books., etc.

"That world has gone. The anchors have dissolved or are dissolving. There is neither a monetary nor religious anchor. The pound floats... The great visions of how one might associate with others – in an Empire, a Commonwealth, a socialist economy, a commune, a religious community, a trade union or even a company – have become implausible. We are individualists in a not very sovereign nation state being buffeted around by economic forces beyond our control. We madly find meaning in cults and celebrity, over-investing in family as the last redoubt of meaning, while reconciling ourselves to fewer public services and cynical companies."

---Will Hutton, The Observer.

~~~

"Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way."
---Anthony Grafton, NYRB.

Well, all that doom and gloom, the goodbye to all that and thanks for the fish mantra, is about par for the course. I mean, the idea of 'the end' (the end of the book, of civilisation, of innocence), the prospect of the sudden termination or disruption of settled ways, continuity, the order of things, tradition is itself as old as modernity and part of its tradition: Beckett: the end of the story is another story...The 'death of Christ' (Holbein) prefigures the 'death of God'. The end of capitalism, the end of socialism. The family as an institution is in terminal decline, the fall of the west, that sea change in political fortunes, is well and truly on its way (or so I'm told by reliable sources). The centre doesn't hold. What binds us when there is only contingency, sovereign becoming? World War one and the jolt out of the belle epoque, the Renaissance as a veritable second Fall.

Can't say I buy it. Of course there's some truth to it. There's some truth to most things. But universities produced (and produce) a lot of stuffiness and snobbery, and a fair number of interminable, self-centred, pedantic bores who masquerade as intelligent people, though in reality they're consumed by their own pettiness and vanity. Well, at least their uselessness was a good antidote to the philistines and religious conservatives, to the anti-intellectual brigade for whom the slow process of learning (replete with all its ambiguities) was to be dispensed with in a sudden gush of enthusiasm for the simple, unadorned life (Peter Brown on how the men of Greek learning looked on at horror at the Christian converts with their belief in a direct line to wisdom via revelation is insightful here).

The tree of knowledge. The tree of life. Same old, same old. But a false opposition. For in life there is no going back, only an upward and onward movement that spirals around a still centre. In the beginning was the act, not the word. And that act, which is in and of the world, that is connected to its myriad strands, is not based on opposition.