{"asin":"B008J2AFP6","title":"To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction","authors":"Phillip Lopate","highlights":[{"text":"spokesperson for the essay,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=38","value":38},"note":null},{"text":"There are questions of technique, such as how do you turn yourself into a character, how do you end an essay, and finally, how do you develop the capacity to think entertainingly and unconventionally on the page?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=46","value":46},"note":null},{"text":"entice by way of a voice that can speak in more than one register, that can tell an anecdote, be self-mocking and serious by turns, and analyze a conundrum.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=51","value":51},"note":null},{"text":"Third graders are now being asked to write their “memoirs”: an invitation which sounds risible, were it not also sensible.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=64","value":64},"note":null},{"text":"No one sets out to write uncreative nonfiction.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=88","value":88},"note":null},{"text":"as though the genre were merely a dodge to get around writing a real book.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=93","value":93},"note":null},{"text":"many students can engage their own reality more confidently than an imagined one.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=101","value":101},"note":null},{"text":"you’re always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=122","value":122},"note":null},{"text":"“tracking the consciousness of the author.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=125","value":125},"note":null},{"text":"well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=126","value":126},"note":null},{"text":"The other element that keeps me reading nonfiction happily is an evolved, entertaining, elegant, or at least highly intentional literary style.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=126","value":126},"note":null},{"text":"“Consciousness plus style equals good nonfiction”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=128","value":128},"note":null},{"text":"For me, the great adventure in reading nonfiction is to follow, as I say, a really interesting, unpredictable mind struggling to entangle and disentangle itself in a thorny problem, or even a frivolous problem that is made complex through engagement with a sophisticated mind.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=129","value":129},"note":null},{"text":"glorious thought excursions.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=134","value":134},"note":null},{"text":"The first reason he gave was that “thought is infinite,” though because it is subject to doubt or (to use Steiner’s words) “internal contradiction for which there can be no resolution,” it is an “incomplete infinity.” His second was that thought is uncontrolled, involuntary, and disorganized. The third is that thought isolates us: no one can read our minds or think our thoughts for us.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=138","value":138},"note":null},{"text":"Steiner’s fourth reason is that there is an inherent collision between rational demands for thought to have one truthful, verifiable meaning and the tendency of language to suggest ambiguous, evasive, multiple meanings. The fifth reason is that thought is incredibly wasteful; even Einstein claimed he had only two ideas in his entire life and the rest was dross. The","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=143","value":143},"note":null},{"text":"sixth reason thought makes us sad is that it causes us to have fantasies and unrealistic expectations which are then frustrated or disappointed by reality.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=145","value":145},"note":null},{"text":"we cannot arrest thought, it keeps going incessantly, like our heartbeat, veiling as much as it reveals.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=146","value":146},"note":null},{"text":"Eighth reason: thinking keeps us strangers from one another, prevents empathy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=147","value":147},"note":null},{"text":"(I believe Steiner has started to repeat himself at this point.)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=148","value":148},"note":null},{"text":"I grew up sensing that a part of me was faking being a child; I felt I was already an old soul. Lots of people feel that, particularly those who will go on to become writers.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=157","value":157},"note":null},{"text":"it’s the fault of a world so poorly constructed as to have tempted them into a wrongful act.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=161","value":161},"note":null},{"text":"And guilt and shame come from consciousness, more so than from doing evil.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=162","value":162},"note":null},{"text":"“consciousness is a disease.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=164","value":164},"note":null},{"text":"“This is my consciousness, now don’t feel so guilty about yours. If you have perverse, curmudgeonly, conflicted, antisocial thoughts, know that others have them too.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=168","value":168},"note":null},{"text":"Obsessives repeat themselves, while ignoring other people or stories breaking around them; it’s an exceedingly redundant form of thinking, so I’m not sure how useful it is in the production of nonfiction.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=185","value":185},"note":null},{"text":"If anything, the voice I had developed in my personal essays was essential for welding together the disparate subjects to which my curiosity had led me. The path of my consciousness through all this obdurate technical material became the unifying element.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=197","value":197},"note":null},{"text":"It is my underlying conviction that nonfiction as a practice tends toward reason, calm, insight, order.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=203","value":203},"note":null},{"text":"Louis Althusser,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=211","value":211},"note":null},{"text":"But as soon as I assert that I am writing “the truth,” my palms sweat and I think I am about to perjure myself: such is the essayist’s equal attachment to skepticism.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=222","value":222},"note":null},{"text":"We may not ever be in possession of the truth, but at least as nonfiction writers we can try to be as honest as our courage permits.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=224","value":224},"note":null},{"text":"I would rather employ the actual facts in a nonfiction piece, because there is something magical and uncanny about the world as it is given to us, in the very randomness or order that it is given to us.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=232","value":232},"note":null},{"text":"facts fashioned like exquisite Venetian glass.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=241","value":241},"note":null},{"text":"That will-less absorption in another’s word pictures, that abandonment of your mind to another’s command seems to me the siren song of popular fiction.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=246","value":246},"note":null},{"text":"backlog of great world literature","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=249","value":249},"note":null},{"text":"I get the feeling that the characters and situations are being mechanically coerced toward tragedy or farce.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=251","value":251},"note":null},{"text":"Sometimes imagination can be too facile, too cheap, and would benefit from a disciplined restraint put upon it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=255","value":255},"note":null},{"text":"We should not be so in awe of invention; it can be a fairly cheap knack.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=259","value":259},"note":null},{"text":"So nonfiction has nothing to apologize for. It can hold its head up high.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=263","value":263},"note":null},{"text":"may be swimming with background and a lush, sticky past and an almost too fatal specificity, whereas the reader encountering it for the first time in a new piece sees only a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to send on.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=270","value":270},"note":null},{"text":"between those fictional personages seen from the outside who acted with the predictable consistency of Dickensian caricatures, and those whose Woolfian complexities or teeming inner lives we came to know.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=275","value":275},"note":null},{"text":"knowable enough in their broad outlines to behave plausibly, and at the same time free-willed enough to intrigue us with surprises.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=279","value":279},"note":null},{"text":"The art of characterization comes down to establishing a pattern of habits and actions for the person you are writing about and introducing variations into the system.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=280","value":280},"note":null},{"text":"In this respect, building a character is a pedagogic model, because you are teaching the reader what to expect.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=281","value":281},"note":null},{"text":"You need to be able to see yourself from the ceiling: to know, for instance, how you are coming across in social situations, and to assess accurately when you are being charming and when you seem pushy, mousy, or ridiculous.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=285","value":285},"note":null},{"text":"it is just as unsatisfactory or distorting to underrate yourself all the time and claim you are far less effective than you actually are, than to give yourself too much credit. The point is to begin to take inventory of yourself so that you can present that self to the reader as a specific, legible character.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=286","value":286},"note":null},{"text":"Literature is not a place for conformists and organization men.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=293","value":293},"note":null},{"text":"restraining one’s expressiveness, rounding out one’s edges, sparing everyone’s feelings—will not work as well on the page, if your goal is to create a memorable and compelling narrator.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=294","value":294},"note":null},{"text":"mean positioning those that are already in us under the most clearly focused, sharply defined light.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=299","value":299},"note":null},{"text":"you need to cut away the inessentials and highlight just those features in your personality that most quickly characterize you, preferably those that lead to the most intense contradictions and ambivalences.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=300","value":300},"note":null},{"text":"What gives personal writing dynamism is the need to work out some problem, especially a problem that is not easily resolved.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=303","value":303},"note":null},{"text":"what’s needed is the emotional preparedness and the generosity, if you will, to be honest and open to exposure.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=309","value":309},"note":null},{"text":"am so weird that I could never tell on the page what is really secretly going on in my mind.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=311","value":311},"note":null},{"text":"Sometimes they can be made too much of, as in the more limiting sort of identity politics, which seeks to explain all the intangibles of a human being’s destiny by this or that social oppression.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=329","value":329},"note":null},{"text":"respects the obligation to get in the basic orienting facts—who, what, where, when, and why—as close to the top of every story as possible.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=338","value":338},"note":null},{"text":"The reader must find you amusing—that’s the crux of it—amusing","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=342","value":342},"note":null},{"text":"amusing enough to follow you, no matter what topic you propose.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=342","value":342},"note":null},{"text":"And here we come to one of the main stumbling blocks placed before effective personal writing: self-hatred.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=344","value":344},"note":null},{"text":"is an observable fact that most people don’t like themselves, in spite of being decent-enough human beings—certainly not war criminals—and in spite of the many self-help books urging us to befriend and think positively about ourselves.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=345","value":345},"note":null},{"text":"all I can say, from my vantage point as a teacher and anthologist of the personal essay, is that an odor of self-disgust mars many performances in this genre and keeps many would-be personal writers from developing into full-fledged professionals.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=347","value":347},"note":"Self-respect (and even love) has now moved from being an emotional prerogative that I ought to act on and turned into a career imperative that I need to deal with. Maybe this problem, as so many are, is related to itself. I don’t love myself so I don’t think I should work hard to love myself. But I do love my writing and so I will try to fix my problem in order to save it."},{"text":"diving into the wreck of personality with gusto.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=350","value":350},"note":null},{"text":"The proper alternative to self-dislike is not being pleased with oneself—a smug complacency that comes across as equally distasteful—but being curious about oneself. Such","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=350","value":350},"note":null},{"text":"am convinced that self-amusement is a discipline that can be learned; it can be practiced even by people such as myself, who have at times a strong self-mistrust.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=353","value":353},"note":null},{"text":"may be very tired of myself in everyday life, but once I start narrating a situation or set of ideas on the page, I begin to see my I in a comic light, and I maneuver him so that he will best amuse the reader.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=354","value":354},"note":null},{"text":"There is also considerable character dimensionality to be derived from expressing your opinions, prejudices, half-baked ideas, etc., provided you are willing to analyze the flaws in your thinking and to consider arguments against your fixations and not be too solemn about it all.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=357","value":357},"note":null},{"text":"fetched, mischievous","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=360","value":360},"note":null},{"text":"consciousness can only take us so far in the illumination of character.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=363","value":363},"note":null},{"text":"There is something off-putting about a nonfiction story in which the I is infinitely more sinned against than sinning.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=366","value":366},"note":null},{"text":"By showing our complicity in the world’s stock of sorrow, we convince the reader of our reality and even gain his sympathy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=367","value":367},"note":null},{"text":"it is that remorse is often the starting point for good personal writing, whose working out brings the necessary self-forgiveness (not to mention self-amusement) that is necessary to help us outgrow shame.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=372","value":372},"note":null},{"text":"not self-absorbed navel gazing, but rather a potential release from narcissism. It means you have achieved sufficient distance to begin to see yourself in the round: a necessary precondition to transcending the ego—or at least writing personal nonfiction that can touch other people.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=380","value":380},"note":null},{"text":"marrow often shows itself in those moments where the writer analyzes the meaning of his or her experience.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=387","value":387},"note":null},{"text":"willingness to wrest as much understanding as one is humanly capable of arriving at—these","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=388","value":388},"note":null},{"text":"simpatico.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=390","value":390},"note":null},{"text":"With me, it goes further: I have always been deeply attracted to just those passages where the writing takes an analytical, interpretative, generalizing turn: they seem to me the dessert, the reward of prose.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=390","value":390},"note":null},{"text":"would do well to tell us or at least hint at how old he or she was at the time the story begins, where the episode was taking place geographically and in what epoch, and something of the protagonist’s family background, class, religion, and dominant mental state at the time.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=411","value":411},"note":null},{"text":"brio,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=418","value":418},"note":null},{"text":"(consider the strong essayistic tendency in novelists from Fielding, George Eliot, Balzac, Tolstoy down to Proust, Mann, Musil, Kundera, Sebald, Foster Wallace),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=425","value":425},"note":"Consider this a reading list"},{"text":"“I cannot wait until page two hundred for the intelligent narrator to arrive! The intelligent narrator must be present from page one onward!”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=457","value":457},"note":null},{"text":"The truth is that readers easily accept the convention of a child narrator using adult vocabulary; even semicolons.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=461","value":461},"note":null},{"text":"They are constantly taking the measure of the distance between their prior and present selves.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=471","value":471},"note":null},{"text":"there are no Grandma Moseses, no outsider primitives of the essay or memoir.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=491","value":491},"note":null},{"text":"Since I was in a hurry, growing up, to forfeit my innocence and achieve a disenchanted, worldly wisdom as fast as possible, I have had no trouble with this trade-off.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=491","value":491},"note":null},{"text":"connoisseurs of downers,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=498","value":498},"note":null},{"text":"nine-year-olds have moments of precocious cognition and startlingly shrewd insight into the people around them, and teenagers, when not being stereotypically adolescent, find within themselves shards of their forty-year-old mothers’ weary understanding, alongside fragments of their doll-playing, six-year-old selves.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=500","value":500},"note":null},{"text":"when you are immersed in a feeling, the context disappears and the I-character becomes generic.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=507","value":507},"note":null},{"text":"To reflect deeply on the wounds inflicted on oneself in the past might lead to an admission of complicity in that suffering.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=510","value":510},"note":null},{"text":"“In the struggle between yourself and the world, you must side with the world.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=511","value":511},"note":null},{"text":"I counsel against constructing a narrative around one’s victimization—always being in the right, more sinned against than sinning—if for no other reason than that the self-righteous protagonist becomes repellent.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=516","value":516},"note":null},{"text":"We do have some choice in what we make of our trials, both early and late.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=521","value":521},"note":null},{"text":"Some of my students’ resistance to retrospective analysis may have come partly from an unwillingness to relinquish their rage.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=521","value":521},"note":null},{"text":"was urging them, I suppose, to move from resentment and self-hate to self-amusement, or at least to stoical realism.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=522","value":522},"note":null},{"text":"being a writing teacher is never merely a matter of teaching writing. I have hopes for my charges’ psychological well-being that go beyond their ability to write clarifying prose.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=524","value":524},"note":null},{"text":"belletristic","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=532","value":532},"note":null},{"text":"undulating, aqueous layers of awareness and repudiation of the truth.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=533","value":533},"note":null},{"text":"scraps of reality the mind does let in seem to circulate freely with the unreality bits, rather than getting shunted off to a denial safe-deposit box.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=534","value":534},"note":null},{"text":"we do need to trust that the narrator is leveling with us.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=552","value":552},"note":null},{"text":"(William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things”)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=598","value":598},"note":null},{"text":"When Stendhal delivers a witty epigram about jealousy, or Oscar Wilde about hypocrisy, we allow for the standard deviation from the norm,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=604","value":604},"note":null},{"text":"to catch the hunches, doubts, and digressive associations that dart through their brains.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=615","value":615},"note":null},{"text":"Then you can truly engage the reader in the adventure of following you, as you try to come up with deep, unexpected insights, without censoring.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=620","value":620},"note":null},{"text":"isosceles triangle epiphany in the modern short story,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=632","value":632},"note":null},{"text":"examine my own practice as an essayist, since I have always managed to come up with endings until now, and so, arguing backwards, I must know how to conclude these things. Right?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=636","value":636},"note":null},{"text":"mental freedom he exhibited, which allowed him to chase his mind from subject to digression: to start off his essay “Of Coaches” talking about sneezing, then move on to seasickness, fear, riding in coaches, fancy dress and ostentatious display, liberal princes, Roman amphitheaters, Chinese artillery, and segue into a stunning denunciation of the Europeans’ treatment of natives in the conquest of Mexico, only to return in the end to coaches and royal litters.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=649","value":649},"note":null},{"text":"“a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=655","value":655},"note":null},{"text":"likely to skitter everywhere, from the ancient world to current events, meantime conflating the personal with the historical and biological.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=679","value":679},"note":null},{"text":"The little habits or quirks that he confesses—how he scratches his ears, eats salt meats, sleeps covered up, loves sauces of all kinds, bites his tongue in his haste to eat—all these comic details have their place in the larger scheme of self-acceptance.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=693","value":693},"note":null},{"text":"“the most barbarous or our maladies is to despise our being.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=695","value":695},"note":null},{"text":"“They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=696","value":696},"note":null},{"text":"“closure, that solipsism that Americans use to replace grief”),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=701","value":701},"note":null},{"text":"Hazlitt’s affecting if creepy Liber Amoris, which tells the sad tale of his unrequited infatuation with a barmaid.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=711","value":711},"note":null},{"text":"Titian.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=716","value":716},"note":null},{"text":"By the end of a Hazlitt essay one feels the author has had a strenuous wrestling match between antagonistic sides of his persona and has pinned one of them to the mat.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=716","value":716},"note":null},{"text":"Montaigne let us in on many of his behavorial quirks but ultimately regarded himself as sane, ordinary, and representative of everyone; whereas Hazlitt saw himself as neurotic, unbalanced, and of a character fundamentally problematic—but unitary.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=724","value":724},"note":null},{"text":"An interesting aside is that contemporary literary theory has cast into doubt the whole notion of the unitary self, positing that the inner core is in fact a fiction, and what we call a “self” may be more a collective reality, conditioned by the media and the expectations of others; that in any case, we are composed finally of language, and language is a product of what is outside us as much as what is within us.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=727","value":727},"note":null},{"text":"I have long held the personal essay to be one of the last bastions of the orthodoxy of the unitary self: those of us who are drawn to practicing this form tend to believe in our possessing a core reality or self, and we would cling to this conviction even if critical theory disproved it beyond doubt.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=730","value":730},"note":null},{"text":"he channels the wisdom of the ancients and Erasmus as though they were occupying as much space in his cerebral cortex as himself;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=734","value":734},"note":null},{"text":"his mind floats on an undulating current of inconstant thoughts, which his ego is paralyzed to control;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=735","value":735},"note":null},{"text":"even while enumerating each little habit of his, he conveys the sense of having a permeable membrane coterminous with everyone else’s:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=735","value":735},"note":null},{"text":"a poem must be short or face the risk of mounting imperfection,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=751","value":751},"note":null},{"text":"students are encouraged to approach the canon as though everything included in it were perfect, more or less, and it is their job to figure out how the parts fit together—a mistaken assumption, which nonetheless can yield useful insights.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=754","value":754},"note":null},{"text":"It’s always good strategy to invoke death at the end of a literary piece,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=759","value":759},"note":null},{"text":"mitered and joined to a tee.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=763","value":763},"note":null},{"text":"can’t forgive White for raising the form’s standards so grievously.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=764","value":764},"note":null},{"text":"“The Death of a Moth,”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=765","value":765},"note":null},{"text":"I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=792","value":792},"note":null},{"text":"Baldwin’s sentences move adroitly from the general (the formal pronoun “one”) to the personal “I”;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=798","value":798},"note":null},{"text":"“some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=806","value":806},"note":null},{"text":"An essay may end in an image, an epigram, a line of dialogue, a joke, a question, a quote, an ellipsis . . .","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=811","value":811},"note":null},{"text":"The ending may recapitulate some phrase introduced earlier, like the return of a refrain, or it may tweak that previous notion and transform it, give it a different spin.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=812","value":812},"note":null},{"text":"Something fresh, in any case.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=814","value":814},"note":null},{"text":"thinking in public,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=817","value":817},"note":null},{"text":"the essayist can produce a nonplatitudinous larger meaning at the end, fine; if not, then an adequate ending may be achieved by adding a few more pages, it almost doesn’t matter what, just so long as the illusion is sustained that the narrative arc has been completed, which may be nothing more than the reader’s sense that the author has grappled as honestly, bravely, and variously as possible with the problems introduced.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=820","value":820},"note":null},{"text":"full mental meal and can walk away from the table satisfied.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=824","value":824},"note":null},{"text":"“Ozick opens the essay with a statement that operates like a road map or a program at a musical event: ‘This is about reading; a drugstore in winter; the gold leaf on the dome of the Boston State House; also loss, panic and dread.’ By beginning with this statement, Ozick not only familiarizes the reader with the places where the essay will travel, she also piques the reader’s curiosity. What do these things have in common? the reader wants to know. . . . As the short essay comes to a close, the narrator, now elderly, grows less certain and self-assured than the former youthful persona we met in the opening paragraph. The narrator, who started out making explicit statements about tangible objects, concludes the essay by asking questions about abstract concepts such as loss, panic and dread. Ozick ends with the following question, ‘Your hair is whitening, you are a well of tears, what you meant to do (beauty and justice) you have not done, papa and mama are under the earth, you live in panic and dread, the future shrinks and darkens, stories are only vapor, your inmost craving is for nothing but an old scarred pen, and what, God knows, is that?’ ”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=826","value":826},"note":null},{"text":"Natalia Ginzburg’s “He and I.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=848","value":848},"note":null},{"text":"If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale, he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago on the Via Nazionale, two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=852","value":852},"note":null},{"text":"the camera pulling back to convey nostalgia, regret, perspective, ironic wisdom, and the invisible workings of destiny.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=858","value":858},"note":null},{"text":"The excitement that Montaigne felt when he realized he was doing something unprecedented by studying the universe of his own mind is available to the contemporary essayist to recover, however fleetingly.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=863","value":863},"note":null},{"text":"If I sense the reader tapping her foot, I know I must wind up this deal.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=866","value":866},"note":null},{"text":"Montaigne’s conviction that everything is connected to everything else,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=866","value":866},"note":null},{"text":"which would encourage any essay to open out fanlike to a thousand different associations, I realize we live in times where there are many more entertainment options than the page.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=867","value":867},"note":null},{"text":"am not interested after all in perfection; this ending will serve, it is good enough, it will have to do.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=877","value":877},"note":null},{"text":"","isNoteOnly":true,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=878","value":878},"note":"Weak"},{"text":"“All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion. Bashful, insolent, chaste, lascivious, talkative, taciturn, tough, delicate, clever, stupid, surly, affable, lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; liberal, miserly, and prodigal: all this I see in myself to some extent depending on how I turn; and whoever studies himself really attentively finds in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this gyration and this discord. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=881","value":881},"note":null},{"text":"Since essays require more than one word, this multiplicity and fragmentation of self comes in handy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=885","value":885},"note":null},{"text":"I often take my own foot-dragging regarding some writing project and try to understand it and turn it into a point of entry,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=892","value":892},"note":null},{"text":"To write a panegyric to love, peace, or brotherhood would be to invite yawns of agreement.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=899","value":899},"note":null},{"text":"For an essayist to strike a mischievous pose, sometimes all that is necessary is to question skeptically a received truth.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=899","value":899},"note":null},{"text":"if, in the end, the writer’s attack on an ostensible positive fails to convince us, all the more strengthened will be our attachment to that particular good, having withstood the trial of devil’s advocacy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=903","value":903},"note":null},{"text":"In testing the validity of certain pieties, the contrarian essay performs a valuable function, like the null hypothesis in experimental science.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=904","value":904},"note":null},{"text":"The “against” strategy is a gauntlet thrown down not only to the reader but to the writer as well, who must now come up with convincing arguments, or at least entertaining rants.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=906","value":906},"note":null},{"text":"provoke without insulting—to","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=917","value":917},"note":null},{"text":"“A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=952","value":952},"note":null},{"text":"In a sense, the contrarian essayist, by presenting himself or herself from the start as an oddball, allows the reader a space to entertain forbidden or antisocial thoughts with minimal risk.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=965","value":965},"note":"Comedians do this too. A lot of comedy employs this contrarian tactic."},{"text":"writer is trying to get a purchase on the moment until something better comes along.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1004","value":1004},"note":"???"},{"text":"this firecracker under the sternum seemed to me especially presumptuous: the reporter, an otherwise highly reliable witness, was crawling right into the poor man’s skin, or pretending to, and had no business being there.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1016","value":1016},"note":null},{"text":"dramatizing his dilemma with fireworks in his sternum remains a piece of self-indulgent somatic speculation.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1018","value":1018},"note":null},{"text":"The harder imaginative task for nonfiction writers is that of seeing the pattern in actual experience and putting it into some order, so that what had seemed random is given narrative significance and symbolic resonance. Understanding is thick imagining.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1025","value":1025},"note":null},{"text":"vanguard","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1044","value":1044},"note":null},{"text":"held out for the idea that nonfiction, including personal essays, has a relationship to factual reality and self-testimony that makes it fundamentally different from fiction.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1048","value":1048},"note":null},{"text":"find myself sitting at my computer, trying to home in closer and closer to the underlying shapes of experience.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1052","value":1052},"note":null},{"text":"have a conviction that life itself has forms underneath it: that there are connections to be made between experience and memory that are not purely subjective but that wait patiently to be brought to the surface.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1053","value":1053},"note":null},{"text":"intuit that life has a shape, has a meaning, and that by working to make a story come alive, a writer can happen upon these underlying configurations, arcs, or ovals. When memoirists or essayists follow closely on the trail of some developing suspense, and discover a through-line, meanwhile cutting away all irrelevancies, we are not fictionalizing, we are serving the innate shape of reality.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1054","value":1054},"note":null},{"text":"Still, I cling to the conviction that there is some organic thread to the things that happen to us, which lurks patiently in experience, hoping to be found out.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1059","value":1059},"note":"Damn this is good."},{"text":"is a little like a potter throwing a pot and “feeling” the way the clay wants to go, or the architect Louis Kahn asking what the stones want to be, or Michelangelo carving into a piece of marble to find the shape waiting underneath. One doesn’t have to be a genius like Michelangelo or Kahn to do this; all humble craftsmen know this moment when the form asserts itself.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1060","value":1060},"note":null},{"text":"I can try to recapture memories as crisply as language will allow;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1064","value":1064},"note":null},{"text":"Facts have implications, which, it seems to me, are ignored at the nonfiction writer’s peril.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1072","value":1072},"note":null},{"text":"combine them into a single composite bigot.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1078","value":1078},"note":null},{"text":"Making things up, bending the facts, throws off my attempt to get as close as possible to the shape underlying experience or to the psychology that flows from the precisely real.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1086","value":1086},"note":null},{"text":"We are always responsible for any pain our actions might give; and there is no “get out of jail” card from some professional writer or teacher that will relieve you of that burden.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1098","value":1098},"note":null},{"text":"She said she would still come to my book party but would tell everyone I was her nephew, not her son.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1122","value":1122},"note":null},{"text":"Befriend only people who are too poor to hire lawyers to sue you.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1137","value":1137},"note":null},{"text":"If you plan to write about friendship, make lots of friends, because you are bound to lose a few.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1138","value":1138},"note":null},{"text":"To be a writer is a monstrously arrogant act. It presumes that you should be listened to for pages on end.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1147","value":1147},"note":null},{"text":"know that when I was in high school I seemed to be in a continual battle with adults to justify my budding self-esteem against charges that I was getting swell-headed.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1152","value":1152},"note":null},{"text":"they had sampled all of life;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1159","value":1159},"note":null},{"text":"And someday I may write something great. Why deny myself the possibility?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1177","value":1177},"note":null},{"text":"Have you ever seen two writers of medium reputation being introduced to each other for the first time? Each is probably thinking, “How can he be a writer? I am the writer.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1179","value":1179},"note":null},{"text":"Each sees himself as the emperor of an unrecognized kingdom. It is like that case of the three mental patients in Ypsilanti State Hospital, each with the unshakable conviction that he was Jesus Christ, even after being put together with the other two who had the same delusion.*","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1181","value":1181},"note":null},{"text":"But they get by somehow: they have a knack, survivor’s instincts, the canny ability to foreground what they do best, an in with the zeitgeist.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1184","value":1184},"note":null},{"text":"Good writers down through the ages have known how to cut through the thickness of complexity when it suited them and simply declare.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1202","value":1202},"note":null},{"text":"Sometimes a writer may even bring into existence, through assertion, more wisdom than he or she possessed before beginning to write the sentence.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1203","value":1203},"note":null},{"text":"Good writers are always trying to write above their heads, to hit on understandings beyond their conscious knowledge, through fortuitous word choice.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1206","value":1206},"note":null},{"text":"whereas there is some doubt, after reading biographies of his life, that he actually possessed such scores of sagacity.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1209","value":1209},"note":"Good ya ;)"},{"text":"would try to elicit from my employers their own ideas on the subject, only to discover that they had none; that was why they were hiring a ghostwriter.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1215","value":1215},"note":null},{"text":"pretend to be this cultivated, self-assured, supremely balanced arbiter who had only a glancing relationship to my everyday self.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1225","value":1225},"note":null},{"text":"projecting in print the appearance of a stable, unitary self—a core around which the different elected tonalities of the moment could spin.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1229","value":1229},"note":null},{"text":"I could only communicate an aspect of myself: sometimes more friendly, sometimes more contrarian.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1232","value":1232},"note":null},{"text":"Whichever path I chose could never reveal my entire self: the linearity of language made that impossible.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1233","value":1233},"note":null},{"text":"because no matter what I said, it wouldn’t be “me,” exactly, but at best an approximation, like a ghostwriter channeling another’s voice, I felt freer to speak.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1234","value":1234},"note":null},{"text":"I understood that I could only do so within the context of a partial projection of my whole self: a sincerity within an insincerity.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1236","value":1236},"note":null},{"text":"to find the shape underlying ordinary happenings, through pressing them into artful form.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1251","value":1251},"note":null},{"text":"It is almost as if by relating an experience in a coherent, suspenseful, attention-getting way, I have mastered its meaning.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1252","value":1252},"note":null},{"text":"Of course I probably haven’t, but I’m no longer so confused and disturbed by it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1253","value":1253},"note":null},{"text":"Part of the storytelling ability is simply the anticipation of boredom and the introduction of a sudden heightening or surprise.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1257","value":1257},"note":null},{"text":"the ability to exchange experiences. . . .","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1263","value":1263},"note":null},{"text":"what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own).","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1271","value":1271},"note":null},{"text":"rationalization is what two-thirds of my stories are about.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1281","value":1281},"note":null},{"text":"As I go about my daily life, I’m turning it into a story.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1283","value":1283},"note":null},{"text":"If something peculiar happens to me at the grocery store or the dry cleaners, I already start shaping it into a narrative the moment I’m out the door, and I bring it home to my wife the way a cat presents a captured mouse to its master.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1283","value":1283},"note":null},{"text":"psychotherapy helps a patient make a “tellable myth”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1291","value":1291},"note":null},{"text":"Pillow Book","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1324","value":1324},"note":null},{"text":"Writing is one way of self-making.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1325","value":1325},"note":null},{"text":"The writer’s notebook has been variously compared to a laboratory, a mirror, a brainstorming tool, an icebreaker, a wailing wall, a junk drawer, a confessional, a postcard to oneself, a singing in the shower, a jump-start cable, an aide-mémoire, an archive, an anthology, a warehouse, a tourist’s camera, a snooping device, a sharpener of observation, a survival kit, a way of documenting mental illness, a meditation practice, a masturbation, a therapist, a spiritual adviser, a compost bin, a punching bag, a sounding board, a friend.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1327","value":1327},"note":null},{"text":"I bogged down around the period of my early twenties, when I couldn’t stand to listen anymore to the callow fellow I was then;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1348","value":1348},"note":null},{"text":"I was massively repeating myself, because I didn’t have more than a half-dozen emotions.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1370","value":1370},"note":null},{"text":"I was like a squirrel hiding away nuts for an older me who would raid the stash.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1376","value":1376},"note":null},{"text":"Gertrude Stein says somewhere that those traits of ours which most embarrass us when we are young, we later come to see as our charms.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1404","value":1404},"note":null},{"text":"“He did not argue or try to persuade. He had no investment in winning over his audience to his opinion; accordingly, he had no fear of being refuted. On the contrary, he expected that some of the ideas he expressed would change, as they did in later essays.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1411","value":1411},"note":null},{"text":"Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, Carl Klaus’s The Made-Up Self, David Shields’ Reality Hunger, John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay, Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories, or my own humble efforts.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1430","value":1430},"note":null},{"text":"Figures of Speech by Arthur Quinn, or Writing with Clarity and Style: A Guide to Rhetorical Devices for Contemporary Writers by Robert A. Harris.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1461","value":1461},"note":null},{"text":"The pressure to answer such internalized-reader questions as “Why are you telling us all this?” and “What are you getting at?” can help drive an essay, can give it pleasurable suspense and forward momentum.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1463","value":1463},"note":null},{"text":"continue to make the same interpersonal mistakes in my domestic life, in my friendships, in my handling of students, despite the embarrassment they have caused me and the pain they have caused others, I have to wonder how much is in my control and how much is not.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1481","value":1481},"note":null},{"text":"yes, I am an individual and I damned well have a self, which I rely on with comfort and consolation—though I just can’t recall how I came by it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1489","value":1489},"note":null},{"text":"Sooner or later you run out of traumas and triumphs to recount; you have chewed up the tastiest limbs of your life story, and research becomes an alternative to further self-cannibalization.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1515","value":1515},"note":null},{"text":"You begin to see your experience as part of a larger pattern, be it sociological, historical, psychological, anthropological, cultural, political, or theological: these lenses can supply useful new perspectives to your private tale.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1520","value":1520},"note":null},{"text":"what do anthropologists say about this problem? What do novelists and memoirists say about it?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1527","value":1527},"note":null},{"text":"In other words, the proportion between self and world may shift in the process of researching.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1532","value":1532},"note":null},{"text":"Essayists and memoirists who are already scientists or doctors have an advantage over the rest of us, in that they can convey the wisdom and knowledge derived from their research with an easy authority.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1551","value":1551},"note":"Big whoop"},{"text":"I could have stayed home and merely reflected on it, but instead I rushed off to the library to learn how the medieval rabbis and midrash writers and modern biblical scholars interpreted this seemingly cowardly act by a patriarch.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1557","value":1557},"note":null},{"text":"After a few weeks at the library, on the Internet, or in the field, you notice that the sources are telling you something you already know, and you grasp the major schools of thought, their differences of opinion.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1566","value":1566},"note":null},{"text":"what you are looking for, subconsciously or not, is the oddity that will spark your imagination—not","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1570","value":1570},"note":null},{"text":"Ambivalence being the essayist’s nectar,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1587","value":1587},"note":null},{"text":"D’Agata, Eula Biss, Lia Purpura, Ander Monson, and Mary Cappello—more","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1595","value":1595},"note":"Reading list"},{"text":"The Technicians of the Sacred.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1605","value":1605},"note":null},{"text":"It seems to me that reasoning has long found a home in the essay, and I would not want to see it made unwelcome there.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1609","value":1609},"note":null},{"text":"let thought accrue to some purpose.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1611","value":1611},"note":null},{"text":"It is the writer’s thought, or consciousness, let us call it, that hooks me, not the ostensible plot.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1612","value":1612},"note":null},{"text":"But as one of the chief dodos,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1649","value":1649},"note":null},{"text":"All this I offer by way of assurance: the personal essay is not headed for a great fall in the Facebook Age, because it never rose very high to begin with.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1653","value":1653},"note":null},{"text":"We frequently make the error of believing in aesthetic progress, as though artistic expression were required to follow an agenda that pointed in only one direction.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1663","value":1663},"note":null},{"text":"So modernism ostensibly taught us that, after Pound, there was no going back to Swinburne, and after Hemingway, no possible return to Henry James.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1664","value":1664},"note":null},{"text":"Then along came David Foster Wallace, and his mighty confusions and perplexities, and Nicholson Baker, piling clause on clause,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1668","value":1668},"note":"Nut"},{"text":"Rick Moody’s","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1669","value":1669},"note":null},{"text":"W. G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Milan Kundera, Roberto Bolaño, José Saramago, Javier Marías,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1669","value":1669},"note":null},{"text":"Because some thoughts cannot be expressed in the Strunk and White, keep-it-simple-and-clear recipe, they require a more sinuous, self-reflective, devious syntax.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1672","value":1672},"note":null},{"text":"Eventually, quality will sort itself out: that is already happening to some extent.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1684","value":1684},"note":"Well, maybe."},{"text":"Future personal essayists, brought up on Facebook, will undoubtedly notice different details from those we did; in any case, they will have no shortage of things to notice.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1691","value":1691},"note":null},{"text":"with his sheer strangeness, which raises the question of authorial intent. For Lamb is not your Everyman, not your average Joe, but a very precisely and peculiarly ordered sensibility, whose acute sense of his difference from other people was both a source of strength and loneliness.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1706","value":1706},"note":null},{"text":"He had the quintessential personal essayist’s ability to see his own personality as problematic, and to dramatize the resulting tensions.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1734","value":1734},"note":null},{"text":"East India House,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1741","value":1741},"note":null},{"text":"his beloved sister Mary, under a great nervous strain from having to attend to her ailing parents and run the household while taking in needlework, stabbed their mother to death and wounded their father.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1742","value":1742},"note":null},{"text":"ingenious labyrinthine inlets—those indispensable side-intelligencers.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1781","value":1781},"note":null},{"text":"He sounds drunk on language.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1782","value":1782},"note":null},{"text":"archaic, mildewed vocabulary,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1783","value":1783},"note":null},{"text":"averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;—***","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1791","value":1791},"note":null},{"text":"topsy-turvyism","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1852","value":1852},"note":null},{"text":"Hazlitt’s syntax mimics the spider’s hesitant, stutter-step movements;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1864","value":1864},"note":null},{"text":"“A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have crushed the little reptile to death—my philosophy has got beyond that—I bear the creature no ill will, but still I hate the very sight of it.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1865","value":1865},"note":null},{"text":"We will pass over Hazlitt’s taxonomical error:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1867","value":1867},"note":"Laughed out loud"},{"text":"“Every involuntary repulsion that arises in your mind give heed unto. It is the surface of a central truth.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1875","value":1875},"note":null},{"text":"The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all round it as dark as possible,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1881","value":1881},"note":null},{"text":"happiness we seek is not arrived at through a cessation in tension but through the proper amount of stimulation, which must be endlessly recalibrated.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1887","value":1887},"note":null},{"text":"We go through life like an electromagnetic needle nervously agitating between the undesirable poles of alpha-flat zombie and tortured suffering, trying to find the right voltage of bracingly vivifying pleasure/pain in the middle.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1888","value":1888},"note":null},{"text":"essayist’s gift for elaboration,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1892","value":1892},"note":null},{"text":"the heart rouses itself in its native lair,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1896","value":1896},"note":null},{"text":"Both authors saw man as a creature needing to feel free, even if by intentionally spiting one’s own self-interests.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1901","value":1901},"note":null},{"text":"“We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1920","value":1920},"note":null},{"text":"it is very difficult to find a true friend who is exactly at one’s level,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1935","value":1935},"note":null},{"text":"walking books","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1948","value":1948},"note":null},{"text":"Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and ignorance of ourselves—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong: always disappointed where I placed most reliance: the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and despise myself? Indeed I do: and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=1998","value":1998},"note":null},{"text":"Good essays often hold off one final insight until the very end;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2006","value":2006},"note":null},{"text":"Some 1,800 pages later, I am in thrall to, in love with, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2028","value":2028},"note":null},{"text":"They sounded oracular, abstract, dizzyingly inspired, like visionary sermons: the thinking and language spectacular, the man somehow missing.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2032","value":2032},"note":"That’s because they *were* sermons."},{"text":"He was dualism ambulant.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2038","value":2038},"note":null},{"text":"I offer myself, if it’s not too late, as his pupil.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2041","value":2041},"note":null},{"text":"In Emerson’s journals you see how gradually, hesitantly, incrementally his belief system accrued over decades, through testing hunches and questioning himself.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2060","value":2060},"note":null},{"text":"(his Big Ideas were syntheses, his throwaway perceptions truly original)","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2062","value":2062},"note":null},{"text":"Emerson and the Art of the Diary,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2070","value":2070},"note":null},{"text":"Emerson’s journals are the lost ark of nineteenth-century American literature, the equivalent for literary nonfiction of Moby Dick in fiction or Leaves of Grass in poetry.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2072","value":2072},"note":null},{"text":"they are an archive of reflections, not a shaped work of art.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2074","value":2074},"note":null},{"text":"you can start off writing about anything, however insignificant, and eventually all thoughts and digressions are somehow connected to each other by an invisible web.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2076","value":2076},"note":null},{"text":"At these journals’ core is Emerson’s sense that it is crucial to record one’s fugitive ideas—to note “the meteorology of thought.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2077","value":2077},"note":null},{"text":"What I respond to most in Emerson is his even-keeled preoccupation with daily life, the daily mental round, and with that, a resistance to the bullying aspects of apocalyptic dread.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2079","value":2079},"note":null},{"text":"It seemed to me as if I had written the book myself in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought & experience.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2087","value":2087},"note":null},{"text":"No book before or since was ever so much to me as that.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2087","value":2087},"note":null},{"text":"there’s precious little smut in Emerson,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2089","value":2089},"note":null},{"text":"pioneering experimental scientists of consciousness, combing their mental lives for raw data;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2091","value":2091},"note":null},{"text":"both believed that life was at bottom flux, transition, undulation;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2092","value":2092},"note":null},{"text":"Montaigne’s essays meander conversationally, whereas Emerson’s are chiseled, taut.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2096","value":2096},"note":null},{"text":"Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2108","value":2108},"note":null},{"text":"under every deep a lower deep opens.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2110","value":2110},"note":null},{"text":"As soon as I perceive that my man does not know me, but is making his speech to the man that happens to be here, I wish to gag him.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2120","value":2120},"note":null},{"text":"for Emerson, conversation was ideally a space where interiorities could be exchanged.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2121","value":2121},"note":null},{"text":"always wondered if he would be better off alone.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2123","value":2123},"note":null},{"text":"Is living in one’s head the special malady of writers, or is it the universal human condition?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2126","value":2126},"note":null},{"text":"Every man is an infinitely repellent orb.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2146","value":2146},"note":null},{"text":"This melancholy conviction of universal solipsism was the reverse side of Emerson’s advocacy of self-reliance.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2146","value":2146},"note":null},{"text":"“Better be a nettle in the side of your companion than be his echo,”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2162","value":2162},"note":null},{"text":"“My way to help the government is to write sonnets.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2165","value":2165},"note":null},{"text":"Just as he made it a point to listen to both sides of every question, so he attended to the split voices in his own thinking.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2177","value":2177},"note":null},{"text":"“My only secret was that all men were my masters. I never saw one who was not my superior.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2186","value":2186},"note":null},{"text":"For a long while he longed for a spiritual guide, a superior being who could lead him upward. But he concluded in the end that one must seek the God within.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2187","value":2187},"note":null},{"text":"The one thing he resisted was embracing suffering in order to feel deeper.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2205","value":2205},"note":null},{"text":"if the people who were honoring his intellect had read the same books he had, they wouldn’t think he was so smart.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2243","value":2243},"note":null},{"text":"’Tis strange, that it is not in vogue to commit hari-kari as the Japanese do at 60. Nature is so insulting in her hints & notices, does not pull you out by the sleeve, but pulls out your teeth, tears off your hair in patches, steals your eyesight, twists your face into an ugly mask, in short, puts all contumelies upon you, without in the least abating your zeal to make a good appearance, and all this at the same time that she is moulding the new figures around you into wonderful beauty which, of course, is almost making your plight worse.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2245","value":2245},"note":null},{"text":"after having spent 1,800 pages in the innermost chamber of his mind.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2254","value":2254},"note":null},{"text":"They are only beginning to realize that the world is difficult and dangerous, that they are, themselves, tormentingly complex and that the years that stretch before them promise to be more dangerous than the years that are behind. And they always seem to be wrestling, in a private chamber to which no grownup has access, with monumental decisions.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2264","value":2264},"note":null},{"text":"“Notes of a Native Son.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2279","value":2279},"note":"Glad we agree on this."},{"text":"(whom he later learned was actually his stepfather, though he never went back and altered the essay to reflect that fact),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2281","value":2281},"note":null},{"text":"with the fact that he knew he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2291","value":2291},"note":null},{"text":"his ennoblings (“tribal chieftains”) and deflations, often in the same sentence;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2312","value":2312},"note":null},{"text":"“Equal in Paris,”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2326","value":2326},"note":null},{"text":"the kind of résumé that used to appear on the bios of novelists before there were MFA programs.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2382","value":2382},"note":null},{"text":"circles a subject from many vantage points, teasing and digressing, piling up gorgeously angled syntaxes and frank admissions while frustrating tidy conclusions—all","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2385","value":2385},"note":null},{"text":"the clouds forgather to parade zoologically overhead,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2420","value":2420},"note":null},{"text":"felt linked to the whole matrix, as you either do or you don’t through the rest of your life.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2420","value":2420},"note":null},{"text":"the next best thing to sleeping with a much younger woman is to protect her from the machinations of men of her own age.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2469","value":2469},"note":null},{"text":"if I try to replay scenes of lovemaking with one of the women I have genuinely loved, it swiftly ramifies into the complexities of the entire relationship—the sadness, the disconnects. The sex in the package cannot be extricated from the stymieing cowardice or passivity, the misperceptions that diluted our passion.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2472","value":2472},"note":null},{"text":"having sampled the lives of several dozen representative strangers,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2519","value":2519},"note":null},{"text":"fear that you are not really alive unless the media have fastened their attentions on you.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2531","value":2531},"note":null},{"text":"we are individuals, in the old humanist sense of the term, if only by virtue of our petty spite, our unresolved desires, and our inexplicable tenderness for the world’s detritus.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2537","value":2537},"note":null},{"text":"Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, and Dave Eggers.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2545","value":2545},"note":null},{"text":"experimental stylists have camped out in the intersection between high and low culture, fiction and nonfiction, reliable witnessing and hypertrophied rationalization.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2546","value":2546},"note":null},{"text":"He shares with Montaigne the conviction that it is precisely these secret little peculiarities, barely acknowledged by oneself, that make a person discretely individual.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2559","value":2559},"note":null},{"text":"“a sense of language and form equal to the finest fiction.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2598","value":2598},"note":"Really? I liked it, but..."},{"text":"the lonely miracle of exquisite prose.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2606","value":2606},"note":null},{"text":"once you have grasped that there are wonderful prose writers in every field under the sun—articulate, expressive, cultivated practitioners—you can better figure out how to expand your focus from the personal to the world-embracing.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B008J2AFP6&location=2661","value":2661},"note":null}]}