Mixed bag –

As a child, had I come across someone talking to a refrigerator, I would have stepped away. Carefully. But it seems there are now connected refrigerators that can keep you in touch with your many, many virtual friends. As a teenager discovered after her mother had taken away her phone and other devices so she might pay a bit more attention to her immediate surroundings. Which she did, apparently – how else could she discover you could talk to your friends via the family fridge?? (This was breaking news on The Guardian this morning, I suppose it’s totally old news out on the social networks.)

This still leaves unanswered the question of why there’s need for a wwwdot fridge dot mine. So that, while you’re away at work and need to know if you must pick up more ice cream at Piggly Wiggly’s on the way home you can query: “Hey, fridge, check the freezer compartment and ask the gallon of ice cream how much is still in it? ….

Answers the fridge: ” ice cream says a spoonful, Gary dug into it last night.”

If that isn’t  another step up in the pursuit of happiness, I don’t know what is.

*

The two Hannah Arendt titles I’d ordered arrived this morning, providing food for thought along with the bread I picked up at the outside market: The Origins of Totalitarianism and Responsibility and Judgment.

I’ll probably start the reading with the latter.   The introduction by Jerome Kohn begins: “Particular questions must receive particular answers; and if the series of crises in which we have lived since the beginning of the century can teach us anything at all, it is, I think, the simple fact that there are no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly, no general rules under which to subsume the particular cases with any degree of certainty.” With these words Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) encapsulated what throughout her life she regarded as the problematic nature of the relation of philosophy to politics, or of theory to practice, or, more simply and precisely, of thinking to acting.”

A vital question, daily.

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, Schocken books, New York, 2003

*

Why should anyone outside the United States of America care about the narrowing of eligibility criteria to the “green card” that allows newcomers to work there? Because, outside whatever empathy you may experience for those people needing to rely on social services to get a foothold in their new life, you can be certain the American example will be followed elsewhere, thus spreading misery far and wide.

There is no such thing as “far-away” in our world.

*

And yes, I will be posting in French again. I’m simply tired of doing immediate translations from whatever I first write in one or the other of my “maternal languages”. If and when I choose to do so again, I will. (I’m translating some of my short stories from English to French at the moment. I suppose that provides me with all the translation exercises I need on any given day.)