Travels

Via a 1970 imprint published at Kandy, Ceylon, by the Buddhist Publication Society and the scholarly work of Bhikkhu Nanajivako, a passage from The World as Will and Respresentation as translated into English by E.F.J. Payne, a passage bearing on considerations of genre and temporal perspectives:

The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischevious trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy. [...] the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate, the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end, always give us tragedy.

Chance in the camp of comedy. Necessity on the side of tragedy. The one displays an arc through time, a pattern of decline and fall, which in its very simplicity is given to a complex discursvie place occupied by an "us" always on this side of the full story. The multiplicity of the chance occurances cluster but are not gathered up in the completion of an end. Hence "scenes" from but never the whole comedy is on offer.

Wherever Schopenhauer takes the asymmetry between chance and necessity and between tragedy and comedy it is worth pausing before departing in some direction to ask if the chance coming together of the reader and the text is always tragic. The life and its story are not one and the same. There is room here for something uncannily other. An unoccupied territory beyond tragedy or comedy and utterly improvized sur le vif.

And so for day 3
17.12.2006