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February 2 - February 11, 2020
literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”
compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader.
the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
But it’s clear that at least one component of all this interpersonal semantic judging involves acceptance, meaning not some touchy-feely emotional affirmation but actual acceptance or rejection of someone’s bid to be regarded as a peer, a member of somebody else’s collective or community or Group.
we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.
No one ever seems willing to acknowledge aloud the thoroughgoing self-interest that underlies all impulses toward economic equality—especially
There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room.
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
Great athletes are profundity in motion.
profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control
the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality.
clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it.
something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a smell from childhood or a name on the tip of your tongue,
physiognomic Rubik’s Cube’s constituent squares and boxes flying around and changing shape
a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
how gray-area-tolerant you are about sincerity vs. marketing, or sincerity plus marketing, or leadership plus the packaging and selling of same.
the core paradox of all teeming commercial demotic events: It’s not for everyone.
purely formal aesthetic approach vs. a social-dash-ideological criticism
admixture of universal and particular that characterizes Notes from Underground 5 really marks all the best
These readings aim to be explicative rather than argumentative or theory-driven; their aim is to show as clearly as possible what Dostoevsky himself wanted the books to mean.
On the other hand, many of our era’s “critical studies” treat an author’s books hermetically, ignoring facts about that author’s circumstances and beliefs that can help explain not only what his work is about but why it has the particular individual magic of a particular individual writer’s personality, style, voice, vision, etc.
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them.
Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that’s really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide.
