(Roughly) Daily

During the period we now call the fin-de-siècle, worlds collided. Ideas were being killed off as much as being born. And in a sort of Hegelian logic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the most interesting ones arose as the offspring of wildly different parents. In particular, the last gasp of Victorian spirituality infused cutting-edge science with a certain sense of old-school mysticism. Theosophy was all the rage; Huysmans dragged Satan into modern Paris; and eccentric poets and scholars met in the British Museum Reading Room under the aegis of the Golden Dawn for a cup of tea and a spot of demonology. As a result of all this, certain commonly-accepted scientific terms we use today came out of quite weird and wonderful ideas being developed at the turn of the century. Such is the case with space, which fascinated mathematicians, philosophers, and artists with its unfathomable possibilities…

Further to yesterday’s nod to topography, and on the occasion of Halloween: hyperspace, ghosts, and colorful cubes – the work of Charles Howard Hinton and the cultural history of higher dimensions– “Notes on the Fourth Dimension.”

* H. P. Lovecraft, The Tomb

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As we get down with the dead, we might recall that it was on this date in 1756 that Giacomo Casanova, who had been incarcerated in Venice as a blasphemer, cabalist, seducer, and ruffian, escaped from prison.  He made his way to Paris where, as “Jacques Casanova, the Chevalier de Seingalt,” he wrote his autobiography, launched the lottery, and made a killing.

Illustration in Casanova’s Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la République de Venise qu’on appelle Les Plombs (Story of my Flight), 1787. From the German edition, 1788.

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Casanova circa 1750-1755 (just before the escape)

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