Some acquaintances indulge themselves in mild ridicule at this minimalist approach of mine. They think either that the lottery itself is a waste of time, or that I should invest more. At the end of his Memoirs of my Life and Writings, I find Gibbon explaining my views on this subject. I too see no reason to be perfectly easy about anything:
The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful. This day may possibly be my last: but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow about fifteen years. [Mr. Buffon, from our disregard of the possibility of death within the four and twenty hours, concludes that a chance, which falls below or rises above ten thousand to one, will never affect the hopes or fears of a reasonable man. The fact is true, but our courage is the effect of thoughtlessness, rather than of reflection. If a public lottery were drawn for, the choice of an immediate victim, and if our name were inscribed on one of the ten thousand tickets, should we be perfectly easy?]
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3 comments:
They say you've a better chance of being struck by lightning than of winning the lottery, so I'm hoping for that. Besides, in Norway you can only win a ridiculously small amount of money on the lottery, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars or so, but there's nothing wrong with the lightning.
Grumbly, you write long interesting comments for other blogs, your audience thinks it's time for a new post here.
How's the translation coming, by the way?
Alright already, I've added a new blog! But it sometimes gets lonely on my solitary soapbox. At languagehat, I can squawk with the pre-assembled crowd. But thanks for the encouragement.
Translating Sloterdijk is even harder than I thought. I used to do technical and advertising-copy translations, but this is of course quite different. I've got a couple of pages, but I keep changing my approach, because I want convincing intermediate results (to wow the Meister). I am now doing rough paraphrase, which I will later revise and revise. I don't even think anymore of what I'm doing as "translating" - I just want to get the content across, although I have even decided that some of it will have to be cut. Sloterdijk's style has a certain nimble weightiness that I particularly don't want to try to imitate in English. The style is like the elegantly pirouetting lady hippopotami in Disney's Fantasia.
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