In comparison to the late D.G. Myers, I’m a quietist, waiting for something to happen rather than stepping on the accelerator myself. He supplied me with more ideas and inspirations than I was ever able to offer him. A longtime reader reminds me of “The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time,” a project David started and together we  organized almost sixteen years ago. That’s sufficiently remote in time to make it feel like a pottery shard dug up from a kitchen midden. David and I and eleven other writers/bloggers responded to a list of nine questions or prompts we had formulated, plus a summing up written by David. The resulting symposium is at once familiar and eerily alien. In 2009, I see I was already thinking of book blogging retrospectively, as a done deal. Here is one of the questions I formulated and my response:  “Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?”:   “There are no golden ages, only golden moments. I once worked with a newspaper editor who said something like this: ‘You pay your dollar and read the paper. If you find one story that amuses you or teaches you something new, you got your money’s worth.’ To read a blog costs nothing. Peruse the blog roll at Anecdotal Evidence. If you can’t find something there that moves or enlightens you, or drives you pleasingly irate, go check your pulse.”   Glib but true. Here is the late Terry Teachout’s reply to the same question:   “Er, who are all those ‘famous’ book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.”   Go to David’s blog, A Commonplace Blog, and scroll down to the bottom of the left column to read the entire symposium.

Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the greatest gifts of the imagination, that crowning curio of consciousness, is our ability to alchemize hindsight into foresight, to chart the most probable course of the future by drawing on our experience of the past. And yet, like the tragic flaw of the Greek hero, our great strength is also our great vulnerability. It is salutary to remember how often our predictions have been wrong, how again… read article

An old friend has grown uncharacteristically introspective and is finding much to regret. It’s a function of age. A widower in retirement from teaching high school, he seems no longer the buoyant social creature I’ve always known. In fact, I envied his gregariousness when we were young. Still funny, still curious, well-read and attentive to the world, he looks back at missed opportunities, doubts, things he should have done or not done. We all do that, at least the non-sociopaths among us, but I fear my friend is growing obsessive. Such self-scourging worries me. I’m no psychiatrist but I do respect depression, especially when it’s not merely an insidious mutation of self-pity.  Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem when he was a little older than we are -- “Things That Might Have Been” (trans. Alastair Reid, The History of the Night, 1977). Here we find the musings of a man who was among the great writers of the last century:   “I think of the things that might have been and were not. The treatise on Saxon mythology that Bede did not write. The unimaginable work that Dante glimpsed fleetingly when the last verse of the Commedia was corrected. History without the afternoon of the Cross and the afternoon of the hemlock. History without the face of Helen. Man without the eyes which have shown the moon to us. In the three labored days of Gettysburg, the victory of the South. The love we do not share. The vast empire which the Vikings did not wish to found. The world without the wheel or without the rose. The judgment of John Donne on Shakespeare. The other horn of the unicorn. The fabled bird of Ireland, in two places at once. The son I did not have.”   The tone is objective, almost clinical, a catalog. All of these events are historical, not personal, until the eighth item on his list: “The love we do not share.” Is he speaking as a generic human being or as Borges? It’s left ambiguous, at least in translation. Only in the final line does the first-person singular assert itself: “The son I did not have.” We know Borges had no children. Hoyt Rogers also translated Borges’ poem, first in the March 1999 issue of The New Criterion, then in Selected Poems (ed. Alexandr Coleman, 1999). Some of the differences in word choice are interesting:   “I think about things that might have been and never were. The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write. The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed As soon as he corrected the Comedy’s last verse. History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross. History without Helen’s face. Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon. Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South. The love we never shared. The vast empire the Vikings declined to found. The globe without the wheel, or without the rose. John Donne’s judgment of Shakespeare. The Unicorn’s other horn. The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once. The child I never had.”   “Child” instead of “son.” Like Borges, my friend has no children.

Jessa Crispin on what the actor’s roles tell us about the crisis of masculinity The post Michael Douglas Explains It All appeared first on The American Scholar.