• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: Marcel Proust

Why Art Matters

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature, Speeches

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

In Search of Lost Time, Leo Tolstoy, literature, Marcel Proust, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, Saul Bellow, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Time Regained

Saul Bellow

“And art and literature — what of them? Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too.

The unending cycle of crises that began with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has lived through terrible, strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds of madness, an immense desire for certain durable human goods — truth, for instance, or freedom, or wisdom. I don’t think I am exaggerating; there is plenty of evidence for this…

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. At the center humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul. If writers do not come again into the center it will not be because the center is pre-empted. It is not. They are free to enter. If they so wish…

The value of literature lies in these intermittent ‘true impressions’. A novel moves back and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world from which these ‘true impressions’ come and which moves us to believe that the good we hang onto so tenaciously — in the face of evil, so obstinately — is no illusion.”

__________

From Saul Bellow’s Nobel Prize Lecture, given on December 12th, 1976.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Could the World Cause Itself?

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza, Benedict Spinoza, existence, Georg Cantor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, God, Jim Holt, John Archibald Wheeler, Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust, mystery, nature, Sir Roger Penrose, Why Does the World Exist?

Baruch Spinoza

“Of all the possible resolutions to the mystery of existence, perhaps the most exhilarating would be the discovery that, contrary to all appearances, the world is causa sui: the cause of itself. This possibility was first raised by Spinoza, who boldly (if a little obscurely) reasoned that all reality consists of a single infinite substance. Individual things, both physical and mental, are merely temporary modifications of this substance, like waves on the surface of the sea. Spinoza referred to this infinite substance as Deus sive Natura: ‘God or Nature.’ God could not possibly stand apart from nature, he reasoned, because then each would limit the other’s being. So the world itself is divine: eternal, infinite, and the cause of its own existence. Hence, it is worthy of our awe and reverence. Metaphysical understanding thus leads to ‘intellectual love’ of reality—the highest end for humans, according to Spinoza, and the closest we can come to immortality.

Spinoza’s picture of the world as causa sui captivated Albert Einstein. In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God,’ he answered, ‘who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’ The idea that the world somehow holds the key to its own existence—and hence that it exists necessarily, not as an accident—jibes with the thinking of some metaphysically inclined physicists, such as Sir Roger Penrose and the late John Archibald Wheeler (who coined the term black hole). It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the ‘participatory universe,’ reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world. It’s a bit like Proust’s great work, which records the progress and the sufferings of its hero through thousands of pages until, at the end, he resolves to write the very novel we have been reading.

Such a Promethean fantasy—we are the world’s author as well as its plaything!—may seem too good to be true. Yet pursuing the question Why is there something rather than nothing? is bound to leave our feelings about the world and our own place within it transformed. The astonishment we feel at its sheer existence may evolve into a new kind of awe as we begin to descry, if only in the faintest outlines, the reason behind that existence. Our mild anxiety about the precariousness of being may give way to confidence in a world that turns out to be coherent, luminous, and intellectually secure. Or it might yield to cosmic terror when we realize that the whole show is a mere ontological soap bubble that could pop into nothingness at any moment, without the slightest warning. And our present sense of the potential reach of human thought may give way to a newfound humility at its limits, or to a newfound wonder at its leaps and bounds—or a bit of both. We may feel like the mathematician Georg Cantor did when he made a profound new discovery about infinity. ‘I see it,’ Cantor exclaimed, ‘but I don’t believe it.'”

__________

From the book I’m most enjoying nowadays (in the 4 and a half minutes of free time that I have to read each night): Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

The picture is of one of the greatest Western philosophers who ever breathed, Baruch Spinoza, of whom Einstein wrote, in “Zu Spinoza Ethik”:

How much do I love that noble man
More than I could tell with words
I fear though he’ll remain alone
With a holy halo of his own.

And Borges memorialized in his poem “Baruch Spinoza”:

Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Since his illness, since his birth,
He goes on constructing God with the word.
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.

The man of whom Hegel claimed, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all;” the figure Gilles Deleuze referred to as, “the Prince of Philosophers… the other greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery.”

…not a bad list of recommendations for a résumé.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

We Are Not Provided with Wisdom

22 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Age, Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, Wisdom, Within a Budding Grove

Proust

“There is no man… however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”

__________

From Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

A selection of this passage is quoted in one of the books I’m currently reading, Clive James’s expansive and brimming collection of essays Cultural Amnesia. On the bus home tonight, as I fanned through its pages, I came across this passage and immediately felt a cool and clarifying sense of uplift — the kind that washes over you in that moment when a paragraph or lyric or painting somehow expresses a thought you had but couldn’t recognize or express until something else spoke it to and for you. This passage from Proust did exactly that, and while I haven’t read his formidable series of novels, this paragraph certainly indicates why they are so loved and lauded.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

When We Say That We Love a Writer’s Work

20 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Charles Dickens, Don Delillo, Franz Kafka, George Eliot, Harper Lee, Homer, James Joyce, Jane Austen, John Milton, Marcel Proust, Martin Amis, Shakespeare

Martin and the Pinball Machine“When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on ‘Ulysses,’ with a little help from ‘Dubliners.’ You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of ‘Paradise Lost.’ Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (‘As You Like It’ is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with ‘King John’ or ‘Henry VI, Part III’?

Proustians will claim that ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ ‘Mansfield Park,’ and ‘Persuasion’). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee. Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are. One helplessly reaches for Kant’s dictum about the crooked timber of humanity, or for John Updike’s suggestion to the effect that we are all of us ‘mixed blessings.’ Unlike the heroes and heroines of ‘Northanger Abbey,’ ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ and ‘Emma,’ readers and writers are not expressly designed to be perfect for each other.”

__________

Martin Amis’s brilliantly clever introduction to his review of Don DeLillo in The New Yorker.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Today’s Top Pages

  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
    "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin
  • Wittgenstein on God and Belief
    Wittgenstein on God and Belief
  • Why the World's Greatest Advertising Man Added Four Words to a Beggar's Sign
    Why the World's Greatest Advertising Man Added Four Words to a Beggar's Sign

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: