...a lot of us fall in love with the great comedians when we are
adolescent. We develop passionate crushes on them because they have a
wholeness and sureness of response to the injustices of the world
which we can only envy. We go to comedy to fulfill a dream of running
the world with our tongues, our wit....
-- Adam Gopnik. "Talking Man: A new biography looks at
Groucho's inner life." New Yorker 4/17/2000:119
Many years ago, when I was young and still in search of wisdom, I went
on a pilgrimage to meet the man I thought was the wisest in the world.
I came away wiser, though what I learned was what most pilgrims learn,
which is that if you want to become wise you should not go on
pilgrimages.
-- Adam Gopnik . "The Porcupine: A pilgrimage to Popper."
New Yorker April 1, 2002. p88.
"Nasty Men Make Nice Things; Unpleasant People Think Important
Thoughts" is, after all, the headline on almost every chapter in
cultural history...
-- Adam Gopnik . "The Porcupine: A pilgrimage to Popper."
New Yorker April 1, 2002. p88.
And there, in retrospect, might lie the secret of the first "Matrix":
beyond the balletic violence, beyond the cool stunts, the idea that the
world we live in isn't real is one that speaks right now to a general
condition. For the curious thing about the movie was that everybody
could grasp the basic setup instantly. Whether it occurs in cult
science fiction or academic philosophy, we seem to be fascinated by
the possibility that our world might not exist. We're not strangers
to the feeling that, for much of our lives, we might just as well be
brains-in-vats, floating in an amniotic fluid of simulations. It
doesn't just strike us as plausibly weird. It strikes us as weirdly
plausible.
-- Adam Gopnik
"The Unreal Thing: What's wrong with the Matrix?"
New Yorker. 2003-05-19
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030519crat_atlarge
Our feelings ceaselessly generate narratives,
contes moraux, about the
world, and we become their prisoners. We make things good and bad,
desirable and not, meaningful and trivial. ...Meditation shows us how
anything can be emptied of the story we tell about it ...All the states
of equanimity come through the realization that things aren't what we
thought they were
The usual run of a famous author's remains is more or less set: first
the (disillusioning) biography, then the (surprisingly mundane,
money-mad) letters, and finally the (painfully naked) diaries, in
which erotic obsessions that seem curious and fresh in literary prose
look mechanically obsessive in daily record... What comes after is
mostly academic commentary.