I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never to be able to credit the questions themselves ... As the questions go up, the performance level goes down—and that's natural, since people don't yet know how to act on those questions, they're stumbling around in a fog—whereas when performance goes up the quality of the questions tends to go down.
Nov 25, 2014
questions
Nov 24, 2014
Nov 23, 2014
what to read and why
... it's good when your conscience receives big wounds, because that makes it more sensitive to every twinge. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Nov 20, 2014
the benefits of pouncing
above—autumn: the pig slaughter; below—the numbering at bethlehem. pieter brueghel the younger, in "the bad shepherd," until 16 january 2015 at christie's on new bond street.
Nov 13, 2014
aesthetic value
Theorists are apt to vex themselves with vain efforts to remove uncertainty just where it has a high aesthetic value.