“It seems to be a continuous historical truth that once you get rich you then have to fight to stay rich.”
—Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects
Category Archives: Life
Life: Active Irresponsibility edition
“Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility.”
—Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Reading it today, I can’t help but get a bloggy feeling.
Reading and empathy: “Why I Read” edition
“Literature is, among other things, an undermining of the coherent worldview.”
—Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books.
I have a weakness for this genre but halfway through this is not my favorite in it, despite many quotable individual sentences. His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art remains my favorite Lesser, although the audience for it is narrow and probably includes few readers of this blog. Do many people outside the essay-writing set care about gender politics in art?
Life: The writing life edition
“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners.”
—Truman Capote, The Paris Review Interviews
Life: The loss of memory and the living in the moment edition
“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.”
—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, first published in 1957 and yet a shockingly good description of today.
One definition of brilliance: willingness to appear to be the fool
From The Making of the Atomic Bomb:
[In 1939] Szilard told Einstein about the Columbia secondary-neutron experiments and his calculations toward a chain reaction in uranium and graphite. Long afterward he would recall his surprised that Einstein had not yet heard of the possibility of a chain reaction. When he mentioned it Einstein interjected, “Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht!“—”I never thought of that!” He was nevertheless, says Szilard, “very quick to see the implications and perfectly willing to do anything that needed to be done. He was willing to assume responsibility for sounding the alarm even though it was quite possible that the alarm might prove to be a false alarm. The one thing most scientists are really afraid of is to make fools of themselves. Einstein was free from such a fear and this above all is what made his position unique on this occasion.
“Einstein was free from such a fear:” are you?
(Incidentally, as Eric R. Weinstein points out, “Over the past two decades I have been involved with the war on excellence:”
In the past, many scientists lived on or even over the edge of respectability with reputations as skirt chasing, hard drinking, bigoted, misogynistic, childish, slutty, lazy, politically treacherous, incompetent, murderous, meddlesome, monstrous and mentally unstable individuals such as von Neumann, Gamow, Shockley, Watson, Einstein, Curie, Smale, Oppenheimer, Crick, Ehrenfest, Lang, Teller and Grothendieck (respectively) who fueled such epithets with behaviors that indicated they appeared to care little for what even other scientists thought of their choices.
But such disregard, bordering on deviance and delinquency, was often outweighed by feats of genius and heroism. We have spent the last decades inhibiting such socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop out of our research enterprise and into startups and hedge funds. As a result our universities are increasingly populated by the over-vetted specialist to become the dreaded centers of excellence that infantilize and uniformize the promising minds of greatest agency.
Are you part of that war? I suspect Einstein cared little for respectability except when it came to being right.)
Life: Expectations edition
“Reality has a way of erasing the idea of a place that the imagination musters in anticipation of seeing it.”
—David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk
Life: The readers edition, and Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan
Both Huet and Bayle were erudites and spent their lives reading. Huet, who lived into his nineties, had a servant follow him with a book to read aloud to him during meals and breaks and thus avoid lost time. He was deemed the most read person in his day. Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.
—Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, a book that I had erroneously believed I had already “read” through the many references to it made by other books and articles. I turned out to be completely wrong, as the book is still original and almost every page has some unexpected insight; like Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind I consistently cannot predict the brilliant observations and extensions that come from the unfurling of a basic idea that is simple to understand.
Regarding the quote itself, I would add that it is not only the quantity of reading but the quality that makes erudition; reading a great number of, say, romance novels is unlikely to yield the erudition of reading broadly yet deeply. Reading a few romance novels might be essential to deep thinkers, however, for reasons that I will leave to you, or to commenters, to explain.
I also have defended reading, especially to those who say they somehow do not “have the time,” by pointing out that books often encompass years or decades of a writer’s life and thinking in a volume that can be read in just a few hours; who would not want the wisdom of 20 years distilled into an easily digestible chunk? Yet apparently many people don’t want such a gift, which is widely available for $10 – $15 at bookstores or for less from Amazon or free from many libraries. Satisfaction with your own knowledge is a sign that a mind has become barren without even realizing its own barrenness.
Life: Why read edition
“Literature is an endless source of courage and confirmation. The reader and beginning writer can count on being heartened by all the brave and original works that have been written without the slightest regard for how strange or risky they were, or for what the writer’s mother might have thought when she read them.”
—Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
EDIT: Another brilliant observation:
art implies a kind of freedom, the freedom of choice, of possibility, of the individual imagination. Which is why dictators—and large corporations—tend not to like art and artists, except those of a highly predictable and malleable sort.
What the writer does: Sherlock Holmes edition
Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result.
That’s Arthur Conan Doyle, from A Study in Scarlet, and it applies to what novelists do too: not just describe events, but put “events together in their minds” and see what happens as those events play out.
One reason I tend to argue against people who say they have no time or inclination for fiction is reality: in the form of nonfiction, even narrative nonfiction, it imposes limits on the imagination in a story (which may be one reason why so many people, especially those writing memoirs, are inclined to make shit up to make the story better). Fiction removes the reality constraint, and instead imagination imposes its own necessary and proper restraints on imagination.
At times fiction also pokes at the problems posed by reality, as in Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man. A chair is the pretext for a major fight between a married couple, and the man is describing a scene to his father-in-law:
“When she wouldn’t get out of the way, I set the bag down and took her by the shoulders. . . . Then . . . I don’t know. She must have tripped over the bag. I heard a crash, and when I turned she was there on the floor. She’d fallen into . . .”
He stops, unable to continue.
“The chair,” I say.
He stares at me through moist, confused eyes. “No, the stereo cabinet.”
“Oh, sorry,” I say. I my writing workshop I’d have explained to my students why, for symmetry, in had to be the chair.
In fiction symbols can align neatly as they so often don’t outside of fiction. The “train of events” runs smoothly or unsmoothly on the writer’s tracks, or on “their own inner consciousness.” Not always to an interesting end, but to an end that shows things nonfiction, whatever its virtues, often doesn’t.
The Story's Story 