My mom commented last night on the porch that the neighborhood is now almost completely quiet at dusk—whereas there was a time when every single night in the summers the alley would be filled up with kids playing. Nobody goes outside anymore, my mom said. And what's strange too is that I've never really seen the old neighborhood look better because the trees and gardens are much more mature than they were 20 or 30 years ago. It's slashing green and floral, but young parents have aged into old folks and for the most part new families just don't have the same habits as old. And mom also said she sees parents pushing their kids in a stroller while looking at their phones all the time.
Maybe the problem with new technology is all of it comes after religious injunctions have already been issued and there's no strong sense of taboo; I wonder what would happen if the Catholic Church for instance declared that Catholics could no longer use their phones or that Catholic parents should not allow children to have phones. Secular society just isn't capable of dealing with this problem on its own.
There's this instrumental Yo La Tango song called "Green Arrow" which is just drums, egg shaker, a slithering guitar and the piped-in sound of crickets at night. It's the perfect soundtrack for walking around a sleepy American town.
Art is more than representational and encodes unrepresentable sensations indirectly and allows us to unbundle them later.
Nothing was worse for American music than the laptop recording studio. Suddenly you could simulate a whole band by yourself. Okay—a few good albums might have been written that way; but making music has stopped being romantic and communal as a result. 1
No one's really more free than the summer they're 16 or 17—when you get your license and at most you have a part-time job.
On the other hand, adulthood begins as soon as you stop trying to recreate the conditions of being 17. In that sense you can start adulthood at 18, you can start it at 25 or 30 or 40. It's really up to you.2
And the consequent danger, one I'm very familiar with, is trading something that's precious and good in the present because it doesn't provide the same kind of thrill as the past. Repetition or retracing, neurotic, returning to the past wastes our energy (and in a way also insults what was unique and unrepeatable about the past).
One simple test for a narrative, whether it's a movie or a story or a book: do good things come to the protagonist through magic, or do they have to pass through a series of harsh dialectical unavoidable realities? The former category, magic, we call fantasy or slop or fanfiction, pop. The latter, essentially art or literature. Art serves adults in the ongoing process of maturation.
FROM HENRY JAMES THE TRAGIC MUSE: “Biddy's life at home was horrid. She was very sorry for her. The child was worthy of a better fate. Peter wondered what constituted the hardness of Biddy's life, and perceived that it mainly arose in the fact that Julia disliked Lady Agnes in grace, profiting comfortably by the freedom to do so conferred upon her by having her given them a house of which she had perhaps not felt the want till they were in possession of it. He knew she had always liked Biddy, but he asked himself. This was the rest of his wonder why she had taken to liking her so extraordinarily just now. He liked her himself. He even liked to be talked about her, and he could believe everything Julia said. The only thing that mystified him was her motive for suddenly saying it.”
The psychoanalytic joke is often mistaken as a form of satanism or cruelty, and the humor is missed.
One way of looking at the study of literature as a whole is as… the tracing of transformations across time, as a looking-for… for the formal structures underneath disparate and disimilar narratives.3
Every day I'm a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of things I still want to internalize, to watch, to read, to think about. Every day I feel like I've done almost nothing in contrast to what I could have done, to what I could have learned.
I think there's a connection between the use of dictation by late 19th-century writers like Nietzsche or Henry James dictating to a female secretary, psychoanalysis, young neurotic women, talking to Sigmund Freud on a couch: the two acts are inversions of each other; and because they are so close in time and culture, I can't help but see that connection.
The late 19th century was the moment when Westerners had finally internalized the lesson of Shakespeare and had started to overhear themselves talking; the moment when they learned that, to speak out loud, is to change the self (and that this process is open-ended and infinite, strange and queer and dangerous).
Geniuses are thieves and gypsies, pickpockets. Nobody trusts them for a reason.
The muse, though they may also be a lover, occupies a category higher than lover, because they serve as a bridge to the eternal. All muses are the tragic muses for this reason, for no one can actually cross that bridge and return, or at least return as they were. The muse is a bridge to spiritual death. They must themselves bear a tremendous burden.