Reading trails and memory lapses

I decided earlier this month to pay more attention to how I discover books that I’m interested in reading. There’s evidence of that on my TBR page. Just last week I was reminded why I started to do that. I received a notice from the local library that a book I had requested — Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami — was at the desk waiting for me to pick it up. I had no recollection of having requested this book. In fact (I’m now embarrassed to say), I had no idea who Haruki Murakami is or was. I wouldn’t have given this memory lapse a second thought twenty years ago or even a decade ago. Now that I’m at a certain age, it does give me pause. But I set that concern aside, at least for the moment.

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Thinking together: citizenship and the web

Jennifer Szalai concludes her recent NYTimes column, Hannah Arendt is not your icon (gift link), with this paragraph:

For Arendt, loneliness was dangerous; it was precisely under conditions of isolation that one’s imagination could untether itself from reality and “develop its own lines of ‘thought.’” She offers not a guide but a goad — to partake in an activity that can enact our freedom and also help to sustain it. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple,” she once wrote. “It is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

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Totalitarianism and the elimination of political freedom

Hannah Arendt:

Our most recent experiences with totalitarian dictatorships … have clearly shown us, if one is serious about the abolition of political freedom, that it is not sufficient to prohibit what we generally understand by political rights; that it is not enough to forbid citizens from being politically active, expressing opinions in public, or forming parties or other associations for the purpose of action. One must also destroy freedom of thought, as far as this is possible, and it is possible to a large extent; one must destroy the freedom of the will; and even the harmless-seeming freedom of artistic production. One must take possession of even those areas we are accustomed to regard as outside the realm of politics, precisely because they, too contain a political element. Or to put it another way: if one wants to prevent humans from acting in freedom, they must be prevented from thinking, willing, and producing, because all of these activities imply action, and thereby freedom in every sense, including the political. Therefore, I also believe that we entirely misunderstand totalitarianism if we think of it as the total politicization of life through which freedom is destroyed. The exact opposite is the case; we are dealing with the abandonment of politics, as in all dictatorships and despotic regimes, though only in totalitarianism do the phenomena of this abandonment appear in such a radical form as to destroy the element of political freedom in all activities, rather than resting content with stamping out action, the political faculty par excellence.

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Fossil fuels and authoritarianism

I’ve just finished reading Bill McKibben’s book Here Comes the Sun. It’s a good read; I’ve written my notes on it, which will be published in my January reading page at the end of the month. But I find the following passage particularly telling and appropriate to the moment. Drawing on Samuel Miller McDonald’s book Progress (2024), McKibben notes that the share of American wealth held by the richest 1% of Americans increased from 8.5% in 1800 to 50% in 1900. Further, McDonald writes, this increase was “partly thanks to fossil fuels, which could be easily concentrated, controlled, and transformed into liquid capital by a small management class. … Because fossil fuels themselves are easy to concentrate, they often yield authoritarian outcomes. … [A petrostate is] fifty percent more likely to be authoritarian and only a quarter as likely to transition to democratic government than a state without petroleum as a major economic base” (p. 181).

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Luxury doesn't mean freedom

Margaret Canovan:

The USA in particular, after being spared the desperate poverty that wrecked the French Revolution, had become the most advanced example of a society devoted to consumption. If the French revolutionary mob had been too poor to be citizens, modern Americans, Arendt thought (echoing classical republican invective against “luxury and corruption”) were too much immersed in the pursuit of affluence. “While it is true that freedom can only come to those whose needs have been fulfilled, it is equally true that it will escape those who are bent upon living for their desires” (pp. 232f; quoting Arendt’s On Revolution, p. 139).

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Boredom, daydreaming, and writing

This past fall I was lucky enough to have lunch with a dozen or so of our extended family members and long-time friends. Though many of these people didn’t know each other, I think the close connection that each of them had with my wife and me created a opportunity for the sort of engagement ordinarily reserved for long-time close friends. It was a remarkable occasion, with the conversation topics ranging from politics to favorite foods to religion and sports.

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Medical lexicon: what's your complaint?

Pria Anand:

The term complaint seems to have entered the medical lexicon even earlier than deny, first documented in a seventeenth-century monograph on surgery in which patients “complain” of everything from vertigo to blindness to “an ill night’s rest.” The language of medicine still reduces patients’ symptoms to “complaints,” as though they are something as petty as a biting Yelp review — as if to suggest that a more stoic person would bear them without complaint, that to endorse them is a form of weakness. In the language of medicine, a chief complaint is what brings a person to the hospital — a headache or chest pain. The terms deny and complaint are diametrically opposed — one to refuse a symptom, the other to claim it — but both are a form of judgment. The lexicon is combative, suggesting that patients and doctors are adversaries in the labor of healing.

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Reading thick and thin

In yesterday’s missive, Joan Westenberg explores the difference between thin and thick desires. As is often the case after reading one of her pieces, I find that it’s difficult to stop thinking about it. That, I think, is one of the marks of good writing. Thanks, Joan.

As she says, others have discussed this distinction between thick and thin desires. My own understanding of such a distinction is grounded in Clifford Geertz’s distinction, building on the work of Gilbert Ryle, between a contextually rich thick description of cultural practices, contrasted with a thin description of observable behaviors.

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The enduring power of anxieties

Christian Wiman:

There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

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Birth, death, and the abyss of unlearning

Karl Ove Knausgaard:

School is a place where we teach our children how things are. It creates a common understanding of how society, nature, and culture work, and a common sense of trust in the world. It makes the world self-explanatory and easy to operate in, not random. Doubt, wonder, the sudden abyss that opens up when we learn that we actually don’t know anything, come much later, if at all. But having a child, which is also something completely self-explanatory until it happens, or losing a loved one and seeing his or her dead body, which is also something self-explanatory until you’re standing there facing the abyss — this void that children come from and that the dead have disappeared into — is an unlearning. In these zones between life and death, what is self-evident has no power; in them there is no certainty. And it has always been this way, because death and birth have always been with us. Everyone who has seen a child being born, everyone who has seen a person lying dead, has been at a place where all knowledge, all insight, is invalidated. It is the place of the beginning of life, the place of the end of life. It is life’s borderland, where no other knowledge exists except the simplest: we all come from, and we all return to, this shell of flesh that is like us but no longer in us.

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