I am a Communist, not an Idiot

1. “The trouble with intellectuals is that what starts as feelings ends in a hangover.”

—Bertold Brecht to Edwin Piscator

2. When Walter Benjamin asked Brecht, who was fleeing the Nazis, if he’d take refuge in Moscow, Brecht is supposed to have replied: “I am a Communist, not an idiot.”

3. In 1945, just after he had retired from UCLA with a meager pension, Arnold Schoenberg applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. He was rejected.

H/t this essay by George Steiner.