Writing toward new meanings

Michael Cunningham:

You could say that writing is a continuation of that effort to render and recognize everything and everyone by naming their qualities, ideally from an illuminating angle — by naming them in ways that are both recognizable and unfamiliar, by combining words unconventionally so that, coming into contact, they emit new sparks of meaning. You attempt to invigorate the names of objects and beings and emotions by finding new variations. You try to imbue them with a vitality that may have faded by being called by the same name, over and over, throughout the centuries.

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Writing is about walking ghosts

Deborah Levy:

All writing is about walking ghosts. Or perhaps the ghosts walk the writer. Towards our parents or something like them. Towards our siblings and lovers and friends or something like them. Towards the unknown. Towards the edge of a cliff.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, p. 215

Art matters

Daniel Kehlmann:

Times are always strange. Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.

Georg Wilhem Pabst, a German film director, but here a character in the historical fiction work The Director

Simone Weil: Living and dying in the face of injustice

Hey, there, blog. It’s been a while. I’ve been busy, but that’s not the main reason for my silence. The bigger problem I’m finding it hard to finds words that capture my sense of what’s going on in the world. But I’m still here, and still sometimes finding the energy to read. While I select some of that reading in hopes that it will help me understand and respond to deteriorating conditions, I’m drawn to other texts because I think they might offer some temporary distraction from those conditions.

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Asceticism and sensuousness

Susan Sontag:

I have never understood asceticism. I have always thought it proceeded from lack of sensuousness, lack of vitality. I’ve never realized that there is a form of asceticism — consisting in simplifying one’s needs and seeking to take a more active role in satisfying them — which is precisely a more developed kind of sensuousness. The only kind of sensuousness I have understood entails love of luxury + comfort.

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The irony of purposeful arguments against the existence of purpose

Alfred North Whitehead:

Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that “purpose” is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.

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You do not have my ideas!

Our son was three years old, and he was in the kitchen with me and my wife as we were preparing to eat breakfast one morning. Standing in front of the open refrigerator door, he announced that he would like to have a pickle on his cereal. “That’s not a great idea,” I said. He closed the refrigerator door and turned to face me, planting his feet solidly on the kitchen floor. “You do not have my ideas!” It dawned on me that my relationship with my son had changed rather significantly. “You’re right,” I stammered. “I do not have your ideas. You can put a pickle on your cereal if you like.”

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An ordinary mind on an ordinary day

Virginia Woolf:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and simplicity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

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The violence of climate change

Rebecca Solnit:

Climate change is caused by many human actions, and the solutions are likewise manifold: change how we design our residences, towns and cities, transit systems, agriculture, land management, and overall consumption habits, including food. But the single biggest one is: get over our reliance on fossil fuels. Climate change is itself violence as fires, floods, extreme heat, drought, famine, sea level rise and other catastrophes that both take human life and devastate the natural world. (Environmental historian Rob Nixon published a book in 2011, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, about the way we need to see these undramatic forces that poison, contaminate, undermine, force relocation as violence.) It is violence caused by the powerful minority that has delayed and derailed the decades of efforts to do what the climate requires of us. People die of stuff like the current heat wave (and heat-wave deaths are one of the most undercounted ways we die of climate chaos).

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No time to understand, but plenty of time for righteous wrath

Lionel Trilling:

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

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