The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralyzing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
–Alain de Botton
Category Archives: Essay
Paralyzing Thinking
Michael Dirda on the Seduction of Reading
Amid such an internal tohubohu, is it any wonder that I think fondly of the man of one book, the hedgehog who–in the phrase made famous by Isaiah Berlin–knows one big thing and doesn’t need to know any other? In very low moments I sometimes think that a passion for omnivorous reading has seduced me into a lifetime of one-night stands, while the less promiscuous have managed to find a single true and more fulfilling love. But it’s too late for me and my kind to change now, n o matter how much we may year for those carpet slippers and one or two well-worn volumes. How, after all, can I resist that flashy new thriller or sloe-eyed biography, let alone the new novel that promises hitherto unimagined pleasures? Sirens all. Of the reading of many books there is no end.
–Michael Dirda
from “The One and the Many”
Reading is Everything (Nora Ephron)
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
–Nora Ephron
from I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
The Magic Door (Arthur Conan Doyle)
“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you.
There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense of it.
Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer’s ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.”
–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
found in Through the Magic Door
Dystopian Bleakness and Creative Fantasy (Pete Townshend)
“The idea of dystopian bleakness that could only be redeemed by creative fantasy resonated with me at a deep, personal level…I had always relied on my imagination and creativity to see me through the lowest points, the darkest days of childhood, and later at school, art college and the early days of The Who. I had come to rely on this mechanism to fly me out of danger and depression, like the air-sea rescue of a drowning man.”
–Pete Townshend
found in Who I Am
Physician and Poet
“The physician and the poet can both be healers. They share a common goal in their efforts to maintain light and order against the chaos of darkness and disease, and to create or restore the beauty and harmony of health: in this quest, medicine serves the body, poetry the spirit.”
–A.H. Jones
from “Literature and Medicine”
David Foster Wallace on Writing and Manipulation
If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
Read More →Introduction to Borges’ Ficciones (Anthony Kerrigan)
The work of Jorge Luis Borges is a species of international literary metaphor. He knowledgeably makes a transfer of inherited meanings from Spanish and English, French and German, and sums up a series of analogies of confrontations, of appositions in other nations’ literature. His Argentinians act out Parisian dramas, his Central European Jews are wise in the ways of the Amazon, his Babylonians are fluent in the paradigms of Babel. Probably, withal, he is the most succinct writer of this century, and one of the most incisive as to conclusions, daring dryly to go beyond such a Mannerist master as James Joyce, who knew philology and felt legends, but eschewed meanings. Perhaps, though, his meaning is simply in the ritual tone of voice with which he suggests some eternal, unanswerable question. Read More →
Language at its Most Acute
“This is what language, at it’s most acute, can do. It can collapse the distances, bring us into not just the thoughts but also the perceptions of a writer, allow us, however fleetingly, to inhabit, literally, his or her eyes. Sure, it’s an illusion, a trick of ink and paper; sure, all literature, all art, is a construction, a creation, flawed and flimsy, an attempt to render, in symbols, the substance of who we are. Still, there is a nobility to the gesture, not least because it is preordained to fail. This is what the postmodernists don’t get, that if literature is a game, it is a game of serious consequences, in which we communicate across an irreconcilable divide.”
–David Ulin
found in The Lost Art of Reading
A Certain Kind of Silence
“…to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. That seems increasingly elusive in our overnetworked society, where every buzz and rumor is instantly blogged and tweeted, and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape, knowledge can’t help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with its promise that speed can lead us to more illumination, that it is more important to react than to think deeply, that something must be attached to every bit of time. Here, we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down.”
–David Ulin
found in The Lost Art of Reading
