nyny

from stuff I'm reading...

From Nick Hornby’s column in last month’s “The Believer” magazine:

Maybe the best thing to do with favorite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be re-created. Sometimes we want to revisit them in order to check whether they were really as good as we remember them being, but this has to be a suspect impulse, because what it presupposes is that we have more reason to trust our critical judgments as we get older, whereas I am beginning to believe the reverse is true....Favorites should be left where they belong, buried somewhere deep in a past self.

--at this point I was seriously lamenting Hornby’s logic, because truly acknowledging the sense his point makes would mean reluctantly sacrificing my faves in the name of artistic or philisophical integrity. I was so relieved when I continued reading the column and eventually came to these concluding sentences:

Forget everything I said! Revisit your favorites regularly!

And from Henry Adams’s autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (sorry for the error but Blogger doesn't have the underline feature on Macs, at least that I can figure out):

This problem of education, started in 1838, went on for three years, while the baby grew, unconsciously, as a vegetable, the outside world working as it never had worked before, to get his new universe ready for him. Often in old age he puzzled over the question whether, on the doctrine of chances, he was at liberty to accept himself or his world as an accident. No such accident had ever happened before in human experience. For him, alone, the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created...his new world was ready for use, and only fragments of the old met his eyes.


What an interesting idea Adams brings to the table...that the world is working to get ready for each individual person to enter it and interact with it, and that this universe is never precisely the same for any two people.

posted by becka @ 4:53 PM