the monkey speaks

A tiger’s DNA is also a ‘duplicate me’ program but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger’s DNA says, ‘Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first.’ At the same time, antelope DNA says, ‘Duplicate me by the round-about route of building an antelope first, complete with long legs and fast muscles, complete with timorous instincts and finely honed sense organs tuned to the danger from tigers.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely.

I lost my nearest friend in the one they called the Great War. So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters … Such grief can only be told in form … Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry – sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief.

It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence.

In his influ­en­tial book The Rhetoric of Reac­tion, [Albert] Hirschmann argued that all pro­gres­sive reforms usu­ally attract con­ser­v­a­tive crit­i­cisms that build on one of the fol­low­ing three themes: per­ver­sity (whereby the pro­posed inter­ven­tion only wors­ens the prob­lem at hand), futil­ity (whereby the inter­ven­tion yields no results what­so­ever), and jeop­ardy (whereby the inter­ven­tion threat­ens to under­mine some pre­vi­ous, hard-earned accom­plish­ment).

One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on either the Lawrence book or the novel was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose - but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere. There were no constraints on me and because of this it was impossible to choose. It’s easy to make choices when you have things hampering you - a job, kids’ schools - but when all you have to go on is your own desires, then life becomes considerably more difficult, not to say intolerable.

Another reason, and this one is more mysterious, has to do with an ongoing democratization of connoisseurship, in which curatorial privilege is available at every level of society.