CONNECTIONS ACROSS TIME AND SPACE

Last year I read Rachel Cohen’s wonderful book, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters. As the title suggests, she writes about chance meetings between a variety of American notables. The book has stuck with me over the last year. Some of the encounters she describes are interesting in themselves. But she also has me thinking about how I’ve been shaped by conversations and encounters both random and planned. A recent trip to Texas, where I lived most of the first 30 years or so of my life, brought those formative connections to mind more vividly.

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WRITING IS MYSTERIOUS

Andrea Barrett:

Writing is mysterious, and it’s supposed to be. Craft guides a writer at every step, as does knowledge of earlier work; we accomplish little without those foundations. Research can help, if it feeds the imagination and generates ideas; a plan is also a wonderful thing, if a writer’s imagination works that way. Groping blindly, following glimmers of structure and sound, is far from the only way; other writers work differently to good effect and any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between the writer’s own uncontrollable interior preoccupations, and what she’s most concerned about in the world around her. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the breathing, bleeding place we guard so carefully in daily life.

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TREASURES OF INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES

Saturday’s celebration of Independent Bookstore Day has me thinking about all of independent bookstores who have fed my literary appetite over more than five decades. Perhaps some of them will be familiar to you – I’d love to hear/read from anyone who has spent time in any of these stores. Even better, perhaps you’d be kind enough to point out other stores that one simply must visit the next time one is in a particular city.

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RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS

Simone Weil:

It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. Other men, seen from his point of view, only have rights. He, in his turn, has rights, when seen from the point of view of other men, who recognize that they have obligations towards him. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.

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UNIVERSITIES TEACHING IGNORANCE

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

Who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance?

The Waste Books, 1793-1796; quoted in Ignorance and Bliss by Mark Lilla, p. 199

PLUGGING FOR DEMOCRACY

Athenagoras of Syracuse, as quoted by Thucydides:

[Some say] that democracy is neither intelligent nor fair and that it is rather the rich who are best fitted to govern. I say, however, that “the people” is the name of the whole state, the elite only one segment of it. In addition, the rich are the best at administering the treasury, the wise the best at framing issues, but the people are best at listening to arguments and judging among them, and that all these functions have their place in a democracy. But what actually happens in an oligarchy is that the few give the many their share of risks and then, not content with the lion’s share of the profits, take them all.

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CONTEMPLATING MORTALITY

“This is such a brush with mortality, difficult to parse at 14.”

So said the father of a 14-year-old boy who shared with his son one of the last helicopter tours of New York City before that helicopter plunged into the Hudson River this past week, killing a Spanish couple, their three young children, and the helicopter’s pilot. Earlier news stories have described the crash itself; this article in the New York Times describes the reactions of families who toured the city in that helicopter shortly before the fatal crash.

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THE CHARACTER OF A NATIONALIST

George Orwell:

A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs, and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the up grade and some hated rival is on the down grade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

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RE-THINKING MY READING (YET AGAIN)

At the beginning of this year I committed myself to taking my reading more seriously. This is not to say that I wasn’t paying attention to my reading before, but rather to say that I wanted to hold myself accountable to read more critically so that I read for understanding, both broadening and deepening what I take from the books I read. (I’d say that regular readers of this site know that I return again and again to the question how and what I want to read, but I know that there are precious few regular readers!) That re-commitment is manifested most concretely in the reading notes that I’m publishing here on this site. I see these notes not as critical reviews of the books but rather as collections of insights that I want to take with me.

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THE EMPTY POWER OF AUTHORITARIANS

Lindsey Stonebridge:

True political power comes only with the active assent of the people. The empty power offered by authoritarians, fantasy nationalists, and sovereignty fanatics, by contrast, can only be maintained by violence.

We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience, p. 288