even*cleveland: 'the saddest urge of human nature'

'the saddest urge of human nature'

The most interesting thing to me ... was the anecdote related by [Simon] Leys ... about sitting in an Australian café minding his own business while a radio is blaring musical and spoken pap in the background. By chance, the program switched to a Mozart clarinet quartet, for a moment turning the café "into an antechamber of Paradise." People fell silent, there were looks of bafflement, and then, "the the huge relief of all," one customer "stood up, walked straight to the radio," turned the knob to another station, and "restored at once the more congenial noises, which everyone again could comfortably ignore."

Leys describes this event as kind of an epiphany. He is sure that philistinism does not result from the lack of knowledge. The customer who could not abide hearing Mozart's music recognized its beauty. Indeed, he did precisely what he did for that reason. The desire to destroy beauty, according to Leys, applies not just to aesthetics but as much, if not more, to ethics: "The need to bring down to our level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendor that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature."

Ian Buruma, "The Man Who Got It Right." The New York Review of Books, 8/15/2013.

I'm looking forward to reading the NYRB's collection of Leys' essays, The Hall of Uselessness.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

'the saddest urge of human nature'

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