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The imagination I take to be indispensable to truth, so defined. It is the prior necessity, not the desire or the duty to perform a liberating action.
it is always more agreeable to play the role of a writer than to be a writer. A writer’s life is solitary, often bitter. How pleasant to come out of one’s room, fly about the world, make speeches and cut a swath!
For a very long time the world found the wonderful in tales and poems, in painting and in musical performances. Now the wonderful is found in miraculous technology,
Literature cannot compete with wonderful technology. Writers, trying to keep the attention of the public, have turned to methods of shock, to obscenity and super-sensationalism, adding their clamor to the grea...
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The attitude of intellectuals toward literature has become a “serious” one (the quotation marks are heavy). They see in novels, poems or plays a creative contribution often unconsciously made to the study of society or psychology or religion. The plots of Dickens are psychoanalytically investigated; Moby-Dick supplies Marxists with material for the study of the factory system. Books are strongly shaken to see what usable things will fall out of them to strengthen a theory or support some system of ideas. The poet becomes a sort of truffle hound who brings marvelous delicacies from the forest.
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No one can doubt the existence of the unconscious. It is there all right. The question is what it contains. Is it only the seat of animal nature, of instinct, the libidinal forces, or does it also contain elements of higher life? Does the human need for truth, for instance, also have roots in the unconscious? Why, since the unconscious is by definition what we do not know, should we not expect to find in it traces of the soul as well as of aggression?
If professors of humanities were moved by the sublimity of the poets and philosophers they teach, they would be the most powerful men in the university and the most fervent.
life-and-death questions are not what we discuss. What we hear and read is crisis chatter.
the truth is not loved because it is improving or progressive. We hunger and thirst for it—for its own sake.
Friendships and a common purpose belong to a nineteenth-century French dream world.
He stated in the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” that art was an attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe: It tried to find in that universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what was fundamental, enduring, essential. The writer’s method of attaining the essential was different from that of the thinker or the scientist, who knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with, the artist had only himself; he descended within himself, and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found “the terms of his appeal.” He appealed, said Conrad, “to that
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Human types have become false and boring. D. H. Lawrence put it early in the century that we human beings, our instincts damaged by Puritanism, no longer care for—worse, have become physically repulsive to—one another. “The sympathetic heart is broken,” he said. “We stink in each other’s nostrils.”
Our collective achievements have so greatly “exceeded” us that we “justify” ourselves by pointing to them.
Since the Twenties, how many novelists have taken a second look at Lawrence or argued a different view of sexual potency or the effects of industrial civilization on the instincts? Literature has for nearly a century used the same stock of ideas, myths, strategies.
Our very vices, our mutilations, show how rich we are in thought and culture.
crowds of reporters have been watching the event on color television sets. All the vending machines are empty, all the candy has been eaten, everywhere cardboard boxes are stuffed with empty cans and paper plates and cups and sandwich wrappings and cigarette butts.
President Johnson used to say that he knew what was happening in Vietnam; he had information he couldn’t share with us and without which we had no opinions worth considering. But he too turned out to be just another amateur.
Chicago, a sprawling network of immigrant villages smelling of sauerkraut and home-brewed beer, of meat processing and soap manufacture, was at peace—a stale and queasy peace, the philistine repose apparently anticipated by the Federalists. The founders had foreseen that all would be well, life would be orderly; no great excesses, no sublimity.
The sun shone as well as it could through a haze of prosperous gases, the river moved slowly under a chemical iridescence, the streetcars rocked across the level and endless miles of the huge Chicago grid.
the socialist line was that FDR’s attempted reforms were saving the country for capitalism, only the capitalists were too stupid to understand this.
What this comes to is that a writer cannot afford to lose his naïveté. It is imperative to add that in the present age he cannot afford to ignore the complexities in which existence is now set. His simplicity will be steeped in complexity.
Lucky writers, born lucid, can get by without reading beautiful books. I myself was not born lucid, unfortunately, and have not been able to manage matters unaided.
Aristocratic Europe, of which he is himself a product, is done for. The new age, which began with Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, is upon us. The democratic world with its masses, its miracles, its mediocrities, its splendid opportunities for freedom and development, its monstrous perversions of the same—no
we are a self-saturated population, a collectivity full of itself, viewing, describing, assessing itself. There is one great act and everybody is in it.
democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external to man, and fixes it on man alone.
Democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the productions of nature; but they are only excited in reality by a survey of themselves.
Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.
Tocqueville’s project (individuals are negligible and therefore collectivity will be the heroic theme) has the air of being one of those happy French thoughts that sound terribly plausible but won’t actually bear much weight.
The “romance of the frontier” was quickly gulped down by the colossus Technology.
Without new relevant art we live in a world in which everything is either of the past or without reference to the deepest developments of the time.
“Truth, clearness and Beauty, naturally are public matters. Indeed, Truth (but written truth) . . . is as public and as necessary as the air we breathe. Truth or Beauty are as much public concerns as the water supply.”
Humankind has today the advantage of an overview—in which ancient epic mingles with modern dehumanization. These are properties of our being in the modern age.
Parisian gloom is not simply climatic; it is a spiritual force that acts not only on building materials, on walls and rooftops, but also on character, opinion and judgment.
Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument—that,
Mysticism and Sensuality are the things that most of all redeem life.”
what America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This was what Europe offered, or was said to offer.
I would be ready for definition when I was ready for an obituary.
Stubborn De Gaulle, assisted by Malraux, issued his fiats to a world that badly wanted to agree with him, but when the old man died there was nothing left—nothing but old monuments, old graces. Marxism, Eurocommunism, existentialism, structuralism, deconstructionism, these could not restore the potency of French civilization. Sorry about that.
God would be perfectly happy in France because he would not be troubled by prayers, observances, blessings and demands for the interpretation of difficult dietary questions. Surrounded by unbelievers, He too could relax toward evening just as thousands of Parisians do at their favorite cafés.
Vulgarity in the Eighties is not so sure of itself as it was fifty years ago. Crisis has chastened it considerably.
all civilized countries were destined to descend to a common cosmopolitanism and that the lamentable weakening of the older branches of civilization would open fresh opportunities and free us from our dependence on history and culture—a concealed benefit of decline.
To interpret our circumstances as deeply as we can, isn’t that what we human beings are here for?
When the center does not hold and great structures fall down, one has an opportunity to see some o...
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the best efforts of intellectuals to enlighten us, the books they have written for us, have so often led to deserts of abstraction. After many years of attentive and diligent study we are left with little more than systems of opinion and formulas that hide reality from us. Personal judgment is disabled, crippled by theoretic borrowing. We are bound, in other words, to be skeptical of learning too. Hybrid barbarians that we are, we trusted intellectuals to tell us what was what, we put up with the invented mental language of their “authoritative explanations.” But in the end man must master his
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access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas that frequently deny its very existence and that indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.
In Germany the revival of the epical theme in Wagnerian and later in Hitlerian form may well have been a bid to supersede the Jewish epic. Even the plan to destroy the Jews was epical in scale. The building up of Israel was a further chapter in the epic of the Jews.
Neither the philosopher nor the scientist can tell the artist conclusively, definitively, what it is to be human.
we must also consider what it requires to face the trouble-sea in its planetary vastness—what an amount of daily reading it demands of us, to say nothing of historical knowledge.
more serious challenge to our loyalty was the invasion of Finland by the Red Army. Trotsky argued that a workers’ state could not by definition wage an imperialist war.
Nineteen forty was also the year of Trotsky’s assassination. I was in Mexico at the time and an acquaintance of the Old Man, a European lady whom I had met in Taxco, had arranged a meeting. Trotsky agreed to receive my friend Herbert Passin and me in Coyoacán. It was on the morning of our appointment that he was struck down.
