Yourcenar's Voice

The voice is pitch-perfect, slow and measured. There is the sense that nothing is superfluous and yet everything is brought to the surface. If anything is to be learned it is slowness; that everything has its season, its allotted time. The desire to outstrip time, see the whole, ends in a farce. One's understanding of the world through the self must be cognizant of the limitations of one's capacities-of mind and soul. Someone who is so wasteful cannot be wise. To give everything its due.

It is amazing to think that once Islam stood for moderation, balance, equilibrium, learning and a pragmatic accommodation with the world, an easy-going 'worldliness' that knows when to turn, when to let go. It seems more than ever now that the strain of violence is all there is and a kind of desert fanaticism, purged of contact with civilizing forces, leads to the metamorphosis of "purity" into its absolute opposite.

There is a memory, a memory of an experience that predates experience, as if it were inscribed in us and our duty is but to find it, name it, take it up again... There is no social institution or ritual for it nowadays and so it returns-if at all-in dream, a chance alignment, a fragment, some wild intuition of a reconstitution in the heart, a trace, an echo.

The wide spaces of second chances.

What is the point of literature? To hear different voices, see the different angles taken up and explored; to find one's own voice and let the harshness drop away.  

How does one live so long without knowing? To speak well is to live well, but I have so few words. I have learned little from books or other people and my powers for self-reflection are dimmed by too great a self-consciousness. The local, the provincial understanding underwritten by no clear insights, no bright lines of your own. There is no more time for abstractions. If your hands were true they would gather more faithfully. The body, like the soul, will bear witness. 

|||

The abruptness of your words reminds you of the desert fathers, stone-tongued, deliberate, slow-minded. Your mind veering off on a tangent, a sudden wild dash to escape..what...oneself? The intellect without the virtues, without generosity, kindness, openness, shrivels to a dry page of trivialities  or, alternatively, suddenly ignites with an inflated sense of self-importance.

A choice turn of words: 'Bastards in High Places'.

|||

A return to the east and already in a few hours your face seems old. Keep low, avoid eye contact, wash your hands well.  The strangeness washes over you as you try and maintain a steady path. Make the arrangements, tick off the items on the lists, track down some semblance of order but these preparations have only an air of expectancy about them; we are waiting, waiting for God knows what. Life, itself? 

In a day a thin layer of dust accumulates over your books-new and old. Ridiculous to think you can save them-and in any case, that is only a pretext for wading off your deeper fears. 

I speak more openly among strangers nowadays, which is a sign, no doubt, of how far you've drifted.  Chalk out some platitudes, put on the tall hat, readjust your face...I can hear the drum roll...

||||

A cemetery, a  lush, rolling acre or two of land, high clouds and tall, leafy trees. There are some things I keep, there are times when words fail. 

|||

There is nothing special to say, and I have even forgotten the word for return. Once I sat on the landing steps, hunched over a book under a grey morning sky and was nobody in particular, except myself, the faint sound of the radio scratching two floors below the last link to the outside world. And now I sit in the open with my memories and a grey lead pencil, writing to myself.

Which way is east?

(A song for)

~~~

Behind the door, the true self, the star prize. Door no. 1 swishes back effortlessly, with an efficiency that could barely be imagined fifteen years earlier. With what precision are our futures told nowadays!He stares blinking into the light, smiling for no reason, the jangling nerves of a monkey. 

The audience might burst from all the excitement, on this day out, this day off from the pub. Live the dream, dream the life, all sponsored by a washing up liquid, a detergent for Christ's sake.

"This is the moment you've been waiting for," says the man in the grey suit, reading from the blank card in his hand, his arm hooking around his shoulder in the most artificial gesture seen on the screens since Miss World in the long summer of '76. He might even kiss him with the false kiss of the ages, the betrayal of his voice hanging on his lips.

"What would it mean to you?," he asks, grinning like a tormentor. 

The world. It would mean the world.

"This could have been yours, but it was not to be, I'm afraid," says the grey-manned suit. The man in the grey suit, living out his last years in clothes that are two sizes too big for him. 

A trip to Barbados, all expenses paid. He pictures a black man stabbing him in the lungs on his first day there. He picks out the glaring eyes of his wife in the audience and starts to perspire. Another knife, a bouquet of daggers from his love. Later, after the long train journey home, the will sleep alone on a bed made from marble, her clothes unruffled, her heart not stirred. He will sleep with his eyes open, the light from a car will travel out of the dark through the lace curtains, giving the impression of warmth on the ceiling and he will know forever that his life has passed.

The audience gasps and moans in unison, the high drama, the pantomime-spirit, all for under a fiver.  

Days of Abandonement

...having the craft of bringing back to life a message from the past, ...creating secret spaces which no one else can enter while the reading takes place, ...being able to redefine the universe and rebel against unfairness, all by means of a certain page. 
---Alberto Manguel

It's amazing to walk down the familiar streets, down Denmark Street with its guitar shops, and lime green wooden window frames, Streatham Street (which has the widest forst green door in London), Bloomsbury square, where the bricks are so dark from grime that they have a black sheen to them and remind you of Amsterdam, the high windows, the sunken garden near Montague Street and one of the leafiest corners of London, Gower Mews, off Gower Street, suddenly opened up for the first time, showing another hidden world. 

The sun old but constant, drifting with you down the long streets in the high hours. The light natural, as real on the trees as on dark windows. A woman with straw coloured hair in deep contemplation at the back of a bus, the glass between our gazes; outside a Bloomsbury hotel a youngish Italian woman with dark, frizzy hair and a strong face sitting on her haunches with her daughter, a passer-by taking her photograph and you, there, to witness it all.

The whole of summer rolled into this hour; many summers from long ago. All of this seems like a single, last or lost wave. There is nothing more to collect; it is time to let go. You chance across an old poem, a thousand years old, broken down, the fragments kept safe, woven again. A song cycle in a now forgotten mode of speech, the letters angled and as if mixed up randomly, like leaves swept together. How do you say that again? They tell of a day, of the fallen, insignificant lives. An afternoon, a few hours maybe, when nothing changed but things were seen for the last time, in the mind's eye.

Nothing can be brought back. There is a time for everything. In the scheme of things, the wider arc of time, there's a kind of sadness that is a luxury for those to whom everything comes late.

Ghosts in the Shelves

I would read my way into the unknown—into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no best-seller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not even word of mouth to guide me.
---Phyllis Rose.

'...in a digital age ruled by anxiety that something, anything, will disappear. We now have the tools to archive every photograph, document every event, and record every chat. There is a brisk trade in artifacts of all kinds—lost singer-songwriters and B-sides, cult films, paperback reissues from small presses, even Web sites that collect old Web sites'
---from The New Yorker.

~~~

The books lost, never read, misplaced, discarded. A magical belief persist that somewhere on the shelves is some ancient wisdom, some particular brief and exact line, that describes your own condition and, more, helps solve the riddle. Perhaps, though, we expect too much from books, as if they could provide a way out of life-or maybe into a truer one; and in an age in which religion provides little consolation or insight with its outdated language and metaphysics, maybe books are supposed to fill the vacuum, answer the questions we don't ask enough: how to live a life, what is a good life? Which is not, of course, to think of literature as an "input" into a utilitarian machine, maximizing overall utility/happiness. 

'Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality'
--Hannah A.

Hard now to talk about pleasure in any other way except the senses, the sensational, and immediate gratification. Pleasure is but a smudge on the map of the brain and the self (or self-interest) is all there is (or at least it's most fundamental). No wonder that when people think about the legacy of the Revolution they instantly think of "liberty" and "equality" but not the much more mysterious fraternity or solidarity.

~~~

Book clubs, prizes, bloggers...yeah, you've really got a bee in your bonnet, b.

'These readers make so much noise. Yet reading is quiet and solitary.'

reality hunger, the cultic animal

No art form exists independently of the conditions in which it is enjoyed.
---Tim Parks.

The background conditions-one suspects for most of us-result in us having to steal half an hour here, a quarter on the train there, to catch some part of a novel. Franzen had written about this a few years back-about the inability of us to read "linearly" any more. Perhaps the type of jagged, fragmented attention we devote to anything serious, meaningful is itself the only type of purpose we can have or imagine in fragmented times.

The vast, intricate, plotted novel of the 19 th century is more closely in line with bourgeois life and its stabilities, a coherent notion of the self underwritten by God or Reason or History or Society, than with our own contemporary fleeting and disjointed lives. We want to scare ourselves into the belief that all that is left open to us it the dour task of registering this fall from grace, wholeness..the eclipse of meaning itself, the demise of language's ability to point to anything but itself. Text, word, and narrative are all dead, or in the last throes of a fascinating series of convulsions. Books are an escape, a phony kind of 'inwardness', a sophisticated game when all is said and done (and it nearly is). If it's true that we love to imagine ourselves as broken it's also true that we picture ourselves as breaking out of the picture, rejoining "pure" life, thoughtlessness, the instinctive life lived out in the open, under the sun.

The trend over the last centuries, it might be argued, has been to move to greater and greater levels of reality, spurning the mystifications of religion and the dense web of tradition in favour of ordinary lives,  natural simplicity, gritty realism, psychological depth. Somehow related to this is the 'decentering' of the self and the world: from now on there is no stable centre, no privileged position from which we can take a step back, no 'cosmos', just eternal flux and animal nature.

You can associate with that. Vermeer and Brueghel can seem like a breath of fresh air, a plain kind of speaking. And to know in 'the light of experience' -as long as the light isn't too harsh-is paramountly what sets modernity apart. And so the question is: can fiction reflect our experiences (does it?) if increasingly the very idea of experience is under scrutiny? If we live in 'liquid times', if entertainment, materialism and gamesmanship are in the ascendancy, if technology promotes virtual reality, or irreality,  can fiction do anything but acknowledge its own powerlessness? Shouldn't we turn to television and film if we really want to hear a more honest voice, decipher the sign of the times?

I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people-maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range....

It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the BOOK. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities....

I don’t think the Kindle will make any difference to what I’m talking about, which is that the BOOK can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen and it can’t compete with the computer screen I don’t think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the BOOK can’t measure up.

---Philip Roth.

'We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as brave, naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity...

We have never had...a satisfactory liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn'

--Iris M. ("Against Dryness")

Well, yes, 'the end of the novel' is, perhaps, only second favourite to 'the end of the west'..the 'west' begins with an awareness of its own end, is rooted in contingency, scepticism toward the facile attempts to seek permanence, SURETY. Cosmos, Nature, God, and eventually reason itself must give way.

What will be lost? That's the question. A narrowing down, a greying of the imagination, as if one were looking at faint lines on an empty canvas? A turn of phrase...how a phrase turns you, or summarizes layers of thought & feeling, eventually only to concede to the realm of facts, thought, light.

Pleasure, uselessness, and slowness as a form of resistance against the manufactured restlessness and strivings of an image-ridden commercial society. Snobbishness and terrible pretentiousness. Of course. But that presumes an 'other, and you like to read for yourself. Silence as a commons, the preference for preferring not to. Already 'preference' is the wrong word.

Second thoughts: there's something peculiar about always being attentive, something suspect about self-absorption.

Academentia

Anton came up with this term, academentia, and it seems just perfect. Here are some words by Steve Hedley, Dean of Law, Cork (?)...

‘… Most departmental members have little interest in making the university run like a well-oiled machine, especially as that vision consigns them to the role of mere obedient cog. Viewed from the departmental level, both the perspectives and the loyalties are very different – which gives the university much of its character, and makes it so hard to govern. As a generality, the academics’ viewpoint and allegiance will be discipline-based rather than tied to the particular institution. Fidelity to the university as a whole may be weak, or indeed (if it conflicts with fidelity to discipline) hardly discernable at all...  

Their loyalty is owed to the people they know and whose activities they understand, not to others, with whom they might occasionally compete for parking space but whom they otherwise ignore. And whatever rationality and purpose may inhere in central university processes is very probably not apparent from the point of view of typical department members. This limits the influence that central university management has, or can possibly have, on the individual departments, and hence on the university’s activities as a whole.’

Of course, 'loyalty' is just what is demanded by everyone nowadays (the company, the State, religion). In fact, all sorts of institutions, including the family, need a kind of unswerving loyalty to sustain and perpetuate themselves. Whence the need for representatives, spokespeople, PR people, spin managers, image stylists, consultants, trainers, 'educationists', in fact, a whole body of scroungers and second-tier court jesters jostling for position and influence.

But why even loyalty to a department or a discipline? Every subject of inquiry has heterogeneous methodologies, manifold assumptions that are deeply implicated in the internal history of the subject. And both are not unrelated to political and social contexts. 

What is the university if it doesn't cultivate the willingness and capacity to take a step back in order to distance oneself from the dominant discourse, the orthodoxies of your time? But more than that, why should one always have to think along those narrow grooves in the first place? Is there, ultimately, a fundamental distinction between an intellectual and an academic, the latter nothing more-and increasingly so- than an official for this or that faction, a trained expert, a 'gamer' who has lost the ability to speak like a human being or be really concerned about the fate of human beings?

University: Clarity. Independence. Opposition.

The reality is probably more like: Fuzziness and deliberate bewilderment. Subservience. Conformity. Meekness.

'"MY LIFE has fallen under the rule of a "dark drive"..The small-at times exceedingly small thing called "demand of the day" which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean, the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence..Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by SCHOLARS...[T]he question asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me...'

--Rosenzweig.

Awakenings

I think the first ten minutes of Awakenings are probably the saddest ten minutes of film you can remember. Of course, you'll always remember the compassionate smile of Robin Williams (though you prefer to remember him for his wackiness in Mork & Mindy)but it's DeNiro who steals the show.

But what is it? The fact of a life that is destined never to grow, that is somehow caught like the winter light in glass? The sudden entering into a different set of rituals..rituals of slow decline, a human being gradually becoming less of a human being as he is deprived of the changing seasons, turning points, various levels of awakenings? His friends are told something is wrong and he has a dim understanding that he's being dragged down and will never be part of their world again? School will go on, some kids will move out of town, time will flow, some will get married, die of heartbreak, fall, sing, but for him his life is locked in that one still moment-and it is not a moment of great beauty or grace or illumination.

Human beings love to carve into wood: their names, a heart, the name of the beloved...and hope to return to it one day, assuming it will last, imagining that the passing of time can be reversed, brought back.

'Och springs us from the domestic into the disconsolate. It is a common, almost pre-linguistic particle, one of those sounds (that in the words of Robert Frost) 'haven't been brought to book..living in the cave of the mouth. ..If 'ouch' is the complaint of the ego, 'och' is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, an on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women inextremis since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.'

The (absolute) Best Top Ten Books you MUST Read Before You Die (or at Least This Summer)

1. 

Hang on, what about the top ten places to see before you die, the top ten films to see before you die, the top ten ways to live before..closely followed by: the top ten ways to die.

From a previous rant:

From time to time you stumble across a few blogs-usually American- dedicated to books and book reading. The curious thing is that you've usually not even heard of, let alone read the books mentioned. The seriousness of book readers. Lists, 'challenges', reviews, analysis, criticism, spinning out not just a secondary literature but fragments, quotations, wild juxtapositions, churning out future anxieties.

Book clubs and the sharing of BOOKS. There's something deeply unsettling about that, incestuous even. Like some sort of underground occult order with its own horrifying rituals of domesticity and chuminess. Reeks of communism and the invasion of the private world, or of the mid-afternoon dullness of mid-America, middle England, middle everywhere. Or the sickly-sweet human warmth found in the catacombs. Probably says more about you than anything else, on second thoughts.

Images: mostly of women drinking coffee. Do men form book clubs? (Actually, two friends did, and all they did was get drunk and read chunks of the Baburnama). The pretentiousness of men reading "difficult" books. Angst, existential despair, edgy or profound. None of that girly stuff for them! But the wives! Now, there's a different kettle of fish for you...

~~~

Book reading, like religion, is increasingly becoming a bit of a show, a freak show. Both promise a kind of redemption, a distraction, a forgetting of self. And both produce their own lists, have their own esoteric circle of interpreters. The publishing industry ties in with self-publicity. 

The great thing about brilliant artists who die at the age of 26 is that everyone wants to get their hands on them. Hot property. The downside is that they generally haven't produced that much (how selfish can you get!). Dig out the letters, the postcards, anything..what can't be accepted is that there's a limit, that nothing will follow (except fragments of a novel not completed or a demo tape recorded in the basement but whose ownership is now subject to a legal dispute). The ultimate prize is to resurrect a long-lost classic, a "masterpiece", to find someone who everyone has totally forgotten about but who was once recognized to be 'the writer's writer'.

The thing about academia and maybe blogland, too, is that it doesn't really care about the pleasure of reading. Pleasure either becomes too refined, a high-brow pursuit of the "pure" aesthete who marks himself off from the worldly or any utilitarian consideration, or it becomes another crude commodity, entangled in the intersection of the marketing machine and individual desire and imagination. 

A list of books...things to be read, to be done, to tick off and get through, to analyse to death, down to the minutest detail and most improbable exegesis. Books to improve your life, books to save your life.

~~~

Of course it goes without saying that much of what you've written above applies to yourself and this blog-preeminently so, perhaps.

So, my list of books to read or re-read whilst I'm busy digging my tunnel during the fall...

2.Alfred Hayes's wonderfully bleak novellas.
3.Walser's Tanners
4.Gottfried Benn's poems
5.Darwish's If I were Another
6.Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence
7.Isobel English (via anton),
8.Lowry's Journey book (another one via anton)
9. Russell Hoban, Turtle Diaries
10. A Stephen King book (can't decide yet, but bag of bones comes highly recommended)
11. Platonov's Soul.

The Table Comes First

The first condition of civilisation is, of course, food.
---Michael Wood, Legacy.

Is it me or is it now impossible to turn on the computer and not be swamped by adverts or images of half-dressed women? Five (ten?) thousand years of civilisation and is this what's it come down to: the black-hearted, black-flagged pirates or candy crush on the tube? 

Legacy is a book that perhaps all school kids should read-especially in the land of the pure. Will always think highly of this book because it pointed me to the great Peter Brown...

~~~

I suppose that at around my age one is always susceptible to the usual bouts of pessimism and world-weariness(maybe because it's easy, but false, to equate 'depth' with sadness...who today after all can be 'profound out of lightness'?). Is the world going to hell in a handcart? Not quite sure what a handcart is, but despite everything you tend to think there's a bit of a hysterical reaction to current events (spurred on by the fake memory of the Great War). Yes, Gaza is terrible-but any worse than before?- and Israel isn't the centre of the world. A plane is shot down over the Ukraine. Yes, a terrible tragedy but, seriously, in the scheme of things?

*Human beings are in the habit of recalling the first times (the first time), all those fumbling first attempts, the tryouts, so it's worth remembering that human civilisation, like human life, has always been a fragile endeavour, something on the verge of collapse and reversal. So why should we be defined by the first or the last time?

One doesn't have to be a Khaldunian to believe that there are phases of history-our circular views of time die hard and come around again- or that what we're witnessing is what Guenon once called 'the reign of quantity'.

~~~

Food isn't just food, of course. Rituals, memory, symbolism. The most memorable meals are always with other people. The sharing of the common meal, the set times, the learning of the truly important skill of not saying what's on your mind; the banter across generations, the passing down of stories, the etiquette of sharing, of not thinking about oneself, and the deep satisfaction of warm food, strong coffee, sweet desserts. The table-to take up a point Hannah once made (and Hirschman, too)-is a deeply political symbol (think about the turning of tables..Christ). Which brings you back to Iraq, the old seat of pluralistic civilisation. The table is intimacy and difference, unity and diversity. Religion, in the old days, was never to be discussed at the table.

Questions of taste and judgement naturally arise. The intelligence of the senses, the fine line between snobbery and savagery. Food, essential to the continuity of life but also a form of life. Is there anything sadder than a t.v. dinner or eating on the move? Eating while checking one's emails, perhaps.

Patrick Cockburn, one of the few genuine journalists, was probably right: the idea of a multi-ethnic Iraq has gone (Of course, the Marsh Arabs were already-as far as you know-already being forced to abandon their ways under Saddam but, still... 

The eaters and the eaten

wintertime

The Nature of Connections

Across the generations, the final boundary itself, hands reach out. There's a remarkable painterly quality to this picture. K. Clark, in what seems an age ago now, wrote about Leonardo's hands and how they showed the self-revealing gestures of the soul.

Nothing new here, just the same old sins committed in the newest of ways, just the same old hands lamenting the fate of lost children.

In the mean-time, the old communities of Iraq (Christians and Yazidis) are being driven out. Your first instinct (always the wrong one) is to return to M. Wood's Legacy and Peter Brown's masterly World of Late Antiquity.

How many connections go into the world we see before us, the settled patterns of life, the wood and glass from unknown quarters, the idea of high windows, the lyrical slanting light on the practical and minimalist bookshelves?

The rain descends, the light fades and winter finds its place again in the human heart. In summer, everyone finds their own way, their own singular patch of shade.A small grove of trees is like an island. Little r stands on the tree stump at the centre of it. 

"What do you have to say?" 

"Nothing. Nothing to say." 

Palestinians have a low IQ and "deserve to be dead" (Joan Rivers). And in the Knesset there is talk of "shipping" the Gazans out. Er..in the good old days that used to be called ethnic cleansing.

The art of listening, like the art of looking, is on the wane. The are no iron-clad arguments, just intuitions.  

Moscow in the rain looks like Tokyo in the rain.

Time is a river, time is a mirror, taking from us without interest, making a killing in the night. 

Love falls, has fallen, like the first darkness of autumn, the first stinging chill in our bones. And the first day is like the last in the north. 

You see a woman on the W14 with an Irish fist, small and inscrutable, and a Spanish arm. You catch your image in the windows, faintly reflected, the broken images like everyone else's-at least in their uncertainty. We hurtle on, with this brief interior light, without resolution, past empty playing fields, and parks shrouded in darkness apart from the artificial lights; a fox pushes against these vast absences, knows something of the stars.

The mirror on the wall clouds over, and a turquoise shape, a veritable small continent, has formed on its surface, disturbing the silver. The mirrors in the house are disintegrating, revealing a text, a word, another mirror.

A man in the land of the pure cut a tomato and found the name of God; you cut a loaf of bread and cut your own finger.  

Excellent Sheep

'Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose...

The ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools...

Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice...

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. ..'

Here's the dope:

'Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms....'

Students are regarded by the institution as “customers,” people to be pandered to instead of challenged. Professors are rewarded for research, so they want to spend as little time on their classes as they can. The profession’s whole incentive structure is biased against teaching...

To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society...

The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things. As of 2010, about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting...'

Meritocracy?

'Never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers...

Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it...

Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal...

~~~

'the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy...

My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to...

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic...

The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this...

The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from...

The message is: You have arrived...

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense...

They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. ..

And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students...

college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend...

You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty...

It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale..

The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy..

The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. 

---from two articles by William Deresiewicz.

~~~

Wow! That was a breath of fresh air.

Two Rivers

k

And how it goes, nobody knows.

~~~

Little r sat on the lowest branch of the apple tree in the last flaring of the sun, near the Roding, dried up by reeds and long grass, stones and, ultimately, the time of the year. 

"Are you having fun?"

"Yes, I suppose so," I replied.

"You don't always have to read your books"

"Okay, I'll keep that in mind, little one!"

~~~

What do we keep, what do we let go of?

~~~

'For the mind, everything is in the future; for the heart, everything is in the past.'
---Platonov.

One can only hint at the stories one cannot tell, the stories that slip on by. 

The Pornography of Violence

'Britain’s commemoration of the Great War has lost all sense of proportion. It has become a media theme park, an indigestible cross between Downton Abbey and a horror movie. I cannot walk down the street or turn on the television without being bombarded by Great War diaries, poems, scrapbooks and songs.'

---Simon Jenkins.

Lest we forget. Huh, what was that again? The great irony being, of course, that Britain has been involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts in occupied Palestine, Libya and Syria, as well (allegedly) as in the transfer of people to 'black sites' (torture chambers). 'Involved' is putting it politely since it's been one of the main actors and instigators, lest we forget.

So, what are the "lessons" we should take from the war to end all wars? Who knows! But I doubt you'll be reading in the papers, or watching any programmes on the t.v., arguments which draw your attention to the fact that most of the violence committed over the last century was by state power (the Trenches, the Gulags, the Camps, not to mention Vietnam, Iraq, etc., etc). And since we're talking about history, wasn't the first use of the word 'terror' employed in discussing state power (the totalitarian state)?

Light the candles, dress up or down, feign some kind of sobriety, read some trench poetry with tears in your eyes, play Barber's mournful flutes and remember that when it comes to the dead, only one's own dead count-and even then, only if they had double-barreled names. The leaders want to get off on the memory of the violence, even as they are busy filming the next scene! 

~~~

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.

--Hardy.

~~~

To the poetic sensibility the reality of dreams is another kind of dream.

To the poet-shaman everything is connected. Only the philosopher-king introduces distinctions, the hard edge of logic.

~~~

'What makes the present moment distinct is the phalangist-like organization of the right-wing thugs, who feed off incitement by politicians, including members of the cabinet, the Knesset, and other figures within the Israeli establishment.' 

---David Shulman in an eye-opening piece for the NYRB.

The full article is here