Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.
― Henry James Sr., letter to his sons Henry and William
Augustine will never be alone. When he returned to Thagaste, he formed a core of abiding friendships. Boys who had grown up with him as fellow-students now rallied to him. They were a singularly intelligent and priggish group of young men. . . . Augustine, who had lapsed into monogamy, was a rarity among these celibates. They thought that music was a divine gift; they would discuss together the nature of beauty; they felt themselves above the circus. Augustine knew to perfection how to keep such friendships "on the boil from the heat of shared enthusiasms." "All kinds of things rejoiced my soul in their company – to talk and to laugh, and to do each other kindnesses; to read pleasant books together; to pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again; to differ without rancour, as a man might differ with himself, and when, most rarely, dissension arose, to find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; to teach each other and to learn from each other; to be impatient for the return of the absent, and to welcome them with joy on their homecoming; these, and such-like things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and by a thousand other pleasing ways, kindled a flame which fused our very souls together, and, of many, made us one."
–Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo. Quotations are from The Confessions.
From his very interesting Reith Lecture on the BBC, 20 December 1953
It is a cruel and humourless sort of pun that so powerful a present form of modern tyranny should call itself by the very name of a belief in community, by a word 'communism' which in other times evoked memories of villages and village inns and of artisans concerting their skills, and of men of learning content with anonymity. But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual. This is not man's fate; this is not his path.
Milan Kundera (1929-2023) was a Czech writer and dissident whose life under Stalinism turned him against not just totalitarian politics but politics in general. His books explored freedom as a deeply personal experience, something found more in art, friendship or sex than in the public realm. Here is a passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being that I transcribed into my commonplace book many years ago:
A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.
When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.
In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing.
– Kwame Anthony Appiah
The things we lack the courage to do are transformed into stories.
–Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter
When Russia started this aggression, they looked at the world as if they were looking at themselves in a mirror. They thought that everyone in the world was cynical and despised people in the same way as the owners of Russia do. But the world is different – the world helps us protect life. And anyone who goes against the world will become marginal. Russia will gain nothing and lose everything. Glory to all who defend our state! Glory to all who help!
Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov on politics and history:
In a recent interview pegged to the International Booker Prize, Gospodinov said Time Shelter looked beyond his country’s borders and was inspired by the global turn toward populism. “I come from a system that sold a ‘bright future’ under communism,” he said. “Now the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a ‘bright past.’
“I know via my own skin that both checks bounce,” Gospodinov added. “They are backed by nothing.”
Evil is when we don't want to be together. . . . We banish it so that we can be together, all equal.
–An unidentified Bulgarian woman in this video
Of the thousands of answers I’ve given myself—during painful, feverish nights or nightmare-filled days, while I’m teaching and the students are writing an essay, or in a shoe store, icy bus stations, or waiting outside a doctor’s office—to the question of why I never became a writer, one answer seems truer than any other in its paradoxicality and ambiguity. I have read all the books, and I have never known a single author. I have heard all the voices, with schizophrenic clarity, but no real voice has ever spoken to me. I have wandered through thousands of rooms of the museum of literature, charmed at first by the art with which a door was painted on every wall, in trompe l’oeil, meticulously matching each splinter of wood with a pointed shadow, each coating of paint with a feeling of fragility and transparence that made you admire the artists of illusion more than you’ve ever admired anything, but in the end, after hundreds of kilometers of corridors of false doors, with the ever-stronger smell of oil paints and thinners in the stale air, the route ceases to be a contemplative stroll and becomes first a state of disquiet, then a breathless panic. Each door fools you and disappoints you, and the more completely you are fooled, the more it hurts. They are wonderfully painted, but they do not open. Literature is a hermetically sealed museum, a museum of illusionary doors, of artists worrying over the nuance of beige and the most expressive imitation of a knocker, hinge, or doorknob, the velvety black of the keyhole. All it takes is for you to close your eyes and run your fingers over the continuous, unending wall to understand that nowhere in the house of literature are there any openings or fissures. But, seduced by the grandeur of the doors loaded with basreliefs and cabalistic symbols, or by the humility of a peasant’s kitchen door, one that has a pork bladder stretched in place of a window, you don’t feel like closing your eyes, on the contrary, you’d prefer a thousand eyes for the thousand false exits arranged before you. Like sex, like drugs, like all the manipulations of our minds that attempt to break out of the skull, literature is a machine for producing first beatitude, then disappointment. After you’ve read tens of thousands of books, you can’t help but ask yourself: while I was doing that, where did my life go? You’ve gulped down the lives of others, which always lack a dimension in comparison to the world in which you exist, however amazing their tours of artistic force may be. You have seen colors of others and felt the bitterness and sweetness and potential and exasperation of other consciousnesses, to the point that they have eclipsed your own sensations and pushed them into the shadows. If only you could pass into the tactile space of beings other than you—but again and again, you were only rolled between the fingertips of literature. Unceasingly, in a thousand voices, it promised you escape, while it robbed you of even the frozen crust of reality that you once had.
–Solenoid, Mircea Cărtărescu
It is so lonely to feel deeply about the world and be met with the complete failure of language to communicate it. Poetry gets us marginally (but importantly!) closer than rhetorical language, like how standing on a roof gets one a few feet closer to grabbing a star than standing in the dirt. It makes the loneliness of being here a little easier to bear.
– Kaveh Akbar, “Galloping Towards Delight: A Conversation with Kaveh Akbar and Ilya Kaminsky”, published in Magma Issue 83, Solitude, Summer 2022
From a speech in the House of Lords, via Marginal Revolutions:
Lord Triesman: I will tell the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that at Cambridge University, after the faculty of economics was redecorated, I was inveigled into taking part in a debate as to the order in which the portraits of its Nobel prize winners should be rehung and whether it should be Marshall or Keynes in the pre-eminent position. I left that debate after eight hours. No one was an inch further down the line of resolving it and, to my knowledge, the portraits have never been hung, because 20 years later no one is any further down the path of resolving it.
And you thought the stories were strange:
Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over; eventually it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony.
The expulsion from Paradise is in its principal aspect eternal: and so, although the expulsion from Paradise is definitive, and life in the world inescapable, the very eternity of the process nevertheless makes it possible not only that we could remain in Paradise forever but that we are indeed there forever, whether we know it here or not.
They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. In the manner of children, they all wanted to be couriers. And so there are only couriers. They rush through the world and, as there are no kings, they shout their meaningless messages to one another.
Belief in progress doesn’t mean belief that progress has already been made. That would not be belief.Many shades of the departed are occupied solely with lapping at the waters of the river of death because it comes from us and still bears the salty tang of our seas. Then the river writhes in revulsion, its current flowing backwards, washing the dead back into life. But they are happy, sing hymns of thanksgiving, and caress the indignant river.
You are the assignment. No student to be seen.
‘But then he returned to his work as though nothing had happened.’ We are familiar with this kind of remark from any number of old tales, even though it may not be found in any of them.
You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world — that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature — but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.
“Why then do you fear love in particular more than earthly existence in general?” It’s as if you had said: “Why not fear every bush in the same way that you fear the burning bush?”
In a struggle between you and the world, bet on the world.
What is more joyful than belief in a household god?
The recipe of a work of art – its ingredients – how to make it – the formula.
I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements and the pciture results from the porportions of these elements.
From Daily Rothko
Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.
–James Baldwin
From Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). Hadrian, embroiled in an ugly war with Jewish rebels, looks toward the horizon:
For some years now people have credited me with strange insight, and with knowledge of divine secrets. But they are mistaken: I have no such power. It is true, however, that during those nights of Bethar some disturbing phantoms passed before my eyes. I admitted that it was indeed vain to hope for an eternity for Athens and for Rome, which is accorded neither to objects nor men, and which the wisest among us deny even to the gods. These subtle and complex forms of life, these civilizations comfortably installed in their refinements of ease and of art, the very freedom of mind to seek and to judge, all this depended upon countless rare changes, upon conditions almost impossible to bring about, and none of which could be expected to endure. We should manage to destroy Simon [bar Kochba]; Arrian would be able to protect Armenia from Alani invasions. But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man's lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else, would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.
Nature fails us, fortune changes, a god beholds all things from on high.
From Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924), translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter:
The volumes were heavy, unhandy. Hans Castorp propped them against his chest or stomach as he lay; they were heavy, but he did not mind. Lying there, his mouth half open, he let his eye glide down the learned page, upon which fell the light from his red-shaded lamp, though he might have read, if need were, by the brilliance of the moonlight alone. He read, following the lines down the page with his head, until at the bottom his chin lay sunk upon his breast — and in this position the reader would pause perhaps for reflection, dozing a little or musing in half-slumber, before lifting his eyes to the next page. He probed profoundly. While the moon took its appointed way above the crystalline splendours of the mountain valley, he read of organized matter, of the properties of protoplasm, that sensitive substance maintaining itself in extraordinary fluctuation between building up and breaking down; of form developing out of rudimentary, but always present, primordial, read with compelling interest of life, and its sacred, impure mysteries.
What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was. Consciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus, was undoubtedly, to a certain degree, present in the lowest, most undeveloped stages of life; it was impossible to fix the first appearance of conscious processes at any point in the history of the individual or the race; impossible to make consciousness contingent upon, say, the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animal forms had no nervous systems, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could suspend life; not merely particular sense-organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irritability to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as in the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and spermatozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness, then, was simply a function of matter organized into life; a function that in higher manifestations turned upon its avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the phenomenon it displayed —a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve self-knowledge, nature in recoil — and vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to itself.
What was life? No one knew. No one knew the actual point whence it sprang, where it kindled itself. Nothing in the domain of life seemed uncaused, or insufficiently caused, from that point on; but life itself seemed without antecedent. If there was anything that might be said about it, it was this: it must be so highly developed, structurally, that nothing even distantly related to it was present in the inorganic world. Between the protean amoeba and the vertebrate the difference was slight, unessential, as com- pared to that between the simplest living organism and that nature which did not even deserve to be called dead, because it was inorganic. For death was only the logical negation of life; but between life and inanimate nature yawned a gulf which research strove in vain to bridge. They tried to close it with myriad hypotheses, which it swallowed down without becoming any the less deep or broad.
Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?
A little bit of everything, all of the time?
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime.
Anything and everything, all of the time.
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) was a Japanese writer born into the era when Japan was obsessively struggling to catch up with the west. His education thus focused on European philosophy and literature. But he was, it seems, ambivalent about the experience. This is from one of his most famous works, A Fool's Life:
Twenty-nine years of human existence had offered him little illumination. But Voltaire at least equipped him with artificial wings.
Unfolding these man-made wings, easily he glided up into the sky. Bathed with reasons light, human joy and sorrow sank away beneath his eyes. Over squalid towns, letting irony and mockery fall, he soared into unobstructed space, heading straight for the sun. That with just such man-made wings, scorched by the sun's radiance an ancient Greek had hurtled into the sea, dead. He'd seemed to have forgotten. ….
