#joshuarothman

[stephanieviperidae]

uncanny allure of unlived lives

Miller quotes Clifford Geertz, who, in “The Interpretation of Cultures,” wrote that “one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” 

He cites the critic William Empson: “There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep.” 

We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. “While growth realizes, it narrows,” Miller writes. “Plural possibilities simmer down.” 

This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.

“Unled lives are a largely modern preoccupation,” Miller writes. It used to be that, for the most part, people lived the life their parents had, or the one that the fates decreed. Today, we try to chart our own courses. The difference is reflected in the stories we tell ourselves.

[immigrationnewsdigest]

"Covington is the kind of product our social-media platforms sell to us. Perhaps we should be warier consumers..." From @joshuarothman's What the Covington Saga Reveals About Our Media Landscape https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-the-covington-saga-reveals-about-our-media-landscape

— ImmigNewsDigest (@ImmigNewsDigest) January 26, 2019

[ronnychieng]

RT @nattyover: So pleased that this essay I wrote last year about the shape-shifting structure of nature's laws will be in The Best Science and Nature Writing 2020! Thanks so much to @jaimealyse and @michiokaku for choosing it and to brilliant editor @joshuarothman. https://t.co/tfMZPvUWV5

So pleased that this essay I wrote last year about the shape-shifting structure of nature's laws will be in The Best Science and Nature Writing 2020! Thanks so much to @jaimealyse and @michiokaku for choosing it and to brilliant editor @joshuarothman. https://t.co/tfMZPvUWV5

— Natalie Wolchover (@nattyover) March 17, 2020

via Twitter https://twitter.com/ronnychieng March 18, 2020 at 10:37AM

[kukeoakhamontri]

Tweeted

ຊີວິດຄົນຊັ້ນກາງໃນ ສອ: ສູ້ຊົນບໍ່ໃຫ້ຕົນເປັນຄົນທຸກ. “Janesville” and the Costs of American Optimism.https://t.co/N4hZfBG9wJ via @joshuarothman

— kukeo (@KukeoAkhamontri) May 20, 2017

[amif2015]

CONTEXT: tenletters

Extract from The New Yorker Online

Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy By Joshua Rothman

These days, when we use the word “privacy,” it usually has a political meaning. We’re concerned with other people and how they might affect us. We think about how they could use information about us for their own ends, or interfere with decisions that are rightfully ours. We’re mindful of the lines that divide public life from private life. We have what you might call a citizen’s sense of privacy.

That’s an important way to think about privacy, obviously. But there are other ways. One of them is expressed very beautifully in “Mrs. Dalloway,” in a famous scene early in the book. It’s a flashback, from when Clarissa was a teen-ager. One night, she goes out for a walk with some friends: two annoying boys, Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf, and a girl, Sally Seton. Sally is sexy, smart, Bohemian—possessed of “a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything.” The boys drift ahead, lost in a boring conversation about Wagner, while the girls are left behind. “Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it.” Sally picks a flower from the urn and kisses Clarissa on the lips:

The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.

[Read more]

[kukeoakhamontri]

Tweeted

ສຳນັກພິມເພິ່ນສົ່ງໃຫ້ອ່ານທາງEmail.. Thanks to @thenewyorker ! Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul https://t.co/zGY53ctT0X via @joshuarothman

— kukeo (@KukeoAkhamontri) March 23, 2017