Eighty Scholarly Monkeys

... though libraries were fine places in themselves, the finest of places, actually, I always found it impossible to complete the tasks I had been assigned for the simple reason that the more often I went there the more aware I became of the other readers, and the more aware I became of the other readers the more I noticed the profusion of nervous tics and compulsive behavior which seemed to flourish in these places.  Pretty soon it was impossible to concentrate on anything, what with the girl to my right chewing her nails and the girl to my left digging at her head, and it did not take long to realize that most people are fidgeters, as if synaptic activity were encouraged by endless scratching and fidgeting, and before long I had the impression I was in a room with eighty scholarly monkeys, busily delousing as they sat reading their books or typing at their computers, and at those rare moments when I looked up and no one was doing anything I felt as if  truce had been called or an anhel were flying overhead and, out of deference, the monkeys had removed their paws from their faces and hair.

 Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

Ghost of a Chance

You see a man

trying to think.

You want to say

to everything:

Keep off! Give him room!

But you only watch, 

terrified

the old consolations

will get him at last

like a fish

half-dead from flopping

and almost crawling

across the shingle,

almost breathing

the raw, agonizing air

till a wave

pulls it back blind into the triumphant 

sea.

Adrienne Rich

Affection For Literature

Even Aristophanes -- who was, we should remember, a comedian and not a critic -- seems to have been made uneasy by the sadistic aspects of criticism. "I cannot judge anymore," his Dionysos apologizes when the word-weighing is over.  "I must not lose the love of either one of them. / One of them's a great poet. I like the other one." The lines remind you that loving and liking are as much a part of criticism as are hating and hacking; and that the impulse underlying good criticism ought to be affection for literature rather than animus toward writers.

Daniel Mendelsohn

A Common Condition But One I Found Troubling

I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.  I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971.  During those five years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen. I wrote a couple of times a month for one magazine or another, published two books, worked on several motion pictures; participated in the paranoia of the time, in the raising of a small child, and in the entertainment of large numbers of people passing through my house; made gingham curtains for spare bedrooms, remembered to ask agents if any reduction of points would be pari passu with the financing studio, put lentils to soak on Saturday night for lentil soup on Sunday, made quarterly F. I. C. A. payments and renewed my driver's license on time, missing on the written examination only the question about the financial responsibility of California drivers ... This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised.  I was supposed to have a script and I had mislaid it.  I was supposed to hear cues, and I no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I know was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no "meaning" beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. 

Joan Didion