I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions Iâd reached myself. ⌠What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?
If we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literatureâwe get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.
Local libraries âare often peopled with ⌠students who canât find a quiet place at home to work.⌠Denying these children the space and silence to study and contemplate the past that the better-off may be able to find in a spare room of their house is nothing short of social discrimination at its worst.â Leslie fears a return to a time âwhen only the elite could afford silence.â
For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I donât like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I donât like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I donât like it.
No critic will ever amount to much who does not start with strong personal preferences and end by transcending them so that he can see the good in works which are not really his âdish.â
Once upon a time we chose none of our reading: it all came to us unbidden, unanticipated, unknown, and from the hand of someone who loved us.
For many children the act of being read toâand therefore the book itselfâis powerfully associated with being loved.
Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become: they have discerned, maybe in a limited way, some good and they are pursuing it as best they can, given limited knowledge and experience.
The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.
Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art.
The exotic and nostalgic attraction of the Mediterranean.
The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it.
Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society.
To be continued by the reader
The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.
Intelligence thatâs not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other peopleâs expense.
“Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) this device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation.”
You see this on many electronic devices sold in the United States, and I think itâs actually a pleasingly crisp formulation of the âgolden ruleâ in terms that make more explicit that such a rule mandates that you accept things from others that you yourself should not or are not allowed to do.
Obliviousness is privilegeâs form of deprivation. When you donât hear others, you donât imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.
Live, [pop music] can provide the kind of indelible, empowering experience that was so beautifully described by the American rock critic Ann Powers on social media in the aftermath of the Manchester attack: âTelling your mom itâs OK and youâll meet her right after the show, running toward the front hand in hand with your best friend like you donât even have a mom right now, flirting with the kid who sells you a soda, dancing experimentally, looking at the woman onstage and thinking maybe one day youâll be sexy and confident like her, realising that right this moment you are sexy and confident like her, matching your voice to the sound, loving the sound, falling into the sound.â
âLate capitalismâ often seems more like âthe latest in capitalismâ
A government no longer steers towards its chosen destination. The word “horizon”, with its promise of a hoped-for future, has vanished from political discourse - on both right and left. All that remains for debate is how to measure what is there. Opinion polls replace direction and replace desire.
The word we, when printed or pronounced on screens, has become suspect, for it’s continually used by those with power in the demagogic claim that they are also speaking for those who are denied power. Let’s talk of ourselves as they.
One of the most consoling aspects of animals is that their priorities have nothing whatsoever to do with our own perilous and tortured agendas. They are redemptively unconcerned with everything we are and want.
Sometimes itâs hard to draw a line between the specific and the trivial.