“The young desire to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.”
—A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (which is excellent and highly recommended so far).
Category Archives: Life
The death of literature part 11,274, from Saul Bellow
“From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early ’30s, taught that our old tired civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.”
That’s from Saul Bellow’s “Hidden Within Technology’s Empire, a Republic of Letters” for the New York Times’ Writers on Writing collection. Fortunately he didn’t listen to the various Spenglers of his day. I often find it amusing to read the various predictions of literature’s demise, which have so frequently been trumpeted in the 20th Century and now the 21st; Orwell does a good job with the same theme in his collected essays.
Although being wrong in the past doesn’t necessarily equate to being wrong in the present, the poor track records of both religious apocalypse and the demise of reading tend to make me skeptical of new claims about either.
Life: On mysteries and Freud
“[Freud] seems throughout this span of time to have been preoccupied with the greatness of human intuitions and the universality of human strivings not only to solve but to participate in the mysteries of life.”
— Gregory Zilboorg, from the introduction to Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
And really, shouldn’t we all be preoccupied with greatness and participation?
Life: Arist and critic's edition
“He’s also a complete sell-out, unlike the rest of you, which gives him a certain kind of integrity.”
—Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison
Life: Arist and critic’s edition
“He’s also a complete sell-out, unlike the rest of you, which gives him a certain kind of integrity.”
—Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison
Life: Critics and artists edition
“A man who tells me my play is very bad, is less my enemy than he who lets it die in silence. A man, whose business it is to be talked of, is much helped by being attacked.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides)
Life: Writing edition
“Interviewer: To write, that is to sit in judgment over oneself.
Robertson Davies: Yes.”
Life: On learning
Gandalf: “I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Life: Occupation and metaphysics edition courtesy of Alain de Botton
“[The accountant] has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe.”
—Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.
(The obvious question arises: can’t you be both a Business Unit Senior Manager and a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe? In any event, you can read more of his thoughts on work in his article “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor: It’s time for an ambitious new literature of the office.”)
Life: New Yorker edition
“… to emigrate is to become a foreigner in two places at once.”
—”Briefly Noted”, the New Yorker, 1 June 2009
The Story's Story 