FREEDOM FOR SOME BUT NOT FOR OTHERS

Jenny Erpenbeck:

Why did people always pronounce the word ‘freedom’ with such enthusiasm, as they continue to do today, whenever they speak of the collapse of East Germany, whereas when people from other countries — from countries like Mali, Niger, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico, Haiti, and other “shitholes,” as Donald Trump recently described them — they’re met with contempt and aversion?

Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, pp 174f

Read more

EPHEMERAL WORLD, EPHEMERAL THOUGHTS

Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Our own time, the change we are able to register as we stand here in the midst of the world, is, apart from the movements of the body, almost always bound up with water and wind. The raindrops that drip from the gutter, the leaf whirled into the air, the clouds that slip over the ridge, the water that trickles toward the stream, the river that runs into the sea, the waves that form and break apart in an ever-changing abundance of unique forms. We can see this, for the time in which such movement occurs is synchronized with that of our own existence. We refer to that time as the now. And what happens within us in the now is not dissimilar to what happens outside us, a continual formation and breaking apart that never ceases as long as we live: our thoughts. On the sky of the self they come drifting, each unique, and over the precipice of oblivion they vanish again, never to return in the same shape.

Read more

WHITEHEAD AGAIN – THIS TIME ON GROWTH, GOOD, AND EVIL

Jim Nielsen has some good thoughts in which he builds on a post by Mandy Brown. I’m piggy-backing on both Nielsen and Brown here to develop another point about Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy. (Over the last couple of years I’ve thought I might develop a series of posts about Whitehead – last week I wrote what I was thinking might be the first post in such a series. As I said in that post, I don’t have a systematic approach in mind. Instead, I’m thinking I’ll write when something I read reminds me of Whitehead in some way. The posts by Jim Nielsen and Mandy Brown did just that.)

Read more

BURNING THE STUFF BUT CHERISHING THE MEMORIES

Last week my wife looked around our living room. “I think there are too many stacks of too many books in this room.” Or something like that. I look around the room and see opportunities (or something like that). She looks around the room and sees clutter.

While we disagree about how many books is too many books, we both believe that we need to do more to declutter our lives. We downsized to a much smaller residence a half-dozen years ago, and we would definitely be more at ease in our space if there were fewer objects filling it up.

Read more

WHITEHEAD MATTERS

I first read Alfred North Whitehead over fifty years ago, in a college Philosophy of Science class. We read a chunk of his Science and the Modern World. I don’t remember much of what we discussed in that class, but I still have the paperback copy of the book sitting on my shelf. The markings and marginal notes I see there suggest that while I made some sense of it, I wasn’t fully persuaded by his account.

Read more

MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

Siri Hustvedt:

In a 1995 essay on memory, ‘Yonder,’ I wrote the following sentence: ‘Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.’ It seemed to me fifteen years ago, and still seems to me today, that the mental activity we call memory and what we call the imagination partake of the same mental processes. They are both bound up with emotion and, when conscious, they often take the form of stories. Emotion, memory, imagination, story — all vital to our subjective mental landscapes, central to literature and psychoanalysis and, much more recently, hot topics in the neurosciences.

Read more

A FATHER'S GIFT OF A LIFETIME

I suppose that almost everyone has a tale to tell in these digital times about a crucial file or two lost in a hard disk crash or some other malfunction. (An aside: There are pre-digital versions of this story as well. One such story, perhaps apocryphal, that floated around my graduate school was an account of a graduate student who took the only copy of his just-finished dissertation with him to a diner to proof-read and accidentally left it there. According to the story, it was already discarded and on the way to the dump when he discovered his mistake and he had to rewrite the entire thing.)

Read more

NO DISAPPOINTMENT CAN FULLY EXHAUST THE RESERVE OF HOPE

Alexander Kluge:

It is a mamtter of observation that there are limits to what people will put up with. At unexpected points that cannot be determined in advance, people develop a will of their own. No disappointment can fully exhaust the reserve of hope. What we can do is devote boundless effort to the concrete areas in which we ourselves work. Whether that will prove useful in teh end is, to put it melodramatically, in God’s hands; but you could also say that it’s in all of our hands. Human willfulness is reliable and invincible. It returns again and again. It is a phoenix.

Read more

BOOK COLLECTING

Jeanette Winterson:

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.

This is a straight-up copy-and-paste steal from Wry Writer. I couldn’t pass it up.

ANOTHER ROLE FOR UNIVERSITY: LEARNING HOW TO LIVE

Jenny Erpenbeck:

It would be nice if the university weren’t something like the gateway to a career, some sort of dues paid to the outside world where you have to succeed if you want to pay your rent, if it didn’t just give you time to learn how you work, but instead time to learn how you live, to learn what matters to you and what doesn’t, if the university could be the affirmation of one’s inner life, of a far-off, remote, uncharted, maybe even uncongenial landscape with its own calendar, where those who are seeking their own way have time to get lost, time to take detours, to meet this or that person along the way, to get excited about something, to despair of something, and sometimes just to lie in the grass, look at the clouds passing overhead, and leave room for thoughts to grow. Because what I referred to earlier as the ‘kernel of truth’ may find you where you least expect it.

Read more