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This is, perversely, the way of things for even the best books: a flurry of attention in the beginning followed by an inexorable march toward obscurity.
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We are sold books the same way we are sold cell phones, as if the latest models deserve the most attention. Each year, publishing houses churn out hundreds of thousands of new titles, including 35,000 works of fiction. The publicity machine goes to work, eager to fashion the rare success. Magazines and newspapers — the ones that still have book sections — chime in with opinions on which new books are worthwhile and why. Newspapers print their “summer reading” lists. The big-box bookstores pile their display tables with glossy stacks of fresh arrivals — for a fee, naturally. A relentless progression of the latest, freshest, greatest. Read this book! But all the middlemen along the way — the publishers, publicists, critics and book sellers — know the truth: The book they are hyping probably is not the book you ought to read, not even the book you would most enjoy reading. That book lies hidden in the back of the bookstore, or perhaps not even there. It is 10-, 20-, 35-years-old. However good it is, no one talks about it anymore. You might not have heard its title or its author’s name.
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In short, the fast-slow polarity – or antithesis, if you prefer – strikes me as false. We all have several guises as readers. If I am reading – to pick an obvious example – James Joyce, slow reading feels appropriate. If I’m reading the instruction manual for a new washing machine, it doesn’t.
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I don’t think using a search engine to find certain key words in a text is a substitute for reading it properly. You don’t get a proper sense of the work, or understand its context. And there’s no serendipity – half the things I’ve found in my research have come when I’ve luckily stumbled across something I wasn’t expecting.
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Hidden within this simple fact - the farther away things are, the farther they are receding - lies a deep consequence: We are not at the center of some giant cosmic migration. You might get the impression that we are somehow special, what with all of these galaxies moving away from us. But put yourself in the place of an alien astronomer within one of those other galaxies. If that astronomer looks back at us, of course they would see the Milky Way receding from them. But if they look in the opposite direction in the sky, they will also see galaxies moving away from them - because, from our perspective, those more distant galaxies are moving even faster. This is a very profound feature of the universe in which we live. There isn’t any particular special place, or central point away from which everything is moving. All of the galaxies are moving away from all of the other galaxies, and each of them sees the same kind of behavior. It’s almost as if the galaxies aren’t moving at all, but rather that the galaxies are staying put and space itself is expanding in between them.
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Thirty years is nothing compared to the hundreds—often thousands—of years involved in ice patch archaeology, but the untimely release of dangerous chemicals we once thought long-forgotten is chilling proof that very few things are ever gone for good.
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The initial interpretations of the art at Lascaux and in other related grottos were couched in suggestions that the paintings and engravings were decorative, or just art for art’s sake. Further analysis at the tail-end of the 20th century suggested that the cave art had deep links to prehistoric rituals promoting fertility and successful hunting. Recent studies have found a systematic sequencing in the renditions of horses, aurochs (an extinct ancestor of domestic cattle), and stags, corresponding to seasonal characteristics of each species representing spring, summer, and autumn respectively. Art historians working for the French Ministry of Culture and Communication have called this process and symbolism a “metaphoric evocation that, in this setting, links biological and cosmic time… with its central theme, the creation of the world.”
Soon after art historians accepted these seasonal and temporal connections within the cave art, archaeoastronomer Michael A. Rappenglück of The Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies in Gilching, Germany, began addressing the possible astronomical significance of the cave imagery. He noticed a group of six spots painted above the back of one of the aurochs in a part of the cave known as the Hall of the Bulls. Charcoal freckles surround the creature’s eye, which Rappenglück thought could represent the eye of the Taurus constellation embedded in the Hyades cluster. Astronomical calculations of when the Hyades cluster would have been visible to Northern Hemisphere observers during the season depicted in the image match well with the date range given by carbon-14 dating of the charcoal traces. He added a fresh layer of interpretation to the images with his conclusion that the cyclical appearance and disappearance of the Pleiades provided a celestial clock, used alongside carved-bone lunar calendars by hunters of the Magdalenian period or just before.
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The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”
But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.
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Fred Rogers
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As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us is, that each of us has something that no one else has - or will ever have - something inside of us that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.
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Jeff Bezos (via Russell Davies)
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One day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.
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Of course, we’d like to collect the people we love and the people we desire. That’s why we tell stories about them. Narration is a kind of collecting. Cities and bodies are interchangeable in much travel writing because going somewhere is the same thing as being with someone physically, and each activity is as fleeting, as impossible to hold onto or to concretely prove, as the other. In old stories about seduction, physical proof is often the object; a lock of hair, a bedroom key, a letter in the lover’s handwriting. Consider the miasma over a handkerchief in Othello. Consumerist acquisition appeals, sets up its camp in the same place as sexual and romantic desire, because it promises to assuage these afflictions. What a relief that one can in fact own something. It doesn’t matter as much to own a pair of shoes as it matters to prove that someone once wanted you or loved you or that you really did travel to Paris or Thailand or Africa, but maybe if you buy enough shoes, the ache of impermanence will calm, close up into a peaceful silence. Of course, it never does, so we continue to apply a consumer’s impulse to essentially un-acquirable things. Perhaps the explorers who documented fruit and trees and animals and land-masses and brought them back to European rulers as though in boxes with price tags experienced a greater alleviation of this longing than we can imagine. Maybe by conquering, by naming a country and populating it with their subjects or relatives, they were able to in some way bridge the gap between personal desire and material acquisition.
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A favorite concept of mine is the 200-year present, a way of thinking about change. The 200-year present began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who have reach their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary of the 200-year present, 100 years from now, is the hundredth birthday of the babies born today. If you take that span, you and I will have had contact with a lot of people from different parts of that span. So think in terms of events over that span and realize how long change takes. You can see how difficult it has been to create these bodies and new ways and how in many ways we are slipping backward; but in other ways we are not. I take comfort to know that super-power hegemony has a very limited lifespan (decline and fall of Rome, the Ottoman Empire).
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Reblogged from libraryland| |#
Robert Louis Stevenson (via libraryland)
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It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.
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A well-trained man knows how to answer questions; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.
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Mike Rowe, in advice to a Boy Scout
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If your strategy in life is to avoid those activities and requirements that you don’t enjoy, you will have a difficult time transcending any definition of mediocrity. That’s not a criticism – merely an observation.
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