the vaulted fool

“ That’s the strangest legacy of all about Maggie: if you listen to those who loved her and thought she was manifestly right, you find, after a while, that you are with people who don’t know their own country and don’t like it either. […]

None of her acolytes will grasp the irony of her political life: that, with Thatcherism, she set out to save the soul of the nation and ended up selling it off to the cheapest bidder.

— Andrew O’Hagan

“ When people who didn’t know about Isabel’s illness asked me what was new, and I told them, I’d witness them rapidly receding to the distant horizons of their own lives, where entirely different things mattered. After I told my tax accountant that Isabel was gravely ill, he said, ‘But you look good, and that’s the most important thing!’

— Aleksandar Hemon

“ Readers are after all the exclusive privilege of those who are brave and determined enough to make a little welcoming committee for them on the middle ground.

— Keston Sutherland replies to Peter Riley

“ No one, in the era when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming, with enormous philosophical and literary effort, its entitlement to emancipation, recognised the pathological aspect of thought as acutely as Rousseau, who himself wished for nothing more than to be able to halt the wheels ceaselessly turning within his head. If he nevertheless persevered with writing, [it was only] in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that, of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.

— WG Sebald

“ Without ever deceiving himself about his medical condition, and without ever allowing me to entertain illusions about his prospects for survival, he responded to every bit of clinical and statistical good news with a radical, childlike hope.

— Seamus O’Mahony quotes Carol Blue’s ‘Afterword’ to Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality

“ The academic study of literature has reached a slightly strange understanding of itself if it thinks that insights drawn from philosophy and social theory can straightforwardly account for aspects of fictional worlds and fictional characters. […] Given that [Musil’s] Ulrich famously advises one of his fellow characters that they should live ‘as if they were characters in a novel’, what does it mean for a critic to come along and describe them as if they belonged to the same social world as himself?

— David Winters

“ There is a way in which one cannot agree with Heidegger ‘on certain points’ any more than one can, even in a manner of speaking, be insane or revolutionary on certain points. None of his concepts, the concept of world included, can be understood until one knows how to turn all of them to account. Until then, it is confusing how one goes about understanding him or, rather, how one decides when one has understood him and whether one has understood him as others must. Our confusion is not anarchic; it has its own discipline. We are not, for example, concerned to ask whether his remarks are true; each will be an untried example of its own truth, a truth which one does not know how to fix.

— Terrence Malick, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons

“ But a sense of the universal, an implied view of all activities from outside, does shape the argument. Nagel does not think that we can coherently achieve such a view, still less that we should stay with it, but as a limiting idea, it conditions his view of everything. That is why he can ask, for instance, whether we are all equally important or all equally unimportant. For many of us the question is not whether the truth lies with one of those options (or, as Nagel rather strangely puts it, ‘somewhere in between’), but whether those options mean anything at all, if we are not talking about our importance to each other.

— Bernard Williams on The View from Nowhere

“ There can be no doubt that he was, so far as he himself went, sincere enough in his commitment to non-violence. But as a political leader, his conception of himself as a vessel of divine intention allowed him to escape the trammels of human logic or coherence. Truth was not an objective value – correspondence to reality, or even (in a weaker version) common agreement – but simply what he subjectively felt at any given time. ‘It has been my experience,’ he wrote, ‘that I am always true from my point of view.’

— Perry Anderson on Gandhi

“ A writer, particularly a young and inexperienced writer, feels himself under an obligation to give his reader the fullest answers to all possible questions. Conscience will not let him shut his eyes to tormenting problems, and so he begins to speak of ‘first and ultimate things.’ As he cannot say anything profitable on such subjects—for it is not the business of the young to be profoundly philosophical—he grows excited, he shouts himself to hoarseness. In the end he is silent from exhaustion.

— Leo Shestov

Proofreading

“ In not one of the hundreds of Aboriginal dialects and languages was there a word for time.

— Wade Davis

“ The decline of religion has only stiffened the hold of faith on the mind. Unbelief today should begin by questioning not religion but secular faith. A type of atheism that refused to revere humanity would be a genuine advance.

— John Gray, The Silence of Animals

“ What contemporary writers, in my view, need to contend with, is the marginality of literature within our culture. Kafka did not believe in religion but he could still believe in art. That same belief in art today, if not grotesque, is based upon a great capacity for denial.

— Lars Iyer