For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

— Sartre, Nausea

Death is not an evil, for it liberates from all evils, and if it deprives man of any good thing, it also takes away his desire for it. Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures, while leaving his appetite for them, and brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, men fear death and desire old age.

— Giacomo Leopardi

To live is to give oneself, perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself, to give oneself, is to die. Perhaps the supreme delight of procreation is nothing other than a foretasting or savoring of death, the spilling of one’s own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves: the most intimate embrace is naught but a most intimate uprooting. In essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of resuscitation in another, for only in others can we resuscitate and perpetuate ourselves.

— Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

Life is the maintenance of an equilibrium that is perpetually threatened.

— Jules Bordet

If you want to live longer, you should — in addition to the obvious: eating less and losing weight — move to the country, not take work home, do what you enjoy and feel good about yourself, get a pet, learn to relax, live in the moment, laugh, listen to music, sleep 6 to 7 hours a night; be blessed with long-lived parents and grandparents (35 percent of your longevity is due to genetic factors); be married, hug, hold hands, have sex regularly, have a lot of children, get along with your mother, accept your children, nurture your grandchildren; be well-educated, stimulate your brain, learn new things; be optimistic, channel your anger in a positive way, not always have to be right; not smoke; use less salt, have chocolate occasionally, eat a Mediterranean diet of fruits, vegetables, olive oil, fish, and poultry, drink green tea and moderate amounts of red wine; exercise; have goals, take risks; confide in a friend, not be afraid to seek psychological counseling; be a volunteer, have a role in the community; attend church, find God.

— David Shields, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead

By Adam Kirsch
wsj.com

One of my favorite stories from World War II concerns the great British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who in 1944 led the daring mission to kidnap the commander of the German forces occupying Crete. The general, Karl Heinrich Kreipe, was held captive in a mountain cave, where one morning the sunrise brought into view the snow-covered peak of Mount Ida.

Gen. Kreipe, who had studied the classics, began to recite a famous Latin ode by Horace, which opens with the image of a mountain that “stands white with deep snow”—whereupon Mr. Fermor, who also knew it by heart, joined in and finished the poem. The men’s eyes met, and a long silence ensued. “It was very strange,” Mr. Fermor recalled. “As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist.”

Mr. Fermor’s story, from his memoir “A Time of Gifts,” is like a fable about the paradoxical power of allusion. Speech and writing are supposed to be most powerful when most sincere. To quote is to use someone else’s words, which ought to make that kind of immediacy impossible. Yet when two people—a captor and a prisoner, or a couple of friends or (most often) a writer and a reader—can share an allusion, it creates a remarkable intimacy. It is almost the intimacy of conspiracy: If you can recognize a writer’s borrowing, it is because the two of you know something that other people don’t.

In this sense, literary allusion is exclusive, even aristocratic—which is why it’s hard for anyone writing in 21st-century America to pull it off. Latin and Greek are out of the question, of course, and have been for some time, since virtually no one still studies them. But even if you stick to English, it is almost impossible to be confident that your audience knows the same books you do. It doesn’t matter whether you slip in “April is the cruelest month,” or “To be or not to be,” or even “The Lord is my shepherd”—there’s a good chance that at least some readers won’t know what you’re quoting, or that you’re quoting at all.

What this means is that, in our fragmented literary culture, allusion is a high-risk, high-reward rhetorical strategy. The more recondite your allusion, the more gratifying it will be to those who recognize it, and the more alienating it will be to those who don’t. To risk an unidentified quotation, you have to have a pretty good sense of your audience: Psalms would be safe enough in a sermon, “The Waste Land” in a literary essay or college lecture, Horace just about nowhere.

In the last decade or so, however, a major new factor has changed this calculus. That is the rise of Google, which levels the playing field for all readers. Now any quotation in any language, no matter how obscure, can be identified in a fraction of a second. When T.S. Eliot dropped outlandish Sanskrit and French and Latin allusions into “The Waste Land,” he had to include notes to the poem, to help readers track them down. Today, no poet could outwit any reader who has an Internet connection.

As a result, allusion has become more democratic and more generous. If you quote an obscure book today, you’re not shutting the reader out but extending an invitation for him to track it down and make it his own. Here, as in so many areas of life and literature, the Internet abolishes secrets and hierarchies, offering universal access to “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”

Sam Sacks
wsj.com

Denis Dutton was one of the most prominent patrons of the arts of the 21st century. This fact has only become apparent in the past 10 days, as writers and editors have begun to think about his legacy in the wake of his death from prostate cancer at the age of 66.

The unexpected news of Dutton’s passing left many of us feeling stunned and guiltily remiss. The shock came in part because Dutton had kept his illness private and had never given any obvious sign of weakening powers. The guilt was due to the realization that his contributions to contemporary intellectual life had never been properly esteemed during his lifetime.

Most readers knew of Denis Dutton—if they knew of him at all—as the creator of a popular website, Arts & Letters Daily. To writers and editors, he was an influential arbiter of culture to whom we appealed to help promote our work. The reality is that he did more for serious cultural criticism than any other figure in the Internet age. Dutton’s life was rich and varied—he was, often concurrently, a professor, philosopher, writer, editor and entrepreneur. But it is for his website, launched in 1998, that he will be remembered.

At first glance, Dutton’s legacy may seem unassuming. Every day, Arts & Letters Daily (ALD to its fans) offers three or four fresh links to nonfiction writing from English-language periodicals and websites around the world, each introduced by a witty 25-word “teaser.” The links themselves—remaining on the site for weeks and thus allowing the reader, cumulatively, to choose among dozens of major pieces of writing with a single visit—appear in three columns, organized under the headings “Articles of Note,” “New Books” and “Essays and Opinions.”

The teasers are no slapdash summary but constitute Dutton’s personal rebuttal to academic obscurantism. They lure readers of diverse temperaments into subjects equally diverse. For example: “Niccolo Machiavelli was an amoebic being: imperialist, proto-libertarian, atheist, neo-pagan, Christian, lover of freedom, tutor to despots, armchair strategist.” Or: “A greener world may eliminate some risks we face, but it will create new ones. Electric cars will require lithium. And guess where the world’s lithium deposits are?” Often they provide a chuckle on their own: “For fans, Gustav Mahler was more than a composer. He was a seer who foretold Auschwitz, McCarthyism, killing JFK, Vietnam. Yeah, whatever . . .”

The appeal of Arts & Letters Daily is in its reliability and lack of fuss. The site has few ads and no bells or whistles. Bucking the Internet habit of spreading content maddeningly over numerous pages—to inflate “page views” and thus appear more attractive to advertisers—ALD is almost entirely contained on a single scrollable page, modeled, Dutton said, on the 18th-century broadsheet. His aim, first and foremost, was to make the site suitable to its purpose. He tried to instill Arts & Letters Daily with the atmosphere of a Victorian reading room or an athenaeum—a place for reading and thinking, free from distractions.

As the site grew in prestige and reach, Dutton gained leverage with the editors whose content he was posting, allowing him to insist on certain specifications. Discussing a possible link with Richard Starr, the deputy editor of the Weekly Standard, Dutton first waved the carrot: “I can promise you 15,000 readers you would not otherwise have had, plus new subscribers out of that. (Just ask The American Scholar, which has built a shrine to me with burning incense in their D.C. office, because I’ve given them so much traffic and so many subscribers. Well, they said they were going to.)” Then came the stick: “There’s a condition, however. I need a formatted single-page version of the article, just like the New Yorker, Slate, Boston Globe, NYT, etc. etc. offer. We do not inflict on our readers four or five page multi-links for a single article.” Mr. Starr notes that the Weekly Standard was happy to rejigger its online set-up to accommodate the request. (At the moment, ALD averages around 3 million visits from more than 350,000 unique visitors each month.)

Clearly Dutton was particular about design and presentation. According to Evan Goldstein, an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education (which now owns ALD), Dutton tweaked and edited a teaser until the lines broke in exactly the right manner, and he gave attention to the minute details of italic and boldface type onscreen. “All of this, he insisted many times, aided readability and added to the experience of visiting ALD,” Mr. Goldstein says.

But Dutton’s greatest service to readers was in sorting through the Internet’s infinite verbiage. The writer and editor Joseph Epstein likens Dutton’s efforts to those of corporate assistants who assiduously cull the daily wires for busy executives. “Under Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily performed a similar function for those of us who are not so important but still haven’t time to read the vast amount of printed material released, avalanche fashion, on the world everyday.”

If readers benefitted, writers and critics did even more, thanks to Dutton’s unparalleled ability to bring small intellectual venues to the attention of wide audiences. Indeed, it is this amplifying effect that makes Arts & Letters Daily so culturally significant. Dutton’s judicious deployment of links amounted to a rare and extraordinary form of patronage.

Links are the Internet’s currency. Usually they are of a base metal, allowing the like-minded merely to note each other’s perspicacity. But ALD’s links are gold, attracting tens of thousands of new readers to articles whose readership might otherwise be painfully small. Of course, even big and well-known venues covet an ALD link. But the windfall is almost epochal for little magazines.

Little magazines are vital to intellectual discourse, not least for the new and iconoclastic voices they present, but in most cases they toil in short-lived obscurity. As Frederick Crews noted in 1978: “Ephemerality is the little magazine’s generic fate.” Such magazines find their audience by filling a niche, typically one based on political ideology. This can lend them a fatal air of parochialism and group think.

The same is true for various precincts of the Internet, though for slightly different reasons. Here the white noise of blogs and chat forums and automated aggregators is so deafening that new voices can make themselves heard only by sounding dog-whistles to targeted groups. Despite its vastness, much of the Internet is fiercely tribalist, with most links traded jealously among similar folks. Dutton’s approach was quite different: eclectic and rigorous, but wide-ranging and broad-minded too, without the rancor of faction or partisanship.

I was lucky enough to learn firsthand the value of Dutton’s sensibility. In 2007, two friends and I launched the online journal Open Letters Monthly. We had no connections or financial backing (total outlay: $300)—nothing but a desire to produce sparkling long-form criticism. Dutton linked to our second issue, giving us our first real readership. In a light-handed manner that contrasted with the influence he wielded, he was with us at nearly every step of our growth. He advised us to change the background to make our pieces more readable. One of his links brought in so much traffic that it crashed our server and prompted us to redesign the site. A link from July 2010 sent more than 14,000 visitors to Open Letters and led to one particular article being linked by dozens of other magazines and blogs, adding up to well over 20,000 new unique visitors in that month alone.

For a small magazine, that is an enormous number. The Paris Review, for instance, has roughly 16,000 subscribers. The New Criterion 6,000. Granta and the London Review of Books around 50,000 each. The 108-year-old Times Literary Supplement, the leading periodical of the Anglophone literary world, has only 32,000 subscribers. For all these magazines, ALD was a godsend.

Unestablished intellectual ventures caught Mr. Dutton’s eye because his criteria were almost anachronistically elemental: An article or review must be lucid, opinionated and conspicuous for the quality of its argument, the felicity of its prose and the individuality of its thought. Such criteria brought parity between little magazines and their bigger rivals. Brendan O’Neill, the editor of the online journal Spiked, notes: “Denis recognized that brilliant ideas are as likely to be found in small but serious online magazines as they are in longstanding print publications. On Arts & Letters Daily, a magazine that occupies two tiny, newspaper-strewn rooms in London with four full-time staff—like Spiked—became the equal of the New Yorker.”

The Dutton imprimatur bestowed immediate relevancy on a journal otherwise buried in the Internet’s undergrowth. According to Jason Wilson, the editor of Drexel University’s online review the Smart Set, “getting on Denis Dutton’s radar was extremely important. Certainly it meant we’d receive lots of traffic. But it was more than that. It meant, for a fledgling journal like ours, that we were being taken seriously. For cultural criticism, it was like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval or a high rating in Consumer Reports.”

Just as it treats with equal seriousness large and small publications, and those in print or online, ALD links to both liberal and conservative articles or to articles with no political coloration at all. Dutton had a penchant for skeptics and debunkers, but even so there was no way to predict what he would link to and so no way for publications to ingratiate themselves with him. Editors were encouraged to publish pieces that they believed in, and readers were encouraged to read with an open mind.

Mr. O’Neill calls the result an “elite meritocracy.” Arts & Letters Daily joins old, aristocratic concepts of excellence with the Internet’s promise of globalism and connectedness. The critic Adam Kirsch likens being linked by the site to joining a republic of letters: “When you’re featured on Arts & Letters, you’ll often find references in blogs around the world. The republic of letters is an old-fashioned, 18th-century notion that Denis used a 21st-century technology to create.”

“People used to say that the great thing about the Internet was that it had no gatekeepers,” Dutton said to Virginia Postrel in 1999. “They were right, of course, except that the worst thing about the Internet is also that it has no gatekeepers.” Arts & Letters Daily shows that the Internet need not be a wilderness inhospitable to intellectual endeavors. It can be colonized under a system of Enlightenment values, and people will eagerly participate in the reborn civilization it offers.

Just weeks ago I emailed Dutton with news of another issue of Open Letters. He advised me to be sure to copy such notices to Evan Goldstein and Tran Huu Dung, an economics professor whom Dutton had invited to co-edit the site in 2000. (They are now managing the site and seamlessly continuing its work.) It was impossible to discern from his note that he was in the last stages of cancer. His response was like all the others from him: immediate, gracious and to the point. It ended: “Thank you, DD.” The thanks should all go the other way.

Samantha Bee
wsj.com

It’s the eighth day of 2011, and my New Year’s resolutions are already in tatters. I have written three bad checks due to “not knowing what year I am living in,” and trying to go without white sugar for a day caused me to eat a half pound of artisanal honeycomb candy, hunkered over the bathroom sink, as my children desperately called out to me from the next room.

I have to ask myself, when I come home from work every day and transform, in a tornado of abandoned Spanx, from professional woman into sweatpants-clad, side-ponytailed “hot mess,” is this me “living my best life”? I just found a deer tick on my husband, reminding me that we haven’t actually looked at each other naked with the lights on since last July. Can we really say that my husband is living his “best life,” too? Are we going to find ourselves next December, chubby and disheveled, spending our date night gobbling Hot Pockets while we scrub melted crayons out of our dryer again? Or is this going to be the year that the Bee-Joneses finally get sorted?

To that end, I am curious about the Oprah Winfrey Network, and the transformative power of watching Oprah and her friends learn how to “live in the moment.” I’m capable of living in the moment. And I’m especially capable of living in the moment of sitting on my sofa and watching other people’s moments.

Let me preface this by saying, I love Oprah Winfrey. Love, love, LOVE. If you don’t love her too, that’s OK, that’s your prerogative. Just know that it makes you weird, and kind of withered inside, like Rumpelstiltskin or something. Full disclosure: I was on Oprah’s show once, briefly, years ago. (She probably doesn’t remember me. It’s OK. It was only one of the most heart-stoppingly exciting moments of my life.) In fact, I love her so much that I would not even decline an invitation to her Montecito ranch, even though I am not usually all that turned on by awe-inspiring vistas, or fountains that flow with the freshly squeezed juice of your choice, as is my understanding of her property there.

The word on the street is that OWN is a kind of “no-cynicism zone” with the potential to melt even the hardest of hearts. The other day, my husband and I watched YouTube videos of spectacular figure-skater wipe outs for about 45 minutes straight. What can OWN offer people like us? Have we ever, even for one minute, attempted to live in a “cynicism-free zone”? And what would happen if we did? What would that even look like? I mean, what happens to a person’s body when all of its connective tissue disappears? Do we just lie there? How do we make our eyes look doe-y after years of angry “New York face”? What would we have to talk about? After all, figure skating is stupid. Don’t even get me started on the outfits.

Blessedly, there is nothing of note going on in the sports world to distract my husband (except for something called “Wild Card Weekend,” which sounds uninteresting), and so I have taken the initiative to pledge our entire weekend to watching the Oprah Winfrey Network. It’s not just for the ladies, you know! It’s also for the men of those ladies! [ed. note: blatantly untrue] From the network’s website alone, I have just learned that it may be inappropriate for a grown married couple to sleep on a giant pile of their children’s cast-off McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. Look at me! I’m improving already!

For my weekend experiment, I have arranged a babysitter. I have prepared low-fat snacks. I have purchased matching full-coverage Swedish long johns for my husband and myself, obviously: shapeless (I don’t want any sex getting in the way of our bonding). And the Bee-Joneses are off on their journey of self-discovery.

Perusing the offerings on the OWN lineup, I am struck by how many of the shows seem to have something just for us. Hoarders (“Enough Already!”): check. A guy cut in half by a train who lives to tell the tale (“Mystery Diagnosis”): Ooh, I wanted to see that one! Oozing religious icons (“Miracle Detectives”): perfect. And on Sunday a Meg Ryan four-pack between 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. to divert our attention from all of that dull playoff football.

As my husband received this delicious news about our weekend plans, he carefully tried to contain his enthusiasm by staring off into the distance and twitching one of his eyelids intermittently. I gently reminded him that television doesn’t always have to be about hair-raising action on the gridiron, or the chance to drop $500 on the Saints with a sure-thing 10-point spread. It can also be about cozying up together to watch “The Color Purple,” one of the four runner-ups to 1985’s actual favorite movie, “Out of Africa.”

I could sense him reverting to his most primal self, preparing for either fight or flight. Whatever. I am fully prepared to become my best self, solo. If I don’t show up for work on Monday, someone please come get me, for I have most likely dissolved into a small puddle of human empathy. Look for me under all the discarded unisex thermal wear on the sofa.

By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and If you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.

— Socrates

Why do women still feel so hounded? The ideal body seems now attainable only by plastic surgery. The ideal woman has the earning powers of a chief executive, breasts like an inflatable doll, no hips at all, and the tidy, hairless labia of an unviolated 6-year-old. The world gets harder and harder. There’s no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out. Anorexia itself seems like mad behaviour, but I don’t think it’s madness. It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional entanglements. It says, like Christ, noli me tangere. Touch me not and take yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time. Most anorexics do recover, after all. Anorexia can be an accommodation, a strategy for survival.

— Hilary Mantel

Never use the word suddenly just to create tension.
– Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
another drip from the faucet?
another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on the shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.

The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountains to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats,
each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.

— Billy Collins

The little car was jammed full of boxes and curled heaps of clothes on hangers. It sat low on its springs, under all these possessions heavy as passengers. Nick stood by it, still thinking, and then drifted unexpectedly down the street. The pavement was dry now in patches, but the sky was threatening and fast-moving. The tall white house fronts had a muted gleam. It came over him that the test result would be positive. The words that were said every day to others would be said to him, in that quiet consulting room whose desk and carpet and square modern armchair would share indissolubly in the moment. There was a large tranquil photograph in a frame, and a view of the hospital chimney from the window. He was young, without much training in stoicism. What would he do once he left the room? He dawdled on, rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked car, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed. It was like a drug sensation, but without the awareness of play. The motorcyclist who lived over the road clumped out in his leathers and attended to his bike. Nick gazed at him and then looked away in a regret that held him and glazed him and kept him apart. There was nothing this man could do to help him. None of his friends could save him. The time came, and they learned the news in the room they were in, at a certain moment in their planned and continuing day. They woke the next morning, and after a while it came back to them. Nick searched their faces as they explored their feelings. He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out. It was the morning’s vision of the empty street, but projected far forward, into afternoons like this one decades hence, in the absent hum of their own business. The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn’t just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

He couldn’t unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said.

The double curve was Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding movement. He ran his hand down Wani’s back. He didn’t think Hogarth had illustrated this best example of it, the dip and swell — he had chosen harps and branches, bones rather than flesh. Really it was time for a new Analysis of Beauty.

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

Who are you?
Here on a high shelf
In webbed flask I
Hook up my folded self
Bat-leather dry.

Who were you?
The gold god goaded me
Sang shrieking sang high
His heat corroded me
Not mine his cry.

What do you see?
I saw the firmament
Steady the sky
I saw the cerement
Close Caesar’s eye.

What do you hope?
Desire is a dowsed fire
True love a lie
To a dusty shelf we aspire
I crave to die.

— Christabel LaMotte
(A. S. Byatt, Possession)

“It rests me to be among beautiful women.
Why should one always lie about such matters?
I repeat:
It rests me to converse with beautiful women
Even though we talk nothing but nonsense.

The purring of the invisible antennae
Is both stimulating and delightful.”

— Ezra Pound