No American fiction I’ve read offers as rich a sense of how love might be attempted and sustained, as well as thrawted or jeapardised, between men and women who don’t read self-help books—just the kind who might want or need grown-up novels of love.
—Benjamin Kunkel writing about The Basic Couple by Norman Rush
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And what had he left behind? A nothing-much bookstore in a nothing-much neighborhood and two daughters, at least one of whom was more than a little strange. What kind of life was that? I wondered. Lying in that hospital bed with his cut-open head and his muddled brain, what had been on his mind as he looked at me? Thinking thoughts like this about Midori’s father put me in such a miserable mood that I had to bring the laundry down from the roof before it was really dry and head off to Shinjuku to kill time walking the streets. The Sunday crowds gave me some relief. The Kinokuniya bookstore was as jam-packed as a rush-hour train. I bought a copy of Faulkner’s Light in August and went to the noisiest jazz cafĂ© I could think of, reading my new book while listening to Ornette Coleman and Bud Powell and drinking hot, thick, foul-tasting coffee. At five-thirty I closed my book, went outside, and ate a light supper. How many Sundays-how many hundreds of Sundays like this-lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn’t wind my spring. —Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Another memory floats by without warning: my mother and me, after a dip in the water. My teeth are chattering. My fingers are raisins. I want to rush toward my towel. But my mother tells me softly, “We don’t run to our towels; we walk. That moment distills her essence for me: a hint of old-fashioned formality—a proper woman should know how to carry herself—combined with an implicit imperative. Hold your head high, was what she was really telling me. Take your time. Soon it won’t be this cold. —Ruth Margalit
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There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.
An older woman would have seen that, although they were little more than children, they were shifting out of the days of clutching love and into the long haul of married life.
Even in the few days he had been gone, he seemed changed. She touched him and sat very close, waiting for the familiar oneness to lock them together.
—Annie Proulx, Them Old Cowboy Songs
”But the TERRORISTS!”
Life seems somewhat like a party that I was dropped into. At first I was shy and awkward and didn’t know what the rules were. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing. It turned out that I was there to enjoy myself and I didn’t know how to do that. Someone kind talked to me and made me laugh. I began to understand that actually I had to make up my own rules and then live by them. —Gillian Bennett
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Noam Chomsky: Why Americans Know So Much About Sports But So Little About World Affairs
Lately I’ve been spending time on reddit reading ideas in the comments about how we should think about and respond to the Snowden revealations, and similar leaks relating to the behaviour of well-financed branches of government.
We’ve no good reason to believe in conspiracy theories so I’m not sure how we ought to think claims that the system is actively working against citizens to maintain its power. In particular, it’s often claimed that the media is used to distract people from real issues. No one individual is behind that, so should we think of the government as constituting an agent, that manipulates the population through the media, as the macro-level effect of the various actions its employees make? Do we then need to think of the government as pre-meditating these things, or might something akin to evolutionary theory better explain what happens? Or is the lack of demand for real news throughly the fault of the non-government? I’d like to read some political scientists writing about ths.
Relevant song: John Mayer – Waiting on the World to Change
My late philosophy tutor Bob Hargrave ran a sect of supporters of the radical philosophical views of the grammarian V.H. Dudman. One of the surviving members has indicated it might well prove useful for me to present some evidence from Korean in favour of one of Dudman’s key theses. That thesis is that natural languages have no future tense. He claims that purported future tense sentences are statements of the conclusions of inductive inferences.