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 was that idea given me by my education–and by the more “cultural,” the nicest, part of thatContinue reading “V. S. Naipaul On The Supposed ‘Writing Personality’”
Category Archives: Writing
G. H. Hardy On The Supposedly ‘Second-Rate Mind’
In A Mathematician’s Apology G. H. Hardy wrote: It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists,Continue reading “G. H. Hardy On The Supposedly ‘Second-Rate Mind’”
Cioran on Academic Writing’s ‘Forms of Vulgarity’
In ‘The Addict of Memoirs’ (from Drawn and Quartered, Arcade Publishing, New York, 1983/2012), E. M. Cioran writes: Is there a better sign of “civilization” than laconism? To stress, to explain, to prove–so many forms of vulgarity. Bergson is said to have said–somewhere–that time spent in refutation is time wasted¹. There is, evidently, a sympathy betweenContinue reading “Cioran on Academic Writing’s ‘Forms of Vulgarity’”
Barbara Tuchman Contra Hot Takes
Barbara Tuchman kicks off the preface to her Practicing History: Selected Essays (Ballantine Books, New York, 1981) by writing: It is surprising to find, on reviewing one’s past work, which are the pieces that seem to stand up and which are those that have wilted. The only rule I can discover as a determinant–and it is aContinue reading “Barbara Tuchman Contra Hot Takes”
An Anxiety-Provoking Description Of The Creative Process
There are many, many, descriptions of the stages of the creative process. Some have been memorialized into pithy, quasi-inspirational, meme-worthy statements that can be shared on the net, all the better to encourage anxious, insecure, doubt-ridden procrastinators, distracting themselves from their creative ‘tasks’ by incessantly checking their social media feeds. Roughly, they amount to this:Continue reading “An Anxiety-Provoking Description Of The Creative Process”
Margaret Sullivan Won’t Miss Five Things About The NYT; Here Are Two More
Margaret Sullivan–“the media columnist for The Washington Post….former Public Editor of The New York Times“–lists the five things she won’t miss about the New York Times: 1. The inherent tension of the job. The whole concept of coming to work every day to handle complaints, and maybe to criticize work done at the next deskContinue reading “Margaret Sullivan Won’t Miss Five Things About The NYT; Here Are Two More”
Tony Judt On A Pair Of Intellectual Sins
In The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and The French Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, p. 121), Tony Judt writes of Albert Camus: One of the things that he had to come to dislike the most about Parisian intellectuals was their conviction that they had something to say about everything, and that everythingContinue reading “Tony Judt On A Pair Of Intellectual Sins”
Chaucer’s Knight As Stoic Philosopher
In How to Read and Why (Scribner, New York, 2001, p. 281), Harold Bloom invokes ‘The Knight’s Tale‘ from Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales and writes: The Knight sums up Chaucer’s ironic ethos in one grim couplet: It is ful fair a man to bere hym evene For al day meeteth men at unset stevene Bloom continues:Continue reading “Chaucer’s Knight As Stoic Philosopher”
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Mountains Of The Mind
A few years ago, while visiting my brother in India, I browsed through his collection of mountaineering books (some of them purchased by me in the US and sent over to him.) In Robert MacFarlane‘s Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit, I found the following epigraph: O the mind, mind has mountains –Continue reading “Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Mountains Of The Mind”
Derrida And Beauvoir On The ‘Powerless,’ ‘Not Bothersome’ Intellectual
In ‘The Ends of Man,’ (from After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, MIT Press, 1987, pp. 129), Jacques Derrida writes: It would be illusory to believe that political innocence has been restored and evil complicities undone when opposition to them can be expressed in the country itself, notContinue reading “Derrida And Beauvoir On The ‘Powerless,’ ‘Not Bothersome’ Intellectual”
Samir Chopra 