Arrow humor

Back in Paris, I used to collect all kinds of documents in which arrows were used—in one way or another—as metaphorical symbols. At a comical level, this was one of my favorites:

The dispirited fellow is trying to pen a short message (to be published in a newspaper, no doubt, because this was well before the birth of the Internet) that might enable him to find a female. We can read the first three versions, all of which have been crossed out and discarded. I've expanded the abbreviations and translated them into English:

— Man, 40 years old, dynamic, intelligent, cultivated, sense of humor, is seeking a young woman, maximum age 28, for a private relationship.

— Male, new style, is looking for a moderate feminist, maximum age 28, for contacts of a different kind, prospective happiness.

— Creative guy, tender and intense, wishes to encounter a young woman of 28 for excursions into space-time.

The final version is definitely less inspired, more down to earth:

— Fellow, depressive, inwardly phallocratic, outwardly open-minded, is looking for anything at all, maximum age 28, so he can listen to her moaning.

As you can see, Cupid is somewhat dubitative about the tone of the looking-for-love message, and it's not at all obvious that he's about to fire an arrow at a lucky 28-year-old female.

The cartoonist Claire Brétecher is celebrated in the French-speaking world for her depictions of frustrated adolescents (female, above all) trying to come to terms with modern society, parents, peer companions, sexuality, etc. In the case of the present cartoon, Brétecher worked for the Parker pen company, whose elegantly-designed writing implements have always been associated with the arrow symbol. Notice, for example, that the arrow held by Cupid is identical to the model found in the Parker logo. Notice too (a subtle detail) that the fellow has several pens on his table, enabling him to use differing nib widths and handwriting styles for his trial-and-error attempts at lecherous self-marketing.

The French company was courageous in calling upon Brétecher to create this excellent cartoon for their publicity. Today, I'm not sure that many big companies would be prepared to link their marketing communications to this kind of second-degree humor evoking primitive machism.

Our daily bread

A month ago, well after 10 o'clock in the evening on the state-owned TV channel that specializes in documentaries (France 5), a program about bread utterly enthralled me. I was dismayed that such a fascinating and fundamental subject should be dealt with, late in the evening, on a relatively secondary media platform. A few days later, however, I learned that I had been far from alone in watching this wonderful celebration of our daily bread. Over three-quarters of a million viewers had been intrigued and subjugated, like me, by this subject.


Funnily enough, one of the stars of the show was a French-speaking US academic who explained that he had been searching doggedly for a concrete theme enabling him to tackle a vast research subject: the marvelous specificity of French culture. Then suddenly, the ideal subject hit him in the face, as it were: French bread! In fact, the bread theme hit him simultaneously in the nose, the eyes and even the ears… prior to the mouth. (When freshly-baked baguettes are taken out of the oven, the cooling crust makes a gentle crackling sound for a few minutes. Bakers say that their bread is "singing".) A correctly-prepared and perfectly-baked French baguette is indeed an exotic masterpiece of everyday gastronomy that deserves admiration and universal respect.

A few days after watching this TV program, I dropped in at a ceramics store on the outskirts of Valence to make inquiries about their wood-burning stone bread ovens. I said jokingly to the lady who was giving me documentation: "Can you guess what made me think about the idea of installing a bread oven?" She answered immediately: "I suppose you watched the marvelous TV program on bread, a few nights ago." I had the impression that I had been drawn into some kind of bread fraternity.

Meanwhile, on the other side of what they refer to as the English Channel (which the French call la Manche), look at this ugly tasteless stuff—devoid of structure and texture—that they refer to as "bread":

Apparently the Brits invented this kind of foodstuff about half-a-century ago (which is really weird, when you think about it, since they're located just across the water from France), and they're as proud as hell, today, to be able to claim that they've exported the recipe to faraway places such as Australia, South Africa and South America.

I've just been reading an article in the UK press which reveals that the invention of this stuff was the work of "research bakers at Chorleywood". I have the impression that many British folk who've grown accustomed to this product would be most upset if they heard me saying that I find this "bread" utterly insipid. Maybe there are British bread-eaters who would be nauseated and physically ill if they were forced to sit down at an outdoor café table and eat a crisp fragment of a freshly-baked baguette with a chunk of Camembert cheese. Besides, I can already hear the whine of members of the Aussie community telling me that there's no better stuff on the planet than white cotton-wool factory-made sliced bread from Sydney smeared with yucky Vegemite. Thankfully, I don't need to get involved in discussions on questions of that kind. I have the good fortune of living in France.

Constant rain at Gamone

When it's raining at Gamone, I don't usually step outside to take photos. But yesterday, I decided to do so. So, I took this photo of the Cournouze with my Nikon in one hand and an umbrella in the other.

The dogs followed me in the rain, no doubt wondering what the hell I was up to.

If I were a little more courageous, I would take my video camera out in the bad weather, because there's a fascinating sequence that I would love to shoot. I'm talking of the movement of low clouds as they drift rapidly into the Choranche circus (round valley), no more than a hundred meters above the house. The first time I observed this phenomenon, at St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse in 1993, I was amazed. Up until then, I had always imagined that moving clouds are necessarily high in the sky. Here at Gamone, this phenomenon is quite commonplace.

What's happening here?

I like this kind of photo. It forces you to think, to ask questions. What the hell is actually happening here? Maybe the police have just cornered a dangerous psychopath disguised as a Disneyland employee. Why are the two guys in blue shirts wielding simple wooden clubs, whereas the police officer appears to be equipped with a high-tech military weapon? Is the "creature" still alive? Is it about to be killed by the policeman taking aim? How come the people wandering around in the background don't seem to be particularly alarmed?

I don't think I could have guessed the true facts before they were revealed to me by the accompanying press article. They're employees of a Chinese zoo, and they're simply practicing an emergency drill involving the escape of one of their tigers. The weapon is designed to fire harmless anesthetic tranquilizer darts, capable of sending a tiger into a nice deep sleep. In the following photos, prior to the final standoff, we see the ferocious make-believe beast bounding across a road and hiding in the bushes, ready to pounce on zoo visitors:

And here's my favorite photo, showing a real tiger watching the show from his glass cage as the fake creature gets carted off on a stretcher, like a dazed rugby man being taken off the playing field:

I can imagine the authentic beast murmuring to itself: "OK, you bunch of silly buggers, one of these days we'll see if events in the real world are likely to turn out just as nicely as that!"

Bring out your raped!

Last night, on France's national TV news, Kenneth Thompson, the US lawyer representing Nafissatou Diallo, launched an appeal for facts about sexual events involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

This pathetic call for help—from a Black American who seemed to be communicating with the planet Mars—reminded me of a notorious Monty Python sketch.

If Thompson cries out long enough, maybe he'll entice a few morbid bidders. But they'll have a tough job faced with a trio such as this:

The alleged victims are likely to end up whispering sadly, like the Monty Python fellow, that they're not really raped yet. It might be regrettable, if not downright wrong (whatever that might mean in the sexual domain), but the fact remains that, whenever a certain male and a certain female happen to be the only concerned individuals in the case, it's often hard to prove that rape has truly occurred. Rape is a terrible bolt of lightning that evokes a violent solitary criminal act. But most observers—even hoodwinked romantic puritanical Americans—find it easier and more plausible to believe that it takes two to tango.

As Confucious said: "Man with trousers down around ankles runs much more slowly than woman with skirt above thighs."

BREAKING NEWS: The lawyer of Tristane Banon—the young French woman who claimed that DSK assaulted her sexually a decade ago—has made it clear that his client will not be responding to Thompson's appeal. In modern French, there's a verb that might be translated as "to instrumentalize". Imagine a situation in which an individual X makes use of an individual Y as a kind of human object, or instrument, with the purpose of solving a problem that only concerns individual X. Often, the solution of this problem might not necessarily have any positive outcome whatsoever as far as individual Y is concerned. In this kind of situation, we might say that individual X is instrumentalizing individual Y. Well, it appears that Tristane Banon does not wish to be instrumentalized by Kenneth Thompson. Incidentally, the crime of blunt rape provides a textbook example of a notoriously ugly way in which a female can be totally instrumentalized by a male.

Blog metronome

Often, the interruption of my blogging activities for a few days is a healthy sign. It can indicate that I've become involved in some other kind of activity that seems to be of a higher priority and maybe more rewarding than the ephemeral pulses of my blog metronome.

Recently, in my blog post entitled Voices from Vienna [display], I included a copy of a short personal letter sent to me in 1976 by the great Vienna-born art critic Ernst Gombrich. I forwarded a link to my blog to the people in charge of the Gombrich archives, for I imagined that it was my duty to inform them of this interesting little letter (in which Gombrich mentions his friend Karl Popper). Well, to cut a long story short, they are indeed interested in this document, and the circumstances in which my correspondence with Gombrich took place. So I started to dig through my personal archives in order to reconstruct the context in which I had written to Gombrich. At one point, I suggested to the British professor Richard Woodfield (a specialist on Gombrich) that I intended to deal with these questions in my blog, as soon as possible. Richard's honest reaction caught me a little off guard: "Blogs themselves are ephemeral affairs." He would prefer to receive from me something a little more substantial, fit to be incorporated into academic archives. And he's so right. In spite of all our wishful thinking and vain attempts to write words of wisdom, or even to entertain in a wholesome style, our poor metronome blogs remain ephemeral creations, in which bloggers flit gaily from one theme to another, often clumsily and inexpertly, while their commenters continue nevertheless to support and applaud their literary heroes of note with lots of LOLs and "I agrees". Finally, I was happy to tell Richard Woodfield that I intended to create an in-depth PDF document describing the context of my contact with Ernst Gombrich. So, in the near future, my blog will contain a short post that merely invites you to download the article in question (on which I am currently working).

Pursuing the theme of voices from Vienna, I had intended to talk about an event that left me with many fond memories: a Unesco consultation of experts on communication that took place at the Berghotel Tulbingerkogel in Mauerbach, near Vienna (on the edge of the Wienerwald), from 15 to 18 April 1980.

We came from nine countries, including the Soviet Union and Japan. The US participant was Lotfi Zadeh, renowned for his mathematical invention of fuzzy sets. The chairman was the Austrian musicologist Kurt Blaukopf (a specialist on Gustav Mahler), whom I had already encountered when I was working in Paris with Pierre Schaeffer (the inventor of musique concrète). My personal participation came about through my contacts in Paris with the French participant Yves Stourdzé, a sociology academic who had been a comrade of Daniel Cohn-Bendit at Nanterre in 1968.

Anecdote: Stepping into a tourist bus for some sight-seeing in Vienna, Yves Stourdzé said to me: "I've just received a phone call from Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre has died." Curiously, that trivial announcement of the philosopher's death [on 15 April 1980] made a lasting impact upon me… on a par with my being informed, say, that Kennedy had been shot, or that terrorists were flying planes into skyscrapers.

As for the meeting itself (for which I was the elected rapporteur), my blog would be an inadequate medium for delving into the themes that were discussed there. In any case, our meeting gave rise to a special issue of Unesco's International Social Science Journal [vol 32, no 2, 1980]. My personal participation consisted of expressing one of my favorite French themes: the way in which a blending of the semaphore towers of Claude Chappe and the punched-card weaving apparatus of Joseph-Marie Jacquard set the scene for the arrival, a century down the road, of a certain US company that gained celebrity and made a fortune through the manufacture and international marketing of so-called "business machines".


Over the last week, during the time that my blog metronome ceased its audible ticking, I was also enthralled by the fascinating story of the bacterial epidemic in Germany, but I soon discovered that it has become such a complex affair—intertwining several different dimensions: biology, public health, economics, etc—that it would be senseless and reckless to run the risk of writing insipid nonsense about such a huge problem. It's incredible that unexpected incompetence in Germany has given rise to so many disastrous false revelations concerning the source of the epidemic. Meanwhile, I've been working on a short blog post that sets forth my impressions of this affair, but it's probably preferable to refrain from saying anything for the moment.

Undisturbed by the ticks of a metronome, I was also able to take advantage of the warm days at Gamone (a little wet at the present moment) to get around to rereading, at last (for the first time since my move to Gamone), the hermit's hero: the American poet-naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who lived on his own in the woods of Massachusetts, alongside the lake named Walden, for two years. He was outdone in the stakes of solitude, in a way, by Master Bruno [1030-1101], who survived in his Chartreuse hermitage for six years. But I emerge far ahead of both of them, of course, in that I've been living on my own here at Gamone for 17 years!

Finally, let me get back to the metronome. Whenever my blog metronome stops ticking for more than a few days (as has been the case over the last week), I inevitably receive worried messages, of one kind or another, asking whether I'm still alive. At such times, I get around to wondering whether some people might be more attracted by the regular beats of my metronome than by the actual music of my blog (if I may be excused for claiming pretentiously that the latter is supposed to be present). To paraphrase an Aussie pollie who's famous for his blunt colorful language: Is it possible that these people receive my blog as all tick and no tune?

Early TV technology

In 1928, when this incredibly futuristic cover of the US magazine Radio News was published, my father was ten years old.

Two decades later, when I myself was a little boy, sick with scarlet fever in an isolation ward of the hospital in Grafton, my dear father took out a soldering iron and built me from scratch a galena-crystal radio receiver so that I could listen to the local 2GF radio station… which sent me a "get well" message. But TV was still a long way off in the future...

In the above cover, we might imagine that the gentleman is using a hand-held device (connected to the set by a red cord) to select a channel. Not exactly. Primitive TV receivers had trouble staying in synchronization with the camera. So, the viewer had to use such a manual device to nudge the picture constantly back into sync. In any case, there was not yet a choice of channels.

As was the case for many Australians, the first stuff I ever watched on TV was black-and-white news coverage (not yet live, of course) of the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. If I remember correctly, relatives (Nancy and Peter in Sydney) had acquired their first TV set for that purpose, and it was in their East Roseville home that I became acquainted with this technological marvel.

Torrid times in French politics

Objective methods make it possible to measure media buzz in a quantitative fashion. This statistical approach informs us, apparently, that Dominique Strauss-Kahn happens to be, at the present moment, the most well-known and asked-about celebrity personage in the universe. Jeez, you might say, this is crazy: DSK doesn't have anything like half the arse of Pippa [display]. Isn't it amazing, the way that buzz can evolve in just a few weeks…

From May 2002 to March 2004, during the presidency of Jacques Chirac, when France was governed by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the minister in charge of youth, education and research was Luc Ferry.

The surname of this 60-year-old philosopher remains mythically magic in the modern French republic.

Luc's great-uncle Jules Ferry, a former mayor of Paris, was responsible for the glorious law that promoted "free, laic and compulsory schooling" in the Troisième République. He might be thought of as the spiritual granddaddy of all the smart (and less bright) republican schoolkids who created—and are still creating—the French nation as we know it today. A fabulous heritage!

Last Monday evening, on a French TV channel, Luc Ferry stirred up shit by declaring that many people were aware of the fact that a former French minister had once been found playing around with little boys in Marrakech. Needless to say, this sort of declaration cannot possibly be ignored by legal authorities, neither in France nor in Morocco. For the moment, everybody's trying to guess the identity of the alleged wrongdoer. This anonymous ex-minister risks a lot if the allegations were to be proven… and he might well compete with DSK, as soon as he's identified, for the title of the buzziest man in the Cosmos.

Now, even if many of us were to feel that this kind of notoriety is neither genuinely deserved nor advantageous for France, we might ask rhetorically: What the hell can we do about it?

Dodgy bridge

I cross the Isère several times a week by means of this bridge, between Choranche and St-Marcellin, which dates from around 1953.

The bridge is located alongside a small and ancient village named La Sône (derived from the Latin expression for "sonorous water"), which I mentioned in my blog post of 30 June 2009 entitled Weaving machines [display]. Here's another view of the bridge, photographed from the café in the middle of La Sône.

A week or so ago, the bridge was closed for vehicular traffic, for an unspecified period of time. The red and white barrier that you can see in the above photo indicates the place at which an unexpected engineering mishap occurred. Look closely at the following photo, and compare the levels of the road on either side of the concrete pylon.

There's a difference in levels of about a dozen centimeters due to a curious collapse of the main span at that point.

The following closeup photo zooms in on the precise spot where a corner of the span appears to have suddenly dropped.

This incident must have scared shit out of the first driver who hit the bump. I wonder if he stopped to see what had happened, or whether he put his foot down on the accelerator to get the hell off the bridge for fear it might fall into the river. If ever his encounter with the bump had left him with a split second for philosophizing, he might have realized that he was face-to-face with what you could call an existential decision.

Online clothes

For the first time ever, I've just purchased clothes on the Internet. It wasn't such a big deal: just a few quite ordinary T-shirts, some of them black, and the others white. And not particularly expensive.

It might be thought of as a small step for the blogger in front of his Macintosh, but it'll be a huge step for William parading through the village streets wearing sexy T-shirt gear purchased online through La Redoute. If ever I were to obtain any breathtaking visual scoops on this affair, I would of course let you know.

Painted-canvas scroll from Mumbai

When Christine, our daughter Emmanuelle and I were returning from Sydney to Paris in 1969, we stopped over for a couple of days with French friends in Mumbai (then known as Bombay). One of the objects we purchased there—with the help of our hosts: the French commercial attaché and his Breton wife, one of Christine's school friends—was a painted-canvas scroll, 1.25 meters in width and almost 5 meters long. Upon moving into the house at Gamone, I became the guardian of this treasure, since I happened to have three adjacent walls that were disposed in such a way that the entire scroll could be viewed.

If I understand correctly (which I surely don't, because my awareness of Indian culture is on a par with my knowledge of Australian Aboriginal languages and traditions), the images are intended to depict and celebrate the glorious achievements of an ancient maharajah whose forces rode to battle, not only on horses, but also on elephants. This is the fellow in question, at the center of the scroll:

We see him here, elsewhere in the vast scroll, riding in parade on a splendid black steed, surrounded by guardsmen mounted on pale ponies, while a pair of his subjects are applauding as if they were watching the Bastille Day parade in Paris.

Oops, it probably wasn't a parade. The maharajah was no doubt riding into a pitched battle! We see the brave nobleman, in the following segment of the scroll, attacking warriors mounted on an elephant. Just behind our hero, the severed head of a tiger has fallen onto the ground. To the left of the elephant, a little blue man appears to be messing around with brightly-attired women, but I don't know what he's doing, and whose side they're on.

In the following segment, our hero appears to be moving through seaside territory (blue water with white fish), accompanied by exotic beasts that might possibly be multicolored camels.

I'll leave off there, because there are many scenes in the scroll, but my ignorance of what exactly is happening prevents me from acting as an intelligently-plausible guide.

Maybe Christine and I should put this scroll on the market, in the hope that it might interest an expert capable of appreciating it seriously. Meanwhile, the maharajah and his cohorts have been gallivanting around on the wall behind my TV set at Gamone for nearly two decades. I'm ashamed to say, though, that they make so little noise—in spite of the horses, elephants, tigers and camels—that I'm barely aware of their spectacular presence.

A river and a bridge

My mother’s eldest brother, Eric Walker, liked to point out in his typical loudspoken manner that I was conceived under Bawden’s Bridge, located to the west of Grafton on the Glen Innes Road, some 20 kilometers beyond the home of the Walkers at Waterview.

He never made it clear, though, how he had obtained that trivial piece of knowledge. Besides, I could not understood why he seemed to take pleasure in shouting out this information every now and again. I can imagine a scenario in which Eric (a 29-year-old bachelor nicknamed “Farmer”) had accompanied his 21-year-old sister Kath (my future mother) and her 22-year-old boyfriend Bill Skyvington (my future father) on an excursion to Bawden’s Bridge. Counting nine months backwards from my date of birth, I imagine that the excursion must have taken place around Christmas 1939. Maybe the trip to Bawden’s Bridge was a family outing on the warm afternoon following the traditional midday Christmas dinner of spiced roast chicken, potatoes, pumpkin, steamed pudding and bottled lager. It is perfectly plausible that my future parents, inspired by the balmy atmosphere on the banks of the splendid Orara River, decided to find a secluded shady spot under the lofty span of the bridge where they could make love. Did they realize that Kath’s big brother Eric was spying on them? I shall never know. In any case, Eric was probably not accustomed to seeing live demonstrations of human sexual activities in the environment of the dairy farm at Waterview, and this chance happening starring his young sister must have impressed him greatly.

If anybody were to ask me what I thought of my parents’ choice of Bawden’s Bridge as a place to conceive me (which is not exactly the kind of question that people often ask), I would reply unhesitatingly that it was an excellent decision... although I am aware, of course, that they probably did not really do any explicit choosing. It was the sultry atmosphere and their passion that did the deciding.

The Orara—a tributary of the Clarence—is such a splendid river that one of Australia’s best-known poets, Henry Kendall [1839-1882], even celebrated it. Had my uncle Eric been a lover of poetry (which was not the case), here are verses from Kendall’s poem that he might have recited, in the shadow of the old bridge, while the young lovers went about the task of conceiving me:

The world is round me with its heat,

And toil, and cares that tire;

I cannot with my feeble feet

Climb after my desire.

But, on the lap of lands unseen,

Within a secret zone,

There shine diviner gold and green

Than man has ever known.

And where the silver waters sing

Down hushed and holy dells,

The flower of a celestial Spring —

A tenfold splendour, dwells.

Yea, in my dream of fall and brook

By far sweet forests furled,

I see that light for which I look

In vain through all the world —

The glory of a larger sky

On slopes of hills sublime,

That speak with God and morning, high

Above the ways of Time!

Giants invade Nantes

A few days ago, in the ancient city of Nantes, on the shores of the Atlantic estuary of the Loire, the citizens discovered—on the square in front of the great 15th-century cathedral—a strange apparition.

A huge block of melting ice contained what appeared to be the dormant form of a giant black dog. Within a few hours, the sun had melted a hole in the ice, and the beast's snout appeared.

By this time, the people of Nantes had heard that the great black dog was named Xolo, and that he came from a mysterious region of Mexico, inhabited by giant creatures. By the end of the afternoon, the dog's entire body had escaped from its tomb of ice, and the disjointed mass was laid to rest on a pile of stuffed bags.

Early the next morning, Xolo woke up in the company of his mistress, Little Girl Giant.

Soon, Xolo and Little Girl Giant were parading through the streets of Nantes, surrounded by noisy throngs of onlookers.

Elsewhere in the city, they met up with another giant, the Peasant.


The street-theatre company behind these spectacular happenings, named Royal de Luxe, was created in Provence by Jean-Luc Courcoult in 1979, but it has been installed in Nantes for the last two decades, and funded by the city.

The Socialist mayor of Nantes, Jean-Marc Cayrault, is excited like a child by all this noise and action, and he's tweeting us constantly about what's happening, and sending out photos.

It's funny, the way we're fascinated by carnival giants. I've often wondered whether there might be some truth about the fabulous biblical stories of the divine giants known as Nephilim, who used to screw our ordinary womenfolk.

In those days as well as later, when the sons of the gods had intercourse with the daughters of mortals and children were born to them, the Nephilim were on the earth; they were the heroes of old, people of renown.
— Genesis 6:4

Maybe we recognize the carnival figures as archaic long-lost companions, or maybe even remote ancestors. And who knows: maybe, one of these days, advanced DNA testing will reveal that some of us carry Nephilim genes, putting us in a race apart from ordinary mortals. Now, if I were to follow up those lines of thought, and meditate upon them while smoking grass, maybe I would end up as crazy as a Creationist, ready to jump aboard Noah's Ark.

Voices from Vienna

When I was a student in Sydney, already fascinated by symbolic logic (as I still am), two of my intellectual heroes were the eccentric British lord Bertrand Russell and the equally exotic Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

An English translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be downloaded today from the Gutenberg website [access]. The philosopher's father, in the industrial context of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was a wealthy iron-and-steel baron—of the Krupp or Rothschild kind. When the dreamy melancholic 24-year-old Ludwig inherited this fortune, he gave some of it away, anonymously, to struggling compatriots such as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, often mentioned in this blog [display].

At a philosophical level, Russell and Wittgenstein represented the great British tradition of empiricism, based upon the common-sense notion that we learn the truth about the world by looking at events that happen and employing the time-honored technique of inductive reasoning. Now, another Viennese philosopher would soon throw a spanner into the works by demonstrating convincingly that scientific knowledge is certainly not acquired by such an illusory empiricist approach.

Karl Popper proposed that an exceptional scientist succeeds in explaining the universe, not by studying data of a laboratory kind, but through his/her intellect and imagination, maybe while seated alone at a desk in the middle of the night. Subsequently, experimental observations enable the inventor of a scientific theory to determination whether the latter might have flaws in it, in which case the theory would need to be corrected, improved or maybe abandoned, to be replaced one day by a better theory.

Today, there is no doubt not a single serious scientist in the world who wouldn't agree entirely with Popper, who is now considered by many intellectuals as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Popper is lauded particularly by the Oxford quantum physicist David Deutsch, author of The Fabric of Reality, mentioned in my blog post of July 2007 entitled Brilliant book [display].

A third Viennese intellectual who would achieve fame in the English-speaking world was Ernst Gombrich, regarded by many as the greatest art historian of the 20th century. Settled in London from 1936, he went on to become a distinguished member of the art establishment. His opus The Story of Art (1950) was the first of a rich series of publications that won him acclaim in academic circles, and led to his being knighted. Gombrich had always been a close friend of his compatriot Popper, and actually played a major role in drawing the attention of the English-speaking world to the Viennese philosopher and helping him to publish The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).

Back in 1976, I wrote to Ernst Gombrich asking for his advice concerning a writing project on which I was working. In a nutshell, I was wondering whether I might be able to put together a history of the use of the arrow symbol in both science and society. Here are the two pages [click to enlarge] of his friendly reply, in which he alludes to his compatriot Popper:



Let me conclude by a couple of trivial anecdotes concerning Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Some people (but not me) imagine that the education meted out by a fine old school can be a guarantee that students will evolve naturally into fine citizens with noble characters. That's what is meant by nurture. Well, around 1903, 14-year-old Wittgenstein went to a reputed establishment in Linz known as the Realschule. And we have no reasons to deny that the spirit of this school played a part in transforming young Ludwig into the outstanding philosopher that he was to become. But there's a hitch in this thinking. At the same school, Ludwig had a mate, just six days older than himself, named Adolf Hitler.

An Australian author, Kimberley Cornish, has even suggested that the future Fuhrer hated the Jewish boy to such an extent that Wittgenstein symbolized the entire race that would soon enrage the mad dictator, as expressed in his Mein Kampf. Cornish's book is nevertheless controversial, in that there is no firm proof that Wittgenstein and Hitler were aware of one another's identity in that high school of 300 students. There is a school photo in which Hitler certainly appears:


But it has never been confirmed—except, curiously, by the photographic services of the Victorian police in Australia—that the boy whom Cornish has labeled as Wittgenstein is correctly identified. And some critics point out that Wittgenstein and Hitler, although they attended the Realschule at the same time, were never in the same class.

My final anecdote, of a personal nature, was related already in my blog post of July 2008 entitled Danger scale [display], in which I announced with excitement my discovery of the writings of Steven Pinker. Since the Harvard psychologist's book deals with children's acquisition of language, I mentioned a story that had amazed me when I heard it, from an English lady named Elizabeth Anscombe, who happened to be a Catholic friend of my wife's parents in Brittany. Well, I learned later on from my mother-in-law (after the lady's departure, much to my regret) that Elizabeth Anscombe, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge, was in fact one of the world's leading authorities on Wittgenstein. I was terribly frustrated to realize that I had missed out on an opportunity of chatting with Elizabeth Anscombe about Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom she had encountered personally)… but Christine's mother could never have suspected that her Australian son-in-law might be interested in an obscure Viennese philosopher.