The Life of the Mind Quotes

“Today Judith was dealing with the problem of grief. Her longtime editor at Harvard University Press who had published all her seminal texts and others not so seminal had died in a freak accident. He had gone out for a walk on the Cape (his second home) at the height of the afternoon, when the glare off the water was most intense. His foot had lost contact with the rocky footpath, sending his body over the edge. He was discovered the next day by a group of high school students who had gone to a cove to smoke angel dust, a fact that had come out when the parents took a closer look at why their children were on the shore in the middle of the day instead of in school. “Some people have been saying he did it on purpose, but that’s because they can’t accept the real tragedy: the accidental nature of the world,” Judith said, motioning to the waiter for another round of piña coladas. “It’s all very sordid.” Objectively that had to be so, although it was hard, while reclining in her luxuriously sturdy plastic chaise, poolside with a second piña colada on the way, for Dorothy to feel the impact of the story, to be there on the New England coastline with the angel-dust-smoking teenagers, the bloated editorial body, the cold gray ocean, the tragic inexorability of mischance. It wasn’t that the pool seemed real and the dead body seemed false; it was that nothing seemed real.”
― Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind

“Dorothy used to love email, used to have long, meaningful, occasionally thrilling email correspondences that involved the testing of ideas and the exchange of videos and music links. Email had been the way that she and the people she knew or was getting to know had crafted personas, narrated events, made sense of their lives. That way of life, alas, had ended. Long emails had ceased being the preferred mode of storytelling among her peers, or perhaps they no longer had so much to say to one another, and emails, though sealed with perfunctory hugs and kisses, had become businesslike. Sending a thoughtful email that she had drafted over several days and edited would, she knew, be a form of aggression; it would be foisting unpaid labor, a homework assignment, on a friend.”
― Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind

“You could do so much damage, giving someone a book at the wrong time. You could prevent them from loving it, or—and this could be worse—make them love it too much, or too stupidly. They might waste years of their lives because they read the wrong book at the right time, or the right book at the wrong time, or the wrong book at the wrong time.”
― Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind

“Love for someone else’s karaoke performance was greater and more intense than love for a great song because it was love for the person singing.”
― Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind

“The psychic effect of texting was to introduce a foreign and yet highly localized weather pattern, as if it had suddenly begun hailing on Dorothy’s head, and the other patients were blinking in sunshine.”
― Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind