Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of themselves.

When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them.

The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant.

As the late Edward W Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, ‘Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.’ I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can’t be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized.

bohemian’s ability not to worry about money always starts with your money rather than his.)

And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days. —DRIEU LA ROCHELLE,

There are no genres, there are only talents. —JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, LE VOLEUR DANS LA MAISON VIDE, P. 311

Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of the evidence. —JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL,

Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops. —COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.):

Man and Superman: “the audience gets an exhausting idea of the inexhaustibility of the subject, and is bored brilliantly.

It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.

the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he suscribes to the pessimism that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state. —RAYMOND ARON, L’OPIUM

A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.

But caveat lector: life is waiting, and to read about someone who writes about life is getting far from it. Reading Schopenhauer when he tells you to watch out for reading too many books is already getting far from it, and at this moment you are reading someone who is telling you about how Schopenhauer said that you should not let reading come between you and life. In philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic. In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality.

if you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line.

A LL THE ENTRIES in Freud’s diary of his last decade are short. Very few are more than one line long.

Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: “It’s about to make me a lot of money.

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. —ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL

Why should I waste my imagination on myself? —SERGEI DIAGHILEV

have been at a great feast of languages,” says Moth, “and stolen the scraps.”)

We shouldn’t call a critic a murderer just because it is his duty to sign death certificates. —MARCEL REICH-RANICKI, DIE ANWALTE DER LITERATUR,

Peacock in real life undid Shelley’s vegetarianism by waving a steak under his nose when he fainted,

In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

Schopenhauer extended the same idea by favouring real observation over erudition, and stated confidently that the second sapped the first.

To die guessing that you will be forgotten is one thing. But what would it be like to know that you have been forgotten before you die?

He has always held to the principle (which was also favoured by Stefan Zweig) that great artists are disqualified from being objective critics, because they are always thinking of how they would have done it.