Thu, May 17, 2012
Early in the novel, "Second Person Singular," a main character known throughout the book as "the lawyer" reads a note in his wife's handwriting. "I waited for you, but you didn't come," the note says. "I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?"
The sense of intimacy leaps off the page. But the note was not written for the lawyer. It fell out of a copy of Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" he had just bought from a used-book store.
Wed, May 16, 2012
We rely on traffic lights to tell us when to go. And when to stop. We should replace that with common sense.
But if death is my end, how can it be bad for me to die? After all, once I'm dead, I don't exist. If I don't exist, how can being dead be bad for me?
Much modern architecture has grown tiresome to me. It does not gladden the heart. It doesn't seem to spring from humans. It seems drawn from mathematical axioms rather than those learned for centuries from the earth, the organic origins of building materials, the reach of hands and arms, and that which is pleasing to the eye. It is not harmonious. It holds the same note indefinitely.
It was not always so.
When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come my senses and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.
Fifteen years after the handover to mainland China, Hong Kong residents worry that their identity—and their freedoms—are slipping away.
Tue, May 15, 2012
It's often said that less is more, and the restaurant industry has taken this literally with a flurry of single and dual dish restaurants opening lately. Like the trend for shorter wine lists, menus are becoming pared down with just a handful of options. But are simple menus here to stay? Or are these restaurants just one, or two, hit wonders?
Perhaps the methodological privilege of logic is not that its principles are so weak, but that they are so strong. They are formulated at such a high level of generality that, typically, if they crash, they crash so badly that we easily notice, because the counterexamples to them are simple. If we want to identify what is genuinely distinctive of logic, we should stop overlooking its close similarities to the rest of science.
Fifty years ago today, Anthony Burgess published his ninth novel, A Clockwork Orange. Reviewing it in the Observer, Kingsley Amis called the book "the curiosity of the day". Five decades later and there is still nothing quite like it.