59. Notes - Ironies galore / agnosticism defined

59. 19 February 2019

       Afternoon. You and Carol thought you had a ceiling repair by M/I Homes today, but it is next Tuesday instead. Carol is working through the 2018 tax statements. Next Monday you see financial advisor, Andy, then Carol will choose who you want to do your taxes for 2018, Andy or the accounting office in Cincinnati. - Amorella

       1359 hours. I really have an aversion to handling money. I don't know why other than in high school I failed a bookkeeping class. The principal, Mr. T. Bancroft, allowed me to drop the course since I didn't need it for graduation. I appreciated that gesture on his part. My debuts and credits rarely, if ever balanced on our class assignments. -- How do we set up this chapter critique by my soul through you, Amorella? I'm, as usual, a bit anxious when I have no idea how this is going to come about. 

       Your soul will go by the name of Miss Havisham, a character in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, will review what is important in the first chapter from a soul's perspective. - Amorella

       1424 hours. This previous paragraph is out-of-the-blue. Why would a soul wish to adopt such a name?

       This is Miss Havisham. Go to Wikipedia and I will drop in the lines of importance then explain what I wish. Out of respect for my immaterial form I would like my messages but not my initials underlined.- mh

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Miss Havisham

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Miss Havisham is a character in the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations(1861). She is a wealthy spinster, once jilted at the altar, who insists on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life. She lives in a ruined mansion with her adopted daughter, Estella. Dickens describes her as looking like "the witch of the place".

Although she has often been portrayed in film versions as very elderly, Dickens's own notes indicate that she is only in her mid-fifties. However, it is indicated in the novel that her long life away from the sunlight has aged her.

Character history

Miss Havisham's father was a wealthy brewer and her mother died shortly after she was born. Her father later remarried and had a son, named Arthur; with the family cook. Although they grew up together, Miss Havisham's relationship with her half brother was far from harmonious.

She inherited most of her father's fortune and fell in love with a man named Compeyson, who conspired with the jealous Arthur to swindle her of her riches. Her cousin, Matthew Pocket, warned her to be careful, but she was too much in love to listen. On the wedding day, while she was dressing, Miss Havisham received a letter from Compeyson and realised he had defrauded her and she had been left at the altar.

her decaying mansion Satis House – never removing her wedding dress, wearing only one shoe, leaving the wedding breakfast and cakeuneaten on the table, and allowing only a few people to see her. She even had the clocks in her mansion stopped at twenty minutes to nine: the exact time when she had received Compeyson's letter.

Time passed and Miss Havisham had her lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, adopt a daughter for her.

I had been shut up in these rooms a long time (I don't know how long; you know what time the clocks keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear and love, and save from my fate. I had first seen him when I sent for him to lay this place waste for me; having read of him in the newspapers, before I and the world parted. He told me that he would look about him for such an orphan child. One night he brought her here asleep, and I called her Estella.

From protection to revenge

While Miss Havisham's original goal was to prevent Estella from suffering as she had at the hands of a man, it changed as Estella grew older:

Believe this: when she first came, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no more. But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.

While Estella was still a child, Miss Havisham began casting about for boys who could be a testing ground for Estella's education in breaking the hearts of men as vicarious revenge for Miss Havisham's pain. Pip, the narrator, is the eventual victim; and Miss Havisham readily dresses Estella in jewels to enhance her beauty and to exemplify all the more the vast social gulf between her and Pip. When, as a young adult, Estella leaves for France to receive education, Miss Havisham eagerly asks him, "Do you feel you have lost her?"

Miss Havisham repents late in the novel when Estella leaves to marry Pip's rival, Bentley Drummle; and she realises that she has caused Pip’s heart to be broken in the same manner as her own; rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain. Miss Havisham begs Pip for forgiveness.

Until you spoke to [Estella] the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!

After Pip leaves, Miss Havisham's dress catches on fire from her fireplace. Pip rushes back in and saves her. However, she has suffered severe burns to the front of her torso (she is laid on her back), up to the throat. The last words she speaks in the novel are (in a delirium) to Pip, referencing both Estella and a note she, Miss Havisham, has given him with her signature: "Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive her!'"

A surgeon dresses her burns, and says that they are "far from hopeless". However, despite rallying for a time, she dies a few weeks later, leaving Estella as her chief beneficiary, and a considerable sum to Herbert Pocket's father, as a result of Pip's reference.

Eliza Emily Donnithorne (1826–1886) of Camperdown, Sydney, was said to have been jilted by her groom on her wedding day and spent the rest of her life in a darkened house, her rotting wedding cake left as it was on the table, and with her front door kept permanently ajar in case her groom ever returned. She was widely considered at the time to be Dickens' model for Miss Havisham, although this cannot be proven. 

In the 1965 Penguin edition, Angus Calder notes at Chapter 8 that "James Payn, a minor novelist, claimed to have given Dickens the idea for Miss Havisham – from a living original of his acquaintance. He declared that Dickens's account was 'not one whit exaggerated'." Although it is documented Dickens encountered a wealthy recluse called Elizabeth Parker on whom it is widely believed he based the character, whilst staying in Newport, Shropshire, at the aptly named Havisham Court. 

In science

The condition of the "Miss Havisham effect" has been coined by scientists to describe a person who suffers a painful longing for lost love,  which can become a physically addictive pleasure by activation of reward and pleasure centres in the brain, which have been identified to regulate addictive behaviour – regions commonly known to be responsible for craving and drug, alcohol and gambling addiction. 

Selected and edited from Wikipedia

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       1926 hours. I find it strange that my soul, or any soul for that matter, would take on the name Miss Havisham from a Dickens' novel for her own characterization.

       There are several reasons /explanations that can be derived from the above but I shall have you underline only one: "The condition of the "Miss Havisham effect" has been coined by scientists to describe a person who suffers a painful longing for lost love," The rest remain a mystery but I assure you there are at least six more that are separate from one another.- mh

       1941 hours. I am totally surprised by this. Being an agnostic, I cannot be fully swept into the concept of a soul having a personality of her/his own; however, this work is fiction because the truth of it does not have words at its base. 

       If you were not an agnostic, a doubter to the depths, boy, you would not find your heartansoulanmind in such a place as this late in life. Ironies galore. Post. - Amorella

       2234 hours. I am an agnostic because I am human. A rational mind needs to have doubts. If I do not have doubts I am not free even spiritually. If I am an atheist I do not have doubts I am, therefore, still not free.

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Agnosticism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Agnosticism is the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable.

Defining agnosticism

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle ... Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. 

— Thomas Henry Huxley

Etymology

Agnostic (from Ancient Greek ἀ- (a-), meaning 'without', and γνῶσις (gnōsis), meaning 'knowledge') was used by Thomas Henry Huxley in a speech at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869 to describe his philosophy, . . ..

. . . Huxley used the term in a broader, more abstract sense. Huxley identified agnosticism not as a creed but rather as a method of skeptical, evidence-based inquiry. 

In recent years, scientific literature dealing with neuroscience and psychology has used the word to mean "not knowable". . . ..

Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume contended that meaningful statements about the universe are always qualified by some degree of doubt. He asserted that the fallibility of human beings means that they cannot obtain absolute certainty except in trivial cases where a statement is true by definition (e.g. tautologies such as "all bachelors are unmarried" or "all triangles have three corners").

Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard

Aristotle,Anselm, Aquinas and Descartes presented arguments attempting to rationally prove the existence of God. The skeptical empiricism of David Hume, the antinomies of Immanuel Kant, and the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard convinced many later philosophers to abandon these attempts, regarding it impossible to construct any unassailable proof for the existence or non-existence of God. 

In his 1844 book, Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard writes: 

Let us call this unknown something: God. It is nothing more than a name we assign to it. The idea of demonstrating that this unknown something (God) exists, could scarcely suggest itself to Reason. For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it; and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it. For at the very outset, in beginning my proof, I would have presupposed it, not as doubtful but as certain (a presupposition is never doubtful, for the very reason that it is a presupposition), since otherwise I would not begin, readily understanding that the whole would be impossible if he did not exist. But if when I speak of proving God's existence I mean that I propose to prove that the Unknown, which exists, is God, then I express myself unfortunately. For in that case I do not prove anything, least of all an existence, but merely develop the content of a conception.

Selected and edited from Wikipedia 

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       I concur, the above selected words from Wikipedia serves as a definition of 'agnostic' from orndorff's personal and spiritual perspective. - Amorella

       From my perspective, a soul which contains orndorff's spiritual heart and mind, my view on the subject is one of being holistically spiritual, something humans are not, either when alive or dead.- mh

       2330 hours. Another surprise. I am evermore curious as to what Miss Havisham will have to say about Chapter One. 

       Post. - Amorella