Dark Thinker
A few months back, at the Guggenheim, I saw an installation by an artist I won’t name, since the work left me mostly unimpressed. I say “mostly” because on one wall was the cover of a book: Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer. Seeing the cover led me, a bit later, to pick up the book itself. I’m glad I did.
Let’s not blow a fuse trying to sum up Schopenhauer’s contributions to German and Western philosophy. (For one thing, R.J. Hollingdale’s wonderfully illuminating introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Essays and Aphorisms makes anything I would put here superfluous.) I will just let the brief passages below speak for themselves. They do not represent the best or deepest writing in the book — only the most quotable. But they do give a hint of Schopenhauer’s wit and, it must be said, dark outlook — which grew, I think, from a compassion for the human condition:
“Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.”
“Knowledge is power. The devil it is! One man can have a great deal of knowledge without its giving him the least power, while another possesses supreme authority but next to no knowledge.”
“The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.”
“Newspaper writers are, for the sake of their trade, alarmists: this is their way of making themselves interesting. What they really do, however, is resemble little dogs who, as soon as anything whatever moves, start up a loud barking.”
“The unalterability of our character and the necessary nature of our actions will be brought home with uncommon force to anyone who has on any occasion behaved as he ought not to have behaved, who has been lacking in resolution or constancy or courage or some other quality demanded by the circumstances of the moment. Afterwards he honestly recognizes and regrets his failing, and no doubt thinks: ‘I’ll do better next time.’ Another time comes, the circumstances are repeated, and he does as he did before - -to his great astonishment.”
Read anything good lately? Tell Cliff . . . and happy new year.
Cliff, have you ever read Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise? What I remember of it (from graduate school) is the deathless quote, “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first call promising.” Sorry to say it, but I have difficulty reading anything anymore that does not have a narrative. I would like to get back to reading poetry, sometime. In the meantime, the best thing I’ve read is Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” an exquisitely subtle and sinister story of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.