The Floating Library

Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. [...]

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– (phrase from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom)

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(inscription over the door of Plato’s Academy) – (Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet)

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By Maureen Dowd nytimes In 1983, Genevieve Cook brought a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream to a Christmas party in the East Village. She left with 22-year-old Barack Obama’s phone number. The lithe Australian assistant teacher at a Brooklyn grade school was soon in a romance with the lithe future president. In the diary entries [...]

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By Dan Shaw nytimes COLLEGE alumni departments market spring reunion weekends like Caribbean cruises with lectures, barbecues, kids’ camps and dancing under the stars. Many people attend them to relive in some fashion their wild, carefree youth. Others go to show their classmates that they’ve made a success of their lives. When I went back [...]

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By Jeanette Winterson nytimes “We are formed by what we desire,” says Billy Dean, the fatherless narrator and chief hero of John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person.” Irving likes to track his characters over long stretches of time. “In One Person” begins in the mid-1950s, when Billy is 13, and shadows him until he [...]

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Kafka’s “The Top” is a story about a philosopher who spends his spare time around children so he can grab their tops in spin. To catch a top still spinning makes him happy for a moment in his belief “that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for [...]

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Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to [...]

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He had the same attitude to his life as a scuptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. One of the novelist’s inalienable rights is to be able to rework his novel. If he takes a dislike to the beginning, he can rewrite it or cross it out entirely. But Zdena’s existence deprived [...]

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President Obama declared for the first time on Wednesday that he supports same-sex marriage, putting the moral power of his presidency behind a social issue that continues to divide the country. “At a certain point,” Mr. Obama said in an interview in the Cabinet Room at the White House with ABC’s Robin Roberts, “I’ve just [...]

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Fuck them is what I say. I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead. I won’t give a shit. – Maurice Sendak RIP  

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Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have [...]

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Parents, in my opinion, have to be finessed, thought around, even as we love them: They are so colossally wrong about so many important things. And even when they are not, paradoxically, even when they are 100 percent right, the imperative remains the same: To live an “adult” life, a meaningful life, it is necessary, I would argue, to [...]

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