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"To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life."
over a year ago

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More from The Marginalian

Anima: One Woman’s Search for Meaning in the Footsteps of Bulgarian Mountain Shepherds

"All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love."

5 hours ago 1 votes
Divinations of the First Light: A Cosmic Poem for the Vera Rubin Observatory

At the end of her trailblazing life, having swung open the gate of the possible for women in science with her famous comet discovery, astronomer Maria Mitchell confided in one of her Vassar students that she would rather have authored a great poem than discovered a comet. A century later, a little girl named Vera had a flash of illumination while reading a children’s book about Maria Mitchell: her nightly pastime of gazing wondersmitten at the stars outside her bedroom window could become a life’s work, work that would culminate in one of the greatest revelations in the history of… read article

2 days ago 3 votes
How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time

If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, smooth even the sharpest edge. Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20,… read article

6 days ago 5 votes
Against Death: Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti on Grieving a Parent, Grieving the World, and What Makes Life Worth Living

The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, whose bottomless love had nurtured the talent that would win him the Nobel Prize in his seventies; his mother, who had raised him alone after his father’s death when Elias was seven (the kind of “wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe,” he would later reflect). Having left chemistry to study philosophy, trading the science of life for the art of learning to die, Canetti,… read article

a week ago 6 votes
The Whole of It

Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning. There can be consolation in looking backward to fathom the staggering odds of never having been born, and in looking forward toward the immortal generosity of our atoms. But nothing calibrates… read article

a week ago 8 votes

More in literature

'Susceptible to Education'

I grew up fetishizing a university education. I knew no one in my family or in my working-class neighborhood who had “gone to college,” as the common phrase had it. In my experience, that status was confined to doctors and teachers. My father was a high-school dropout. Higher education seemed like a gift reserved for the anointed, whether by wealth or genius. Naturally this inspired a strain of suspicion and resentment. After high school, I applied, without assistance, to two universities – Harvard and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. My naiveté was stunning. The state school accepted me and after three years I dropped out. It was probably my generation that first came to believe everyone should go to college. I no longer think that’s the case, especially because a university degree no longer signifies a true education. I’ve known too many degree-holding alliterates and even border-line illiterates. Robert Conquest chooses his words carefully in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999): “Not all young, or old, people are susceptible to education.” Conquest’s analysis of education is interesting. His formal education at Oxford was excellent and he became a gifted historian, poet, novelist and all-around man of letters – a rare breed today. He bolsters his argument with allusions to Edward Gibbon and Marcus Aurelius. Some young people are, Conquest writes, “more or less uneducable. Others have had a good education by the time they are eighteen, or even younger, but have neither the desire nor the bent for ‘higher’ education.” This confirms my observation that some of the brightest, most well-read people I’ve known are degreeless. “For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all," Conquest writes, "as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds -- except in special fields—as their Bachelored and Mastered and Doctored acquaintances.” It’s always a pleasure to meet and talk with an autodidact, a self-directed learner, as opposed to a formally educated pedant or drone. Often the former is motivated by love of learning; the latter by status, money, fashion, indifference. Of the amateur class, Conquest writes: “No doubt these were naturally inclined that way, or else brought up in circumstances where it was taken for granted. And, of course, they must have had some sort of preuniversity education that puts them above many university entrants, or exiters, these days. I think of such people (at random) as Julian Symons, or Roy Fuller, or V S. Pritchett, or Iain Hamilton, the editor of the London Spectator (who left school at sixteen to work in a clothes shop), and of other major figures in literature and journalism.”

13 hours ago 2 votes
Once in a Lifetime

Jonathan Gould on how Talking Heads transformed rock music The post Once in a Lifetime appeared first on The American Scholar.

14 hours ago 2 votes
Anima: One Woman’s Search for Meaning in the Footsteps of Bulgarian Mountain Shepherds

"All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love."

5 hours ago 1 votes
'The Neglected By-ways'

Thomas Parker is a longtime reader and frequent commenter on this blog. On Monday’s post he recalled a passage he thought may have been the work of George Saintsbury. Unable to track it down for attribution, he quoted from uncertain memory: “Nothing pains me more than the contempt with which people treat second-rate writers -- as if there were room in life for only the first-rate.”  Dave Lull tells me the writer in question may have been not Saintsbury but a comparably situated critic in French literature, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who has little standing in literary circles today, at least in the English-speaking world. Dave identified this sentence, though not the source, as Saint-Beuve’s: “Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.”   Clive James devotes a chapter to Saint-Beuve in Cultural Amnesia (2007). Dave quotes James, in part: “The student should be slow to join in the denigration. Sainte-Beuve really was the greatest literary critic of his time, even though he sometimes gave too much praise to mediocrity, and not enough to genius.” I would distinguish “second-rate” status from “mediocrity,” though James continues: “Sainte-Beuve certainly had a gift for slighting the gifted while rabbiting on endlessly in praise of mediocrities.”   No writer is minor while we are paying attention to his work, enjoying it, admiring it, sharing it with other readers. Every serious reader agrees that Swift and Tolstoy are major writers – “first-rate” – whom we are obligated to read if we wish to be fully literate. That’s easy. But what about their contemporaries; say, Matthew Prior and Nikolai Leskov? Who would wish to miss the latter’s novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”? “Second-rate” is better than “thirteenth-rate,” and even thirteenth may be worth pursuing.   In her life of Siegfried Sassoon, Journey from the Trenches, Jean Moorcroft Wilson says Sassoon shared with his friend Edmund Blunden an interest in “the neglected by-ways, a taste which reflected their literary interests as a whole. Though both had a proper respect for the major writers of the past, it was the minor figures who intrigued them.”   “Minor,” I suspect, is not a qualitative term, precisely. It ought to be used carefully, with discretion and due respect. After all there’s a class of writers judged unimportant by the usual standards, by the usual people – minor (such a patronizing word), un-engagé, witty rather than weighty, blithely indifferent to literary fashion and significance. The English seem to specialize in this species. Think of Sydney Smith, Walter Savage Landor, Maurice Baring, Saki, Walter de la Mare, Lord Berners and Henry “Chips” Channon. The unlikely alpha male of the bunch, the major English minor writer is, of course, Max Beerbohm. Among his friends was another, the New Jersey-born British essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith, a writer whose resistance to pigeon-holing and portentousness defines him. All of these writers are entertaining, sometimes even wise. I would read any of them before I would the latest, much-heralded tour de force.

yesterday 2 votes
The future used to be better

How contemporary art reflects our waning belief in progress.

2 days ago 2 votes