Reviews and News:
The sad state of free speech in France: “A country is heading for trouble when its most popular writers worry that their words will land them in jail. France is that way now. Two years ago, TV commentator and journalist Éric Zemmour published Le Suicide français, an erudite, embittered, and nostalgic essay about the unraveling, starting in the 1970s, of the political system set up under the leadership of World War II hero Charles de Gaulle. (See ‘French Curtains,’ The Weekly Standard, December 8, 2014.) The book sold 500,000 copies. Since then, it seems, Zemmour has spent half his time collecting prizes and the other half defending himself in court. In September, he was let off by a French tribunal for a 2014 remark he made on the radio station RTL. ‘The Normans, the Huns, the Arabs, the great invasions that followed the fall of Rome,’ Zemmour had said, ‘have their modern equivalents in the gangs of Chechens, Roma, Kosovars, Africans, and North Africans who mug, rob, and rape.’ The French court decided his words were not so extremist that Zemmour needed to be punished, but France’s media authority, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel, issued a warning to RTL. Over the summer, Zemmour was fined by a Belgian court for making similar statements. Such censorship, most often carried out in the name of racial harmony, is becoming a normal part of being an intellectual in France. Great philosophers (Alain Finkielkraut, member of the Académie française), great historians (Olivier Grenouilleau, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse), and great novelists (Michel Houellebecq) have all come under the thumb of the country’s growing body of speech laws.”
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How Thomas Merton found freedom in constraint: “Though Merton was baptized in the Church of England and attended Catholic and Anglican schools, he grew up to be religiously agnostic. In high school, he defiantly refused to recite the Apostles’ Creed during chapel and found faith instead in ‘pamphlets and newspapers.’ He fancied himself an intellectual and acted like it. In college, he dabbled in Communism, became a pacifist, wrote for literary publications, flirted with a lot of women, drank a lot of alcohol, and read a lot of D. H. Lawrence. But his freewheeling lifestyle failed to bring him fulfillment. ‘If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it,’ he wrote, ‘I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.’ What he was, though, was a shallow young man with an inner life that was a mess of raging appetites and desires.”
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The fascinating, disturbing tale of the mad Earl of Portsmouth.
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The pleasures of boredom: “We go to great lengths to avoid boredom, described by Dickens as a ‘chronic malady’, and by Kierkegaard as ‘the root of all evil’. We are conscious of it throughout our lives — from childhood, when we are in a grown-up world void of organised entertainment or planned activities, on into the first flush of youth, when we seek fun and amusement at every possible turn, and finally in adulthood, when our busy world is occasionally punctuated with the realisation that there isn’t really that much to do. But I have discovered that boredom is bliss.”
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In September 1940, Witold Pilecki left his wife and two young children to go to Auschwitz to report on the treatment of Polish resistance fighters: “His initial reports of conditions within Auschwitz were smuggled out and reached Britain in November 1940, just two months after his detention began. Using a radio transmitter that he and his fellow ZOW conspirators built, in 1942 he broadcast information that convinced the Allies the Nazis were engaged in genocide on an unprecedented scale. What became known as ‘Witold’s Report’ was the first comprehensive eyewitness account of the Holocaust.”
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Adam Kirsch on Elena Ferrante and the power of appropriation: “In recent weeks, the literary world has been at war over the idea of cultural appropriation — whether a writer has the right to tell stories about people unlike herself. Lionel Shriver’s speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival said yes; many critics of that speech said no. But now it appears that one of the world’s best-loved writers is actually a sterling example of the power of appropriation. For it turns out that in telling the story of poor Neapolitan girls like Lina and Elena, Ms. Raja was claiming the right to imagine the lives of people quite unlike herself.”
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Essay of the Day:
According to Kierkegaard, the pleasures of life only bring despair. The philosopher’s task, as Will Rees writes in The Times Literary Supplement, was to “violently strip the reader of the psychic and social comforts that stop one from being forced – and therefore able – to confront the terrifying task of forging an individual self before God“:
“As a child Kierkegaard was sensitive, sulky, ironical and precocious. In other words, he had precisely that youthful temperament which, while not a sufficient condition, is nonetheless a necessary condition for the later burgeoning of genius. In adolescence, Kierkegaard’s shyness gave way to defensive wit, his lack of physical endowments conditioning the need for a different type of strength. At school, he was talented but not exceptional, always overshadowed by his eldest brother, Peter. But posterity has been kind to the younger Kierkegaard: his childhood indolence is seen now as an indictment of the tedious pedagogical system of the time, rather than of his moral or intellectual stamina. Indeed, it is precisely here, in the oppressive nineteenth-century classroom, that the mature Kierkegaard’s radically individualistic, anti-authoritarian attitude developed – even if, for now, it could only manifest itself as naughtiness.
“In his twenty-fifth year Kierkegaard’s dwindling family became smaller still when his father died (his mother and five of his six siblings had already done so), leaving him and Peter a fortune. But, in a way that can’t fail to be of interest to the post-Freudian reader, this period of unrest seems to have focused Kierkegaard’s mind, and he took to work on his theological examinations with uncharacteristic vigour. As the ground fell away beneath him, Kierkegaard found his feet.
“Around this time Regine Olsen entered his life. Later, Kierkegaard would claim that he had long planned to marry her, but there is little outward sign of this before his awkward, abrupt proposal in September 1840. During his relationship with Regine, documented in a series of startling, passionate but strangely abstract letters, Kierkegaard was not merely courting a kind-hearted and unusually patient teenager, but earthly life and its rewards. Thus when, a year later, he broke off the engagement, he was only ratifying a renunciation he had initiated long before, back while he was still making avowals of love: by identifying Regine with the sum of what the world had to offer, he had barred himself from ever appreciating what she herself had to offer. He had shrouded her particularity in the garb of the universal.
“Determined though Kierkegaard was to retreat from life in order to devote himself to his work, his life remained inseparably caught up in that work. At that time, he was working on the manuscript of Either/Or, a long and baffling work, which looked at serious risk of remaining unfinished. Its longest section, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, is a haunting novella-like narrative about a philandering aesthete called Johannes the Seducer. Johannes preys on a young woman called Cordelia, dedicating months to inducing her to fall in love with him, something he does with the calculation and guile of the modern-day ‘pick-up artist’. When he finally succeeds, he instantly and irrevocably takes leave.
“Later, Kierkegaard claimed that writing the ‘Diary’ – his most celebrated literary achievement, often published as a stand-alone book – was an act of what elsewhere he called ‘necessary cruelty’, an attempt to ‘repel’ the still hopeful Regine by making her see him as a pervert and a scoundrel. (In fact, in its relative understatement, the near-contemporaneous Repetition, which also concerns a broken engagement, is arguably the crueller book. And in Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard even went so far as to include a verbatim copy of the letter in which he broke off the engagement.) During this period, both on the page and off, Kierkegaard’s behaviour towards Regine was often truly callous, but it appears that he succeeded more by perseverance than by the believability of the charade.”
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Image of the Day: Værøy
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Poem: Osip Mandelstam, “Impressionism,” translated by Svetlana Lavochkina
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