February 2012
19 posts
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“Most of us, by the time we leave childhood, have repressed our vision of the...”
– Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. This idea of necessary partialization is enormously useful in thinking about mental illness, socialization and maturation, art, everything. Later, Becker puts it more plainly:
When we say neurosis represents the truth of life we again mean that life is an...
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Fights
Abby and I fight from time to time; perhaps it’s often, perhaps not. How could we know? And why should we care? A couple introspects almost as poorly as an individual, absorbs and rejects ambient social standards of normalcy, ponders its viability as it ponders whether viability is a question of chance congruence —easy emotions expanding into one another’s moods and memories— or of...
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Ways Not to Write
I am a terrible descriptive writer in part because I am not perceptive about the world visually; in addition to being self-absorbed and inattentive, I have never acquired several important vocabularies which help one take note of what one sees. Like many men, I suppose, I’ve neglected color, and still round all blues to blue, from Cornflower to Pantone 292. I have no idea what the plants I...
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“He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left...”
– Don DeLillo, Mao II. Especially in my outrageously shameful early adolescence, such concerns dominated my mental life. Had I some reliable means of addressing the unwanted and ungovernable erections, the pangs of shooting gas pains, the sweat and the stench of my form, the revolting phlegm always...
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“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns to...”
– Bill Gray, the reclusive novelist in Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II.
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“I think.” Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical...”
– Milan Kundera in Testaments Betrayed, discussing the meaning of the various prose styles developed by Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and how technical details like paragraph structure and the use of semicolons express deeper elements of an author’s thought and...
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“I have often thought that the nature of science would be better understood if we...”
– David Deutsch, quantum physicist and philosopher, in The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch is obliged, in the course of arguing his theses about the nature of knowledge, progress, and human purpose, to rebut reductive notions like instrumentalism and our parochial cultural pessimisms. To do so he often...
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Argos, dog of Odysseus
At the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus returns home in disguise after two decades of war and wandering; his old swineherd, Eumeaus, taking him for a stranger, walks him across his property and nearby his old dog, occasioning one of the earliest sentimental descriptions of the human-canine bond (from the eighth century BCE):
Now, as they talked on, a dog that lay there lifted up his muzzle, pricked...
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The Sense of Uncertainty
In Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending, a precocious schoolboy named Adrian Finn recites, from memory and in reply to a teacher, a definition of history:
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
It’s a marvelously provocative sentence. The book’s unreliable narrator, Anthony Webster,...
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“When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its...”
– Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory, quoted by my heroine Abby, who rebuts a classroom critic of the author:
in class some twit complained that nabokov was uselessly pretentious and pedantic, that he used latin terms and untranslated french and russian to intentionally muddle the reader. i can agree...
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“There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in...”
– Virginia Woolf in The Waves, quoted by the excellent American Roulette.