Caleb Crain at The New Yorker:

In “The Red Badge of Courage,” the novel that made Crane famous, at the age of twenty-three, the nonhero Henry Fleming desperately wants to be perceived as brave, even though he deserts in a moment of cowardice, and doesn’t really seem to believe in bravery except as a perception. When, after his flight from the front lines, he manages to return to his regiment unexposed, he adopts a virile attitude: “He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man.” And that’s only the outermost shell of his hypocrisy. A friend has entrusted Fleming with letters to his family, to be delivered in case of the man’s death. Fleming, desperate to keep his lapse secret, sees that these personal letters make the man vulnerable. He decides to taunt his friend about them if he gets too curious about Fleming’s absence. As it happens, the friend doesn’t get curious. When he asks for the letters back, Fleming tries to come up with a cutting remark but can’t, and hands them over without comment. “And for this he took unto himself considerable credit,” Crane writes, as Fleming’s self-serving consciousness turns a final pirouette. “It was a generous thing.

Even when performing a small act of self-restraint, Fleming is, to the narrator’s eye, a cad. Crane writes of Fleming at one point that “his capacity for self-hate was multiplied,” and one senses that he saw himself in the character, and was correspondingly hard on him.

more here.

Benjamin Morris at FiveThirtyEight:

It’s not possible to shoot more efficiently from outside the penalty area than many players shoot inside it. It’s not possible to lead the world in weak-kick goals and long-range goals. It’s not possible to score on unassisted plays as well as the best players in the world score on assisted ones. It’s not possible to lead the world’s forwards both in taking on defenders and in dishing the ball to others. And it’s certainly not possible to do most of these things by insanely wide margins.

But Messi does all of this and more.

I think it’s fair to say that goals mean more in soccer than points do in most sports. And Messi scores a lot of them. Since the end of the 2010 World Cup, Messi has been responsible for 291 goals and assists in the 201 of his games in club and national team play tracked by the sports analytics company Opta.

more here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Innocence is often thought of as a quality projected outward. It means, literally, ‘not harm’. If a person is innocent, they aren’t going to harm you. But another way to consider the idea of harmlessness is that which is unharmed. It is a place within our own self, untouched by harm.

Hans Christian Andersen believed in an untouched innocence at the core of every person. “She cannot receive any power from me greater than she now has,” says the Finn woman of Gerda in The Snow Queen, “which consists in her own purity and innocence of heart.” Children had special access to this innocence – animals and grandmothers did as well – but the innocence was inside everyone. Innocence could be hidden and emerge, or it could be apparent and then corrupted. See, for example, the devil’s mirror in The Snow Queen, which had the peculiar power to make everything good and beautiful seem like nothing. The loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach and the very best people became hideous or stood on their heads and had no stomachs.

To be wholly innocent was rare. To be wholly innocent, for Andersen, meant to be wholly yourself. It meant that you were free from the distorted reality of the devil’s mirror.

more here.

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
.

by Margaret Atwood
from Morning in the Burned House
McClelland & Stewart, Houghton Mifflin, Virago, 1995.

John Steele in Nautilus:

Gross Domestic Product is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. It is, today, the standard snapshot of a country’s economy. But does it deserve this position? After all, it focuses on economic activity while ignoring many of the consequences of that activity, economic or otherwise.

Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta has long argued for a broader measure of a country’s wealth, and has worked on some of the most difficult challenges involved: How do you assign a dollar value to a forest? To human capital? How do humans understand long-term planning, and the effects of their actions on fellow citizens?

Dasgupta and I met in the Vatican Gardens in Rome, where we were both attending a symposium organized by the Pontifical Academy of Science and the Pontifical Academy of Social Science. Among the most lively and engaged of the symposium participants, Dasgupta challenges us to cast a critical eye onto how we assign value, and how we make decisions…

What should economists be most concerned with measuring?

[PG] Ultimately we social scientists should be concerned with human wellbeing, the quality of lives people lead. That sounds very metaphysical or perhaps repugnant to the hard-nosed social scientist, a policy maker. But at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about, otherwise we should just call it a halt, call our enterprise a halt. The question is not how to measure human wellbeing, because that’s an impossible thing, but whether you can find some metric which more or less approximately corresponds to it. So two things can move in the same way, even though they are not the same thing. The metric which best, and it can be proved to be so, mimics movements of human wellbeing, no matter how you define human wellbeing, is the measure of wealth. Wealth was originally a word used to define wellbeing, but that’s not how I want to use it. The result I’m quoting, the metric that you were asking for, is a value of all the assets an economy has inherited from the past. And the assets include not just buildings, machinery, roads, and equipment, the stuff that we typically think of as being capital goods, but also our health and education, which now economists all agree consist of asset, which we call the human capital. But a third category, and that’s the one we are discussing here at the Pontifical Academy, is natural capital, nature, which comes in abundance and in various forms and sizes.

Let me give you an example of why wealth, which is the value of these assets, could be going down even when GDP goes up. Imagine now, just to take a simple example, suppose you convert a huge swathe of wetlands and construct shopping malls, just as an illustration. Now, in national accounting, from which you can estimate GDP, the shopping mall will be an investment; the amount that you’ve spent will be counted as investment. But the fact that you have lost the wetlands, the republic property out there, will not be costed, it will not be seen as a depreciation of your assets, because the wetland is lost and the wetland was supplying lots and lots of services, birds and bees, and water. There’s a huge amount of services that a wetland does and I needn’t innumerate that here. But that loss will not be counted against the project.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Thomas Sattig in 3:AM Magazine [Photo: Tuomas Tahko]:

3:AM: In your book about language and reality you study them together rather than separately. Why put them together?

TS: Metaphysicians often begin with prephilosophically accessible phenomena and then go deep by asking what the phenomena are like fundamentally. Given that the phenomena are familiar, we have common-sense beliefs and intuitions about them. What role does common sense play in the metaphysical enterprise? I believe that foundational metaphysical analysis should aim to preserve our common-sense conception. The task is a difficult one. Soon tensions between our metaphysical principles and our ordinary thought and talk start appearing. But we should resist giving up our prephilosophical beliefs too easily. For they are prima facie guides to how things are and to how they could be. So I recommend searching for an equilibrium between the metaphysical analysis of the deep structure of the world and our ordinary, linguistic and mental, representation of the latter. The way in which I recommend establishing such an equilibrium is by giving a semantical account of ordinary discourse, which links familiar linguistic behaviour with deep metaphysics. To be sure, this is a type of semantics geared to the demands of metaphysicians. Semantics as done in linguistics and philosophy of language doesn’t share the aim of uncovering the metaphysical basis of ordinary thought and talk.

3:AM: You begin with what you call temporal supervenience. Can you explain what you mean by this term?

TS: The problem of temporal supervenience is an equilibrium problem of the sort I just mentioned. There are different conceptions of time. While ordinary space is three-dimensional, ordinary time is one-dimensional—it can be represented by a line—and consists of past, present, and future. This is the ordinary conception of time, in virtue of being the conception to which we are committed by our ordinary temporal discourse. When we describe the world in ordinary time, we describe it from the perspective of the present time—we use tensed language.

Modern physics, by contrast, offers a different conception: there is only a four-dimensional spacetime of which time is merely an aspect. In its most general form, the problem concerns the metaphysical status of our ordinary conception of time.

One instance of the problem concerns the status of tense. Is temporal perspective an aspect of the reality represented by ordinary thought and talk—are there fundamentally present-directed, past-directed and future-directed facts—or do we merely represent a fundamentally tenseless reality in a tensed way? Another instance concerns the relationship between ordinary time and spacetime. How is what goes on in ordinary time related to what goes on in spacetime?

More here.

Linda Marsa in Aeon (Picasso at home in his villa in villa at Notre-Dame de Vie in Mougins in 1967 surrounded by his latest paintings. He was 85 at the time. Photo by Gjon Mili/Time Life/Getty):

The life expectancy gap between the affluent and the poor and working class in the US, for instance, now clocks in at 12.2 years. College-educated white men can expect to live to age 80, while counterparts without a high-school diploma die by age 67. White women with a college degree have a life expectancy of nearly 84, compared with uneducated women, who live to 73.

And these disparities are widening. The lives of white, female high-school dropouts are now five years shorter than those of previous generations of women without a high-school degree, while white men without a high-school diploma live three years fewer than their counterparts did 18 years ago, according to a 2012 study from Health Affairs.

This is just a harbinger of things to come. What will happen when new scientific discoveries extend potential human lifespan and intensify these inequities on a more massive scale? It looks like the ultimate war between the haves and have-nots won’t be fought over the issue of money, per se, but over living to age 60 versus living to 120 or more. Will anyone just accept that the haves get two lives while the have-nots barely get one?

We should discuss the issue now, because we are close to delivering a true fountain of youth that could potentially extend our productive lifespan into our hundreds – it’s no longer the stuff of science fiction. ‘In just the last five years, there have been so many breakthroughs,’ says the Harvard geneticist David Sinclair. ‘There are now a number of compounds being tested in the lab that greatly slow down the ageing process and delay the onset of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.’

Sinclair, for instance, led a Harvard team that recently uncovered a chemical that reverses the ageing process in cells. The scientists fed mice NAD, a naturally occurring compound that enhances mitochondria – the cell’s energy factories – leading to a more efficient metabolism and less toxic waste. After just a week, tissue from older mice resembled that of six-month-old mice, an ‘amazingly rapid’ rate of reversal that astonished scientists. In human years, this would be like a 60-year-old converting to a 20-year-old practically before our eyes, delivering the tantalising dream of combining the maturity and wisdom of age with the robust vitality of youth. Researchers hope to launch human trials soon.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in The Nation (Photo: AP/Bernat Armangu):

The opening call of the BDS movement, by a group of Palestinian intellectuals in 2005, demanded that Israel fully comply with international law by “(1) Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall; (2) Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) Respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.”

This call received considerable attention, and deservedly so. But if we’re concerned about the fate of the victims, BD and other tactics have to be carefully thought through and evaluated in terms of their likely consequences. The pursuit of (1) in the above list makes good sense: it has a clear objective and is readily understood by its target audience in the West, which is why the many initiatives guided by (1) have been quite successful—not only in “punishing” Israel, but also in stimulating other forms of opposition to the occupation and US support for it.

However, this is not the case for (3). While there is near-universal international support for (1), there is virtually no meaningful support for (3) beyond the BDS movement itself. Nor is (3) dictated by international law. The text of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 is conditional, and in any event it is a recommendation, without the legal force of the Security Council resolutions that Israel regularly violates. Insistence on (3) is a virtual guarantee of failure.

The only slim hope for realizing (3) in more than token numbers is if longer-term developments lead to the erosion of the imperial borders imposed by France and Britain after World War I, which, like similar borders, have no legitimacy. This could lead to a “no-state solution”—the optimal one, in my view, and in the real world no less plausible than the “one-state solution” that is commonly, but mistakenly, discussed as an alternative to the international consensus.

The case for (2) is more ambiguous. There are “prohibitions against discrimination” in international law, as HRW observes. But pursuit of (2) at once opens the door to the standard “glass house” reaction: for example, if we boycott Tel Aviv University because Israel violates human rights at home, then why not boycott Harvard because of far greater violations by the United States? Predictably, initiatives focusing on (2) have been a near-uniform failure, and will continue to be unless educational efforts reach the point of laying much more groundwork in the public understanding for them, as was done in the case of South Africa.

Failed initiatives harm the victims doubly—by shifting attention from their plight to irrelevant issues (anti-Semitism at Harvard, academic freedom, etc.), and by wasting current opportunities to do something meaningful.

More here.

Roderick Conway Morris at The Spectator:

An eccentric English aristocrat who constructed a 20-mile network of underground corridors to avoid coming into contact with his fellow humans on his country estate; a Japanese dentist who has amassed an enormous collection of decorative details from buildings spanning a century, retrieved from Tokyo demolition sites; the German inventor of ‘Scalology’, who has spent 60 years studying staircases; and Inuit soapstone carvings of a Cold War early-warning station and of an airport terminal are among the surprises offered by the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale.

The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is this year’s artistic director. With his team of researchers, he has not only composed a fascinating show — Elements of Architecture in the Central Pavilion at the Biennale Gardens — but by insisting on the announcement further in advance than usual of the theme to be tackled by the national pavilions (Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014) he has also shaped a more co-ordinated overall view of the chosen subject than ever before. The theme has given rise to a variety of thought-provoking reflections on both Architectural Modernism and its impact on those who have lived with the results.

more here.

Charles Simic at the New York Review of Books:

I haven’t done a thing in three weeks except watch soccer. Mowing the lawn, paying bills, working on an essay and a lecture whose deadlines are fast approaching, writing overdue letters of recommendation and one of condolences, answering dozens of urgent emails and writing an angry letter to The New York Times pointing out the many historical inaccuracies in John Burns’s recent piece on the hundredth anniversary of the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria—all these have had to wait. With sixty-four games to watch, it’s a wonder I find time to brush my teeth or tie my shoelaces. The only phone calls I let through these days are those from other junkies who want to discuss some game we are watching. Should an unexpected visitor come to the door, I would emulate the example of soccer players and fake an injury, dropping on the floor and writhing in agony until the person left.

Consequently, I was astonished last Sunday when my wife marched into our TV room, where I was making myself comfortable in my chair to watch the Netherlands play Mexico, and asked me if I wanted to go picking strawberries with her and our little granddaughter. My mouth fell open. I was about to ask her to repeat what she said, but then I remembered how it is with soccer and the women in my family.

more here.

Ben Sobel in Harvard Magazine:

I took this past semester, my junior spring, off from Harvard. What was I trying to accomplish? It took a few months to realize it, but the truest answer I can give is “nothing, really.” What kind of a Harvard student spends a few months he could have spent in Cambridge traveling aimlessly through Western Europe, the Balkans, and North Africa—trying to accomplish nothing? At Harvard, I had developed an obsession with ensuring that every instant of my time could be justified in terms of tangible accomplishments. “Productiveness” is a buzzword around here—as qualifier, quantifier, boast, and complaint—and the concept hovers spectrally alongside a disconcerting amount of on-campus dialogue. Most undergraduates have likely been on one or both sides of an exchange like this:

“How was your weekend?”

“Productive.”

Because the word is used constantly in this sort of context, productivity becomes a universal validator, and, more disturbingly, an end in itself. In these conversations, it doesn’t matter whether the weekend was good or bad, as long as it was productive. On campus, what I was achieving didn’t matter, as long as I was achieving. In this way, my productivity fetish allowed me, paradoxically, to move through my life in a monumentally lazy way. As long as I was productive, “good” and “bad” and “happy” and “sad” were all subordinate considerations. The constant noise of commitments, which I had sincerely convinced myself were important and substantial, let me tune out larger uncertainties. These larger uncertainties—about goodness and badness and happiness and sadness; about who I am, what I like to do, how I want to relate to others; and most importantly, about what I’m trying to achieve through all this achievement in the first place—were and are far more difficult to confront than any number of innocuous, “productive” obligations.

So I buried my unsettling concerns in piles of schoolwork, term-time jobs, and extracurricular organizations. In some ways, this was one of the best things that could have happened to me. My fixation on generating tangible achievements helped me write the best papers I’ve written and think the most stimulating academic thoughts I’ve thought. Each of my productivity-chasing pursuits introduced me to wonderful people I wished I had time to get to know better and wonderful ideas I wished I had time to understand better. Indeed, I produced good things—but these products often felt secondary to the feeling of productiveness they gave me. Rare were my moments of unproductivity, but rarer still were my moments of genuine, uncompromising self-reflection. I never spent any time alone with myself, in part because I had conditioned myself to view such activity as a shameful waste of time, and in part because I was profoundly unsettled by the “larger uncertainties” that surfaced whenever I spent time inside my own head. This is why it is necessary for me to frame my semester off in terms that sound unconscionable to my Harvard-honed sensibilities. “Accomplishing nothing” is exactly what I had trained myself to abhor in order to fight off the bugaboo of meaningful personal scrutiny. With the goal of “accomplishing nothing” in mind, the worst that could have happened is also, conveniently, the best that could have happened.

More here.

Patricia Fara in Nature:

In the early twentieth century, female scientists felt beleaguered. It is “as though my work wore petticoats”, cries Ursula, the fictionalized version of distinguished physicist Hertha Ayrton in the 1924 novel The Call. The real-life Ayrton was denied entry to the Royal Society in 1902 because she was married; later she struggled to make the British government's War Office consider her design for a wooden fan to protect soldiers against gas attacks. Pre-war, alongside fellow suffragettes, Ayrton had marched behind banners embroidered with scientific figureheads including Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale, but such protests often aroused contempt rather than support.

“I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all,” declared Ayrton. “Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not.” Ringing words — so have we yet achieved the ideal she was fighting for a century ago? Overt discrimination is now illegal — equality of opportunity is firmly entrenched. But all over the world, traditional attitudes linger on. Glass ceilings and leaky pipelines still present tough challenges for ambitious women in science, especially at higher levels. Exposing prejudice is the first step to eliminating it. By examining the past, we can understand how we have arrived at the present — and how to improve the future. In Britain, where the suffragists and violent demonstrations had failed, the First World War persuaded the government that women belonged in the polling booth as well as the parlour. “Oh! This War! How it is tearing down walls and barriers, and battering in fast shut doors,” enthused a female journalist in 1915 in the Women's Liberal Review. By 1918, women had helped Britain to victory by making drugs, explosives, insecticides, alloys, electrical instruments and other essential laboratory products, and by carrying out research, running hospitals and teaching students. Yet after the war, it was almost universally assumed that female workers should give up their jobs and slip back into their previous roles as wives and mothers. Only much later did the authorities recognize the twin follies of converting highly educated men into cannon fodder and of failing to deploy female brains effectively.

More here.

Grass and Water

The geese have their heaven and I have mine,
though both are made of grass and water and both
have sudden and subtle bridges where the carved stone
changes color under the presumptive arches,
and it is microcosmic and symbolic
so I could be there lying under the stars,
if it is one of the hazy afternoons,
and even mistake the birdlime for the Milky Way
or one drop of water in the sunlight
for one of the late afternoons, though nothing I know
will save them even though their eggs are like steel,
even though their guards are wise; whereas I
still am struggling, I with the soft egg, I
with the infantile presidents. You should see me
explaining things to them, below the bridge
this side of the river, not for one good second
ridiculing them. I still am reading and thinking;
I still am comparing; and I am spending my time
like one or two others in understanding, that is
a type of heaven too, at least for me it is,
holding on to the stabbed uprooted sycamore.
.

by Gerald Stern
from American Sonnets
W.W. Norton, 2002

Massimo Mazzotti in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Art forgeries have long been the stuff of thrillers, with fake da Vincis or Vermeers fooling connoisseurs, roiling the art world, and moving millions of dollars. We don’t think of ancient books driving such grand forgery, intrigue, and schadenfreude. This is changing thanks in part to a clever forgery of Galileo’s landmark book Sidereus Nuncius, published in Venice in 1610. Arguably one of the most extraordinary scientific publications of all times, Sidereus Nuncius turned Galileo into the brightest new star of Western science. Four centuries later, a faked copy of this book has disarmed a generation of Galileo experts, and raised a host of intriguing questions about the social nature of scholarly authentication, the precariousness of truth, and the revelatory power of fakes.

The story begins in 1609, when Galileo was a professor at the University of Padua, then under the rule of the Republic of Venice. The 45-year-old Galileo was on his way to toppling Ptolemaic and Aristotelian conceits, revolutionizing the principles of motion, and redefining what physics was and meant. He was also struggling with financial problems, saddled with supporting a lover and three children, with the dowry for a sister’s marriage, and with a hapless brother. With little hope for a salary increase, he borrowed money, gave private lessons, and made instruments to sell.

In July 1609, he heard about a spyglass being made in Holland. Quickly, he figured out the requisite shape and combination of lenses needed to go from two or three orders of magnification to eight. Just one month later he presented his invention to the Senate of Venice as a new military technology; it would, he told the Senate, make it possible to spot enemy ships at sea a full two hours before a naked-eye observer. There was no such thing as our notion of a patent in those days, so Galileo needed to be strategic in order to benefit from his inventions and discoveries. To this end, he offered the telescope as a “gift” to the Senate. It worked. He was rewarded in the form of tenure and a doubling of his salary.

More here.

From World Pulse:

Have you yourself faced obstacles to embracing a different view of masculinity?

There is a stigma that exists today in the United States. I think it exists in all countries, but we’ll talk about the US. It’s a very subtle stigma regarding men working on “women’s issues” or being associated with women’s issues. I remember when the book The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen came out. Oprah Winfrey selected it as one of her Oprah’s Book Club books. Mr. Franzen declined the offer, and I heard him imply on NPR that his concern was that Oprah’s selections are “women’s books.” This is one example of the mentality I am talking about. I admit myself that when I first started the Harpswell Foundation, I initially placed most of the emphasis on helping Cambodia develop. At a subtle level, I myself was resisting the idea of working for women’s empowerment. I was both a victim and a culprit of this mentality. It took me a couple of years to get comfortable with the fact that the empowerment of women was, in fact, a central thrust of what I was doing.

I’ve always believed that women are equal to men, but I still had to erase this attitude in myself that was resisting the idea of aligning myself with women’s empowerment. I am a case study in the problem. But of course now I fully embrace this role.

More here.

From Scroll:

Honorable ladies and gentlemen!

I've been asked to explain how I write stories.
This “how” is problematic. What can I tell you about how I write stories?

It is a very convoluted matter. With this “how” before me I could say I sit on the sofa in my room, take out paper and pen, utter bismillah, and start writing, while all three of my daughters keep making a lot of noise around me. I talk to them as I write, settle their quarrels, make salad for myself, and, if someone drops by for a visit, I show him hospitality. During all this, I don’t stop writing my story.

If I must answer how I write, I would say my manner of writing is no different from my manner of eating, taking a bath, smoking cigarettes, or wasting time.

Now, if one asked why I write short stories, well, I have an answer for that. Here it goes:

I write because I’m addicted to writing, just as I’m addicted to wine. For if I don't write a story, I feel as if I'm not wearing any clothes, I haven't bathed, or I haven’t had my wine.

More here.

Wilfred M. McClay at Hedgehog Review:

Do we imagine that complete control over our biological fates will necessarily make us happier? Perhaps it will. But one can as easily imagine that there might be little room for uninhibited joy or exuberance in such a world. More likely it will be a tightly wound world, saturated with bitterness and anxiety and mutual suspicion, in which life and health will be guarded with all the ferocity of Ebenezer Scrooge guarding his money. Growing mastery means growing responsibility, and the need to assign blame, since nothing happens by chance. Some of the blame will be directed at the parents, politicians, doctors, and celebrities who make plausible villains, or conspiracy theories that explain why someone else is always at fault. But much of the blame will devolve upon ourselves, since in being set free to choose so much about our lives, we will have no one else to blame when we make a complete mess of things.

No, there is good reason to fear that the more our lives are prolonged and powers extended, and the more death becomes seen as an avoidable evil whose precise moment should be “chosen,” rather than an inherent feature of human life, the more common it will be to encounter people who live imprisoned by their fear of all risk, since the possible consequences of any risk will seem too vast, too horrible, and too fully avoidable, to be contemplated.

more here.

Michael Wood at Lapham's Quarterly:

While Sentimental Education provides the requisite arcs and twists of a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel, and a story of a Young Man from the Provinces, it also questions the assumptions of each, asking if any of these stories quite leads to where it is supposed to go. This is to say that we are invited to explore the realm of what Balzac calls illusions and Flaubert calls sentiments, where ambition and fantasy are rampant and sometimes fulfilled, where cynical advice passes as sagacity. It is the realm of what we think we know—what some of us are sure we know—but where none of us is always right. In other words, the world we enter in adolescence and rarely ever leave. The trouble with the place is that although it provides unheard-of opportunities, it offers no guarantee in individual cases. This is as true for bad news as it is for good. If so many European novels seem to know that things will not end well, they know this for sure only because they are novels, because the choice of endings belongs to the author, not to chance or history. What the novels and the authors know beneath their plots, or inside of them, is that almost anything can happen; that the difference between a successful plan and an aberrant fantasy can’t be told until the game is completely over.

more here.