On "The Room."

I don't even know how to begin talking about "The Room."

On libraries and taste.

The line between decaying splendor (good!) and dreary grandeur (not so good!) is a fine one. I can confidently place the Bod on the former and the Widener on the latter side. Loveliest of all is Sterling, which is as old-fashioned as either but not so campily as the Bod (those portraits of forgotten scholars everywhere) nor so creakily as the Widener (all that marble and gold). I do like modern libraries too (the Seattle Public Library and the Beinecke are two of my favorites, and the Wellesley library's intimidatingly "designed"-looking chairs that turn out to be excellent of their kind remind me of Seattle), and I rather like the British National Library as well) and some comfily elderly ones, including many smaller university or college libraries and my local public libraries where I was raised.

I don't know, it's hard to say what makes one person appreciate this imperfection and another dislike it. (I discussed this a bit in the bad movies post.) My inclination is toward a weak aesthetic Platonism: I believe that many or most of the good things people see in anything are really there and really good. On this sort of account the hard work is not saying what is really good and not good, but prioritizing: since we are not big enough to get all of the good things, and because it is not unusual for appreciation of one good to detract from our capacity to "get" others, whether because of internal tensions or simply because we have not world enough and time. So for example I believe that there really are the good things that others see in songs or books or films that I would normally, casually call "horrible." That doesn't mean I regret my inability to appreciate, oh, reggae music and Nicholas Sparks and Wes Anderson, or professional football either. Nor when picking tastes to acquire would I make an effort to cultivate those in particular. But I have no problem with people filling in the blanks in art differently than I do and I have no problem accepting that what is salient to each of us on each occasion is not of necessity the only feature of that thing that could be important. I love enough clichés myself that I could never claim to occupy some Archimedean outside point. I can't criticize those who find "Brief Encounter" classist and sentimental; so it is; but I should be very sorry to watch it again and find that those features and aspects dominated my perception in place of its delicately intense emotional fidelity. I would be sorry to lose what I have seen in it. Naturally I cannot have the same investment in "The Royal Tenenbaums," and so I am neither sad nor ashamed to declare it trite, strained, arbitrarily sentimental, somewhat sexist, and dull. But I would be sad and ashamed to find myself trying to argue someone else out of her (well, realistically ... more likely his) love of Wes Anderson.

On founding moments.

In the context of a discussion of the literary tropes and cultural assumptions Aristotle deploys in setting out his project at the beginning of the Politics, to many of which he never returns again in the book:

"Founders were very important to the Greeks. They all have stories about the first person who founded their city and wrote its laws. -- Well, not the Athenians; they sprung from the ground -- that is what 'autochthonous' means. But founders were very important to other Greeks. -- Athena gave the Athenians olive trees. So that was important."

-- the dry, but relaxed, but sharp, but never mean, but terribly blunt Gisela Striker, who was one of my favorite philosophers for years before she became one of my favorite people as well

On empathy, in scattered, conversational format.

H&I have been talking Hume of late, and sentimentalism of other stripes. H says he is dubious that empathetic sentiments -- that is, sentiments of identification with another -- are as natural and automatic and unreflective as Hume assumes; I say that babies above say three, or certainly six, months respond palpably to the moods of those around them. H says that Hume is thinking of something stronger -- not merely natural proclivity towards others' stances and status, but positive feeling as if it were happening to you, and belief that it could happen to you. I say I can go along as far as feeling as if it were happening to you, that it is natural to blush for your friend who has got mud all over herself, and to be afraid for your friend who is going to a war zone, and to cry for Baptiste et al. in "Children of Paradise." He agrees but considers the further requirement false and onerous. Aristotle sometimes seems to say such things in the Poetics, I say, and there too it is a bafflingly unnecessary restriction. It is true that the characters must be somewhat like us to evoke our pity (and fear?): I cannot pity a character in a noh drama, whose language and affect and gestures and appearance convey little to me; I know I lose something from the nineteeth century social dramas because I cannot really understand the stakes in the bizarre reputation games they are always playing. It is not true that I have to consider myself very likely to encounter the character's situation, else no one would appreciate Euripides's "Medea" or Sophocles's "Oedipus the King." It is not clear how important the thought that if I were in this situation, I might think it through like them, let alone that I would respond as they do, is. Surely it makes some difference. Surely we empathize more when we identify more closely, and surely we pity more when we empathize more. The issues are of thresholds.

I do always think of what Chesterton's Father Brown says: I understand criminal behavior because I am a criminal, too. It is not a stretch for a human being to imagine herself coming to cause unnecessary harm.

On the demon of migraine.

When I was young and foolish, I held two beliefs so false that I wonder I wasn't disillusioned earlier:

(1) that there was something romantic about suffering and incapacity, perhaps about desperation, something artistic;
(2) that migraines were a species of headache.

Now I know that migraines are radically heterogeneous. I also know that any way you slice it, they steal a whole day from you: the episode itself may last as little as fifteen minutes, but you're too drained for anything else. I have had blind-vision migraines (by far the least bad kind in my experience), extreme sensitivity to light and sound migraines, aphasic migraines, abdominal migraines; migraines that overcome me with premonitions of death, and migraines that lack that shred of panic; migraines in class, at friends', on the street, at home, at all times of day and year in various patterns of frequency on three continents. I have lost nearly a month running to migraines, at one time. I went on anti-migraine medication after that, and it helps -- sometimes I think something will become a migraine, and then it doesn't -- but they are still migraines when they come. I have had migraines that lasted less than half an hour, all-day migraines (more rarely, thankfully; but this is one), interrupted migraines that resume later in the day or in the week, migraines whose full onset I was able to stave off until I got to a safer place, migraines whose onset came at an incredibly inconvenient time (they can be induced by stress, you know), migraines of whose onset I was unaware until I tried to speak and my interlocutor responded with concern as if to some garbled gobbledygook, tried to look and realized my unfocused eyes saw nothing but bright light wormed through with threads of still brighter light, heard a telephone ring down the hall and wept with the pain. I had my first migraine, blind with vision, only a few hours before my Greek class read Acts (4:19??) on Saul's blind vision onthe road to Damascus. I have been able to conduct conversations during a migraine and been felled in the middle of a thought. I have returned obsessively to the same thought and been unable to maintain any train of thought at all, and also I have had lulls during which my brain is less affected. I have told people it was nothing and I did not need their help, and begged them not to leave me. I have not been improved. I have learned only the two things, that suffering is pain, not art, and that migraines are not per se headaches. The first I already knew and the second Oliver Sacks could have taught me.

On my misspent youth.

H&I went out to see "Ruddigore" tonight at the Harvard Gilbert&Sullivan Society and I noted every flub & commented on the unusual choice to make Dick Dauntless rather self-aware and intelligent & cooed with praise over their choice to let Rose sing her verse of "Happily coupled are we" & delighted in the comic lead getting the happiest ending for once instead of the principal tenor & sang all the songs to myself all the way home. Next week: "Patience" at MIT Gilbert&Sullivan, I hope. And in the spring "Yeomen" here, and perhaps in winter something in New York, if we can catch it.

One of my students (an astrophysicist with whom I've discussed grad school applications) was violin section chair. I felt very proud of her.