayon by some child I didn’t know.

Wislawa Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces.

Domingo no mundo (72)

Issei Suda, Ajigawa, Ibaraki, 1977.

To bring about justice

Crucially, in calling conscience ‘unpolitical’, Arendt does not mean that it is useless. In fact, she believed that the voice of conscience was often vitally important. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), for example, she argues that it was the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann’s lack of ethical introspection that enabled his participation in the unimaginable evils of the Holocaust. Arendt knew from the experience of Fascism that conscience could prevent subjects from actively advancing profound injustice, but she saw that as a kind of moral bare minimum. The rules of conscience, she argues, ‘do not say what to do; they say what not to do’. In other words: personal conscience can sometimes prevent us from aiding and abetting evil but it does not require us to undertake positive political action to bring about justice. 

Katie Fitzpatrick, Change the world, not yourself.