|k| clippings: 2014-12-27 — could've been light

If I ever change my name, it would probably be to today’s WORD. Or “Eustace.”

WORK

It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio’s clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u’s, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine. There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, “What would have happened if…” and substituting one chance occurrence for another, observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one’s life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy event that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a “thus” and an “otherwise,” with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.

—Vladimir Nabokov
—from The Eye

WORD(S)

manqué /mon-KAY/. adjective. Characterized by unfulfilled potential and/or ambition. Used, after a noun, to describe what a person could or should have been but never was.

“…the answer must have something to do with White’s sense of himself as a painter manqué—that is to say, as a man with a painterly vision of the world but none of the painter’s skills.” (J. M. Coetzee)

“He doused the flares. He kicked glass down a storm drain. A Plymouth idled by. A redhead had the wheel. She was a Joan-from-Northwestern manqué.” (James Ellroy)

“They treated me with great charity when I left, they gave me a warm welcome whenever I returned for a drink, but I felt the guilt of a beach-comber manqué: I had failed at failure. How could they tell that for a writer as much as for a priest there is no such thing as success?” (Graham Greene)

WEB

1. Tim Parks’ “How I Read” reminded me of Maria Popova’s note-taking habits, particularly her habit of keeping an “idea index”. Which further reminds me I need to slow down; I can’t read them all, but those I do get to I can read well.

2. Dystopic Utopias: A Movie Montage.

3. I’m not a devotee of C. S. Lewis’ work, but this recently discovered letter in which he talks about joy, pleasure and happiness was interesting.

4. On BuzzFeed, 24 Movies You Probably Missed This Year, But Should Totally See. Many of these were already on my “to watch” list, but a few were new. What other movies flew under the radar this year?

5. Today in 2004, light from a starquake on magnetar SGR 1806–20—a neutron star that has a diameter of no more than 12 miles and resides more than 50,000 light years from us—reaches Earth. It was the brightest extra-solar event ever observed. In 1/10 of a second, the quake released more energy than our sun produces in 100,000 years. Magnetars are mind-boggling phenomena. SGR 1806–20’s density is the equivalent of smashing every car in the United States into a lump the size of a sugar cube and its magnetic field is a quadrillion times stronger than our planet’s. Consider this: had such an explosion occurred even 10 light-years from Earth, it would have destroyed the ozone layer and snuffed out all complex (and most simple) life forms.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D. observes: “…a lot of connections in the last newsletter. The post-apocalyptic excerpt. Cannibalism in the Andes mtns. Adrets. J’adore.”

• Reader T., who loves commas, notes: “The problem I have with the had had had sentence (”Where John had had had Mary had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.“) is that it’s missing a comma. Cannot have an introductory clause without one, and I believe its appearance would alleviate some of the had-induced confusion.”

• Reader F. has experience: “In a little reversal of ‘authority,’ my mother gave us the ”had had“ sentence, whereupon I took it into my teacher (in the fourth grade) and demonstrated my awesome powers of punctuation! I have loved it ever since. The only difference between the one posted here and the one I received was that my mother’s version ended with ‘effect UPON, rather than ON, the teacher.’ Small distinctions, indeed.”

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