WRB—July 31, 2024

“save civilization and have fun”

Those who are readiest to die for a cause may easily become those who are readiest to kill for it.

One sees the same principle at work in a field (comparatively) so unimportant as literary criticism; the most brutal work, the most rankling hatred of all other critics and of nearly all authors, may come from the most honest and disinterested critic, the man who cares most passionately and selflessly about literature. The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper over the game.

We must not over-value the relative harmlessness of the Managing Editors. They are not above, but below, some temptations.

N.B.:

The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “May we despair?”, will take place on the evening of August 17. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details. [At

Wisdom of Crowds

,

Santiago Ramos

on the decadence of despair: 

To hope in our own time requires going against the temptation of meta-decadence. Meta-decadence is a cousin to despair. It breeds passivity before the daunting tasks before us, and makes the ascent of the unjust more likely. Rejecting it doesn’t mean becoming naïve or even optimistic, or inveighing against accounts of decadence in the name of hope (don’t shoot the messenger!). It means not allowing those accounts to be the final word on our time or a drag on one’s spirit. 

Why not come despair with us this August? —Chris]

Links:

• In The New Yorker, David Owen on porches and sleeping on them:

  Porches are semi-magical spaces, intermediate between inside and outside. Charlie Hailey, a professor of architecture at the University of Florida, has written—in The Porch, published in 2021—that porches embody “the benefits of public life, the thrills of nature, the atmosphere of weather, the exhilaration of coming and going, the calm of simply sitting down, the warmth of family and friends, and the restfulness of solitude.” For years, they also played a prominent role in American efforts to prevent, manage, or cure several devastating diseases, among them tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonia. In many parts of the country, though, porches have either disappeared or ceased to serve anything like their original purposes. There are two comfortable-looking chairs on the front porch of a house not far from my house, but I’ve never seen anyone sitting in either of them. The porches that do survive constitute a fragile and weakening link to a past that most people have forgotten, if they ever knew about it at all.

  [I don’t have a porch so I’m working on this on a rooftop. It’s nice! I’m always disappointed whenever I see a new house without a front porch. If you had the choice between front porch and no front porch, why would you choose the latter? —Steve]

• In Berliner, Alexander Wells interviews Theresia Enzensberger about her new book on sleep (Schlafen, May);

  Enzensberger: I was very interested by the contradiction between sleep being a private thing—a private problem, a personal problem, a biological one—and all the societal influences on how we sleep and what it means.

  You can never quite solve that contradiction, because it’s always obviously both. That contradiction is reflected in how we talk about sleep. It is also connected to how our society thinks about weakness and illness, which is also considered private, in a sense—although health is obviously also determined by societal factors. Nowadays, there is the expectation that sleep should not be standardized and normalized. Other human needs, like food and sex, have been made into individual consumer product areas; with sleep, people aren’t encouraged to talk about their preferences at all.

  Our society is not structured in a way that is conducive to having sleep preferences—you are supposed to sleep from a certain hour to a certain hour for a certain amount of time. There is not much room for individual preferences or needs.

  Wells: How does that kind of estrangement—that kind of self-studying, while being out of sync with other people’s sense of time—relate to writing? Is it a coincidence that so many writers are interested in insomnia?

  Enzensberger: I actually think it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Writers do write a lot about insomnia—but that might be because they are writers, so they can tell us about the experience [in ways] other people cannot. I don’t know if writers more often do have insomnia. Then again, if you think a lot about yourself, perhaps that does make you more prone to insomnia, so maybe writers are more prone.

  [I agree. The structure of our society does not take into account that I am old and tired and hate being out of the house after 9 p.m. —Steve]

• In Tablet,

  Blake Smith
  on Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody and his translations from French:

  We are left in our uncertain and possibly misguided faith, unsure whether the presence of such minimal figures as “the dove,” “the man,” and “the rain” are, indeed, enough to assure that we are, in fact, placed within the biblical narrative of Noah and its promises. It is just this anxiety that puts us, as readers, in something like the existential situation, if not of Noah himself, than of the less heroic others on the ark—those members of his family, wife, sons, and daughters-in-law, to whom God hadn’t spoken, who had to face first the mockery of their neighbors and then the annihilation of their world, who suffered the alternating terror and discomfort of life on the ark, and who looked some morning from the deck for they did not know what sign, all without the comfort of divine conversation.

  By removing biblical references to God and Noah, flood and rainbow, Rudavsky-Brody returns us to the existential situation typically covered by our overfamiliar reception of the story. In this respect, he is a real inheritor, if not of Fondane’s poetic style or voice, then of the central concern of all Fondane’s writing, whether poetry or philosophy or criticism, which was to bring Jewish spirituality into dialogue with existentialism and to bring both to bear—not to salve, but to properly intensify—our collective and private crisis.

[Behind the paywall: Steve on Romanticisms, anti-Romanticisms, Flaubert, Franzen, and full English breakfasts, Faustian bargains, Olympic sports, blurbs, not meeting famous people, young men worshipping at the altar of Pynchon, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]