More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I yearned for the time to ponder and deliberate and do the slow thinking banished from our contemporary world, slow thinking absolutely required yet absolutely ravaged by our contemporary climate and culture,
there’s nothing worse than catching oneself trying to be intelligent or original when one lacks intelligence or originality;
A title, I think, rather useless by itself, because one needs a book that supports the title, and I consider all the books whose titles haven’t measured up to the book
anyway, the light burst through and touched my arm and perhaps it was those four espressos or the students’ silence, but I had a moment of clair-voyance or organic unity or mythical ecstasy, call it what you want, but I was suddenly uplifted from my feeble existence, an existence plagued by interruptions:
cursing myself for cleaning the machine during Philosophy 102, a boorish class with tepid meditations on critical thinking and the analysis of logical arguments and blah, blah, blah, the entire curriculum overrun by trite and shitty platitudes, by kitsch, all which scarcely scraped the surface of true philosophy
for a moment I’m sated, the coffee smooth and bitter but not too smooth and not too bitter and I recall Napoleon who said I’d rather suffer with coffee than be senseless
I realize the one thing I need, silence, is the thing that terrifies me the most because left alone, finally, with silence, I have only my own thoughts to guide or disturb, encourage or assail, and once again the phone chirps
the smartphone an invitation to join society even though I abhorred society because society was undeniably on a downward slope, inundated by mediocrity and half thoughts, hindrances and interruptions, namely the ceaseless chirps of phones, and the chirps of my phone,
coffee, a drink Voltaire indulged in as early as five in the morning and continuously throughout the day, cup after cup, as friends, strangers, and curious pedestrians looked on, and under the scrutiny of those Parisian eyes Voltaire, his love for coffee fervid and unabashed, his passion for coffee a statement of his own selfhood, happily dismissed the mediocrity around him.
I wasn’t a savage nor an imbecile and ersatz or instant coffee shouldn’t even be allowed to invoke the word coffee because ersatz or instant coffee is swill, worse than swill, it’s swill’s bastard cousin, in fact there’s nothing in my mind more diabolical and repulsive than ersatz or instant coffee, nothing more demeaning and distasteful than the belief that ersatz or instant coffee has any relationship to coffee itself and simply because the word coffee is in its name, doesn’t, in any way, mean that it is coffee, my feelings about this long and complex, probably stronger than they should be,
...more
if I were feeling up to it I’d lecture about Madness and Civilization because Foucault always terrified the students,
the chirp of the smartphone returns me once again to the third bedroom where I must face the long-postponed moment of finally learning how to silence the smartphone because an exemplary work of single-minded boldness, of irrefutable artistry which aims to embody the spirit of Montaigne, is unthinkable with the constant assault of the smartphone, easily the most ironic name for an object in human history,
I began seeing myself as I once was, that is, a reader, nothing more perfect and pure, I felt, than a reader, especially a serious reader because a serious reader was the most immaculate creature on earth, and by serious reader I meant a reader with romantic sensibilities, one who approached books with hope in their hearts and no concern at all for schools or disciplines, the serious reader seizing each book with wide-eyed possibility because serious readers, I felt, were utopians and every book an attempt at transcending oneself.
the smartphone the cruelest instrument ever devised, I think, sipping my coffee, my bovine-faced students so enthralled by their smartphones, having no interest in anything but their smartphones, staring perpetually at the screens of their smartphones while I held forth about Virgil and Diderot,
let’s also remember that Russian translations do not lend themselves to English because of tone and register, anything of Slavonic origin to be honest, I pointed out, and what’s left, if we’re lucky, is the best appropriation of a masterful Russian poem, a mere glimpse, a timid shadow, not the poem itself,
even the most accurate and astute translation can unwittingly betray, each syllable, every stress and stanza, just another opportunity for the English translation to betray the Russian original, the betrayal practically begging to happen, betrayal hovering over every translation like an enormous raptor, translation itself an enormous monster fashioned for the express purpose of betrayal,
Yes, I continued to lecture, one could write an entire book just about the demands of translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into English, which, indeed, I’ve considered, and I said a few more things about melody and rhyme versus exactness and faithfulness
one of stupidity’s tricks is its ability to cloak itself, often as its opposite, and people like to dress it up, call it fascism, capitalism, communism, whatever rotten conviction they can muster a name for and which they’re either staunchly for or against, in short, whatever dogma they’re able to categorize and label, and all of them amount to the same thing which is stupidity, all of them mere spokes in the wheel of stupidity because stupidity isn’t simply not knowing, no, stupidity is the pretense of knowing which is arguably worse, stupidity is feigning knowledge while knowing nothing,
...more
my final assault, my final insult, she added, laughing at the ridiculousness of the English language, loving the English language, she said, for its ability to bend shapes and, if one wanted, a person could justify virtually anything they said simply by speaking in English.
literature demands you meet it halfway and you, meaning the reader, must bring the context and imagination; literature, such a lonely and noble endeavor, I always thought, lonely for the writer and the reader, and this doleful solitude was part of literature’s allure
each writer I discovered introduced me to another writer, another book, so that it became an endless obsession, more immense and elusive the more I read,
Reading about Proust confirmed my love for both coffee and books
I recall my students stabbing the screens of their smartphones as if they relied upon these devices to generate the very oxygen necessary for their survival, stabbing the screens of their smartphones as if it were an act of life-giving sustenance, without which they would surely die, endlessly scrolling the surface of their smartphones, refusing to capitulate for even the briefest moment.
my bovine-faced students were struggling for oxygen, the teachers too, everyone, I felt, trying desperately to breathe and I’d begun suspecting the smartphones were the culprit, the smartphones stealing oxygen and causing inertia on a cosmic scale,
for decades I defined myself through my wife’s eyes and now that she’s dead I can’t see myself, can’t see who I am,
hatreds without logic or reason, hatreds of entire cultures and peoples and thus hatreds of whole histories, and instead of simply saying Jew-hater which is what it is, they call it anti-Semitism as if there’s some academic rationale, some written doctrine that supports their stupidity when the only conviction behind hating a group of people, any group, is the dogma of stupidity, just as bigotry itself is merely an excuse stupid people feel justifies their own stupidity.
the smartphone is an intrusion on the mental lucidity and concentration required to create anything serious, anything novel and new,
countless versions of the espresso incident sent soaring across the globe, the humiliation of my crack-up circulating for the enjoyment of the dim-witted hordes;
what mattered was being companions in this curious life, so strange and beautiful and undeniably tragic,
Armageddon could come and the world would be left with only rubble and the chirps of smartphones, those chirps rising from the detritus of civilization, chirps inexorably tied to our fates,
the updates, I think, the number of updates for these contraptions is beyond comprehension, the updates of updates that suddenly need updates to correct the last update before the next update,
the real villain was stupidity, stupidity the true architect of those deaths, stupidity rearing its head in a place already drenched in stupidity, the death camps a place where stupidity swelled with ambition, the death camps the culmination of stupidity’s most aspiring enterprise because where can stupidity go after a death camp,
the everyday chores, renewing one’s driving permit, applying for a position at some university, are riddled with impediments, infested with bureaucracy, everyday chores awash with hurdles, but escaping one’s murderous past, exchanging continents, doctoring one’s identity, outrunning an obscene body count, that simply requires a smattering of hubris and gall because that’s how the modern world is arranged, the villains forever the most accommodated,
why can’t we say the things we need to say, I think, why are we talking about everything in the world besides what we should be talking about, meaning the grief and despair, the misery and anguish,
