p. 3 The most forceful lines of a serious moral statement are usually less powerful than those of satire; and nothing will reform most men better than the depiction of their faults. It is a vigorous blow to vices to expose them to public laughter. Criticism is taken lightly, but men will not tolerate satire. They are quite willing to be mean, but they never like to be ridiculed.
p. 5 I admit that there have been times when comedy became corrupt. And what do men not corrupt every day? There is nothing so innocent that men cannot turn it to crime; nothing so good in itself that it cannot be put to bad uses.
p. 24 There are pretenders to devotion as well as to courage; and as those who are truly brave in battle are not they who make the most noise, so those who are truly devout, who ought to be imitated, are not those who make the most outward show.
p. 24 How strangely are most men made! They are never at one with nature. Reason's bounds are too small for them. They exceed its limits in every way, and often ruin the noblest of things in trying to go too far.
p. 71 DAMIS: I'll knock his brains out. CLEANTE: You talk just like a young man. If you please, moderate these outbursts of passion. We live under a reign and in an age in which violence does only harm to one's cause.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, r. Nov. 2018
p. 16 "I hardly suspected that I was boring you. After all, that bus ride was one of the more formative experiences of my life. As a mother, you should be more interested in the traumas that have created my worldview."
p. 106 Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.
p. 110 I am going to pray to St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mullatoes, for our cause in the factory. Because he is also invoked against rats, he will perhaps aid us in the office, too.
p. 110 As a lecturer Dr. Talk was renowned for the facile and sarcastic wit and easily digested generalizations that made him popular among the girl students and helped to conceal his lack of knowledge about almost everything in general and British history in particular.
p. 127 After having fought with his father for almost thirty-five years, Mr. Levy had decided that he would spend the rest of his life trying not to be bothered. But he was bothered every day that he was at Levy's Lodge by his wife simply because she resented his not wanting to be bothered by Levy Pants. And in staying away from Levy Pants, he was bothered even more by the company because something was always going wrong there. It would all be simpler and less bothersome if he would have really operated Levy Pants and put in an eight hour day as manager. But just the name "Levy Pants" gave him heartburn.
p. 159 Mrs. Levy was a woman of interests and ideals. Over the years she had given herself freely to bridge, African violets, Susan and Sandra, golf, Miami, Fanny Hurst and Hemingway, correspondence courses, hairdressers, the sun, gourmet foods, ballroom dancing, and, in recent years, Miss Trixie.
p. 185 Ignatius, a very bad crack-up is on the way. You must do something. Even volunteer work at a hospital would snap you out of your apathy, and it would probably be non-taxing on your valve and other things. Get out of that womb-house for at least an hour a day. Take a walk, Ignatius. Look at the trees and birds. Realize that life is surging all around you. The valve closes because it thinks it is living in a dead organism. Open your heart, Ignatius, and you will open your valve.
p. 331 Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna mink from a subway tube, from some picket line, from the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.
p. 106 Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.
p. 110 I am going to pray to St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mullatoes, for our cause in the factory. Because he is also invoked against rats, he will perhaps aid us in the office, too.
p. 110 As a lecturer Dr. Talk was renowned for the facile and sarcastic wit and easily digested generalizations that made him popular among the girl students and helped to conceal his lack of knowledge about almost everything in general and British history in particular.
p. 127 After having fought with his father for almost thirty-five years, Mr. Levy had decided that he would spend the rest of his life trying not to be bothered. But he was bothered every day that he was at Levy's Lodge by his wife simply because she resented his not wanting to be bothered by Levy Pants. And in staying away from Levy Pants, he was bothered even more by the company because something was always going wrong there. It would all be simpler and less bothersome if he would have really operated Levy Pants and put in an eight hour day as manager. But just the name "Levy Pants" gave him heartburn.
p. 159 Mrs. Levy was a woman of interests and ideals. Over the years she had given herself freely to bridge, African violets, Susan and Sandra, golf, Miami, Fanny Hurst and Hemingway, correspondence courses, hairdressers, the sun, gourmet foods, ballroom dancing, and, in recent years, Miss Trixie.
p. 185 Ignatius, a very bad crack-up is on the way. You must do something. Even volunteer work at a hospital would snap you out of your apathy, and it would probably be non-taxing on your valve and other things. Get out of that womb-house for at least an hour a day. Take a walk, Ignatius. Look at the trees and birds. Realize that life is surging all around you. The valve closes because it thinks it is living in a dead organism. Open your heart, Ignatius, and you will open your valve.
p. 331 Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna mink from a subway tube, from some picket line, from the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb, r. Sep. 2018
p. 14 So learning isn’t quite what teach inmates inside the high-security prisons called schools. In biology, learning is something that, through the filter of intergenerational selection, gets imprinted at the cellular level – skin in the game, I insist, is more filter than deterrence. Evolution can only happen if risk of extinction is present. Further,
There is no Evolution without skin in the game.
This last point is quite obvious, but I keep seeing academics with no skin in the game defend evolution while at the same time rejecting skin in the game and risk sharing. They refuse the notion of design by a creator who knows everything, while, at the same time, want to impose human design as if they knew all the consequences. In general, the more people worship the sacrosanct state (or, equivalently, large corporations), the more they hate skin in the game. The more they believe in their ability to forecast, the more they hate skin in the game. The more they wear suits and ties, the more they hate skin in the game.
p.19 We rapidly go through the rules to the right of Hammurabi. Leviticus is a sweetening of Hammurabi’s rule. The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you not like them to treat you. More robust? How? Why is the Silver Rule more robust?
First, it tells you to mind your own business and not decide what is “good” for others. We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good. The Silver Rule can be seen as the Negative Golden Rule, and as I am shown by my Calabrese (and Calabrese-speaking) barber every three weeks, via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by addition).
p. 38 For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor – and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts.
p. 58 Things don't “scale” and generalize, which is why I have trouble with intellectuals talking about abstract notions. A country is not a large city, a city is not a large family, and, sorry, the world is not a large village.
p. 60 But we don’t have to go very far to get the importance of scaling. You know instinctively that people get along better as neighbors than roommates.
p. 61 A saying by the Brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism.
I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.
p. 65 Now can one make medicine less asymmetric? Not directly; the solution, as I have argued in Antifragile and more technically elsewhere, is for the patient to avoid treatment when he or she is mildly ill, but use medicine for the “tail events,” that is, for rarely encountered severe conditions. The problem is that the mildly ill represent a much larger pool of people than the severely ill – and are people who are expected to live longer and consume drugs for longer – hence pharmaceutical companies have an incentive to focus on them. (Dead people, I am told, stop taking drugs.)
p. 82 And it was not because pagans had na intellectual deficit: in fact, my heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.
p. 83 Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
p. 86 So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the processo of committing suicide.
p. 105 What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
p. 129 In this chapter, I will propose that what people resent – or should resent – is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, he is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting his income or wealth bracket, and waiting in line outside the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractor of Donald Trump, when he was still a candidate, not only misunderstood the value of scars as risk signaling, but they also failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankrupcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, he removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) people may have had toward him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.
p. 131 Consider that about 10 percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top 1 percent, and more than half of all Americans will spend a year in the top 10 percent. This is visibly not the same for the more static – but nominally more equal – Europe. For instance, only 10 percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty year ago; more than 60 percent on the French list are heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.
p. 142 In probability, volatility and time are the same. The idea of fragility helped put some rigor around the notion that the only effective judge of things is time – by things we mean ideas, people, intellectual productions, car models, scientific theories, books, etc. You can’t fool Lindy: books of the type written by the current hotshot Op-Ed writer at The New York Times may get some hype at publication time, manufactured or spontaneous, but their five-year survival rate is generally less than that of pancreatic cancer.
p. 152 Madness of crowds: Nietzsche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule. (This counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicista; I’ve seen many such references in Plato.)
p. 152 The Paradox of progress, and the paradox of choice: There is a familiar story of a New Yorker banker vacationing in Greece, who, from talking to a fisherman and scrutinizing the fisherman’s business, comes up with a scheme to help the fisherman make it a big business. The fisherman asked him what the benefits were; the banker answered that he could make a pile of money in New York and come back to a vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman, who was already there doing the king of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece.
p. 168 It hit me that the rich were natural targets; as the eponymous Thyestes shouts in Seneca’s tragedy, thieves do not enter impecunious homes, and one is more likely to be drinking poison in a golden cup than an ordinary one. Poison is drunk in golden cups (Venenum in auro bibitur).
It is easy to scam people by getting them into complications – the poor are spared that type of scamming. This is the same complication we saw in Chapter 9 that makes academics sell the most possibly complicated solution when a simple one can do. Further, the rich start using “experts” and “consultants.” An entire industry meant to swindle you swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councilors, breathing specialists, etc.
Hamburgers, to many of us, are vastly tastier than filet mignon because of the higher fat content, but people have been convinced that the latter is better because it is more expensive to produce.
p. 184 It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
This will be the main topic of this chapter: exploiting virtue for image, personal gain, careers, social status, these kinds of things – and by personal gain I mean anything that does not share the downside of a negative action.
p. 185 Kids with rich parents talk about “class privilege" at privileged colleges such as Amherst – but in one instance, one of them could not answer Dinesh D’Souza’s simple and logical suggestion: Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line? Clearly the defense given by people under such a situation is that they want others to do so as well – they require a systemic solution to every local perceived problem of injustice. I find that immoral. I know of no ethical system that allows you to let someone drown without helping him because other people are not helping, no system that says, “I will save people from drowning if others too save other people from drowning.” Which brings us to the principle: If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
p. 199 My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and ... fools in words. Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they think they mean by what they said – hence philosophy was born as rigor is discourse and disentanglement of mixed-up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric.
p. 200 For most Jews today, religion has become ethnocultural, without the law – and for many, a nation. Same for Armenians, Syrians, Chaldeans, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, religion is largely aesthetics, pomp, and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief without aesthetics, pomp, or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists, and Hindus, religion is a practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, a cosmogony). So when Hindus talk about the Hindu “religion,” it doesn’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani, and would certainly mean something different to a Persian.
p. 231 All risks are not equal. We often hear that “Ebola is causing fewer deaths than people drowning in their bathtubs,” or something of the sort, based on “evidence.” This is another class of problems that your grandmother can get, but the semi-educated cannot. Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.
p. 233 Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.
p. 256 Compare someone with lumpy payoffs, say an entrepreneur who makes $4.5 million every twenty years, to an economics professor who earns the same total over the period ($225K in taxpayer-funded income). The entrepreneur over the very same income ends up paying 75 percent in taxes, plus wealth tax on the rest, while the rent-seeking tenured academic who doesn’t contribute to wealth formation pays say 30 percent.
P. 256 Satisficing: It is erroneous to think that the axioms necessarily lead one to “maximize” income without any constraint (academic economists have used naive mathematics in their optimization programs and thinking). It is perfectly compatible to “satisfice” their wealth, that is, shoot for a satisfactory income, plus maximize their fitness to the task, or the emotional pride they may have in seeing the fruits of their labor. Or not explicitly “maximize” anything, just do things because that is what makes us human.
There is no Evolution without skin in the game.
This last point is quite obvious, but I keep seeing academics with no skin in the game defend evolution while at the same time rejecting skin in the game and risk sharing. They refuse the notion of design by a creator who knows everything, while, at the same time, want to impose human design as if they knew all the consequences. In general, the more people worship the sacrosanct state (or, equivalently, large corporations), the more they hate skin in the game. The more they believe in their ability to forecast, the more they hate skin in the game. The more they wear suits and ties, the more they hate skin in the game.
p.19 We rapidly go through the rules to the right of Hammurabi. Leviticus is a sweetening of Hammurabi’s rule. The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you not like them to treat you. More robust? How? Why is the Silver Rule more robust?
First, it tells you to mind your own business and not decide what is “good” for others. We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good. The Silver Rule can be seen as the Negative Golden Rule, and as I am shown by my Calabrese (and Calabrese-speaking) barber every three weeks, via negativa (acting by removing) is more powerful and less error-prone than via positiva (acting by addition).
p. 38 For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor – and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts.
p. 58 Things don't “scale” and generalize, which is why I have trouble with intellectuals talking about abstract notions. A country is not a large city, a city is not a large family, and, sorry, the world is not a large village.
p. 60 But we don’t have to go very far to get the importance of scaling. You know instinctively that people get along better as neighbors than roommates.
p. 61 A saying by the Brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism.
I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.
p. 65 Now can one make medicine less asymmetric? Not directly; the solution, as I have argued in Antifragile and more technically elsewhere, is for the patient to avoid treatment when he or she is mildly ill, but use medicine for the “tail events,” that is, for rarely encountered severe conditions. The problem is that the mildly ill represent a much larger pool of people than the severely ill – and are people who are expected to live longer and consume drugs for longer – hence pharmaceutical companies have an incentive to focus on them. (Dead people, I am told, stop taking drugs.)
p. 82 And it was not because pagans had na intellectual deficit: in fact, my heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.
p. 83 Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
p. 86 So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the processo of committing suicide.
p. 105 What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
p. 129 In this chapter, I will propose that what people resent – or should resent – is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, he is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting his income or wealth bracket, and waiting in line outside the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractor of Donald Trump, when he was still a candidate, not only misunderstood the value of scars as risk signaling, but they also failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankrupcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, he removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) people may have had toward him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.
p. 131 Consider that about 10 percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top 1 percent, and more than half of all Americans will spend a year in the top 10 percent. This is visibly not the same for the more static – but nominally more equal – Europe. For instance, only 10 percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty year ago; more than 60 percent on the French list are heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.
p. 142 In probability, volatility and time are the same. The idea of fragility helped put some rigor around the notion that the only effective judge of things is time – by things we mean ideas, people, intellectual productions, car models, scientific theories, books, etc. You can’t fool Lindy: books of the type written by the current hotshot Op-Ed writer at The New York Times may get some hype at publication time, manufactured or spontaneous, but their five-year survival rate is generally less than that of pancreatic cancer.
p. 152 Madness of crowds: Nietzsche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule. (This counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicista; I’ve seen many such references in Plato.)
p. 152 The Paradox of progress, and the paradox of choice: There is a familiar story of a New Yorker banker vacationing in Greece, who, from talking to a fisherman and scrutinizing the fisherman’s business, comes up with a scheme to help the fisherman make it a big business. The fisherman asked him what the benefits were; the banker answered that he could make a pile of money in New York and come back to a vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman, who was already there doing the king of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece.
p. 168 It hit me that the rich were natural targets; as the eponymous Thyestes shouts in Seneca’s tragedy, thieves do not enter impecunious homes, and one is more likely to be drinking poison in a golden cup than an ordinary one. Poison is drunk in golden cups (Venenum in auro bibitur).
It is easy to scam people by getting them into complications – the poor are spared that type of scamming. This is the same complication we saw in Chapter 9 that makes academics sell the most possibly complicated solution when a simple one can do. Further, the rich start using “experts” and “consultants.” An entire industry meant to swindle you swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councilors, breathing specialists, etc.
Hamburgers, to many of us, are vastly tastier than filet mignon because of the higher fat content, but people have been convinced that the latter is better because it is more expensive to produce.
p. 184 It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
This will be the main topic of this chapter: exploiting virtue for image, personal gain, careers, social status, these kinds of things – and by personal gain I mean anything that does not share the downside of a negative action.
p. 185 Kids with rich parents talk about “class privilege" at privileged colleges such as Amherst – but in one instance, one of them could not answer Dinesh D’Souza’s simple and logical suggestion: Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line? Clearly the defense given by people under such a situation is that they want others to do so as well – they require a systemic solution to every local perceived problem of injustice. I find that immoral. I know of no ethical system that allows you to let someone drown without helping him because other people are not helping, no system that says, “I will save people from drowning if others too save other people from drowning.” Which brings us to the principle: If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
p. 199 My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and ... fools in words. Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they think they mean by what they said – hence philosophy was born as rigor is discourse and disentanglement of mixed-up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric.
p. 200 For most Jews today, religion has become ethnocultural, without the law – and for many, a nation. Same for Armenians, Syrians, Chaldeans, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, religion is largely aesthetics, pomp, and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief without aesthetics, pomp, or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists, and Hindus, religion is a practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, a cosmogony). So when Hindus talk about the Hindu “religion,” it doesn’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani, and would certainly mean something different to a Persian.
p. 231 All risks are not equal. We often hear that “Ebola is causing fewer deaths than people drowning in their bathtubs,” or something of the sort, based on “evidence.” This is another class of problems that your grandmother can get, but the semi-educated cannot. Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.
p. 233 Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin.
p. 256 Compare someone with lumpy payoffs, say an entrepreneur who makes $4.5 million every twenty years, to an economics professor who earns the same total over the period ($225K in taxpayer-funded income). The entrepreneur over the very same income ends up paying 75 percent in taxes, plus wealth tax on the rest, while the rent-seeking tenured academic who doesn’t contribute to wealth formation pays say 30 percent.
P. 256 Satisficing: It is erroneous to think that the axioms necessarily lead one to “maximize” income without any constraint (academic economists have used naive mathematics in their optimization programs and thinking). It is perfectly compatible to “satisfice” their wealth, that is, shoot for a satisfactory income, plus maximize their fitness to the task, or the emotional pride they may have in seeing the fruits of their labor. Or not explicitly “maximize” anything, just do things because that is what makes us human.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Home Game by Michael Lewis, r. Sep. 2018
p. 24 One of the many things I dislike about being a grown-up is the compulsion to have a purpose in life. People are forever asking why you are doing whatever you happen to be doing and before long you succumb to the need to supply an answer. The least naturally ambitious people can have ambition thrust upon them in this way. Once you've established yourself as a more or less properly functioning adult, it is nearly impossible to just go somewhere and screw off.
p. 26 "Assimilation" is just another word for acquiring a bit of the local status.
p. 73 The fact, as opposed to the theory, of life with a small child is an amoral system of bribes and blackmails. You do this for me, you get that. You don't do this for me, you don't get that. I've always assumed that if a small child has enough joy and love and stability in her life, along with intelligently directed bribes and blackmail, the rest will take care of itself.
p. 78 The simple act of taking care of a living creature, even when you don't want to, maybe especially when you don't want to, is transformative. A friend of mine who adopted his two children was asked by a friend of his how he could ever hope to love them as much as if they were his own. "Have you ever owned a dog?" he said. And that's the nub of the matter: All the little things that you must do for a helpless creature to keep it alive cause you to love it. Most people know this instinctively. For someone like me, who has heretofore displayed a nearly superhuman gift for avoiding unpleasant tasks, it comes as a revelation.
p. 101 How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child's vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.
p. 135 A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is only as happy as its unhappiest member. Occasionally that is me; more often it is someone else; and so I must remain vigilant, lest the pleasure of my own life be dampened by their unhappiness.
p. 163 After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It's only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.
p. 26 "Assimilation" is just another word for acquiring a bit of the local status.
p. 73 The fact, as opposed to the theory, of life with a small child is an amoral system of bribes and blackmails. You do this for me, you get that. You don't do this for me, you don't get that. I've always assumed that if a small child has enough joy and love and stability in her life, along with intelligently directed bribes and blackmail, the rest will take care of itself.
p. 78 The simple act of taking care of a living creature, even when you don't want to, maybe especially when you don't want to, is transformative. A friend of mine who adopted his two children was asked by a friend of his how he could ever hope to love them as much as if they were his own. "Have you ever owned a dog?" he said. And that's the nub of the matter: All the little things that you must do for a helpless creature to keep it alive cause you to love it. Most people know this instinctively. For someone like me, who has heretofore displayed a nearly superhuman gift for avoiding unpleasant tasks, it comes as a revelation.
p. 101 How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child's vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.
p. 135 A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is only as happy as its unhappiest member. Occasionally that is me; more often it is someone else; and so I must remain vigilant, lest the pleasure of my own life be dampened by their unhappiness.
p. 163 After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It's only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.
Monday, June 18, 2018
A Hora da Estrela by Clarice Lispector, r. Jun. 2018 and Mar. 2025
p. 27 Essa moça não sabia que ela era o que era, assim como um cachorro não sabe que é cachorro. Daí não se sentir infeliz. A única coisa que queria era viver. Não sabia para quê, não se indagava.
p. 36 Pensando bem: quem não é um acaso na vida? Quanto a mim, só me livro de ser apenas um acaso porque escrevo, o que é um ato que é um fato.
p. 39 Em todo casa o futuro parecia vir a ser muito melhor. Pelo menos o futuro tinha a vantagem de não ser o presente...
p. 39 Será que entrando na semente de sua vida estarei como que violando o segredo dos faraós? Terei castigo de morte por falar de uma vida que contém como todas as nossas vidas um segredo inviolável?
p. 47 Enfim o que fosse acontecer, aconteceria. E por enquanto nada acontecia, os dois não sabiam inventar acontecimentos.
p. 60 É melhor eu não falar em felicidade ou infelicidade - provoca aquela saudade desmaiada e lilás, aquele perfume de violeta, as águas geladas da maré mansa em espumas pela areia. Eu não quero provocar porque dói.
p. 69 - Eu sou sozinha no mundo e não acredito em ninguém, todos mentem, às vezes até na hora do amor, eu não acho que um ser fale com o outro, a verdade só me vem quando estou sozinha.
p. 36 Pensando bem: quem não é um acaso na vida? Quanto a mim, só me livro de ser apenas um acaso porque escrevo, o que é um ato que é um fato.
p. 39 Em todo casa o futuro parecia vir a ser muito melhor. Pelo menos o futuro tinha a vantagem de não ser o presente...
p. 39 Será que entrando na semente de sua vida estarei como que violando o segredo dos faraós? Terei castigo de morte por falar de uma vida que contém como todas as nossas vidas um segredo inviolável?
p. 47 Enfim o que fosse acontecer, aconteceria. E por enquanto nada acontecia, os dois não sabiam inventar acontecimentos.
p. 60 É melhor eu não falar em felicidade ou infelicidade - provoca aquela saudade desmaiada e lilás, aquele perfume de violeta, as águas geladas da maré mansa em espumas pela areia. Eu não quero provocar porque dói.
p. 69 - Eu sou sozinha no mundo e não acredito em ninguém, todos mentem, às vezes até na hora do amor, eu não acho que um ser fale com o outro, a verdade só me vem quando estou sozinha.
____
p. 6 One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking and only believing that the silence I believe to be inside me is the answer to my – to my mystery.
p. 7 Who hasn't ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?
p. 10 ...we live exclusively in the present because it is always eternally today and tomorrow will be a today, eternity is the state of things at this very moment.
p. 12 I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I'm desperate and I'm tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I've experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I'd only like to have what I would have been and never was.
p. 18 Meanwhile the clouds are white and the sky is all blue. Why so much God. Why not a little for men.
p. 24 So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she'd never run out. This savings gave her a little security since you can't fall farther than the ground. Did she feel she was living for nothing? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. Only once did she ask a tragic question: who am I? It frightened her so much that she completely stopped thinking.
p. 54 The air? You can't tell everything because the everything is a hollow nothing.
p. 63 She vaguely thought while ringing the doorbell: grass is so easy and simple. She had unprompted and stray thoughts because even though she was at random she possessed much inner freedom.
p. 72 The worst part is that I have to forgive them. We must reach such a nothing that we indifferently love or don't love the criminal who kills us. But I'm not sure of myself: I have to ask, though I don't know who can answer, if I really have to love the one who slays me and ask who amongst you slays me. And my life stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all costs and replies that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I die in the end. If that's the way it is, so be it.
p. 76 As soon as you discover the truth it's already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is? Reply: it's not.
p. 77 My God, I just remembered that we die. But – but me too?!
Sunday, June 3, 2018
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, r. May 2018
p. 49 The feeling of apartness from others comes to most with puberty, but it is not always developed to such a degree as to make the difference between the individual and his fellows noticeable to the individual. It is such as he, as little conscious of himself as the bee in a hive, who are the lucky in life, for they have the best chance of happiness: their activities are shared by all, and their pleasures are only pleasures because they are enjoyed in common.
p. 88 The school seemed less of a prison when he knew that before Easter he would be free from it for ever. His heart danced within him. That evening in chapel he looked round at the boys, standing according to their forms, each in his due place, and he chuckled with satisfaction at the thought that soon we would never see them again. It made him regard them almost with a friendly feeling.
p. 121 It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.
p. 142 He had read many descriptions of love, and he felt in himself none of that uprush of emotion which novelists described; he was not carried off his feet in wave upon wave of passion; nor was Miss Wilkinson the ideal: he had often pictured to himself the great violet eyes and the alabaster skin of some lovely girl, and he had thought of himself burying his face in the rippling masses of her auburn hair. He could not imagine himself burying his face in Miss Wilkinson's hair, it always struck him as a little sticky.
p. 207 "I do not attach any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about."
p. 210 "I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience."
p. 224 It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to sleep at night. The heat seemed to linger under the trees as though it were a material thing. They did not wish to leave the starlit night, and the three of them would sit on the terrace of Ruth Chalice's room, silent, hour after hour, too tired to talk any more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of the stillness. They listened to the murmur of the river.
p. 242 "What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it."
p. 243 Of late Philip had been captivated by an idea that since one had only one life it was important to make a success of it, but he did not count success by the acquiring of money or the achieving of fame; he did not quite know yet what he meant by it, perhaps variety of experience and the making the most of his abilities.
p. 248 "Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off."
p. 321 "Why do you read then?" "Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read is if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me, and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times."
p. 384 They thought him reasonable and praised his common sense; but he knew that his placid expression was no more than a mask, assumed unconsciously, which acted like the protective coloring of butterflies; and himself was astonished at the weakness of his will. It seemed to him that he was swayed by every light emotion, as though he were a leaf in the wind, and when passion seized him he was powerless. He had no self-control. He merely seemed to possess it because he was so indifferent to many of the things which moved other people.
p. 405 "You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it's the only thing I've got left now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness. It disgusts you. You are a puritan and in your heart you despise sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures are the most violent and the most exquisite. I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I have indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now, and I am ready to pay." [dying of cirrhosis]
p. 422 "May I see what you're reading?" asked Philip, who could never pass a book without looking at it.
p. 432 "Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and tho morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer."
p. 524 His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty.
p. 524-525 [photo] Persian rug pattern analogy - weaving your own pattern, simple or complex, is the meaning of life, for beauty's sake.
P. 601 Philip had never been able to surmount what he acknowledged was a defect in his resolute desire for a well-ordered life, and that was his passion for living in the future; and no sooner was he settled in his work at the hospital than he had busied himself with arrangements for his travels.
p. 88 The school seemed less of a prison when he knew that before Easter he would be free from it for ever. His heart danced within him. That evening in chapel he looked round at the boys, standing according to their forms, each in his due place, and he chuckled with satisfaction at the thought that soon we would never see them again. It made him regard them almost with a friendly feeling.
p. 121 It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.
p. 142 He had read many descriptions of love, and he felt in himself none of that uprush of emotion which novelists described; he was not carried off his feet in wave upon wave of passion; nor was Miss Wilkinson the ideal: he had often pictured to himself the great violet eyes and the alabaster skin of some lovely girl, and he had thought of himself burying his face in the rippling masses of her auburn hair. He could not imagine himself burying his face in Miss Wilkinson's hair, it always struck him as a little sticky.
p. 207 "I do not attach any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about."
p. 210 "I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience."
p. 224 It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to sleep at night. The heat seemed to linger under the trees as though it were a material thing. They did not wish to leave the starlit night, and the three of them would sit on the terrace of Ruth Chalice's room, silent, hour after hour, too tired to talk any more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of the stillness. They listened to the murmur of the river.
p. 242 "What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it."
p. 243 Of late Philip had been captivated by an idea that since one had only one life it was important to make a success of it, but he did not count success by the acquiring of money or the achieving of fame; he did not quite know yet what he meant by it, perhaps variety of experience and the making the most of his abilities.
p. 248 "Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off."
p. 321 "Why do you read then?" "Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read is if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me, and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times."
p. 384 They thought him reasonable and praised his common sense; but he knew that his placid expression was no more than a mask, assumed unconsciously, which acted like the protective coloring of butterflies; and himself was astonished at the weakness of his will. It seemed to him that he was swayed by every light emotion, as though he were a leaf in the wind, and when passion seized him he was powerless. He had no self-control. He merely seemed to possess it because he was so indifferent to many of the things which moved other people.
p. 405 "You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it's the only thing I've got left now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness. It disgusts you. You are a puritan and in your heart you despise sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures are the most violent and the most exquisite. I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I have indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now, and I am ready to pay." [dying of cirrhosis]
p. 422 "May I see what you're reading?" asked Philip, who could never pass a book without looking at it.
p. 432 "Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and tho morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer."
p. 524 His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty.
p. 524-525 [photo] Persian rug pattern analogy - weaving your own pattern, simple or complex, is the meaning of life, for beauty's sake.
P. 601 Philip had never been able to surmount what he acknowledged was a defect in his resolute desire for a well-ordered life, and that was his passion for living in the future; and no sooner was he settled in his work at the hospital than he had busied himself with arrangements for his travels.
Thursday, March 29, 2018
How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen, r. Mar. 2018
p. 8 …the brain is not an album in which memories are stored discretely like unchanging photographs. A memory is, instead… a “temporary constellation” of activity…
p. 10 The organ with which we observe and make sense of the universe is, by a comfortable margin, the most complex object we know of in that universe.
p. 11 Alzheimer’s is a disease of classically “insidious onset.” Since even healthy people become more forgetful as they age, there’s no way to pinpoint the first memory to fall victim to it.
p. 32 Plato’s description of writing, in the Phadreus, as a “crutch of memory” seems to me fully accurate: I couldn’t tell a clear story of my father without those letters. But, where Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper. My mother’s letters are truer and more complete than my self-absorbed and biased memories; she’s more alive to me in the written phrase “he NEEDS distractions!” than in hours of videotape or stacks of pictures of her.
p. 35 There’s no way to know if he recognized my voice, but within minutes of my arrival his blood pressure climbed to 120/90. I worried then, worry even now, that I made things harder for him by arriving: that he’d reached the point of being ready to die but was ashamed to perform such a private or disappointing act in front of one of his sons.
p. 43 In the last few decades, many judges and scholars have chosen to speak of a “zone of privacy,” rather than a “sphere of liberty,” but this is a shift in emphasis, not in the substance: not the making of a new doctrine but the repackaging and remarketing of an old one.
p. 52 Walking up Third Avenue on a Saturday night, I feel bereft. All around me, attractive young people are hunched over their StarTacs and Nokias with preoccupied expressions, as if probing a sore tooth, or adjusting a hearing aid, or squeezing a pulled muscle; personal technology has begun to look like a personal handicap. All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen, but even this modest ideal is thwarted by cell-phone users and their unwelcome privacy.
p. 65 Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time increments of cultural change: How to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
p. 66 The essence of fiction is solitary work: the work of writing, the work of reading. I’m able to know Sophie Bentwood intimately, and to refer to her as casually as I would to a good friend, because I poured my own feeling of fear and estrangement into the construction of her. If I know her only through the video of Desperate Characters, (Shirly MacLaine made the movie in 1971, as a vehicle for herself), Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen on which I viewed her, by the surficiality of film, and by MacLaine’s star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better.
p. 71 In publishing circles, confessions of doubt are widely referred to as “whining” – the idea being that cultural complaint is pathetic, and self-serving in writers who don’t sell, ungracious in writers who do. For people as protective of their privacy and as fiercely competitive as writers are, mute suffering would seem to be the safest course. However sick with foreboding you feel inside, it’s best to radiate confidence and to hope that it’s infectious.
p. 77 Reading does resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it’s a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a “social isolate” as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading – to reconnect to that community.
p. 82 Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive – my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weight book.’ Redaing that book gives me substance.” This substance, Heath adds, is most often transmitted verbally, and is felt to have permanence. “Which is why,” she said, “computers won’t do it for readers.”
p. 85 Anthony Lane, in a pair of recent essays in The New Yorker, has demonstrated that while most of the novels on the contemporary best-seller list are vapid, predictable, and badly written, the best-sellers of fifty years ago were also vapid, predictable, and badly written. Lane’s essays usefully destroy the notion of a golden pre-television age when the American masses had their noses stuck in literary masterworks; he makes it clear that this country’s popular tastes have become no worse in a half a century.
p. 107 His shirt darkens with sweat as we walk through the long morning shadows, through the vacancy of a residential neighborhood emptied by the morning rush hour. Children who stay home sick and writers who stay home working know this emptiness. It brings a sense of estrangement from the world, and for me that sense has always been sharpened and confirmed by the sound of a mailman’s footsteps approaching and receding. To be a mailman is to inhabit this emptiness for hours, to disturb five hundred abandoned lawns, one after another.
p. 160 There’s no simple, universal reason why people smoke, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: they don’t do it because they’re slaves to nicotine. My best guess about my own attraction to the habit is that I belong to a class of people whose lives are insufficiently structured. The mentally ill and the indigent are also members of this class. We embrace a toxin as deadly as nicotine, suspended in an aerosol of hydrocarbons and nitrosamines, because we have not yet found pleasures or routines that can replace the comforting, structure-bringing rhythm of need and gratification that the cigarette habit offers. One word for the structuring might be “self-medication”; another might be “coping.”
p. 165 I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly lonely. It has little to do with the mediascape that constitutes so many other people’s present. For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing, here in the anxious mid-nineties, the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images – a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers – feels apocalyptic.
p. 166 Sanders’s generalizations about “young people today” apply only to the segment of the population (admittedly a large one) that lacks the money or the leisure to inoculate its children against the worst ravages of electronic media.
p. 167 If a market exists, someone will inevitably exploit it, and so it’s pointless to ask “Do we need this?” or “How might it harm us?”
p. 171 “By contrast,” he says, “the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader’s imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you.”
p. 172 Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, he says, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best when tracing the subtleties of this state. Here is his description of his initial engagement with a novel: “I feel a tug. The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide.”
p. 173 Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data.
p. 178 But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
p. 204 Obsolescence is the leading product of our national infatuation with technology, and I now believe that obsolescence is not a darkness but a beauty: not perdition but salvation. The more headlong the progress of technological development, the greater the volume of obsolete detritus. And the detritus isn’t simply material. It’s angry religion, resurgent countercultural ideologies, the newly unemployed, the eternally unemployable. These are the fiction writer’s guarantee that he or she will never be alone. Obsolescence is our legacy.
p. 231 Lowering one’s eyes is a sign of deference – I learned this very early on. But it’s also, of course, a way of not seeing.
p. 249 There’s something medieval Christian about The Recognitions. The novel is like a huge landscape painting of modern New York, peopled with hundreds of doomed but energetic little figures…
p. 258 Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves.
p. 294 As I sat watching football and listened to the barren wind, I believed that the reason I couldn’t stand to look at my old house was that I was done with it: that I didn’t want to feel the inevitable nothing when I went inside it, I didn’t want to have to blame an innocent house for still existing after its meaning had been emptied out.
p. 10 The organ with which we observe and make sense of the universe is, by a comfortable margin, the most complex object we know of in that universe.
p. 11 Alzheimer’s is a disease of classically “insidious onset.” Since even healthy people become more forgetful as they age, there’s no way to pinpoint the first memory to fall victim to it.
p. 32 Plato’s description of writing, in the Phadreus, as a “crutch of memory” seems to me fully accurate: I couldn’t tell a clear story of my father without those letters. But, where Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper. My mother’s letters are truer and more complete than my self-absorbed and biased memories; she’s more alive to me in the written phrase “he NEEDS distractions!” than in hours of videotape or stacks of pictures of her.
p. 35 There’s no way to know if he recognized my voice, but within minutes of my arrival his blood pressure climbed to 120/90. I worried then, worry even now, that I made things harder for him by arriving: that he’d reached the point of being ready to die but was ashamed to perform such a private or disappointing act in front of one of his sons.
p. 43 In the last few decades, many judges and scholars have chosen to speak of a “zone of privacy,” rather than a “sphere of liberty,” but this is a shift in emphasis, not in the substance: not the making of a new doctrine but the repackaging and remarketing of an old one.
p. 52 Walking up Third Avenue on a Saturday night, I feel bereft. All around me, attractive young people are hunched over their StarTacs and Nokias with preoccupied expressions, as if probing a sore tooth, or adjusting a hearing aid, or squeezing a pulled muscle; personal technology has begun to look like a personal handicap. All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen, but even this modest ideal is thwarted by cell-phone users and their unwelcome privacy.
p. 65 Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time increments of cultural change: How to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
p. 66 The essence of fiction is solitary work: the work of writing, the work of reading. I’m able to know Sophie Bentwood intimately, and to refer to her as casually as I would to a good friend, because I poured my own feeling of fear and estrangement into the construction of her. If I know her only through the video of Desperate Characters, (Shirly MacLaine made the movie in 1971, as a vehicle for herself), Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen on which I viewed her, by the surficiality of film, and by MacLaine’s star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better.
p. 71 In publishing circles, confessions of doubt are widely referred to as “whining” – the idea being that cultural complaint is pathetic, and self-serving in writers who don’t sell, ungracious in writers who do. For people as protective of their privacy and as fiercely competitive as writers are, mute suffering would seem to be the safest course. However sick with foreboding you feel inside, it’s best to radiate confidence and to hope that it’s infectious.
p. 77 Reading does resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it’s a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a “social isolate” as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading – to reconnect to that community.
p. 82 Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive – my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weight book.’ Redaing that book gives me substance.” This substance, Heath adds, is most often transmitted verbally, and is felt to have permanence. “Which is why,” she said, “computers won’t do it for readers.”
p. 85 Anthony Lane, in a pair of recent essays in The New Yorker, has demonstrated that while most of the novels on the contemporary best-seller list are vapid, predictable, and badly written, the best-sellers of fifty years ago were also vapid, predictable, and badly written. Lane’s essays usefully destroy the notion of a golden pre-television age when the American masses had their noses stuck in literary masterworks; he makes it clear that this country’s popular tastes have become no worse in a half a century.
p. 107 His shirt darkens with sweat as we walk through the long morning shadows, through the vacancy of a residential neighborhood emptied by the morning rush hour. Children who stay home sick and writers who stay home working know this emptiness. It brings a sense of estrangement from the world, and for me that sense has always been sharpened and confirmed by the sound of a mailman’s footsteps approaching and receding. To be a mailman is to inhabit this emptiness for hours, to disturb five hundred abandoned lawns, one after another.
p. 160 There’s no simple, universal reason why people smoke, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: they don’t do it because they’re slaves to nicotine. My best guess about my own attraction to the habit is that I belong to a class of people whose lives are insufficiently structured. The mentally ill and the indigent are also members of this class. We embrace a toxin as deadly as nicotine, suspended in an aerosol of hydrocarbons and nitrosamines, because we have not yet found pleasures or routines that can replace the comforting, structure-bringing rhythm of need and gratification that the cigarette habit offers. One word for the structuring might be “self-medication”; another might be “coping.”
p. 165 I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly lonely. It has little to do with the mediascape that constitutes so many other people’s present. For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing, here in the anxious mid-nineties, the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images – a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers – feels apocalyptic.
p. 166 Sanders’s generalizations about “young people today” apply only to the segment of the population (admittedly a large one) that lacks the money or the leisure to inoculate its children against the worst ravages of electronic media.
p. 167 If a market exists, someone will inevitably exploit it, and so it’s pointless to ask “Do we need this?” or “How might it harm us?”
p. 171 “By contrast,” he says, “the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader’s imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you.”
p. 172 Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, he says, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best when tracing the subtleties of this state. Here is his description of his initial engagement with a novel: “I feel a tug. The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide.”
p. 173 Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data.
p. 178 But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
p. 204 Obsolescence is the leading product of our national infatuation with technology, and I now believe that obsolescence is not a darkness but a beauty: not perdition but salvation. The more headlong the progress of technological development, the greater the volume of obsolete detritus. And the detritus isn’t simply material. It’s angry religion, resurgent countercultural ideologies, the newly unemployed, the eternally unemployable. These are the fiction writer’s guarantee that he or she will never be alone. Obsolescence is our legacy.
p. 231 Lowering one’s eyes is a sign of deference – I learned this very early on. But it’s also, of course, a way of not seeing.
p. 249 There’s something medieval Christian about The Recognitions. The novel is like a huge landscape painting of modern New York, peopled with hundreds of doomed but energetic little figures…
p. 258 Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves.
p. 294 As I sat watching football and listened to the barren wind, I believed that the reason I couldn’t stand to look at my old house was that I was done with it: that I didn’t want to feel the inevitable nothing when I went inside it, I didn’t want to have to blame an innocent house for still existing after its meaning had been emptied out.
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, r. Feb. 2018
p. 8 Julie seemed unimpressed, and in reviewing the interaction later, I realized that Gene must have lied to her about his reason for not being present. This was presumably to protect Julie from feeling that her lecture was unimportant to Gene and to provide a justification for a less prestigious speaker being sent as a substitute. It seems hardly possible to analyze such a complex situation involving deceit and supposition of another person's emotional response, and then prepare your own plausible lie, all while someone is waiting for you to reply to a question. Yet that is exactly what people expect you to be able to do.
p. 48 "The human brain is wired to focus on differences in its environment - so it can rapidly discern a predator. If I installed pictures or other decorative objects, I would notice them for a few days and then my brain would ignore them. If I want to see art, I go to the gallery. The paintings there are of higher quality, and the total expenditure over time is less than the purchase price of cheap posters."
p. 57 I had seen the view when I bought the apartment. It did not change much in different conditions. And the only times I just sat were when I was waiting for an appointment or if I was reflecting on a problem, in which case interesting surroundings would be a distraction.
p. 60 Although my parents continued to make routine, ritual contact, it was my assessment that they had lost interest in me some years ago. Their duty had been completed when I was able to support myself.
p. 61 "An image of Isis with an inscription: Sum omnia quae fuerunt suntque eruntque ego. 'I am all that has been, is, and will be.'" I hoped I had read the Latin correctly.
p. 110 Research consistently shows that the risks to health outweigh the benefits of drinking alcohol. My argument is that the benefits to my mental health justify the risks. Alcohol seems to both calm me down and elevate my mood, a paradoxical but pleasant combination. And it reduces my discomfort in social situations.
p. 276 I need not be visibly odd. I could engage in the protocols that others followed and move undetected among them. And how could I be sure that other people were not doing the same - playing the game to be accepted but suspecting all the time that they were different?
p. 277 I had a great deal of valuable knowledge - about genetics, computers, aikido, karate, hardware, chess, wine, cocktails, dancing, sexual positions, social protocols, and the probability of a fifty-six-game hitting streak occurring in the history of baseball. I knew so much shit and I still couldn't fix myself.
p. 48 "The human brain is wired to focus on differences in its environment - so it can rapidly discern a predator. If I installed pictures or other decorative objects, I would notice them for a few days and then my brain would ignore them. If I want to see art, I go to the gallery. The paintings there are of higher quality, and the total expenditure over time is less than the purchase price of cheap posters."
p. 57 I had seen the view when I bought the apartment. It did not change much in different conditions. And the only times I just sat were when I was waiting for an appointment or if I was reflecting on a problem, in which case interesting surroundings would be a distraction.
p. 60 Although my parents continued to make routine, ritual contact, it was my assessment that they had lost interest in me some years ago. Their duty had been completed when I was able to support myself.
p. 61 "An image of Isis with an inscription: Sum omnia quae fuerunt suntque eruntque ego. 'I am all that has been, is, and will be.'" I hoped I had read the Latin correctly.
p. 110 Research consistently shows that the risks to health outweigh the benefits of drinking alcohol. My argument is that the benefits to my mental health justify the risks. Alcohol seems to both calm me down and elevate my mood, a paradoxical but pleasant combination. And it reduces my discomfort in social situations.
p. 276 I need not be visibly odd. I could engage in the protocols that others followed and move undetected among them. And how could I be sure that other people were not doing the same - playing the game to be accepted but suspecting all the time that they were different?
p. 277 I had a great deal of valuable knowledge - about genetics, computers, aikido, karate, hardware, chess, wine, cocktails, dancing, sexual positions, social protocols, and the probability of a fifty-six-game hitting streak occurring in the history of baseball. I knew so much shit and I still couldn't fix myself.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, r. Jan. 2018
p. 10 Enid looked at the chair. Her expression was merely pained, no more. "I never liked that chair." This was probably the most terrible thing she could have said to Alfred. The chair was the only sign he'd ever given of having a personal vision of the future. Enid's words filled him with such sorrow - he felt such pity for the chair, such solidarity with it, such astonished grief at its betrayal - that he pulled off the dropcloth and sank into its arms and fell asleep. (It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.)
p. 11 He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am-" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seem as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness...
p. 18 [His mother] had always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at here ha had no idea what she really looked like.
p. 69 But Denise left the kitchen an took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you'd be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he'd established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip's living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn't absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; an no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip's living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer on new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world...
p. 96 To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing: neither taking advantage of his good night's sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing.
p. 163 "You've gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we've gotten you. Things you also said you were 'very interested in' at the time." "This is different," Caleb pleaded. "This time I'm really, truly interested." Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father's acquiescence.
p. 186 What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic and egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed.
p. 259 It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world. No man worked harder than he, no man made a quieter motel neighbor, no man was more of a man, and yet the phonies of the world were allowed to rob him of sleep with their lewd transactions...
p. 263 If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.
p. 276 There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
p. 279 And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled - the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor - refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.
p. 283 Aristotle: Suppose the eye were an animal - sight would be its soul.
p. 326 "And Ted's right on top of that, he things our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it's out of control, it's not computers that are making everything virtual, it's mental health. Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, is what Ted says. We've bumped up to the next level of abstraction because we have too much time and money, is whet he says, and he refuses to be a part of it."
p. 351 The protective sky was thinner in this country of northern water [off the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula]. Clouds ran in packs resembling furrows in a field, gliding along beneath the sky's enclosing dome, which was noticeably low. One approached Ultima Thule here. Green objects had red coronas. In the forests that stretched west to the limit of visibility, as in the purposeless rushing of the clouds, as in the air's supernal clarity, there was nothing local.
p. 477 The gray morning light and the snow on the trees and the peripheral sense of disarray and breakup recalled the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break.
p. 555 As she left her parents' neighborhood [on foot in the frigid winter night], the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one [Christmas Eve], was a good hour for staring at a screen.
p. 555 She'd never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.
p. 571 And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. the tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body - softer, more mortal and organic - than like a building.
p. 600 She had to tell him [her husband in the depths of Alzheimer's whom she visited every day], while she still had time, how wrong he'd been and how right she'd been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. Even if he wouldn't listen, she had to tell him.
p. 11 He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am-" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seem as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness...
p. 18 [His mother] had always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at here ha had no idea what she really looked like.
p. 69 But Denise left the kitchen an took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you'd be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he'd established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip's living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn't absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; an no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip's living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer on new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world...
p. 96 To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing: neither taking advantage of his good night's sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing.
p. 163 "You've gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we've gotten you. Things you also said you were 'very interested in' at the time." "This is different," Caleb pleaded. "This time I'm really, truly interested." Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father's acquiescence.
p. 186 What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic and egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed.
p. 259 It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world. No man worked harder than he, no man made a quieter motel neighbor, no man was more of a man, and yet the phonies of the world were allowed to rob him of sleep with their lewd transactions...
p. 263 If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.
p. 276 There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
p. 279 And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled - the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor - refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.
p. 283 Aristotle: Suppose the eye were an animal - sight would be its soul.
p. 326 "And Ted's right on top of that, he things our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it's out of control, it's not computers that are making everything virtual, it's mental health. Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, is what Ted says. We've bumped up to the next level of abstraction because we have too much time and money, is whet he says, and he refuses to be a part of it."
p. 351 The protective sky was thinner in this country of northern water [off the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula]. Clouds ran in packs resembling furrows in a field, gliding along beneath the sky's enclosing dome, which was noticeably low. One approached Ultima Thule here. Green objects had red coronas. In the forests that stretched west to the limit of visibility, as in the purposeless rushing of the clouds, as in the air's supernal clarity, there was nothing local.
p. 477 The gray morning light and the snow on the trees and the peripheral sense of disarray and breakup recalled the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break.
p. 555 As she left her parents' neighborhood [on foot in the frigid winter night], the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one [Christmas Eve], was a good hour for staring at a screen.
p. 555 She'd never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.
p. 571 And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. the tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body - softer, more mortal and organic - than like a building.
p. 600 She had to tell him [her husband in the depths of Alzheimer's whom she visited every day], while she still had time, how wrong he'd been and how right she'd been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. Even if he wouldn't listen, she had to tell him.
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