thinking out loud

Zadie Smith: “When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced.

Jamaica Kincaid: What if social status in American society were based on nothing else but time of arrival?

It’s mid-August already and I’ve not updated my “What I’m Reading” section with an entry for this month.

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Perhaps the sentence most often quoted (and, often enough, misquoted) from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical writing is this: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to…

Alfred North Whitehead: Scholarship can ask itself three questions: first, “What exactly did an ancient author mean when he wrote certain words, and what exactly did those words mean to his contemporaries?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there…

Paul Elie: [Walker] Percy’s point — in the language of pilgrimage — is that the modern predicament makes pilgrimage impossible.

Late last month I was able to spend time with a former student and her partner.

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month *— (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Seyla Benhabib: In the first two decades of the twenty-first century it is astonishing that the fate of refugees and asylum seekers would emerge as a worldwide problem.

Claude Anshin Thomas: I often speak about the four essentials of Zen practice: silence, discipline, ritual, and study.

Claire Messud: There is glory in each day, for each of us.

My current strategy for selecting books to read reflects my hope to learn better how to live in these troubled times by reading works by and about people who lived in troubled times before now, focusing on those who challenged the power and authority of o…

Elie Wiesel: The collective political madness of the twentieth century, in the forms of fascism and Communism, took over nations; millions of people were swept up in it. … How can we protect ourselves against this kind of madness?

Hannah Arendt: The basic issue involved is the following: As long as mankind is nationally and territorially organized in states, a stateless person is not simply expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries — none being obliged to…

Karl Jaspers: It is not easy to describe things here.

I wrote this Saturday afternoon, before reading the news that Trump is sending the National Guard into Los Angeles.

As I wrap up another month of reading, I’ll pause to celebrate and appreciate the privileges of a comfortable retirement.

My current reading and TBR lists.

Rebecca Solnit: Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles — but driving isn’t an autonomous activity.

Hannah Arendt: …when I awoke in the car and became conscious of what had happened[,] I tried out my limbs, saw that I was not paralyzed and could see with both my eyes, then tried out my memory — very carefully, decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German…

Sometimes people are surprised when they learn that I’m typically reading 6 or even 7 books at a time.

Hannah Arendt: Whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

Earlier this week I finished reading No Straight Road Takes You There, a new collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit.

Craig Mod: A couple of points for context: A torii is the gate at the entrance to a Shinto temple that separates the sacred from the secular.

Hannah Arendt: The much deplored devaluation of all things, that is, the loss of all intrinsic worth, begins with their transformation into values or commodities, for from this moment on they exist only in relation to some other thing which can be acquired

Thomas Piketty: Monetary distance is more than just monetary distance.

I know there are mysteries in the world much more mysterious than this, but still — how could I have gone this long without discovering Mandy Brown’s A Working Library?

Yesterday I wrote of a challenge I face: the challenge of integrating the self, of living day-to-day in a way that lessens the negative impact on the larger cultural and natural world.

Hypernormalization.

I was traveling for the first half (and more) of this month, and so I fell a bit behind on my reading notes.

Last night I began reading Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume I, which was shortlisted this year for the International Booker Prize.

Lauren Markham: As a writer, I knew that words could sometimes feel like not only the antithesis of action, but also, worse, like mechanisms of concealment for doing nothing at all: empty gestures in the mouths of politicians, static social media slogans,…

Lauren Markham: …to be alive on today’s planet is, as Daisy Hildyard writes, to hold two selves, to inhabit two bodies.

Earlier this week I described my recent travels in Texas, reflecting on planned re-connections with old friends and the surfacing of other connections with people in my past.

Last year I read Rachel Cohen’s wonderful book, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters.

Andrea Barrett: Writing is mysterious, and it’s supposed to be.

Some notes about books I finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Saturday’s celebration of Independent Bookstore Day has me thinking about all of independent bookstores who have fed my literary appetite over more than five decades.

Simone Weil: It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights and on the other hand, obligations.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance?

Athenagoras of Syracuse, as quoted by Thucydides: [Some say] that democracy is neither intelligent nor fair and that it is rather the rich who are best fitted to govern.

“This is such a brush with mortality, difficult to parse at 14.”

George Orwell: A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.

At the beginning of this year I committed myself to taking my reading more seriously.

Lindsey Stonebridge: True political power comes only with the active assent of the people.

James Atlas: Like the drinker who treats his hangover with ‘the hair of the dog,’ I assuage my anxiety about all the books I’ve bought and not read by purchasing more.

Jenny Odell: I have no problem with the idea of an online social network; I just don’t want to buy a sense of community with my attention to ads, on a platform that implicitly encourages me to advertise myself, all while my data gets collected.

Sacha has some wonderful reflections on how she wants to speak to her child, building on the notion that “the way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.”