By Morris Dickstein
dissent magazine

The following remarks were prepared for a panel on “The Next Decade in Book Culture,” with special emphasis in criticism and book reviewing, at the PEN World Voices Festival, April 27, 2011, cosponsored by the National Book Critics Circle.

On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a more depressing cultural subject right now than the future of book culture. Publishers are hurting badly; droves of independent bookstores have closed down; Borders, a major chain of booksellers, has filed for bankruptcy and is currently dumping the dregs of its stock at its flagship store on E. 57th Street and Park Avenue; floundering newspapers have cut loose their reviewers and, at best, folded their book review sections into their shrinking pages. The newspapers themselves may not be far behind. The Great Recession delivered the coup de grace; advertising revenue is in free fall. Ask any editor, any author, any media maven: it is not a pretty picture. The executive editor of the New York Times wonders whether there will still be a print edition five years from now.

On the other hand, some would argue that this worst of times is also the best of times. Thanks to the Internet, to online booksellers like Amazon, to the ubiquitous Google digitizing whole libraries, books have never been so readily available, including rare books, out-of-print books, and, thanks to the famous “long tail,” older titles once hard to find, since bookstores rarely stocked them. Loving the serendipity of browsing in bookstores, actually fingering the merchandise, we forget the frustrations of the fruitless search, the books we could not find. Browsing online we find it’s all there yet tantalizingly out of reach.

Without fetishizing the physical properties of the book, which after all do not reach back to the tablets on Sinai, we can acknowledge the difference between reading print, flipping pages, plunging ahead or backward, and reading on a computer or miniature electronic device. There is something of a generational divide here, but screen reading, while near-miraculous for retrieving hard-to-find information, is less than ideal for the focused attention of literary reading. As storage devices books indeed are cumbersome. We can be grateful for the amazing horizontal connectivity of the Internet without slighting how shallow those connections often are. It gives us the world at a glance but often no more than a glance.

In the case of book reviewing, or critical writing of any kind, cyberspace offers a few advantages, but to my mind they are outweighed by the drawbacks. There is that vast storehouse of material that can be retrieved, such as reviews, old and new; biographical information; profiles of writers, movie directors, artists, composers; but also, for reviewers, something genuinely new, a vast grey hinterland between publishing and not publishing. The Internet is an open grid for bloggers, commentators, cranks, obsessive enthusiasts who have made cults of individual writers, but not least of all for the fabled man in the street, the consumer now empowered to talk back, to emerge from anonymity, or take cover in anonymity, to make his or her peeves and passions known.

To put it simply, the professional reviewer, who has a literary identity, who had to meet some editor’s exacting standard, has effectively been replaced by the Amazon reviewer, the paying customer, at times ingenious, assiduous, and highly motivated, more often banal, obtuse, and blankly opinionated. What works for a website like TripAdvisor, which gives us unfiltered but welcome criticism of hotels and restaurants, most assuredly does not work for literary reviewing, which demands taste, training, sensibility, some knowledge of the past, and a rare feeling for both language and argument. Barring this, we’re stuck with the thumbs-up, thumbs-down school of reviewing. Raw opinion, no matter how deeply felt, is no substitute for argument and evidence. The democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing.

But what about bloggers, you may ask. They may not be professionals but they certainly can be devoted and persistent. Blogging has a style of its own, most commonly diaristic, spontaneous. As with online reviewing in general, it has opened the culture to a vast spectrum of writing and opinion, most of which no one will ever read. I enjoy casual blogging myself as a relief from the formal essay, with its carefully honed prose. I plan to post these very remarks in a blog, and would be gratified if they found a few readers. But it’s striking that there are twenty successful political blogs for each effective literary blog. With all due respect to Critical Mass, the valuable website of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, there’s not a single must-read literary blog I turn to on a regular basis. The ones that I do read are linked to print magazines like the New Yorker, the New Republic, or the Atlantic, or the ones actually modeled on print magazines, such as Slate and Salon or gateway sites like Arts & Letters Daily. But will the online extensions of print journals still thrive when the magazines themselves go under, as some surely will when they run out of millionaires nostalgic for the old print culture who are willing to subsidize them. What will happen to online journalism, especially investigative journalism, when it destroys the print journalism on which it feeds, or to aggregator sites when they find themselves aggregating only from other websites?

As writers of books and as reviewers ourselves, what do we expect from a book review? In the case of a movie review we’re usually content with learning what it’s about and deciding whether to see it. Because books are literature we hold book reviewing to a higher standard. We expect much more than plot summary or summary judgment. We expect it to be really written, exacting, to rise to the level of its subject, to display an understanding of the medium, a personal point of view. We would be outraged if new novels were rated with a certain number of stars, as movies commonly are. We demand incisive judgment, not mere consumer guidance. Book reviews should be a province of writing, not of marketing—or polling. Criticism is a refined art, not a popularity contest. We expect it to be done with style and intelligence.

The last thing we want to do is idealize the old middlebrow culture with its genteel book industry, its banal bookchat and boosterism, its highly stratified culture—a pyramid capped by a small cadre of little magazines and rigorous critics. But we may miss its respect for the written word, the life of the mind, the culture of the past. The Internet accelerated a democratization of culture that had long been under way, a shift toward visual media and popular music that consigned literature to the outer margins. The revolution initiated by the movie screen and the TV screen is being brought to high definition by the computer screen. Here critical writing has a small niche, but will it acquire a real presence? Deployed with technical savvy, it can become a form of resistance, a rampart of personal vision within a relentlessly homogenized culture, ever in thrall to the fashions of the moment. Thanks to its open grid and easy access, the same technology that marginalizes literature and drowns out criticism leaves room for dissent, for the still, small voice that may yet find ways to be heard.

When to Come Out

Unlike most minority groups, gay people have some control over when they reveal their identity. And on that question of timing, a study suggests that later in an interaction is better.

Forty-five people, mostly undergraduates, were told that before meeting a man they would listen to an audio of him answering 20 questions about his background, interests and relationships. Half the time, the relationships question (in which the man mentioned a male partner) came second. The rest of the time that question came 20th.

Asked how they felt about the prospective meeting (which never occurred), women didn’t react differently to the early or late disclosure of homosexuality. But men expressed more negative expectations when the disclosure came early. Men who heard the early disclosure also expressed more negative views about homosexuality in general.

“Interorientation Interactions and Impressions: Does the Timing of Disclosure of Sexual Orientation Matter?” David M. Buck and E. Ashby Plant, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (March)

— Christopher Shea, Ideas Market blog, wsj

By Dan Neil
wsj.com

Did Christ really have awesome abs? Western art has frequently stumbled over the contradiction between the ascetic figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the iconography of Christ inspired by the heroic, Hellenistic ideal: Christ as beautiful, tall and broad-shouldered, God’s wide receiver; blue-eyed, fair-haired, a straight aquiline nose, Christ as European prince.

Rembrandt van Rijn, in a career rich with artistic innovation, begged to differ. A new exhibition at Paris’s Louvre museum—and coming to Philadelphia and Detroit later this year—shows in dozens of oils, charcoal sketches and oak-panel studies how the 17th-century Dutch painter virtually reinvented the depiction of Jesus and arrived at a more realistic portrait.

As “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” shows, before Rembrandt painters tended to reiterate the conventional imagery of Christ. Catalog authors Larry Silver, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Shelley Perlove, of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, call this “the predictable majesty” of the subject.

Where artists did rely on life models, they were uniquely beautiful specimens, such as in Michelangelo’s Pietà. Rembrandt, working in the relatively open and tolerant society of Golden Age Holland, turned to life models for Jesus to give an “earthly reality” to the face of Christ. He often relied on one model, a young Dutch Jew, whose face appears in the seven oak panels. An unnamed Dutch auditor assaying Rembrandt’s possessions during the painter’s later bankruptcy notated one of these panels as “Head of Christ, From Life,” and the curators use this note as an evocative departure point for the exhibit.

The poor and ascetic Jesus likely was small and thin and almost certainly olive-skinned, with black hair and brown eyes, and so Rembrandt painted him. In this he anticipated much more recent studies of what the historical Jesus was like. The savior of Rembrandt’s faith was a young man with a sweet, homely face, heavy-lidded, stoop-shouldered and wan.

Rembrandt’s recasting of Christ culminates in the 1648 “Supper at Emmaus,” where the unprepossessing figure of Christ seems almost stunned, slack with preoccupation, rapt in a conversation no one else hears. The painter’s Jesus is no hero of suffering and sacrifice; instead, he’s a kindly, hungry pilgrim.

Viewing the pictures in order of their creation shows how Rembrandt’s own coarse features gradually infiltrated the images of Christ. It feels like the most spiritually edifying aspect of these works: When Rembrandt looked into the face of his savior, he saw his own.

The exhibition lasts through July 18 at the Louvre, will go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Aug. 3 to Oct. 30 and will end at the Detroit Institute of Arts (Nov. 20-February 2012).

The night after the chilly and sort of awkward joint Interdependence Day picnic for Enfield’s Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, Somerville’s Phoenix House, and Dorchester’s grim New Choice juvenile rehab, Ennet House staffer Johnette Foltz took Ken Erdedy Kate Gompert along with her to this one NA Beginners’ Discussion Meeting where the focus was always marijuana: how every addict at the meeting had gotten in terrible addictive trouble with it right from the first duBois, or else how they’d been strung out on harder drugs and had tried switching to grass to get off the original drugs and but then had gotten in even terribler trouble with grass than they’d been in with the original hard stuff. This was supposedly the only NA meeting in metro Boston explicitly devoted to marijuana. Johnette Foltz said she wanted Erdedy and Gompert to see how completely nonunique and unalone they were in terms of the Substance that had brought them both down.

There were about two dozen beginning recovering addicts there in the anechoic vestry of an upscale church in what Erdedy figured had to be either west Belmont or east Waltham. The chairs were arranged in NA’s traditional huge circle, with no tables to sit at and everybody balancing ashtrays on their knees and accidentally kicking over their cups of coffee. Everybody who raised their hand to share concurred on the insidious ways marijuana ravaged their bodies, minds, and spirits: marijuana destroys slowly but thoroughly was the consensus. Ken Erdedy’s joggling foot knocked over his coffee not once but twice as the NAs took turns concurring on the hideous psychic fallout they’d all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety — the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy — the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible inplications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch — and then the endless symptomatic gauntlet of Withdrawal from delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol: i.e. pot-detox: the loss of appetite, the mania and insomnia, the chronic fatigue and nightmares, the impotence and cessation of menses and lactation, the circadian arrhythmia, the sudden sauna-type sweats and mental confusion and fine-motor tremors, the particularly nasty excess of saliva — several beginners still holding institutional drool-cups just under their chins — the generalized anxiety and foreboding and dread, and the shame of feeling like neither M.D.s nor the hard-drug NAs themselves showed much empathy or compassion for the ‘addict’ brought down by what was supposed to be nature’s humblest buzz, the benignest Substance around.

Ken Erdedy noticed that nobody came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression, much less clinical depression; but this worst of symptoms, this logarithm of all suffering, seemed, though unmentioned, to hang fog-like just over the room’s heads, to drift between the peristyle columns and over the decorative astrolabes and candles on long prickets and medieval knockoffs and framed Knights of Columbus charters, a gassy plasm so dreaded no beginner could bear to look up and name it. Kate Gompert kept staring at the floor and making a revolver of her forefinger and thumb and shooting herself in the temple and then blowing pretend-cordite off the barrel’s tip until Johnette Foltz whispered to her to knock it off.

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

— Covering Lolita: An Online Exhibit by Dieter E. Zimmer

A cold comming they had of it, at this time of the yeare: just the worst time of the yeare, to take a journey, and specially a long journey, in. The ways deepe, the weather sharp, the daies short, the sunn farthest off…the very dead of winter.

— Lancelot Andrewes, in a letter to King James

If the devil has the best tunes, sometimes the bandits have the best sentences.

— Simon Blackburn

Magic “Fatty” Price

1999? — 29 April, 2011

I’ll always remember with a smile my favorite reading buddy

.

.

No knowledge is more powerful
Than knowing love, than knowing how
To love despite a world so full

Of the intent to hate. . . .

And knowledge is less powerful
Than love, and . . . whatever dream
I have, in him it is fulfilled.

— Rafael Campo, “Defining Us”

A woman was watching a western dubbed into Italian. I’ll say this for Italian TV: you’re never more than a few channels away from a western. She was watching TV in that way of night porters the world over: they watch for hours but never get so absorbed in anything that they mind being interrupted. Given that there are a finite number of westerns and an infinite number of nights in which to watch them they figure that any gaps can be filled in later. To them each film is really no more than a segment of an epic ur-western spanning thousands if not millions of hours, offering a quantity of material so vast it can never be edited into a finished form. The western thus takes the place of the great myths of antiquity: shifting glimpses of character and situations, variously recurring, but manifesting through the very fact of their myriad transformations, the existence of some stable, changeless order.

— Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

A belief is not an idea that the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.

— Robert Bolton (via my dad)

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out that once MA’s Department of Social Services has taken a mother’s children away for any period of time, they can always take them away again, D.S.S., like at will, empowered by nothing more than a certain signature-stamped form. I.e., once deemed Unfit — no mater why or when, or what’s transpired in the meantime — there’s nothing a mother can do.

Or for instance that people addicted to a Substance who abruptly stop ingesting the Substance often suffer wicked papular acne, often for months afterward, as the accumulations of Substance slowly leave the body. The staff will inform you that this is because the skin is actually the body’s biggest excretory organ. Or that chronic alcoholics’ hearts are — for reasons no M.D. has been able to explain — swollen to nearly twice the size of civilians’ human hearts, and they never again return to normal size. That there’s a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their wallet. That (both a relief and kind of an odd let-down) black penises tend to be the same general size as white penises, on the whole. That not all U.S. males are circumcised.

That you can cop a sort of thin jittery amphetaminic buzz if you rapidly consume three Millennial Fizzies and a whole package of Oreo cookies on an empty stomach. (Keeping it down is required, however, for the buzz, which senior residents often neglect to tell newer residents.)

That the chilling Hispanic term for whatever interior disorder drives the addict back again and again to the enslaving Substance is tecato gusano, which apparently connotes some kind of interior psychic worm that cannot be sated or killed.

That black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people, and then can get even more hostile and unpleasant when this realization seems to surprise you.

That it is possible, in sleep, for some roommates to secure a cigarette from their bedside pack, light it, smoke it down to the quick, and then extinguish it in their bedside ashtray — without once waking up, and without setting anything on fire. You will be informed that this skill is usually acquired in penal institutions, which will lower your inclination to complain about the practice. Or that even Flents industrial-strength expandable-foam earplugs do not solve the problem of a snoring roommate if the roommate in question is so huge and so adenoidal that the snores in question also produce subsonic vibrations that arpeggio up and down your body and make your bunk jiggle like a motel bed you’ve put a quarter in.

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males. That over 60% of all persons arrested for drug- and alcohol-related offenses report being sexually abused as children, with two-thirds of the remaining 40% reporting that they cannot remember their childhoods in sufficient detail to report one way or the other on abuse. That you can weave hypnotic Madame Psychosis-like harmonies around the minor-D scream of a cheap vacuum cleaner, humming to yourself as you vacuum, if that’s your Chore. That some people really do look like rodents. That some drug-addicted prostitutes have a harder time giving up prostitution than they have giving up drugs, with their explanation involving the two habits’ very different direction of currency flow. That there are just as many idioms for the female sex-organ as there are for the male sex-organ.

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is: Unit, which is why Ennet House residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital’s designations of its campus’s buildings.

That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on.

That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

That AA and NA and CA’s ‘God’ does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you. That, pace macho bullshit, public male weeping is not only plenty masculine but can actually feel good (reportedly). That sharing means talking, and taking somebody’s inventory means criticizing that person, plus many additional pieces of Recoveryspeak. That an important part of halfway-house Human Immuno-Virus prevention is not leaving your razor or toothbrush in communal bathrooms. That apparently a seasoned prostitute can (reportedly) apply a condom to a customer’s Unit so deftly he doesn’t even know it’s on until he’s history, so to speak.

That a double-layered steel portable strongbox w/ tri-tumblered lock for your razor and toothbrush can be had for under $35.00 U.S./$38.50 O.N.A.N. via Home-Net Hardware, and that Pat M. or the House Manager will let you use the back office’s old TP to order one if you put up a sustained enough squawk.

That over 50% of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too. That some male prostitutes become so accustomed to enemas that they cannot have valid bowel movements without them. That a majority of Ennet House residents have at least one tattoo. That the significance of this datum is unanalyzable. That the metro Boston street term for not having any money is: sporting lint. That what elsewhere’s known as Informing or Squealing or Narcing or Ratting or Ratting Out is on the streets of metro Boston known as ‘Eating Cheese,’ presumably spun off from the associative nexus of rat.

That nose-, tongue-, lip-, and eyelid-rings rarely require actual penetrative piercing. This is because of the wide variety of clip-on rings available. That nipple-rings do require piercing, and that clitoris- and glans-rings are not things anyone thinks you really want to know the facts about. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That female chicanos are not called chicanas. That it costs $225 U.S. to get a MA driver’s license with your picture but not your name. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer, and sitting so close to Ennet House’s old D.E.C. TP cartridge-viewer that the screen fills your whole vision and the screen’s static charge tickles your nose like a linty mitten.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal — will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people. That the metro Boston street term for panhandling is: stemming, and that it is regarded by some as a craft or art; and that professional stem-artists actually have like little professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in parks or public-transport hubs, at night, where they get together and network and exchange feedback on trends and techniques and public relations, etc. That it is possible to abuse OTC cold- and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is over 50 proof. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

That addiction is either a disease or a mental illness or a spiritual condition (as in ‘poor of spirit’) or an O.C.D.-like disorder or an affective or character disorder, and that over 75% of the veteran Boston AAs who want to convince you that it is a disease will make you sit down and watch them write DISEASE on a piece of paper and then divide and hyphenate the word so that it becomes DIS-EASE, then will stare at you as if expecting you to undergo some kind of blinding epiphanic realization, when really (as G. Day points out tirelessly to his counselors) changing DISEASE to DIS-EASE reduces a definition and explanation down to a simple description of a feeling, and a rather whiny insipid one at that.

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis. That cats will in fact get violent diarrhea if you feed them milk, contrary to the popular image of cats and milk. That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That the metro-street term for really quite wonderful is: pisser. That some people’s moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That no one who has been to prison is ever the same again. That you do not have to have sex with a person to get crabs from them. That a clean room feels better to be in than a dirty room. That the people to be the most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That you don’t have to hit somebody even if you really really want to. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

That nobody who’s ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever. That bit is a metro Boston street term for a jail sentence, as in ‘Don G. was up in Billerica on a six-month bit.’ That it’s impossible to kill fleas by hand. That it’s possible to smoke so many cigarettes that you get little white ulcerations on your tongue. That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating.

That pretty much everybody masturbates.

Rather a lot, it turns out.

That the cliché ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliché. That it costs $330 U.S. to get a passport in a phony name. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That you can obtain a major credit card with a phony name for $1500 U.S., but that no one will give you a straight answer about whether this price includes a verifiable credit history and line of credit for when the cashier slides the phony card through the register’s little verification-modem with all sorts of burly security guards standing around. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That the term vig is street argot for the bookmaker’s commission on an illegal bet, usually 10%, that’s either subtracted from your winnings or added to your debt. That certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

That cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with.

That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.

That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.

That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.

That it is permissible to want.

That everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

That God — unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.

That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you.

That the smell of Athlete’s Foot is sick-sweet v. the smell of podiatric Dry Rot is sick-sour.

That a person — one with the Disease/-Ease — will do things under the influence of Substances that he simply would not ever do sober, and that some consequences of these things cannot ever be erased or amended. Felonies are an example of this.

As are tattoos.

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest