BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE:PHILOSOPHY (sort of)

“A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.”
          Fred Allen

Quoted in Writing Changes Everything , edited 
by Deborah Brodie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
**

IDEAS OF ENDANGERMENT

“It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy , too
uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too bellicose, 
too unwell, too freighted with a possibility of the 
perception of error. The word of the last few years –
in American activist and academic circles anyway – 
has been ‘precarity.’ Which gets at ideas of endangerment, neglect, contingency, risk. Basically, we’re worried. 
And: we’re worried you’re not worried enough. Like I said:
 it’s too much.”

Wesley Morris. “Beyonce’ Is, of Course, In Control” 
in The New York Times (August 1, 2022)
**

ON FRIENDSHIP

“ There are two categories of friendship: those 
in which people are enlivened by each other and 
those in which people must be enlivened to be with 
each other. In the first category one clears 
the decks to be together. In the second one looks 
for an empty space in the schedule.”

Vivian Gornick.  Approaching Eye Level (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996)

**

THE STRAIGHT FORWARD STARE

“Flaubert said at one point that it’s only by looking
 down at the black pit at our feet, that we can remain 
calm (i.e. you’re more likely to panic if you don’t 
look at it, and the only way to look at it is to look 
at it with  a straight forward stare.”

Julian Barnes

  from Conversations With Julian Barnes, edited by Vanessa Guignery and Ryan Roberts (University Press of Mississippi, 2009)

**

 on Famine, Affluence, and Morality by Peter Singer

“Singer, prompted by widespread and credible hunger 
in what’s now Bangladesh, proposed a simple thought 
experiment : if you stroll by a child drowning in 
a shallow pond, presumably  you don’t worry too 
much about soiling your clothes before you wade 
in to help; given the irrelevance of the child’s 
location – in an actual pond nearby or in a 
metaphorical pond six thousand miles away—devoting 
resources  to superfluous goods is tantamount to
allowing a child to drown for the sake of a 
dry cleaner’s bill.

Gideon Lewis-Kraut. “Do Better” in The New Yorker
(August 15, 2022)

**
ESCAPE FROM DOUBT

“To some people return to religion is the answer, 
not as an act of faith but in order to escape an 
intolerable doubt but in search of security. The 
student of the contemporary scene who is not concerned 
with the church but with man’s soul considers this 
step another sympton of the failure of nerve.”

Erich Fromm. Psychoanalysis and Religion (New Haven:
Yale University Press. 1958)
***

WHAT IS CORRECT THINKING?

“What is correct thinking? It is to make our little
interior model of the outside world as exact as possible.
If the laws of our microcosm resemble fairly closely 
those of macrocosm, if our map represents with relative precision the country though which we must travel, 
there is some chance that our actions may be 
adjusted to our needs, our desires, or our fears.”

Andre Maurois. The Art of Living (New York: 
Harpers Brothers, 1959)
**
THE PARALLEL WORLD WHERE WE REALLY LIVE 

“Man lives in the real world; but there’s also 
a parallel world: a paper one, a bureaucratic one. 
So the passport is the person’s double in the
 parallel world.’ The comment comes from a Russian 
woman in her thirties interviewed as part of a study 
in St. Petersburg in 2008. She might have been 
channeling the philosopher Ron Harre’ , who 
called these bureaucratic doubles ‘file-selves.’”

Sheila Fitzpatrick. “Diary” in  London Review 
of Books (22 September 2022)
**

ESSENCE OF READING POETRY

Socrates contends
The essence of knowing
Is not knowing.

Since that is true,
Then the essence
Of reading this short verse

Is not reading this verse.

LJP