A Commonplace Book

It is astonishing that we forget so easily that we have only a single, local view. What we see of an event may look entirely unlike what a person on the other side of the event may see or entirely unlike what we ourselves actually do see when we walk to the other side, but we imagine that these views from either side are nonetheless views of the same story, despite the manifest differences in perceptions. This is evidence of our considerable mental capacity to integrate fragmentary information, to blend it into one mental construction.

For the first two decades, "Turn of the Screw" was looked upon as a story of demonic possession. With the rise of Freud, scholars viewed the novel as an examination of Miss' repressed sexual desires, sparked when she meets the Master. Currently, Pope [Martin Pope: producer of 1999 TV adaptation of the novel] says, critics believe "Turn of the Screw" is really a chronicle of child abuse. "These children were abused by Quint and Jessel and now, in a way, are being abused by the governess," Pope says. Whatever people think is really, really terrible is what they think is going on in the novel because [Henry] James was so unspecific."

Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (see from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.

Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid, and the book Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce, is this not sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?

The fact, the thing as it is without any relation to anything else, is a matter of no importance or concern whatever: its relation to what it evinces, the fact viewed as evidence, is alone important.

...how an argument is conducted constitutes the argument itself... ideas are not separable from their articulation...

James Cole [Bruce Willis]: The movie never changes -- it can't change -- but everytime you see it, it seems to be different because you're different -- you notice different things.

Since the universe itself is built on quantum systems such as atoms, and since all quantum systems are continually exchanging information, Lloyd concludes that the universe must be a giant quantum computer. And what does this machine compute? "It computes itself. The universe computes its own behavior."
...
Throughout history, humans have interpreted the world in terms of things they know. The ancient creator gods behaved like super-humans, coupling and breeding and giving birth to the cosmos, or fashioning its elements from familiar technologies such as weaving or molding clay. Modern scientific accounts also have drawn heavily on familiar contemporary tropes: In the 17th century, the universe was seen as a vast clockwork system. By the 19th, when the study of magnetic and electrical phenomena was hot, it was reconceived as a network of invisible force fields. At the dawn of the age of digital computers, scientists speculated that it was one of these machines.

Inevitably, we see the whole through the lens of the particular.

Now let me tell a ... story, not one illustrating the tensions within constitutional law, but one showing the subtlety of constitutional facts. [T]he story is about a famous case...: Brown v. Board of Education from 1954, in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that racial segregation in public schools imposed by law was unconstitutional, as violating the guarantee of equal protection of the law.

Brown ended the era of separate-but-equal, whose paradigm was the decision in 1896 of the case called Plessy v. Ferguson, where the Supreme Court had held it was no violation of the equal protection guarantee to require black people to ride in a separate railroad car that was physically equal to the car for whites. One argument offered in Plessy was that the separate black car was a badge of inferiority, to which the court majority responded that if black people viewed it that way, the implication was merely a product of their own minds. Sixty years later, Brown held that a segregated school required for black children was inherently unequal.

For those whose exclusive norm for constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision. Those who look to that model are not likely to think that a federal court back in 1896 should have declared legally mandated racial segregation unconstitutional. But if Plessy was not wrong, how is it that Brown came out so differently? The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be hard to say that the obvious facts on which Plessy was based had changed, either. While Plessy was about railroad cars and Brown was about schools, that distinction was no great difference. Actually, the best clue to the difference between the cases is the dates they were decided, which I think lead to the explanation for their divergent results.

As I've said elsewhere, the members of the Court in Plessy remembered the day when human slavery was the law in much of the land. To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant progress. But the generation in power in 1954 looked at enforced separation without the revolting background of slavery to make it look unexceptional by contrast. As a consequence, the judges of 1954 found a meaning in segregating the races by law that the majority of their predecessors in 1896 did not see. That meaning is not captured by descriptions of physically identical schools or physically identical railroad cars. The meaning of facts arises elsewhere, and its judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own. Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page. And when the judges in 1954 read the record of enforced segregation it carried only one possible meaning: It expressed a judgment of inherent inferiority on the part of the minority race. The judges who understood the meaning that was apparent in 1954 would have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution if they had not held the segregation mandate unconstitutional.

What we write about fiction is never an objective response to a text; it is always part of a bigger mythmaking -- the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves. That story changes. George Orwell, writing in 1940 about Henry Miller, has very different preoccupations from Kate Millett writing about Miller in 1970. Orwell doesn't notice that Miller-women are semihuman sex objects. In fact, his long essay "Inside the Whale" barely mentions women at all. Millett does notice that half the world has been billeted to the whorehouse, and wonders what this tells us about both Henry Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.

Norman Mailer needed Miller to be like Shakespeare (this is plain wrong, but the need is interesting); Erica Jong wanted to be Athena to Miller's Zeus -- born straight out of his head and saving him from the Feminist Furies in her book "The Devil at Large" (1993).

The local people called these hills "mountains," as people do in regions where no mountains exist. Well, he was beginning to understand why. After you walked these hills they became mountains. Everything was relative. The older he got the more mountainous the world became.

Every society defines and shapes its own normality - and its own abnormality - according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don't.

Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.

[R]eading and experience are usually "compiled" at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times.

[W]e have a long history of explaining the present via the output of industry. These rationalizations are always grounded in familiarity, and thus they feel convincing. But mostly they are metaphors.

Each generation, we reset a belief that we've reached the end of this chain of metaphors, even though history always proves us wrong precisely because there's always another technology or trend offering a fresh metaphor. Indeed, an exceptionalism that favors the present is one of the ways that science has become theology.

Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling. Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling.

Over those decades of historical documentary filmmaking, I have also come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. History is a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present new meaning, new possibility and new power. The question becomes for us now--for you especially--what will we choose as our inspiration? Which distant events and long dead figures will provide us with the greatest help, the most coherent context, and the wisdom to go forward?

Nearly thirty years after a revisionary wave of biographies reimagined the man, Hutchisson arrives to reset the scales once more, giving us a fuller, more nuanced portrait than we've ever enjoyed. Every generation deserves its own Hemingway, and this is ours.

"In a book", writes Mr Mars-Jones, "reader and writer collaborate to produce images, while a film director hands them down." I disagree. The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer. They're not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but, I think, to engage with them on as intimate a level as possible. The viewer also "collaborates" with the filmmaker, or the painter. No two viewings of Raphael's "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints" will be the same: every new viewing will be different. The same is true of readings of The Divine Comedy or Middlemarch, or viewings of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or 2001: A Space Odyssey. We return at different moments in our lives and we see things differently.

I suspect it is rare for anyone to see what they consider to be the greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it's extremely unlikely After fifty, impossible. The films you see as a child and in your early teens have such a special place in your affections that is's all but impossible to consider the objectively...

I saw it [Stalker] when it came out within a month of its release, when Tarkovsky was at his artistic peak. I saw it, so to speak, live. And this means that I saw it in a slightly different way from how a twenty-four-year-old might see it for the first time now....

The thing, the product, the work of art stays the same but by staying the same it ages -- and changes. It exists now in the wake of its own reputation...

[A]s Wittgenstein's later work (especially the Philosophical Investigations) shows, no proposition or set of propositions wholly contains their meaning. An understanding of the meaning of a proposition always depends upon other, external, factors. We understand one another ... because we share a common set of assumptions with which to interpret our communications. Lacking such a mutual basis we must seek it out and fail to find it before we can dismiss propositions under such a rubric as 'schizophrenese'.

Books, like people, have their unique fates--their zodiac. Written in one context, they arrive in another, and every now and then a special convergence takes place.

Salvador Mallo [Antonio Banderas]: Having seen the movie again, his acting is better now than 30 years ago.

Zulema [Cecilia Roth]: It's your eyes that changed, honey. It's the same movie.

I remember seeing the 1937 movie Stage Door in the mid-Forties. The audience tittered at the obsolete long skirts and curled hairdos. I saw the same movie in the mid-Seventies, and the audience sat enthralled as obsolescence was transformed by time into history