Letter from California: Jumpers: The New Yorker
Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,†he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.†On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,†he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.â€
Tim Parks: headhunters, pianists – we’re all the same – Telegraph
His work raises the issue of intervention. The translator’s goal is to vanish, to prevent his own identity from influencing the writer/reader interface.
Now in his fifties, Parks says that “whereas 10 years ago I might have offered advice to a friend in marriage or professional difficulties, my instinct now is to listen and not influence the situation. Because people will do what they will do.”
Then he tells me: “Maybe one of the characteristics of a decadent period is that the people doing a lot of thinking – maybe the people who you hope would be driving a community – are the people who are bowing out and saying, ‘We don’t think there’s much you can do about all this’.
“So it’s interesting looking back at writers like D H Lawrence or somebody much more difficult – like Nietzsche – and their line was that it’s always better to make an adventurous mistake than not get engaged at all.”
So while Parks has an “emotional sympathy” with Batesonian non-intervention, he also “rather admires” Helen’s work.
“It’s an ambiguity about how we think of the Third World,” he says. “Half of the time we’re thinking we should sort the whole thing out for them, and the other half we’re thinking it’s criminal that we ever got engaged with them at all.
“Between colonialism and the charitable organisations, there’s an enormous amount in common: that you go somewhere and do something. I’m not really on anybody’s side in that debate.”
article 46 Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Claudio Magris
HUO: …A beautiful conclusion. One last question I always ask at the end of every interview: could you tell me about an unrealised project.
CM: It risks getting long, but let’s say I have always been fascinated by cinema. After secondary school I was unsure for a long time whether to go to Turin to study literature, as I did, or to Rome to the experimental centre of cinematography. I would have loved to narrate with things, with colours, with faces and with gestures. But then there are numerous other unrealised projects, many omissions. In catholic catechism, in the list of sins, where it says that we can sin with words, with thoughts, or with actions, it also says that we can sin by omission: and I believe this is the most serious sin. But this is not about projects, but about a lack of generosity or charity. In many cases what I have not done weights on me more than what I have.
Interesting – a different rationale for doing.
Last Night’s TV:
Imagine…Doris Lessing – The Hostess And The Alien, BBC1
I approached the film a little warily, nervous that it might settle for the clichés of formidable old age, indifferent to social and cultural convention. I’d reckoned without Doris Lessing, whose entire life seems to have been conducted with a wild daring, and Jill Nicholls, the director, who crafted a compelling, even challenging, portrait of a completely original artist.
“I despise people who don’t experiment with their lives,” Lessing once wrote, and she unquestionably lived up to her own credo. You can’t do such a thing, of course, without also experimenting with the lives of those attached to you, which in Lessing’s case included the young children she abandoned when she walked out of her first marriage. Lessing got edgy when questioned about this, but it says something about the film that you felt persuaded of the necessity of her flight. And if you wanted proof of her poetic power as a fabulist, it came right at the end when she described a childhood memory of luring moths out of the African night with a hand smeared with honey, as good an image of the writer’s talent for drawing things out of obscurity as you could want.
Oliver Burkeman: This column will change your life | Lifeandhealth | Life and Health
…the psychologist Neal Roese explains in his book, If Only, “If you decide to do something and it turns out badly, research shows that it probably won’t haunt you down the road. You’ll reframe the failure and move on. But you will regret the things left undone.” You’ll regret them for longer, too, because they’re “imaginatively boundless”: you can lose yourself for ever in the infinite possibilities of what might have been. In other words: you know that thing you’ve been wondering about doing? Do it.
Semi interesting musings on the difference between unhappiness and despair from Kieran Setiya.
The nub of the argument:
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…if despair is unhappiness about the impossibility of achieving some good, the good must be an object of commitment – or else irrelevant to one’s happiness – and so it must be something one thinks one could achieve. At the very least, one must hope for its attainment, and in hoping believe that it is possible. It follows that despair is epistemically irrational: it depends on having contradictory beliefs.
The “irrationality of unhappiness” turns on the further claim that all unhappiness is despair. For how could one be unhappy about the frustration of an end one thinks one could achieve?
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Even philosopher, Setiya, admits it’s a good illustration of how philosophy fails to get to grips with life as we live it.
He points to the case of a fan who supports an unsuccessful team. In this formulation, to commit oneself to something that is out of one’s control is irrational, even though it’s hard to see why there is any muddled thinking. Setiya relates this to the difference between pure and practical reason. I feel a Wikipedia search coming on…
An interesting piece in the NY Times about ‘soft’ paternalism.
The idea is a simple one. Lets say you have a gambling problem. In one of your more lucid moments you decide to sign a self limiting ordnance, that says simply if you enter another casino you will be arrested and any winnings you might be fortunate enough to accrue be confiscated by the state. The self is fluid as any postmodernist will tell you. But should we be allowing one self to bind the behaviour of another self, especially if this involves state sanction.
Of course it’s a rather fanciful piece, but very interesting in the questions it throws up about our ever changing selves and the way in which we manage the the relationship between who we are and who we want to be.
