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A Lecture at the Sorbonne

You should study philosophy, at best,
After fifty. Build a model
Of society, all the more so. First you should
Learn to make soup, fry (if not catch)
Fish, make decent coffee.
Otherwise, moral laws
Smack of dad’s belt or a translation
From the German. You first should
Learn how to lose rather than gain,
Loathe yourself more than the tyrant,
Shell out half your measly paycheck on rent
For years on end before holding forth
On the triumph of justice. Which always comes
At least twenty-five years too late.

You should study a philosopher’s work through the prism
Of experience or wearing glasses (which nearly amounts to the same thing),
As when the letters run together and
The naked dame on the rumpled sheets is once again
A photograph for you or a reproduction
Of an artist’s painting. Genuine love of
Wisdom does not insist on reciprocity
And ends not in marriage
To a hefty tome published in Göttingen
But in indifference to oneself,
In the blush of shame; sometimes, in an elegy.
(Somewhere, a streetcar clangs, eyelids droop,
Soldiers return from a brothel, singing;
Only the rain is reminiscent of Hegel.)

The truth is there is no
Truth. This doesn’t exempt us
From responsibility. On the contrary:
Ethics is the selfsame vacuum, filled by human
Behavior almost continuously;
The selfsame universe, if you like.
And the gods love the Good not for its eyes,
But because they wouldn’t exist were it not for the Good.
And they in turn fill the vacuum,
Perhaps even more systematically
Than we do, for we are
Unreliable. Although there are more of us
Than ever before, this is no Greece:
We are undone by low cloud cover and, as mentioned above, rain.

You should study philosophy when
You have no need of philosophy. When you have a hunch
The chairs in your living room and the Milky Way
Are interconnected, and more closely than causes and effects, than you
And your relatives. And that what constellations
And chairs have in common is insensibility, inhumanity.
This a bond stronger than copulation
Or blood! Naturally, you shouldn’t try
To resemble things. On the other hand, when
You’re ill, you don’t necessarily have to convalesce
Or worry how you look. This is what
People over fifty know. Hence, when they
Look into a mirror, they sometimes confuse aesthetics with metaphysics.

Original

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A Russian emigrant student in France yelled at Russia’s top investigator Alexander Bastrykin this week during a panel at the Sorbonne, calling him a murderer and accusing him of launching politically motivated criminal probes.

An unidentified male student was apparently angered with Bastrykin’s evasive replies to questions about the prosecution of Greenpeace activists from the Arctic Sunrise and participants at the opposition rally on Bolotnaya Ploshchad in May 2012, French media and eyewitnesses reported on the Internet.

An eyewitness of the incident, Lolita Gruzdeva, posted a video on her Instagram account late Wednesday in one of which an unidentified male student yells at Bastrykin in French.

In another video posted by Gruzdeva, the same young man yells at Bastrykin in Russian, “You are a criminal!”

The student’s outburst happened after Bastrykin, replying to questions from participants of the meeting, said that the fate of Greenpeace activists would be decided by the court system and that the denial of medical assistance to a hunger-striking suspect in the Bolotnaya trial, Sergei Krivov, was not his business, Gruzdeva wrote on her Twitter account Wednesday.

Source:  Moscow Times