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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Freedom for some but not for others

Jenny Erpenbeck:

Why did people always pronounce the word ‘freedom’ with such enthusiasm, as they continue to do today, whenever they speak of the collapse of East Germany, whereas when people from other countries — from countries like Mali, Niger, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico, Haiti, and other “shitholes,” as Donald Trump recently described them — they’re met with contempt and aversion?

Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, pp 174f

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Ephemeral world, ephemeral thoughts

Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Our own time, the change we are able to register as we stand here in the midst of the world, is, apart from the movements of the body, almost always bound up with water and wind. The raindrops that drip from the gutter, the leaf whirled into the air, the clouds that slip over the ridge, the water that trickles toward the stream, the river that runs into the sea, the waves that form and break apart in an ever-changing abundance of unique forms. We can see this, for the time in which such movement occurs is synchronized with that of our own existence. We refer to that time as the now. And what happens within us in the now is not dissimilar to what happens outside us, a continual formation and breaking apart that never ceases as long as we live: our thoughts. On the sky of the self they come drifting, each unique, and over the precipice of oblivion they vanish again, never to return in the same shape.

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Whitehead again – this time on growth, good, and evil

Jim Nielsen has some good thoughts in which he builds on a post by Mandy Brown. I’m piggy-backing on both Nielsen and Brown here to develop another point about Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy. (Over the last couple of years I’ve thought I might develop a series of posts about Whitehead – last week I wrote what I was thinking might be the first post in such a series. As I said in that post, I don’t have a systematic approach in mind. Instead, I’m thinking I’ll write when something I read reminds me of Whitehead in some way. The posts by Jim Nielsen and Mandy Brown did just that.)

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Burning the stuff but cherishing the memories

Last week my wife looked around our living room. “I think there are too many stacks of too many books in this room.” Or something like that. I look around the room and see opportunities (or something like that). She looks around the room and sees clutter.

While we disagree about how many books is too many books, we both believe that we need to do more to declutter our lives. We downsized to a much smaller residence a half-dozen years ago, and we would definitely be more at ease in our space if there were fewer objects filling it up.

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Whitehead matters

I first read Alfred North Whitehead over fifty years ago, in a college Philosophy of Science class. We read a chunk of his Science and the Modern World. I don’t remember much of what we discussed in that class, but I still have the paperback copy of the book sitting on my shelf. The markings and marginal notes I see there suggest that while I made some sense of it, I wasn’t fully persuaded by his account.

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Memory and imagination

Siri Hustvedt:

In a 1995 essay on memory, ‘Yonder,’ I wrote the following sentence: ‘Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.’ It seemed to me fifteen years ago, and still seems to me today, that the mental activity we call memory and what we call the imagination partake of the same mental processes. They are both bound up with emotion and, when conscious, they often take the form of stories. Emotion, memory, imagination, story — all vital to our subjective mental landscapes, central to literature and psychoanalysis and, much more recently, hot topics in the neurosciences.

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A father's gift of a lifetime

I suppose that almost everyone has a tale to tell in these digital times about a crucial file or two lost in a hard disk crash or some other malfunction. (An aside: There are pre-digital versions of this story as well. One such story, perhaps apocryphal, that floated around my graduate school was an account of a graduate student who took the only copy of his just-finished dissertation with him to a diner to proof-read and accidentally left it there. According to the story, it was already discarded and on the way to the dump when he discovered his mistake and he had to rewrite the entire thing.)

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No disappointment can fully exhaust the reserve of hope

Alexander Kluge:

It is a mamtter of observation that there are limits to what people will put up with. At unexpected points that cannot be determined in advance, people develop a will of their own. No disappointment can fully exhaust the reserve of hope. What we can do is devote boundless effort to the concrete areas in which we ourselves work. Whether that will prove useful in teh end is, to put it melodramatically, in God’s hands; but you could also say that it’s in all of our hands. Human willfulness is reliable and invincible. It returns again and again. It is a phoenix.

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