Writer's Diary
9/29/24
Within the last 30 years, writers of disagreements would carry out those disagreements in the open letter sections of major book reviews. They would write to each other directly, by mail. There was something inherently gentlemanly or courtly about this; literary matters should be dealt with in a literary way.
Truth is invented and then grasped in the same process, imaginatively. In the realm of epistemology, we are both writer, editor, publisher, and reader.
The bohemian1 is a crucial social type, not easily replaced (I happen to think that there’s a positive correlation between laziness and high culture)2. Thus, I abhor the loss of the wino, the café dweller, the perpetual undergraduate who plays chess and reads and sits with a stack of papers in the corner of a coffee shop all day…who lives on some slender income source—reads, and spends most of that income on books.
I’m walking along the west side. There are all these new buildings that look like space stations. Made of glass.
The early October weather is disgusting. Humid, gray.
I almost stepped into the street right without looking; I would have been absolutely crushed by the electric bike that raced by—amoral, indifferent. 3
There’s so much that I’d like to do. I think I could spend a decade or two learning other languages properly, for instance, reading through the literatures of those languages.
There’s nothing about my life and my culture that seems exceptional to me, except that it’s mine, and I have no other options. I could think of many other ages and places in which my sensibility would be better applied, flourished more, and more avidly.
The most embarrassing admission is that we are children of the ages we’re born in, and that a visit to the past or future would be shocking to us—that we would likely die in any other hothouse other than the one we know. We are well-adapted to our environments.
So many wonderful civilizations, people, animals, and cities, and rituals have come and gone on this earth. Certain aspects of global civilization might improve in a linear way. The macroscopic, that is. Haltingly, ploddingly, it gets better. But the local, the subjective, the private realm—I have no faith that there aren’t a hundred trillion elements of such sweetness or wonder that have not disappeared. Extremes of terror and joy.
If the world exists, I think it must have some goodness to it. The material world, I mean.