No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?

I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.

It appears that we've given up on the long-range view. That we've decided not to think about consequences—about cause and effect. Maybe that's why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.

Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.

A decision worthy of the name is based on observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment. Opinion—that darling of the press, the politician, and the poll—may be based on no information at all.

Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.

Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story ... ? Tell me what it Means. But that is not my job, honey. That's your job.

Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.

The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability.

Question 14: “Are you living your secret desires?” Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none, my desires are flagrant.

Cats have no guilt and very little shame.

Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.

Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.

If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.

Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can't life and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.

Literature is a field a great many men consider theirs by right. Virginia Woolf committed successful competition in that field. She barely escaped the first and most effective punishment--omission from the literary canon after her death. Yet eighty or ninety years later charges of snobbery and invalidism are still used to discredit and diminish her. Marcel Proust's limitations and his neuroticism were at least as notable as hers. But that Proust needed not only a room of his own but a cork-lined one is taken as proof he was a genius. That Woolf heard the birds singing in Greek shows only that she was a sick woman.

if I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog.

I work in my mind. What I do is done in my mind. And what my hands do with it in writing it down is not the same as what the hands of the weaver do with the yarn, or the potter’s hands with the clay, or the cabinetmaker’s with the wood. If what I do, what I make, is beautiful, it isn’t a physical beauty. It’s imaginary, it takes place in the mind—my mind, and my reader’s. You could say that I hear voices and believe the voices are real (which would mean I was schizophrenic, but the proverb test proves I’m not—I do, I do understand it, Doctor!). And that then by writing what I hear, I induce or compel readers to believe the voices are real too . . . That doesn’t describe it well, though. It doesn’t feel that way. I don’t really know what it is I’ve done all my life, this wordworking. But I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them. I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.

Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?

The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.

We cried “Sisterhood is powerful!”—and they believed us. Terrified misogynists of both sexes were howling that the house was burning down before most feminists found out where the matches were.

Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great.

Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not?

None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it.

What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn from our birthday to last day - from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land—wishful thinking country.

Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.

Fear is seldom wise and never kind.

When there’s no social pressure behind it, respectful behavior becomes a decision, an individual choice.

Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears.