I think this is less true in the era of memoir and blogging, but I will always prefer conscious foolishness to blind faith.

Paper is kindly, because it teaches this humility and opens one’s eyes to the vacuity of the ego. Someone who writes a page and, half an hour later while waiting for a bus, realizes that he understands nothing, not even what he has just written, learns to recognize his own inconsequence, and as he dwells upon the fatuity of his own page realizes that each person takes his own lucubrations to be the center of the universe. And there you have it in a nutshell — everybody does. And perhaps the writer has a fraternal feeling towards that myriad of everybodies who, like him, fancy they are souls elect as they trundle their whims towards the grave; perhaps he realizes how stupid it is, in our common, jostling rush towards nothingness, to do each other injury. Writers constitute a universal secret order, a freemasonry, a Grand Lodge of stupidity. It is no coincidence that they themselves, from Jean Paul to Musil, have been the ones to compose essays and eulogies on Stupidity. (Claudio Magris, Danube)

From Wikipedia:

“In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century…The book outsold all Woolf’s previous novels, and the proceeds enabled the Woolfs to buy a cat.”

A bit of cross-blog pollination. A friend and I are doing periodic posts on things we happen to be reading. Here’s the latest, on Gyula Krúdy, a pre-WWII (and mostly pre-WWI) Hungarian writer sweet as summer berries, and deeper than he appears at first.

Gyula Krúdy: Seduction and Innocence

Joseph O’Neill, as part of the Atlantic’s four-part Border Crossings collection of essays:

There is a venerable tradition of being critical of nationalism and its assumptions. Nationalism proposes that a person’s freedom is justly maximized if the obligations limiting that freedom are set by the group with which he has most in common—i.e., his nation. A Frenchwoman’s freedom is best entrusted to a French government. Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, proposes that, as an ethical and therefore political matter, a person can belong only in a global community. Therefore a person’s freedom is qualified by obligations to others arising irrespective of the nationality or proximity of the other, or—nodding to the contribution of Emmanuel Levinas—l’autre.

…Writers, in order to produce something truly worthwhile, must be ruled only by their deepest impulses, which can come from anywhere and lead in a million valuable directions. But it does seem that those who internalize the new world have every chance of writing something newly interesting.

Read the whole essay here.

This is like blog candy. Or no, not candy, more like a wine club, where something new and delectable comes in the mail whether you’ve remembered to look for it or not, and it might not be to your liking but it will always be worth tasting…

Or something. In any case. The folks who do the National Book Award are doing a blog countdown of their 60 77 winners over 60 years (celebrating their 60th anniversary, natch). An entry a day, on one of the biggies. Today, one of my favorites (and I realize one of the only in the list I’ve actually read), Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm:

He was obsessed by the paradoxical guilt of those who have nothing, in a postwar America where having mattered a great deal. “If you don’t have anything you’re nothing,” Mr. Dennis tells Barbara Loden in the film Wanda. “You might as well be dead.” Algren would have been moved by Wanda’s plight, though he chose, famously, Simone de Beauvoir, and a taste for women who think abstractly leaks through in The Man with the Golden Arm. The men, Frankie and Sparrow, are all action and hustle, and their thoughts are dominated by plans, constantly modified. The women—Zosh, Violet and Molly-O—are more dreamily cut off from their environment, like the limp, white curtain, a singular image of freshness, that hangs in Molly-O’s window…