“Week in review,” by Suzanna Murawski (original) (raw)

Recent stories of note:

“The troublesome idealism of Simone Weil”
Lucasta Miller, The Spectator

In her book The Sovereignty of Good, the philosopher Iris Murdoch writes, “To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.” If this is true, it was certainly the case with Simone Weil (of whom Murdoch was a champion): the French philosopher advocated for a concept of “attention”—one so powerful that the attender’s sense of self falls away—and also, as Lucasta Miller writes for The Spectator, was “preternaturally altruistic” from a young age, joining labor strikes at age ten and later, despite clumsiness and physical ineptitude, volunteering in the Spanish Civil War. Reviewing a recently released volume of Weil’s letters, Miller muses that there is often a fine line between philosophical and pathological. Readers of Weil’s missives can judge for themselves where she falls.

“Voynich Manuscript scans reveal early decoding attempt”
Garry Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Calling all those who are fluent in Voynichese. Admittedly, that’s a party of zero, though new scans of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript reveal that one of its seventeenth-century owners may have made some progress. The illustrated, handwritten fifteenth-century codex has baffled researchers with its unknown and, so far, undecipherable script—perhaps it’s an invented language, a code, written glossolalia, or simply a hoax. Recent scans reveal that Johannes Marcus Marci, a Prague doctor who owned the manuscript from 1662 to 1665, wrote into the margins three columns of letters: two in the Roman alphabet and one of Voynichese script. Perhaps Marci’s since-faded marginalia will help to decipher the puzzling document.

“Re-Possessed”
Gary Saul Morson, Commentary

When Dostoevsky was an idealistic twentysomething, he channeled his energies into the revolutionary Petrashevsky Circle, serving four years in a Siberian prison camp as a result. This brush with revolution helped the author to write one of his psychologically acute and prophetic masterpieces, Demons, which follows the schemes of charismatic revolutionaries in a Russian town. As Gary Saul Morson writes for Commentary, the novel is even more scathing toward gullible fellow travelers than to totalitarian true believers: in a meeting of revolutionaries, someone says, “Do you know how many we will catch by little, ready-made ideas?” The novel’s prescience shocked readers in the aftermaths of the USSR, Mao’s China, and the Khmer Rouge—and, Morson warns, we should not let ourselves be shocked again.