Adversaria
Not quite commonplace, not quite notes on reading, not quite anything else. Mostly monthly digests of quotations that I have not quite digested.
31 October 2025
‘Ignorance will be the dupe of cunning, and passion the slave of sophistry and declamation.’ —Federalist Papers (No. 58)
‘There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things’ —Gilles Deleuze (Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, p. 2)
‘…the earth is suffering, and we are her symptoms’ —Kat Duff (The Alchemy of Illness, p. 105)
‘If we are steeped in the Apocalypse, it is rather because it inspires ways of living, surviving, and judging in each of us. It is a book for all those who think of themselves as survivors. It is the book of Zombies’ —Gilles Deleuze (Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, p. 37)
‘There is a contagion in example which few men have sufficient force of mind to resist’ —Federalist Papers (No. 61)
‘We get fussy, rigid, and particular about our ways and needs, beg for help while resisting intervention, complain bitterly, and take offense readily, in our wounded vulnerability. The places we cling to, hoarding rather than sharing, are often the places that must give way in the sacrifice: our pocketbooks, privacy, or pride. Doctor’s visits usually take all three’ —Kat Duff (The Alchemy of Illness, p. 139)
‘The schoolmaster’s stress on the root of words had its effect on the literary appreciation of the pupils; they grew fond of etymological puns and quibbles. The university training in logic only increased the appetite for all kinds of wordplay’ —John R. Mulder (The Temple of the Mind, p. 72)
‘The age admired primarily, not originality of ideas, but virtuosity in the manipulation of known materials’ —John R. Mulder (The Temple of the Mind, p. 151)
‘…quitting the dim light of historical research, attaching ourselves purely to the dictates of reason and good sense…’ —Federalist Papers (No. 70)
‘Religious melancholy was a condition in which the human love of God naturally inspired by His beauty had become corrupted. Like other forms of the disease, it manifested itself in a variety of disturbing passions: inordinate fear of divine punishment, anxiety over the decree, and so on. Accordingly, Burton’s most pressing task was to diagnose the causes of such perturbations and seek the means to alleviate them. In effect, this was a reworking for contemporary England of the classical philosophical enterprise to destroy the unnecessary fear generated by superstition’ —Angus Gowland (The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 202)
‘…the terms of Burton’s discussion of the melancholic commonwealth appeared to privilege the eudaimonist concerns found in Greek political philosophy over the goals of fama and gloria more typically found in their Roman counterparts’ —Angus Gowland (The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, pp. 240f.)
‘Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of experience. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response’ —Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 63)
What a strange shelter it is, to be sure! How fragile it seems, this mosaic of individual selves that combine by symbolic gesture and language into a common artifact, a coral reef of social mythology, symbol built out of symbols. But how long it has endured! It is the product of our essential humanity, which can come to fruition only within the structure that it created from our individual identities in order to satisfy our need for connectedness’ —Elizabeth Janeway (Powers of the Weak, p. 27)
‘An individual who is observed to be inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all, is marked at once, by all prudent people, as a speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly. His more friendly neighbors may pity him, but all will decline to connect their fortunes with his; and not a few will seize the opportunity of making their fortunes out of his’ —Federalist Papers (No. 62)
30 September 2025
‘Some people were in the park pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 10%)
‘I noted all my findings on index cards. I valued the cards as signifiers of serious scholarship, and boosted my spirits with several packs’ —Michelle de Kretser (Theory & Practice,, p. 33)
‘We always need both freedom and order. We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coordination’ —E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 69)
‘It was the room in the house where he spent most time and it was furnished with the debris of past attitudes. Those attitudes were an unresolvable argument in which he was a very tired chairman’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 9%)
‘She does not like the exclusion of opposition, the idea of the absolute, the positive distinction between mind and matter; she prefers the notions of complementarity, or circulation, influx, of action at a distance, of a model, and the idea of order as an organic totality’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 32)
‘Just as history is not made by the brute facts but by the natural dynamism immanent in them which the historian must seek to grasp by intuition, so the true object of painting does not reside in the concrete representation of the visible but in the apprehension of the metamorphoses of being’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 344)
‘I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.And what is the cost of a reorientation? We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear’ —E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 169)
‘He was a good middleweight before he became two middleweights. But he was never as good as they told him he was. That’s why his brains are omelette. But he’s a good man’ —William McIlvanney (Laidlaw, 82%)
‘History is such an interested business that it is tempting to think it has no truth at all’ —Paul Hamilton (‘Byron, Clare, and Poetic Historiography’ in Rethinking British Romantic History, p. 225)
‘The wise man had to be useful to the world and take everyday realities as the starting-point of his reflections, not walk about with his head in the clouds’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. Foster & Hartman, p. 440)
31 August 2025
‘So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question’ — The Federalist, (No. 1)
‘All empty space is a space for questions, not for answers. And what we don’t know is infinite’ —Jenny Erpenbeck (Not a Novel, trans. Kurt Beals, p. 34)
‘The dry hardness which you get in the classics is absolutely repugnant to them. Poetry that isn’t damp isn’t poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite’ —T.E. Hulme (‘Romanticism and Classicism’, in Speculations, p. 126f.)
‘No text, of course, has a perfectly transparent meaning, and if there are multiple contending texts, the room for interpretive maneuver is that much larger. Nonetheless, the text itself is a fixed point of departure; it makes some reading implausible, if not impossible. Once there is a text as an indisputable point of reference, it provides the kind of yardstick from which deviations from the original can roughly be judged. […] The very existence of such texts has powerful consequences; it facilitates the development of an orthodox, standard account’ (—James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, p. 227)
‘I shall call my philosophy the “Valet to the Absolute.” The Absolute not a hero to his own valet’ —T.E. Hulme (‘Cinders’, in Speculations, p. 238)
‘Charisma is, above all, a specific cultural relationship between a would-be prophetic figure and his or her potential following. And because it is a relationship or an interpersonal resonance, we cannot claim that an individual has charisma in the sane way we might say that someone has a gold coin in his pocket. What constitutes a charismatic connection is always somewhat elusive, but what is charismatic in one cultural setting is unlikely to be charismatic in another, and what is charismatic at one historical moment might well be merely incomprehensible at another’ (—James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, p. 295)
‘…when a shilling circulates ten times, there is still only one shilling, even though it performs the functions of ten shillings. However, no matter in whose hand it exists for the moment, it remains always the same identical value of one shilling’ —Marx (Capital, vol. 2, p. 383)
31 July 2025
‘Irritability, bad moods, and outbursts of affect are the classic symptoms of chronic virtuousness’ —C.G. Jung (Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 87)
‘I have known some angry people I have encountered many people’s anger, but I have rarely found angry people illuminating or inspiring. Too often their anger—a feeling, a reaction, an interpretation—is presented as fact, or, worse, truth’ —Yiyun Li (Things in Nature Merely Grow, 29%)
‘…digression is never the same as distraction. Its twists and turns are unified in their aim, which is to help us understand the one complete action that is the subject of the work to which they belong” —Daniel Mendelsohn (Three Rings, 23%)
‘Can we be sure that stating truly is a different class of assessment from arguing soundly, advising well, judging fairly, and blaming justifiably?’ —J.L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, p. 142)
‘Perfectionism always ends in a blind alley, while completeness by itself lacks selective values’ —C.G. Jung (Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 33)
‘One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one’s visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist. A garden is good training for life, too’ —Yiyun Li (Things in Nature Merely Grow, 45%)
30 June 2025
‘Of course one must not tax an archaic god with the requirements of modern ethics’ —C.G. Jung (Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 9)
‘Although the disruptive students turned out to be very useful pedagogically—and analytically—for their willingness to express what others might only think about fat people, I still wondered: Why did the course make students so mad? Why do fat people make (nonfat) people so mad?’ —Julie Guthman (Weighing In, 22%)
‘This incapacity to tell the difference between the power of words and the force of argument (prevalent, then as now, in Paris) contributed to the sceptical disorientation which existed in Descartes’s time’ —Bernard Williams (Descartes, p. 27)
Man’s life is a dream, spiritualist philosophers tell us, and if they were entirely logical they would add: history, too, is a dream. Of course, taken in an absolute sense, both of these comparisons is equally absurd; however, one cannot but admit that there are in history sinkholes, as it were, which make human thought stop not without perplexity. It is as if the stream of life ceases its natural course and forms a whirlpool, which spins, sprays, and gets covered with turbid foam, through which it is impossible to make out either clear typical features or even any specific phenomena. Confused and senseless events follow one another disconnectedly, and people apparently do not pursue any other goals than the safeguarding of the present day. They alternate between trembling and triumph…
‘It is hardly surprising that Descartes’s account is unclear at this point, since he is engaged in an impossible task’ —Bernard Williams (Descartes, p. 284)
‘The food economy, that is, mirrors the larger economy: it is full of contradictions, some of which are literally embodied’ —Julie Guthman (Weighing In, 74%)
‘For it is easy to observe in those we call “pedants” that philosophy makes them less capable of reasoning than they would be if they had never learnt it’ —Descartes (‘Preface’ to the Principles of Philosophy, trans. Cottingham et al., p. 188)
31 May 2025
‘Again: I highlight here the naturalist’s art of attention not because scientists don’t have rich and complex modes of attention. Rather, we might do better science—attend better—if we have better narratives, grounded in arts of noticing that open to and allow for noticing in contexts that are already disturbed, already impure’ —Alexis Shotwell (Against Purity, p. 106)
‘We all know people who freely talk about the brotherhood of man while treating their neighbours as enemies, just as we also know people who have, in fact, excellent relations with all their neighbours while harbouring, at the same time, appalling prejudices about all human groups outside their particular circle’ — E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 70)
‘A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable. Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something else; a smell that remembers another smell. A panting, nostalgic smell that guides you, like a worn tourist map, to the smell of the original place. A smell is a memory and a setting sun. Sunset, here, is beauty rebuking the stranger’ —Mahmoud Darwish (In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon, 47%)
‘For what can a poet do before history’s bulldozer but guard the spring and trees, visible and invisible, by the old roads’ —Mahmoud Darwish (In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon, 72%)
‘If you trace back many important decisions of the last few decades, you will regularly come up against the uncomfortable sensation that the unacknowledged legislators are relatively junior civil servants who put placeholder numbers in spreadsheets, which are later adopted as fundamental constraints; to do otherwise would mean someone having to risk being criticised for making a decision’ —Dan Davies (The Unaccountability Machine, p. 31)
‘Being largely dependent upon books for stimulation, they are apt, like the generality of historians, to set too high a value on the rôle of thought in culture’ —Paul Radin (Primitive Man as Philosopher, p. 11)
‘You fear for the present stifled by the hegemony of the past and fear for the past from the absurdity of the present. You do not know where to stand at this crossroads’ —Mahmoud Darwish (In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon, 78%)
‘Knowing a great deal of detail about a subset of a system has a habit of increasing your confidence in your opinions disproportionately from their reliability’ —Dan Davies (The Unaccountability Machine, p. 70)
‘The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion—political or otherwise—which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to their existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies on of the great dangers of our time’ —E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, p. 88f.)
30 April 2025
‘Her psychic membrane was so permeable that she picked up on clues that lay far beneath the surface of daily life’ —James Hollis (Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances, 42%)
‘Dream work is work, and it is a very uncertain forensic endeavor’ —James Hollis (Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances, 44%)
‘When “facts” are unpleasant, one can create “alternative facts.” such a tawdry device may offer a moment’s comfort, but it is, ultimately, a psychotic way to make one’s critical decisions’ —James Hollis (Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances, 54%)
‘So we are to find the old gods in the fevers of the flesh, the disquietude of the stomach, the contentions of the heart, and so on’ —James Hollis (Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances, 82%)
‘It is the process itself—the damnably hard work of living with an idea long enough so that it gradually becomes the basis for a new existence even as the old one is disappearing—that is actually the analysis’ —Vivian Gornick (‘Toward a Definition of the Female Sensibility’, in Taking a Long Look, p. 265)
‘His purpose was to contrast this supposedly fair-minded approach with that of modern scientists who dismissed astrology without bothering to understand its claims. If the desire to shock is very obvious, so too is a certain intellectual frivolity’ —Robin Briggs (Witches & Neighbors, p. 372)
‘…routine performances are adequate only to routine occasions’ —Michael Walzer (Political Action, 14%)
‘They are in search precisely of a politics that does not require them to support candidates who are only barely better than their opponents and who have, most likely, weak and vacillating positions on what the activists believe is the crucial issue. Sentiment of this sort is entirely justified’ —Michael Walzer (Political Action, 23%)
‘…for many people, a cause, even their own cause, is a luxury they can only occasionally afford’ —Michael Walzer (Political Action, 32%)
‘To argue about decision-making in general usually doesn’t make sense and isn’t necessary’ —Michael Walzer (Political Action, 40%)
‘Marginal politics attracts marginal people who are ill at ease, resentful, graceless, unhappy, or frightened in the everyday world’ —Michael Walzer (Political Action, 64%)
‘…good politics most often consists in doing the same thing over and over again. Like many other worthwhile human activities, it requires a considerable capacity for boredom’ —Michael Walzer (Political Action, 75%)
‘Politics is sometimes interesting, urgent, dangerous; more often, in any decent society, it is none of those things’ —Michael Walzer (Political Action, 96%)
‘…if we turn a benefit into a commodity, the value of something very important will be destroyed. We do not need to encourage the mind to greed, quarrels, and strife; it rushes down that road all on its own’ —Seneca (On Benefits, trans. Miriam Griffin & Brad Inwood, 3.14.4)
‘You should adjust your minds to the semblance of truth and, while you are learning virtue, respect whatever boasts the name of virtue’ —Seneca (On Benefits, trans. Miriam Griffin & Brad Inwood, 5.14.5)
‘We are ungrateful en masse. Let each one question himself: there is no one who does not complain of someone’s ingratitude’ —Seneca (On Benefits, trans. Miriam Griffin & Brad Inwood, 5.17.3)
31 March 2025
‘I read because reading was order, harmony, the promise of a third act where everything would come together, where everything would make sense’ —Federico Falco (The Plains, trans. Jennifer Croft, p.109)
‘Crude and arrogant writers defend their works even against just criticisms and reasonable corrections; others, faint of heart perchance, fill themselves with the favorable judgments of their works, and, by reason of these, take no steps to perfect them’ —Giambattista Vico (Autobiography, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, Continuation, 1731, p. 193)
‘Triumph belongs to the attainment of maturity by growth process. Triumph does not belong to the false maturity based on a facile impersonation of an adult. Terrible facts are locked up in this statement’ —D.W. Winnicott (Playing and Reality, p. 147)
‘“Americanism” was a form of Modernism which had arisen from the American spirit upholding democracy, human progress, education uncontrolled by the Church, unfettered human reason, and the natural virtues of honor, courage and trustfulness. The heresy had been promulgated by Father Hecker…’ —David Christie-Murray (A History of Heresy, p. 197)
‘Investigators here have proceeded according to instinct, and their words do not correspond to what they have actually sensed’ —V. Propp (Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, p. 6)
‘In many jobs, censorship is a perk of office; the censor will no more forgo it, even if it is quite ineffectual, than the man who is entitled to a second biscuit with his tea will forgo that, even if he dislikes biscuits’ —Brigid Brophy (‘The British Museum and Solitary Vice’, in Don’t Never Forget, p. 102)
‘Even if the whole of the occult arts are without scientific or metaphysical basis, even if they should one day turn out to be nothing more than an illusion without substance, they would still stand as very good examples of psychological aids in that lend to the individual a focus that he might not normally have. Anything that aids the individual in centering on himself, causing him to consider his frailties and enhance his potentials, cannot be considered useless’ —Charles Poncé (The Game of Wizards, p. 209)
‘…one cannot call one’s brother in the Spirit a heretic even if one disagrees with his views’ —David Christie-Murray (A History of Heresy, p. 216)
‘Among the semi-learned or pseudo-learned, the more shameless called him a fool, or in somewhat more courteous terms they said that he was obscure or eccentric and had odd ideas’ —Giambattista Vico (Autobiography, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, Continuation, 1731, p. 199f.)
28 February 2025
‘Men may come and men may go, but the truth of the multiplication table does not budge’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 29)
‘The carer, after all, also eats, wears clean clothes, washes herself. The more you read, the more Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be describing a radically sane life, rooted in the hour-by-hour reconciliation of responsibilities and pleasures, acts required and desired in the short and long term for the welfare of household, community and self’ —Sarah Moss (My Good Bright Wolf, p. 237)
‘But a single word is likely to say too little, or too much, or both too little and too much in different ways’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 49)
‘Fashion and the zeal of the literati would have us think that the specialist can to-day be spared, or degraded to a position subordinate to that of the seer. Almost all sciences owe something to dilettantes, often very valuable view-points. But dilettantism as a leading principle would be the end of science. He who yearns for seeing should go to the cinema’ —Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, p. 29)
‘It is better to be a man of calm wisdom than a fluttering fool, and better for one’s intelligence to be dry and bright than to be a victim of moist emotions; nevertheless the foolish and dissolute have their roles to play in the ever shifting universe, like everything else’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 109)
‘In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudæmonistic, not to say hedonistic, admxiture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational’ —Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, p. 53)
‘It is a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is quite easy to conceive of a person lunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbors’ —Julien Benda (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington, p. 61).
31 January 2025
‘When ideas are dead their ghosts usually walk; but no ghost walks for ever, and the main thing is for the people they haunt to remember that they are only ghosts’ —R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of Nature, p. 149f.; cf. another ghost)
‘For when a master is instructing his scholar, if the scholar understand all the parts of the thing defined, which are resolved in the definition, and yet will not admit of the definition, there needs no further controversy betwixt then, it being all one as if he refused to be taught. But if he understand nothing, then certainly the definition is faulty; for the nature of a definition consists in this, that it exhibit a clear idea of the thing defined; and principle are either known by themselves, or else they are not principles’ —Thomas Hobbes (De Corpore, VI.15)
‘Rembrandt’s scenes of the Old Testament permit us to trace the course of the artist’s own life, since the ancient stories become real to him only through the medium of his own experiences; but vice versa, the old figures furnish him with a better approach toward his own life. Just so the Greek discovered the human intellect—by reading it into myths’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 206)
‘…this kind of metaphor may be appropriate, it may be striking, and even witty, but it lacks the element of necessity which would make it philosophically profitable’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 198)
‘According to the eudaemonistic theory of ethics the guilty conscience proves that moral conduct may safely be founded on a refined and intelligent understanding of happiness and unhappiness. […] The upshot of these reflexions was that those who speculated on the subject of happiness and morality, like those who talked of profit and morality, did not content themselves with the promise of ease and complacency as the rewards of a moral life. Instead, they granted virtue the prospect of a permanent “inner” happiness, that that is simply the assurance of having done no wrong’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 163f.)
31 December 2024
‘The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art’ —Zadie Smith (Intimations, 26%)
‘A man who will decide, on philosophical grounds, to give up speaking and confine himself to pointing must be a man in whom the ordinary interests of intelligent human beings have been completely strangled by the parasitic growth of a philosophy only capable of killing what it feeds on’ —R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of Nature, p. 66)
‘In the absence of these fixed elements, I’d make up hard things to do, or things to abstain from. Artificial limits and so on. Running is what I know. Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.’ —Zadie Smith (Intimations, 29%)
‘A world is thus a thing that makes itself wherever a vortex arises in the Boundless; hence a world is also a world-maker or a god. The natura naturata of this world (to anticipate a very much later distinction) is finite in extent and in the duration of its life; but its natura naturans is the creative nature of the Boundless and of its rotary movement, and hence eternal and infinite’ —R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of Nature, p. 35)
‘Back then, I took everything seriously. I studied hard because I genuinely believed it would serve a higher purpose, and I liked the idea of living according to a certain strictness or method’ —Jessica Au (Cold Enough for Snow, p. 61)
‘Its geometrical structure gave the cosmos a kind of organization that was contrary to the one ascribed to it by myth. No longer was any element or portion to be privileged at the expense of the rest; no longer was any physical power to be in the dominant position of a basileus exercising his dynasteia over all things’ —Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Origins of Greek Thought, trans. anon., p. 121)
30 November 2024
‘The greatest opportunity anybody can have is to live in a free society as one among many who are fully capable of taking advantage of its freedom; but to take advantage of that opportunity, each must develop the cooperative virtues of good faith and benevolence’ —Alan Donagan (‘Spinoza’s Theology’ in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, p. 376)
‘The power of the unconscious requires more respect than logic, tradition and the Constitution of the United States’ —James Hollis (The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, p. 57)
‘She does not like the exclusion of opposition, the idea of the absolute, the positive distinction between mind and matter; she prefers the notions of complementarity, or circulation, influx, of action at a distance, of a model, and the idea of order as an organic totality’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization2, trans. J.R. Foster and Charles Hartman, p. 32)
‘One of the grandest of those illusions is that there is some Ultima Thule called Happiness, a real state which one can discover and in which one can live permanently. Sadly, our lot more often is to wallow in the swamplands of the soul, victimized by sundry dismal denizens’ —James Hollis (The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, p. 107)
‘Just as history is not made by the brute facts but by the natural dynamism immanent in them which the historian must seek to grasp by intuition, so the true object of painting does not reside in the concrete representation of the visible but in the apprehension of the metamorphoses of being’ —Jacques Gernet (A History of Chinese Civilization2, trans. J.R. Foster and Charles Hartman, p. 344)
‘When a young man who ordinarily presents a particularly blank countenance to the world suddenly lapses into a display of temper, there is undoubtedly something amusing about the exhibition’ —Patricia Wentworth (Weekend with Death, 30%)
‘We won’t hand rehandle or reinterpret it, we’ll create history and forget about it, events will be our instant history, but history as events not history as discourse. We won’t allow you verbiage-mongers to add the water, we‘ll scatter the self-consuming ashes to the winds and move on into the next instant. That’ll be one thing less for kids to break their brains and be made miserable with in competition, and there’ll be others, plenty of other things we’ll drop in the next civilization mark my words’ —Christine Brooke-Rose (Amalgamemnon, trans. p. 109)
31 October 2024
‘Spinoza does not believe in the sufficiency of clarity and directness, because he doesn’t believe there is any satisfactory way of proceeding from the knowledge of an effect to a knowledge of its cause’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 157)
‘…do not place a false value on tears. Crying is not completion. One of you make a commitment to supply tissues’ —John W. James and Russell Friedman (The Grief Recovery Handbook, p. 70)
‘A man who is to become reasonable, strong and free, begins by doing all in his power to experience joyful passions. He then strives to extricate himself from chance encounters and the concatenation of sad passions, to organize good encounters, combine his relation with relations that combine directly with it, united with what agrees in nature with him, and form a reasonable association between men; all this in such a way as to be affected with joy’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 262)
‘The person being forgiven need never know that it has happened. Remember, never forgive anyone directly to their face’ —John W. James and Russell Friedman (The Grief Recovery Handbook, p. 140)
‘And the world is defined not just by the places and peoples in it, but also by the passage of time as it is experienced by those places and peoples’ —Christopher Rowe (The Navigating Fox, 27%)
‘Soldiers, merchants, priests, consuls, ambassadors, politicians of every kind, and even scholars and philosophers happily fed at the trough filled by lack. Lack of leadership? Perhaps. But it could hardly be said the common citizen or subject was particularly wanting for leadership. Most would say they could get along very well without the regulations and taxes that leadership seemed inevitably to impose. How roads and sewers would miraculously spring into existence, to say nothing of trade networks and currency, literacy or public safety, those were questions that went unanswered because they generally went unasked’ —Christopher Rowe (The Navigating Fox, 52%)
‘A clear and distinct idea does not in itself constitute real knowledge, any more than it contains in its own ground within itself: the sufficient reason of clarity and distinctness is to be found only in adequacy, and a clear and distinct idea constitutes real knowledge only to the extent that it follows from an idea that is itself adequate’ —Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, p. 152)
30 September 2024
‘The concentration and tension of psychic forces have something about them that always looks like magic: they develop an unexpected power of endurance which is often superior to the conscious effort of will.’ —C.G. Jung (Four Archetypes, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 97)
‘A chaise was like an apartment: wines and provisions in the north-facing room, clothes and books in the south-facing one. Everything a man needed, except less empty space and no need to move about. Only the horses moved; the man stayed still’ —Yury Tynyanov (The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, trans. Anna Kurkina Rush & Christopher Rush, p. 188)
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
‘All the old views—the Renaissance aesthetic contempt, the Enlightenment’s anticlerical sneers, the economic snobbery of the early twentieth century—are still alive. All are the products of ignorance and bias, the more surprising because the proponents of these views abhorred those evils and thought they were free of them. All are primarily negative. All are quite wrong. ’ —William Carroll Bark (Origins of the Medieval World, p. 109)
Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.
31 August 2024
‘Karl knows something of every handicraft, and in addition he has the ability, peculiar to nearly all Norwegians, to tackle any situation with the most meagre equipment. He is what the Norwegians call for short an altmüligman—an everything-possible-man’ —Christiane Ritter (A Woman in the Polar Night, trans. Jane Degras, 52%)
‘…the heart of man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet’ —Karl Marx (Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, p. 336)
‘The beginning of wealth, of the levity of wealth, is discernible in the act of taking an item from a shelf of food without first checking the price’ —Annie Ernaux (Look at the Lights, My Love, trans. Alison L. Strayer, 40%)
‘Now that I know what a live polar fox is like I no longer want a dead one’ —Christiane Ritter (A Woman in the Polar Night, trans. Jane Degras, 26%)
‘An archetype is in no sense just an annoying prejudice; it becomes so only when it is in the wrong place.’ —C.G. Jung (Four Archetypes, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 18)
‘For the first time I realise that in the solitude of an all-too-powerful nature things have a different meaning from that we attribute to them in our world of constant reciprocal relations between man and man. It dawns on me that in many cases it may be more difficult for a man to retain his ordinary humanity in the Arctic than to sustain his life in battle with the elements’ —Christiane Ritter (A Woman in the Polar Night, trans. Jane Degras, 43%)
‘The superstore’s art of making people believe in its benevolence’ —Annie Ernaux (Look at the Lights, My Love, trans. Alison L. Strayer, 75%)
‘Perhaps in centuries to come men will go to the Arctic as in biblical times they withdrew to the desert, to find the truth again’ —Christiane Ritter (A Woman in the Polar Night, trans. Jane Degras, 45%)
‘Through a stunning reversal, it is the machines that look smart and humans stupid. I can’t get used to this [self check-out/superstore] system, either’ —Annie Ernaux (Look at the Lights, My Love, trans. Alison L. Strayer, 78%)
‘And suddenly I realise that civilisation is suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency because it cannot draw its strength directly from nature, eternally young and eternally true. Humanity has lost itself in the unnatural and in speculation’ —Christiane Ritter (A Woman in the Polar Night, trans. Jane Degras, 79%)
31 July 2024
‘Divination had been practised for centuries. Everyone knew that one thing rather than another was to happen to him. He might not be very rational about it’ —George Boas (introduction to The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, p. 13)
‘Although every written work is a monologue, the philosophical work is always implicitly a dialogue. The dimension of the possible interlocutor is always present in it’ —Pierre Hadot (‘Spiritual Exercises’ in Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 105)
‘Pen in hand, one may dream such a dream in the study, but in contact with reality it comes to nothing’ —Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread, trans. anon., p. 69)
In almost all Plato’s Socratic dialogues, there comes a moment of crisis, when the interlocutors are overcome by discouragement. They no longer have confidence in the possibility of continuing the discussion, and it seems as though the dialogue is about to be broken off. This is where Socrates intervenes: he takes the others’ doubt, uneasiness, and discouragement upon himself. He assumes all the risks of the dialectical adventure, and carries out a complete switching of roles.. If the enterprise fails, it will henceforth be his responsibility. In this way, he shows his interlocutors a projection of their own selves. They can now transfer their personal uneasiness onto Socrates, and regain confidence in dialectical research and in the logos itself.
‘…fine ladies would find that palaces were not well adapted to self-help in the kitchen’ —Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread, trans. anon., p. 85)
‘Kierkegaard’s goal was to make the reader aware of his mistakes, not by directly refuting them, but by setting them forth in such a way that their absurdity would become clearly apparent’ —Pierre Hadot (‘The Figure of Socrates’ in Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 150)
‘Just like ironical Socrates, Eros teaches nothing, for he is ignorant. He does not make people more wise; he makes them other. He, too, is maieutic: he helps souls to engender themselves’ —Pierre Hadot (‘The Figure of Socrates’ in Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 163)
‘…it is not enough to consider the obvious, surface meaning of the phrases in an ancient text in order fully to understand it. Rather, we must try to understand why these phrases were written or spoken; we must discover their finality’ —Pierre Hadot (‘Marcus Aurelius’ in Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 186)
‘After all, it is not enough merely to repeat some rational principle to oneself, in order to be persuaded by it; everything depends on how you formulate it’ —Pierre Hadot (‘Marcus Aurelius’ in Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, p. 201)
‘…though his theories seemed unreliable, his practice not only utterly convinced me but, literally, enchanted me’ —Octavio Paz (afterword to 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, p. 49)
30 June 2024
‘To fail in everything, it is true, will always remain possible. Nothing will ever give us any insurance against this risk, still less against this feeling’ —Derrida (Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, p. 19)
‘He is constantly rediscovered and as constantly laid aside. He remains unreadable and unread’ —Isaiah Berlin (‘Vico: Philosophical Ideas’ in Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p. 146)
‘…what we are saying here will not please anyone. But who ever said that someone ever had to speak, think, or write in order to please someone else?’ —Derrida (Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, p. 109)
Words are counters, he says, echoing Hobbes unconsciously; language is a currency: men of genius can use it, but officials turn it, as they turn everything, into a sterile dogmatism, which they proceed to offer for their own and popular worship. This turns human relations into mechanical ones, and makes of what were living truths or a spontaneous capacity for acting in some appropriate fashion, a dead rule, an object for idolatrous worship. This is a sermon against dehumanisation and reification before those terms had been thought of.
31 May 2024
‘One can only accept the answers one needs’ —Marghanita Laski (Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 1)
‘Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx’s riddle’ —William James (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 364)
‘There is something ghostly, in this history where questions disappear, and answers survive’ —Franco Moretti (The Bourgeois, p. 14)
‘What Kant’s pen could not do, the guillotine did for him’ —Frederick C. Beiser (The Fate of Reason, p. 198)
‘In the lesser poets, and in the greater poets, too, at times when inspiration is not equal to the effort, the result is, all too often, loss of vitality, tastelessness, and lack of precision’ —E.V. Gordon (introduction to The Pearl, p. xxxvii)
‘I suggest that some part of the honorific superiority of horses over cows may be due to the fact that one cannot ride to ecstasy on a cow’ —Marghanita Laski (contra Veblen, in Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 198f., n.5)
‘Although he did not possess any great philosophical talent, Eberhard did have one indisputable skill: he knew how to give an academic dispute the added air of scandal’ —Frederick C. Beiser (The Fate of Reason, p. 219)
Capital posits the permanence of value (to a certain degree) by incarnating itself in fleeting commodities and taking on their form, but at the same time changing them just as constantly; alternates between its eternal form as money and its passing form in commodities; permanence is posited as the only thing it can be, a passing passage – process – life.
30 April 2024
‘Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth.’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 92)
‘Works of fiction should be seen as responses to obsessions, instincts, and tensions – responses whose purpose is simply to satisfy the mind’ —Danielle Régnier-Bohler (‘Imagining the Self’ in A History of Private Life (vol. 2), trans. Arther Goldhammer, p. 315)
‘A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage?’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 111)
‘Value is their social relation, their economic quality. A Book which possesses a certain value and a loaf of bread possessing the same value are exchanged for one another, are the same value but in a different material. As a value, a commodity is an equivalent for all other commodities in a given relationship. As value, the commodity is equivalent; as an equivalent, all its natural properties are extinguished’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 141)
‘Their apologetic wisdom consists in forgetting their own definitions at every decisive moment’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 150)
‘Nature does not produce money, any more than it produces a rate of exchange or a banker’ —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 239)
31 March 2024
‘Lack of clarity is selfish and confusing. The writer is wasting your time. Up with this you need not put’ —Deidre Nansen McCloskey (Economical Writing, p. 17)
‘No one is prepared to be Serious, especially about Art. I liked the way these critics wrote and fell under the rhetorical spell of their semi-colons, qualifications and parentheses. Their casual appropriations, novel compounds and elaborate metaphors spoke of a mind that believed itself equal to anything’ —Lavinia Greenlaw (The Importance of Music to Girls, p. 171)
‘Reality itself is deep, precisely in that it is not yet locked up; and realism itself, when it is real, withdraws from the schema which knowns everything in advance and construes everything according to formula. It is far truer that the timetable of the process is nowhere smooth and uninterrupted. It is not made up once and for all like some dull middle-class Cooks’ tour where, on a mass basis, every last detail has already been tried out and rationally organized, so there is not discovery or hazard—everything having been predigested and disposed of’ —Ernst Bloch (On Karl Marx, trans. John Maxwell, p. 138f.)
‘Although it is risky to ask mosaics more than they are prepared to tell, it is foolish not to ask them anything at all’ —Yvon Thébert (‘Private Life and Domestic Architecture in Roman Africa’, in A History of Private Life (vol. 1), trans. Arther Goldhammer, p. 397)
‘…it must be recognized that many of life’s experiences only verify and illustrate the most conventional ideas, which one may have already encountered in numerous books without believing them’ —Guy Debord (Panegyric I, trans. James Brook, p. 48)
‘Those who are satisfied only with ready-cooked nourishment are poor in spirit. A good cause, even if it is an old one, is always “in the making”; and if this be not understood, the cause will lose contact with life’ —Ernst Bloch (On Karl Marx, trans. John Maxwell, p. 153)
‘Therein lies a clue, to be sure, but to what, we will never know’ —Evelyne Patlagean (‘Byzantium in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’, in A History of Private Life (vol. 1), trans. Arther Goldhammer, p. 608)
29 February 2024
‘…poetry, which is like modern dance for uncoordinated people’ —Claire Dederer (Love & Trouble, ch. 13)
‘…The Editor, an avuncular but testy figure who might send a few encouraging words written in a discouraging hand’ —Lavinia Greenlaw (Some Answers Without Questions, p. 99)
‘I read the letters but couldn’t understand them. I could understand the words but not the letters, yet I was trying to understand in order to get over my not-caring but the not-caring was stopping me from understanding, understanding without caring is not truly understanding, and faking understanding is not understanding’ —Noémi Lefebvre (Blue Self-Portrait, trans. Sophie Lewis, p. 57)
‘…we are all a patchwork of oddities’ —Anna Vaught (The Alchemy, p. 25)
‘The bookshelves went up up up ten feet, and then there was another expanse of ceiling above that, filled with dust motes drifting like the stuff of thought itself. It was as if the books were dreaming, and their dreams floated into the air above, just barely visible’ —Claire Dederer (Poser, ch. 5)
« La promptitude à croire le mal sans l’avoir assez examiné est un effet de l’orgueil et de la paresse. On veut trouver des coupables; et on ne veut pas se donner la peine d’examiner les crimes » —François duc de La Rochefoucauld (Les Maximes, 267)
‘…a healthy person had to watch himself continuously, he had to subject himself to minute rules, he had to guard against any deviation from the prescribed regimen. Only thus could he be healthy and live long, he was told. An odd way of achieving health and longevity!’ —Ludwig Edelstein (‘Ancient Philosophy and Medicine’ in Ancient, trans. C. Lilian Temkin, p. 358)
‘As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep’ —Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, §21)
« Il arrive quelquefois des accidents dans la vie, d’où il faut être un peu fou pour se bien tirer. » —François duc de La Rochefoucauld (Les Maximes, 267)
Movable property ‘discountenances his reminiscences, his poetry and his enthusiastic gushings by historical and sarcastic recital of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarch and revolt forged in the workshops of his romantic castles’ —Marx (‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, trans. Gregor Benton, in Early Writings, p. 339)
‘Books were there to be the same; to be ordered; to present life as a manageable, dependable proposition. Books were my stable family’ —Claire Dederer (Poser, ch. 12)
‘The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.’ —Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy, p. 297
« Il arrive quelquefois des accidents dans la vie, d’où il faut être un peu fou pour se bien tirer. » —François duc de La Rochefoucauld (Les Maximes, 267)
‘When art, which was the common language of social inaction, develops into independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too becomes subject to the movement governing the history of all separate culture. Its declaration of independence is the beginning of its end.’—Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, §186)
‘I am in the house of nouns here, and it fills me with the conviction that good books sometimes give: that life can be holdable in the hand, examined down to the dog hairs, eaten with the eyes and understood’ —Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy, p. 306)
31 January 2024
In a certain sense, I think that my writing gets along better with the features of digital presence than physical presence. That’s why I’m sometimes tempted to post texts online, because there they can enjoy a continuous existence and, at least to all appearances, remain oblivious to worldly travails. The joy of forgetting and persisting at the same time.
‘It is the goal of all good craftsmanship to seek the for the object with which the craftsman is concerned’ —Ludwig Edelstein (‘The Hippocratic Oath’, in Ancient Medicine, trans. C. Lilian Temkin, p. 22)
‘The influence of that myth on medieval minds was deep and strange; but it is not the concern of this book’ —J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (The Barbarian West, p. 128)
‘They are ideal subjects for biography because they do not distract from or interrupt the accumulation of curious detail for which they are the excuse’ —Harriet Guest (Small Change, p. 67)
‘People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare. Nobody affects the character of liberality and good fellowship, by being profuse of a liquor which is as cheap as small beer.’ —Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, p. 77 )
‘Men in general, though they are aware of the fact that some things, such as wine, may suddenly bring about a striking change in a person’s behavior, do not apprehend hat every kind of food or drink causes a certain mental habit, slight as the variation may be’ —Ludwig Edelstein (‘The Hippocratic Oath’, in Ancient Medicine, trans. C. Lilian Temkin, p. 22)
‘The marks on other people’s books (other people’s both because they belong to others and because they were written by others) confront him with that mixture of magic and righteousness that all restorative acts possess’ —Sergio Chejfec (Forgotten Manuscript, trans. Jeffrey Lawrence, p. 61)
‘For in history no less than in science, there are facts which one cannot afford to overlook; new discoveries are made which one must take into account, and doubtful instances ought not to be considered certain’ —Ludwig Edelstein (‘Petersen on Hippocratic Wisdom’, in Ancient Medicine, trans. C. Lilian Temkin, p. 130)
31 December 2023
An awareness of over-interpretation needn’t imply a kind of unattainable (and undesirable) objectivity, but rather a thoughtfully subjective approach, which does not involve second-guessing the artist. When content and materials are interpreted and combined in a balanced way, the result can be greater than the sum of its parts. A transformation of the given matter through a kind of elegant alchemy, rather than cut-and-paste pastiche.
‘All theories of behavior that reduce enjoyment to the satisfaction of needs, whether they are held by economists or behaviorists, come to the same conclusion: the needs can never be fully satisfied.’ —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, p. x)
‘Something deep and dark and unrecognisable. Something no manuscript should concern itself with, for no book is able to bear the weight of what it cannot say’ —Christina Tudor-Sideri (If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, p. 31)
‘You can’t criticize something for not doing things it isn’t meant to do’ —Galen Strawson (‘Real Naturalism’, Things That Bother Me, p. 160)
‘The essays written by experts which needed some form of recasting were mainly passed on to me. I learned how to copy-edit tactfully. I recall that I took out a great many adjectives’ —Muriel Spark (Curriculum Vitae, p. 161)
‘…you end up with not with a book written by the you who existed on any particular day but, rather, one collaborated upon by the many selves who existed over the likely hundreds of days you were writing’ —Matt Bell (Refuse to Be Done, p. 98)
‘A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another. When he first begins the new work, he is seldom very keen and hearty; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose’ —Adam Smith (…Wealth of Nations, p. 10f.)
‘Achievement of a goal is important to mark one’s performance but is not in itself satisfying. What keeps one going is the experience of acting outside the parameters of worry and boredom: the experience of flow’ —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, p. 38)
‘If you want a brutal test of how well your prose is holding up, I promise that a tone-deaf robot with pronunciation issues will be happy to give you the least generous read possible’ —Matt Bell (Refuse to Be Done, p. 100)
‘…so much remains on the outside that one could gather it, for days and days, and have another all, and then another, that this is how life is lived, through the little that piles up, through the everything that comes and comes and sometimes leaves, through things and actions and gestures so small that one barely sees them…’ —Christina Tudor-Sideri (If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, p. 81)
The addictive properties of flow and its potential for offering a metasocial critique are two sides of the same coin. We have seen in connection with rock climbing that a rich flow activity provides a perspective from which people evaluate everyday life and from which they gain impetus for social change. But the simple beauty of the deep-flow world is so seductive from some that they relinquish their foothold in everyday life and retreat into the self-contained universe of the activity. When this happens, the constructive potential of flow is lost. The flow activity is still enjoyable, but it becomes a rigid, isolating system instead of a growing, integrative one. The fragile dialectical tension between the flow sphere and the rest of experience is indispensable if the former is to enrich the latter.
These dangers, however, only confirm the power of intrinsic motivation. Just as one can become power crazy or money hungry, it is possible to be hooked on flow in its many manifestations. Like all forms of motivation, flow is a dangerous resource. But given its advantages over extrinsic rewards, it is a resource which one cannot afford to neglect.
30 November 2023
‘And yet it’s autumn now, as clear as water and as bright as a mirror, and I should be happy’ —Eileen Chang (‘On the Second Edition of Romances’, Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones, p. 218)
‘Every reader is cumbered by an excess of books, and every book by an excess of readers—each overwhelmed in turn by the consciousness that others have touched the same book that he or she is now holding, and thereby gain some hold over him or her’ —Leah Price (How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, p. 140)
‘Those exquisite minuets dance gingerly on cloven hoofs, as if they’re afraid to break something underfoot’ —Eileen Chang (‘On Music’, Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones, p. 225)
‘The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing need to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs’ —Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, p. 7)
‘Not a beauty that necessarily reminds you of anything. But in the dimness of the room, they carve out a space and quietly pervade it with a sort of joy’ —Eileen Chang (‘On Music’, Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones, p. 219)
‘I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate’ —Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes, p. 128 [note 83])
‘I am not fond of the romantic tradition: its atmospheric suggestions of mysteries left complacently unexplained strike me as tantamount to flicking on a light switch so as to shine artificial moonlight on whatever comes in view, fabricating a scene of hazy blue beauty, intermingled with dark shadows, through which one might hear the excited calls of insects and the startled croaking of frogs’ —Eileen Chang (‘On Painting’, Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones, p. 205)
‘There was a time when I would answer people’s questions largely with quotations from plays, novels, poems, and nonfiction works. What I wanted to say had already been said and said better than I could have hoped to say it myself’ —Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes, p. 219 [note 154])
‘The discovery that someone else has long ago given voice to your own words, and said them much better than you ever could, is disconcerting enough. But to discover that he didn’t say it as well as you might have done is heartbreaking’ —Eileen Chang (‘Let’s Go! Let’s Go Upstairs’, Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones, p. 105)
‘Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value’ —Leah Price (How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, p. 57)
‘I have neither the desire to write history nor the qualifications to comment on the approach historians ought to bring to their work, but privately I have always found myself wishing that they would concern themselves more with irrelevant things. This thing we call reality is unsystematic, like seven or eight talking machines playing all at once in a chaos of sound, each singing its own song. From within that incomprehensible cacophony, however, there sometimes happens to emerge a moment of sad and luminous clarity, when the musicality of a melody can be heard, just before it is engulfed once more by layer after layer of darkness, snuffing out this unexpected moment of lucidity’ —Eileen Chang (‘From the Ashes’, Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones, p. 44)
‘The question of whether books stand outside the market becomes a test case of whether anything at all stands outside the market. Anything, or even anyone: the value of used paper provides a measure of the value of the human beings who sell it’ —Leah Price (How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, p. 223)
‘Each book held and underlying sadness, some bit of despair
Each book also held wonder and a kind of fury.
Each book produced in me the feeling that I needed to feel.’
—Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes, p. 288 [note 202])
‘But the real empirical world is also that in which these things are taken for granted or forgotten or repressed or unknown, in which people are free. It is a world in which the broom in the corner or the taste of something like pineapple are quite important, in which the daily toil and the daily comforts are perhaps the only items that make up all experience’ —Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man, p. 185)
31 October 2023
‘…we must fall back upon the wholesome truth that we cannot delegate our intellectual functions, and say to a machine, to a formula, to a rule, or to a dogma, I am too lazy to think, do please think for me.’ —Edward Sang (‘On Mechanical Aids to Calculation. A Lecture to the Actuarial Society of Edinburgh’, p. 265; mentioned in Daston, Rules, p. 116)
‘An island of stability and predictability in a tumultuous world, not matter what the epoch or locale, is the arduous and always fragile achievement of political will, technological infrastructure, and internalized norms. At any moment it can be suddenly overwhelmed by war, pandemic, natural disaster, or revolution.’ —Lorraine Daston (Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, p. 5)
‘We have received our early ideas, formed our taste, on books from which the first page was torn off, leaving us ignorant of both title and author. It is the old, tattered novel read forty times on the sly that has left the most lasting mark on us’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, September 1908)
‘Interpretation too readily declared dims the lights of things; holding off allows the elements to glow.’ —Lewis Hyde (A Primer for Forgetting, p. 339)
‘But fantasy machines defy friction and wear; no dust or moisture perturbs their inner workers; they never break down. An essential part of the story of the newfound rigidity of rules is how such fantasies first became imaginable, even if their realization lagged far behind.’ —Lorraine Daston (Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, p. 117)
30 September 2023
‘The parallel reader. He has ten books open at once and reads one sentence in each, then the next sentence in the book beside it. What a scholar!’ —Elias Canetti (Notes from Hampstead, trans. John Hargraves, p. 68)
‘That poignant sensation which makes you take hold of a sentence as though it were a weapon’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, December 1889)
‘There are innumerable ways to write badly. The usual way is making sentences that don’t say what you think they do. […] Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial’ —Verlyn Klinkenborg (Several Short Sentences about Writing, 4%)
‘Our impression is that writers talk about writing too often in an unsatisfying way’ —Elena Ferrante (In the Margins, trans. Ann Goldstein, 22%)
‘A line of verse is always to a certain extent a cage for thought’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, January 1898)
‘Good people, always giving something away, until suddenly they bitterly regret it and hate everyone for it’ —Elias Canetti (Notes from Hampstead, trans. John Hargraves, p. 42)
‘One enters a book as one enters a railway carriage, with glances to the rear, hesitations, and a disinclination to change one’s place and one’s ideas. Where will the journey take us? What will the book turn out to be?’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, February 1890)
‘And worse—the end of the sentence commonly forgets the beginning, as if the sentence were a long, weary road to the wrong place’ —Verlyn Klinkenborg (Several Short Sentences about Writing, 7%)
‘Your actual affection for people overcomes you when they are no longer around’ —Elias Canetti (Notes from Hampstead, trans. John Hargraves, p. 110)
‘I mean a pale and nameless unease, as if a poorly constructed sentence could make you slightly homesick’ —Verlyn Klinkenborg (Several Short Sentences about Writing, 41%)
‘The fear of boredom is the only excuse for working’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, September 1892)
‘The bildungsroman seems to me on the right track when it’s clear that no one will be built’ —Elena Ferrante (In the Margins, trans. Ann Goldstein, 28%)
‘The memory wants to come undisturbed in its own moment, and must not be bothered by anyone who was present then’ —Elias Canetti (Notes from Hampstead, trans. John Hargraves, p. 161)
‘The little premonitory shiver that comes when a beautiful sentence is about to take shape’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, March 1895)
‘In writing, it’s impossible to express sincerity sincerely’ —Verlyn Klinkenborg (Several Short Sentences about Writing, 29%)
‘Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned. Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written—great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel-essay and the screenplay—and in turn becoming, within the limits of one’s own dizzying, crowded individuality, something written’ —Elena Ferrante (In the Margins, trans. Ann Goldstein, 60%)
‘I desire nothing from the past. I do not count on the future. The present is enough for me. I am a happy man, for I have renounced happiness’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, April 1895)
31 August 2023
‘Take a story from a place and drop it into another place and it doesn’t necessarily make sense, at least not at first. Like people, stories don’t always travel well. Nothing belongs everywhere, and some things only belong somewhere. But some stories, when they travel, can spark strange things in unmeasured hearts’ —Paul Kingsnorth (Savage Gods, p. 31)
‘Why is it that destroying things is an activity to share with someone you love, while repairing things is done alone?’ —Akiko Busch (Everything Else Is Bric-a-Brac, ‘Damage’, 20%)
‘Sometimes, very briefly, a blank moment—a kind of numbness—which is not a moment of forgetfulness. This terrifies me’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 31 October 1977)
‘It is, when all is said and done, when faced with the subject of death that we feel most bookish’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, December 1893)
‘We all think we have reason to reproach Nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages; we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love. Why did not Nature give us the golden curls of Balder or the strength of Siegfried or the lofty brow of a genius or the noble profile of aristocracy? Why were we born in a middle-class home instead of in a royal palace? We could carry off beauty and distinction quite as well as any of those whom we are now obliged to envy for these qualities’ —Sigmund Freud (‘Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytic Work’, in Collected Works, vol. 14, p. 315)
‘What’s remarkable about these notes is a devastated subject being the victim of presence of mind’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 2 November 1977)
‘…the way we attach value to things is both impossibly arbitrary and very, very precisely measured’ —Akiko Busch (Everything Else Is Bric-a-Brac, ‘Rewards’, 21%)
‘Sometimes, in a macabre imitation, I stop int eh middle of the road and open my mouth the way his was open on the bed. […] My laziness feeds on his death. My only inclination is to contemplate the picture that struck so terribly at my eyes.’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, July 1897)
‘Everything seemed normal. That’s what “normal” is for. It’s a word we use to paint over the cracks in what we fail to live with’ —Paul Kingsnorth (Savage Gods, p. 80)
‘Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà. I’m home now’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 11 November 1977)
‘We must of course guard against thinking of every event whose cause is unknown as “causeless.” This, as I have already stressed is admissible only when a cause is not even thinkable. But thinkability is itself an ida that needs the most rigorous criticism’ —C.G. Jung (Synchronicity, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 102 (¶967))
‘Chaotic, erratic: moments (of distress, of love of life) as fresh now as on the first day’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 29 November 1977)
‘I thought I wanted to belong. I thought I needed to have a place, a people. But every time I find a place, I don’t fit into it. Something takes me away from it, from the campfire to the slopes o the mountain. Every time I could belong, I push it away. So I suppose this must be who I am. Or, this must be part of who I am, one faction, jostling with the others’ —Paul Kingsnorth (Savage Gods, p. 120)
‘…places exist in memory almost entirely differently than they exist in the material world.’ —Akiko Busch (Everything Else Is Bric-a-Brac, ‘Music’, 53%)
‘…it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude make us less miserable’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 19 March 1978)
‘At Harvard he discovered, lying in idleness, a fund for the support of psychic research and he put it to work’ —J.B. Rhine (New Frontiers of the Mind)
‘Despite the fact that the statistical method is in general highly unsuited to do justice to unusual events, Rhine’s experiments have nevertheless withstood the ruinous influence of statistics. Their results must therefore be taken into account in any assessment of synchronistic phenomena’ —C.G. Jung (Synchronicity, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 64 (¶911))
‘How annoying to be in mourning! Every moment you must remind yourself that you are sad.’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, September 1897)
‘…by remembering it he had made the story his; and insofar as I have remembered it, it is mine; and now, if you like it, it’s yours. In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle’ —Ursula K. Le Guin (Dancing at the Edge of the World, ‘It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; Or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire?’, p.30)
31 July 2023
‘At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end’ —Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, p. 171)
‘…psycho-analysis brings out the worst in everyone.’ —Sigmund Freud (The History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement [in the Standard edition, vol. 14], p. 39)
‘The best part of life are the hours we spend in bed. The ego has a marvelous faculty for finding its way around in the dark. Trust the ego and not your flash-light.’ —Henry Miller (The Book of Conversations with David Edgar, p. 17)
‘We forget, nowadays, the scarcity of treats that made a piece of self-made toast extraordinarily exciting: something you would spend your whole teens striving towards.’ —Ysenda Maxtone Graham (Terms and Conditions, p. 198)
‘“Polk-Mowbray was a perfectly normal well-balanced Englishman then. He had all the fashionable weaknesses of the eighteenth-century gentleman. He fenced, he played the recorder.” […] Antrobus leaned forward and said with portentous triumph: “He wrote good English in those days.” Then he sat back and stared impressively at me down the long bony incline of his nose. He allowed the idea to soak in. Of course what he meant by good English was the vaguely orotund and ornamental eighteenth-century stuff which was then so much in vogue. A sort of mental copperplate prose’ —Lawrence Durrell (Esprit de Corps, p. 21)
There was a chest of drawers under the window with a label gummed to the top: worthless sentimental souvenirs. I opened the top drawer. It was crammed to the brim and covered with a piece of sewing, on which Grand had pinned another notice: it is dangerous to open this drawer! I shut it quickly and pulled out the next. It was extremely heavy and revealed yet another notice: beware! open this drawer at your peril.
I drew back breathing deeply with frustration. […] Beware, indeed! It was all tommyrot. Of course I must unpack.
‘Finally, and this is highly significant, he sent out a staff circular saying that any of the secretaries caught using phrases like quid pro quo, sine qua non, ad hoc, ab initio, ab ovo and status quo would be transferred. This was a bombshell. We were deprived at a blow of practically our whole official vocabulary.’ —Lawrence Durrell (Esprit de Corps, p. 23)
‘I really ought to say a good deal more, or a great deal less. It is an improvisation, like everything I am writing here. It is born of the moment’ —Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, p. 171)
‘…he had been very subdued that winter and apart from confessing that he was clairvoyant at parties and dabbling in astrology he had lived an exemplary life of restraint.’ —Lawrence Durrell (Esprit de Corps, p. 79)
30 June 2023
‘Their ideas were beautiful and academic, like pictures in a gallery, but somewhat remote’ —Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard & Clara Winston, p. 68)
Just as his mission in life, to solve the puzzle of existence, represented an act of love for human kind, his love for Adele was analogous. His love of human kind was abstract, universal, and not direct to the particular. Particular people, flesh and blood living people, human bipeds, or factory products, as he called them, were best loved at a distance. His love of Adele had that distance. He loved her abstractly, as a sister, and not personally, as an individual. He could not have her play a role in his everyday life, because then he would have had to recognize her as a person.
‘My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my own light.’ —Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard & Clara Winston, p. 88)
‘…the surest moment is also the most amazed, the least possessable. We’ll never know. Life is tender. And cruel’ —Philippe Delerm (Second Star, 100%, trans. Jody Gladding)
When Freud visited me in Zürich in 1908, I demonstrated the case of Babette to him. Afterward he said to me, “You know, Jung, what you have found out about this patient is certainly interesting. But how in the world were you able to bear spending hours and days with this phenomenally ugly female?” I must have given him a rather dashed look, for this idea had never occurred to me. In a way I regarded the woman as a pleasant old creature because she had such lovely delusions and said such interesting things. And after all, even in her insanity, the human being emerged from a cloud of grotesque nonsense.
31 May 2023
‘The deepest secrets are to be found in the simplest natural things, but, pining away for the Beyond, the speculative fantast treads them under his feet’ —Ludwig Feuerbach (‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, p. 94, trans. Zawar Hanfi)
‘Even though many ideas come, we do not think about them – they come in and go out, that’s all. We do not entertain various ideas – we do not invite them to stay or serve them food or anything. If they come in, okay, and if they go out, okay. That’s all.’ —Shunryu Suzuki (Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, p. 63)
‘I have come to the conclusion that mindfulness is much like tidying the house. It is focus and satisfying in concentrated spurts, but it lacks a direction of travel. It seeks to keep things as they are. It leaves the world unchanged’ —Marina Benjamin (Insomnia, 85%)
‘Ambivalence was painful equipoise; poetry was how he broke its grip’ —Martha Cooley (Guesswork, ch.14)
‘The problem with routine is that when you are wedded to it—let’s say, it’s breakfast, and you must have an egg or your kind of coffee or tea—when that gets disrupted, even temporarily, so you can’t perform it, the rest of the day is off, and it all feels wrong’ —Lynne Tillman (Mothercare, 89%)
‘If you are being trashed by the machinations of a heedless world, disguise yourself as a bin bag; if you’re being savaged by wolves, disguise yourself as a wolf. It’s a way of hiding in plain sight’ —Samantha Harvey (The Shapeless Unease, 21%)
‘The thing about running, I was realizing, was that I could think in motion in a way that I could not bear to when sitting still. In stillness, thinking threatened to overpower me, sink me, destroy me. There on the trail the thinking rolled with me, the hill itself forcing me to breathe’ —Liz Tichenor (The Night Lake, ch. 4, §2)
‘…enlightenment as a kind of majestic imperturbability’ —Marina Benjamin (Insomnia, 84%)
Erinnere dich, daß wir manchmal Erklärungen fordern nicht ihres Inhalts wegen, sondern der Form der Erklärung wegen. Unsere Forderung ist eine architektonische; die Erklärung eine Art Scheingesims, das nichts trägt.
Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the explanation a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.
‘A dull person is good because he is dull; a sharp person is good because he is sharp. Even though you compare, you cannot say which is best.’ —Shunryu Suzuki (Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, p. 42)
‘St Augustine asked: what is time but a set of nothings? The “no longer” and the “not yet” separated by the vanishing now’ —Samantha Harvey (The Shapeless Unease, 39%)
‘…chronos—the kind of time we know and mark here in this life, the kind that moves like an arrow, orderly, reliable, chronological—and kairos—the kind of time that folds in on itself, mysterious and creative and well beyond us, the kind of time that belongs to God’ —Liz Tichenor (The Night Lake, ch. 10, §2)
During our tea, Bononi had told us that his biblioteca gave him access to an interior space, a realm of truths at once hidden and open, available to all. What he hadn’t said, though I was certain he felt it, was that this realm belonged to the dead, could belong to no one else. They and not he were its real curators.
‘Being so out of time, unable to plan, not able to maintain her own schedule must have been terrifying. Also a terrific blow to her sense of self. A great wound to her pride’ —Lynne Tillman (Mothercare, 19%)
He picks up on the sense of anxiety I describe, that of something groundless and objectless, something that has to find objects to attach to in order to maintain itself, but which originates without those objects. The mind inflates with a shapeless unease, he says. I find myself going over that phrase again, the loveliness of it, the aptness, the fact that shapeless is a word that occurs to me often lately: the shapeless dark, a shapeless fog of thought, the shapelessness of loneliness as opposed to that human shape in the doorway, the shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded.
‘He who has written a bad poem and knows it to be bad, is in his knowledge – and hence in his being – not so limited as he who, having written a bad poem, thinks it is good.’ —Ludwig Feuerbach (‘Introduction to The Essence of Christianity’, in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, p. 105, trans. Zawar Hanfi)
30 April 2023
‘When you feel disagreeable it is better for you to sit. There is no other way to accept your problem and work on it.’ —Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind…, p. 40)
‘Engaging with mystery is neither problem-solving nor completing tasks. None of these mysteries can be solved, answered definitively, controlled, managed, or mastered. We never finish with any of them or deal with them decisively. They are constants in our surroundings […] We cannot change them (though our egos may try). We can only change in response to them. Some responses are more sustainable than others, more suited to some of than others. Our responses are always provisional, subject to change.’ —Thomas Attig (How We Grieve, p. xliv)
‘Truth is unattainable, but logic is intelligible. Ghosts may be things, but things are things, even if they be ghosts’ —Fernando Pessoa (unsigned), ‘Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Rationalism’
‘In order not to leave any traces, when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should to it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely.’ —Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind…, p. 63).
‘As we live, we establish, broaden, enrich, combine, transform, and at times discard or abandon practical involvements with things, places, other persons, and projects. We develop and achieve individual character through our patterns of caring and through the variety, breadth, and depth of our attachments to the surrounding world. Our life histories unfold as we weave and reweave these threads of attachment.’ —Thomas Attig (How We Grieve, p. 107)
‘…the house was brand-new, wood with panels and a high step slate roof, one of the styles that I lumped all together and called Queen William.’ —Rex Stout (Fer-de-Lance, ch. 10)