Observances

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect”

I take this moment to again complain about Brideshead Revisited… and how Julia’s marriage is invalid but also when it ends she decides to treat it like it is valid, because getting an annulment would be too easy, I guess. When you don’t take the mercy on offer because you think that’s for other people you’re going crazy places.

B. D. McClay, “Cooltholicism”

A quite mediocre person can do spectacularly wicked things without thereby becoming impressive.

Elizabeth Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” 64–65, quoted in Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals, 4.

Plant sequoias.

Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

The LRB is the house magazine of the British intellectual elite. In the TLS they talk to the world. In the LRB they talk to each other. The dons let their hair down. Professor Ricks tears his out. Everyone is in character. Ellipsis, allusiveness and casual snidery propagate a coffee-house atmosphere which is no doubt part of the appeal. More important, however, is that good minds are at their best when writing like this, on their mettle rather than up on stilts.

Clive James, “Lively Copy”

But one surprises within oneself the church-going urge to be more serious.

Clive James, “Lively Copy”

In this respect it is a pity the anthology has no more room than it has for extracts from the letters column, a water-hole at which proud beasts appear fortnightly and charge at one another head down, sometimes for months on end.

Clive James, “Lively Copy”

Its atmosphere of fiscal unreality made the venture hard to defend with a whole heart when it was attacked. A sitting duck dolled up like a flamingo, it was attacked often, most tellingly on grounds of waste.

Clive James, “Lively Copy”