Unmasking our Self-Deception about Self-Improvement
In reviewing the incongruous medley of Dan Brown‘s Inferno and two new translations of Dante‘s classic (by Clive James and Mary Jo Bang), Robert Pogue Harrison writes: Much of the fascination of the...
View ArticleMankind as Deluded Sisyphus
As the apocalypse closes in again on humanity in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle For Leibowitz, Joshua, who has been ‘chosen’ to ‘escape’ into space, leaving this world behind, wonders about the...
View ArticleOn Failing In Our Own Style
In Flaubert’s Parrot (Vintage International, New York, 1990, pp. 39) Julian Barnes writes: But then Ed Winterton liked to present himself as a failure…. His air of failure had nothing desperate about...
View ArticleJohn Nash On Thinking Rationally As Dieting
In A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1998, p. 351), Sylvia Nasar writes: Nash has compared rationality to dieting, implying a...
View ArticleV. S. Naipaul On The Supposed ‘Writing Personality’
In The Enigma of Arrival (Random House, New York, 1988, pp. 146-147) V. S. Naipaul writes: It wasn’t only that I was unformed at the age of eighteen or had no idea what I was going to write about. It...
View ArticleWestworld’s ‘Analysis Mode’ For Humans
In the course of a discussion about the various motivations underlying the character Robert Ford‘s actions in HBO’s Westworld, a friend raised the following query: In what senses would it be good, and...
View ArticleThe Academic’s Peculiar Dissonance
The academic state of mind is distinguished, I think, by a peculiar kind of dissonance; the academic is able to entertain two conflicting states of being simultaneously; each informs the other and...
View Article