The Future is Unmarked

A description of Lulu, a young woman who works in the music industry, circa 2025:

Lulu was in her early twenties, a graduate student at Barnard and Bennie’s full-time assistant: a living embodiment of the new “handset employee”: paperless, deskless, commuteless, and theoretically omnipresent, though Lulu appeared to be ignoring a constant chatter of handset beeps and burps. The photos on her page had not done justice to the arresting, wide-eyed symmetry of her face, the radiant shine of her hair. She was “clean”: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

From A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan (published 2010).

On rereading

Maybe you can’t go home again, but you can (and should) reread good books:

… you come to a book the second or third time with a different hunger, a more settled sense about how far off the previously-mentioned great horizon really is for you, and what you do and don’t have time for, and what you might reasonably hope to gain from a later look. Every time I open a book for the first time I feel I’m taking a risk. It’s part of the great excitement of reading. It’s like standing in the street and watching a glistening, sequined tightrope walker traverse the empty space between tall buildings. If he falls, I’m implicated because I’m watching. Though maybe he won’t, and I’ll be implicated in a triumph.

But with rereading, less is thrillingly at risk—though it can still be thrilling. Everything just seems to happen on solider ground—not high up. In that sense, rereading is more like what we originally meant by reading—an achieved intimacy, a dappled discernment, the pleasures of volition, of surrendering, of time spent lavishly, the chance of glimpsing (but not quite possessing) the heart of something grand and beautiful we might’ve believed we already knew well enough.

From “Rereading,” by Richard Ford (Eighteen Bridges magazine, Fall 2010).

On Explorers

There’s the journey and there’s the destination:

All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.

From The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke (published 1956)

On Wartime Culture

Written during the buildup to the war in Iraq:

In wartime the state seeks to destroy its own culture. It is only when this destruction has been completed that the state can begin to exterminate the culture of its opponents. In times of conflict authentic culture is subversive. As the cause championed by the state comes to define national identity, as the myth of war entices a nation to glory and sacrifice, those who question the value of the cause and the veracity of the myth are branded internal enemies.

From War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges (published 2003).

On the Ruination of Friendships

Writing about Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and how it’s the little things that ruin a friendship.

Whenever I would think of these two men who had been my friends, I would find myself growing fascinated at the way little details, little vanities, little slights, shape all our relationships. It is these little things, not clashes over great principles, that turn people against each other.

From That Summer in Paris, by Moreley Callaghan (published 1963).

On Paris

Much has been written about “the other Paris” (or, to be realistic, “the other Parises”), but Julian Green (sometimes written as Julien Green) sums it up nicely:

Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing. Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was.

From Paris, by Julian Green (published 1991).