SELF INTERRUPTING THE SELF

Mary Oliver:

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It need the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again. But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the midst.

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BROKENIST OR STATUS-QUOIST?

It’s a commonplace these days to say that the United States is in turmoil. While many understand the primary conflict as one between progressives and conservatives and others point to conflicts within both the progressive and conservative sides as being at least as significant, Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, suggests a different way of looking at things.

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WRITER'S BLOCK

Joan Didion:

I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

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TEACHING AS THINKING IN PUBLIC

I took the long route through graduate school, taking several leaves of absence to teach in different universities. During one year, I had a position replacing two different professors who were on sabbatical leave. In the fall semester I taught courses in religious studies; in the spring, I taught courses in philosophy. It was a pretty brutal year in terms of teaching load: four different preparations each semester. I spent much of the year exhausted.

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BERTRAND RUSSELL ON DICTATORS

George Orwell:

Mr. Russell points out that the huge system of organized lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their followers out of contact with reality and therefore tends to put them at a disadvantage as against those who know the facts. This is true so far as it goes, but it does not prove that the slave-society at which the dictators are aiming will be unstable. It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves. Dare anyone be sure that something of the kind is not coming into existence already? One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, State-controlled education and so forth, to realize that “the truth is great and will prevail” is a prayer rather than an axiom.

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NAZIS AND SOCIALISTS (AND THE KKK)

Mildred Harnack:

The official name of the Nazi Party is the Nationalsozialisticishe Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), Mildred explains, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, “although it has nothing to do with socialism and the name itself is a lie. It thinks itself highly moral and like the Ku Klux Klan makes a campaign of hatred against the Jews.”

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