ウォール街の伝説の予測士

Marc Faber&Victor:2人の著名投資家マーク・ファーバーとVictorのブログ

彼らの目はいつもOPENです

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

— Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

I am fascinated by the diversity of these opening lines. Some are simple and peaceful, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel”; some are beautifully crafted, such as Dickens’s “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...” and Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night ...”. They vary in length from just a few words (Heller’s “It was love at first sight”) to a substantial paragraph (Stevenson’s opening line in Treasure Island). Then I thought about those feminists who might take offence at Johnson’s “Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women”; or Sorrentino’s “... stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings”; or Eliot’s “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress”; or Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (The ultra-liberals have now determined, after incurring more than $300 million in student debts researching the subject, that Jane Austen, who passed away more than 200 years ago, was a racist. For this rare insight, we should all be deeply indebted, and make a contribution, to the BLM movement ...)

Some opening lines are shocking and immediately engage the reader’s interest, such as Orwell’s “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”; and Kafka’s “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested” and “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”.

The reader might like to take the time to consider which of these opening lines you like best. I find Ballard’s “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash” to be extremely funny, while Gaddis’s “Justice? You get justice in the next world[;] in this world you have the law” to be pragmatic and realistic. Naturally, I also remember from my childhood the line with which many fairy tales opened: “Once upon a time ...”, which in recent years has changed somewhat (see Figure 1).
While I was studying these opening lines, I was struck by an observation Victor Teicher, a friend of more than 30 years, made on his blog: “I am who I am I am what I am I am why I am.” (Formerly a very successful New York–based hedge fund manager, Victor now publishes his philosophical observations at https://iawia.net/, which I highly
recommend. I find that his daily
blog relieves me of the irritation
I suffer on reading the relentless
nonsense and lies generated by
politicians such as Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortez.) For instance,
Teicher writes:
A professor wrote on a chalkboard: “A woman without her man is nothing.” He then asked the students
in his class to punctuate the sentence. The men in the class wrote: “A woman, without her man, is nothing.” The women wrote: “A woman, without her, man is nothing.”
Our perceptions are as much a function of our
Figure 1 If I get elected ...
Source: bilama
6 the Gloom, boom & Doom report
March 2021
identities as they are of what we are looking at. However, as we habitually assume our identities, we are generally unaware we are doing so and of how our identities affect our experiences.
On www.quora.com, you can find hundreds of comments on this sentence, which some consider to be sexist because it either puts down women or it puts down men. I recommend that woke youths pursue further deep studies on gender identity, ideally at an Ivy League university, which will increase student debts by another few billion dollars.
To Teicher’s comment that “Our perceptions are as much a function of our identities as they are of what we are looking at”, I would add: “Our perceptions also depend on the perspective from which we are looking at facts, history, and ongoing events.”