“I am sick to death of cleverness,” wrote the very clever Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Everybody is so clever nowadays.... The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was tormented by the thought that he was “merely clever” and criticized himself and others for valuing cleverness over genuine wisdom. Søren Kierkegaard, who placed a genuinely religious life before a merely aesthetic one, wrote that “the law for the religious is to act in opposition to cleverness.”
Is there really something wrong with being clever? Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes, its associations remain overwhelmingly positive: Cleverness is seen as a source of not just amusement but insight. Nonetheless, many will identify with Wilde’s complaint; the cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance. Our popular media are drenched in contrived knowingness and irony. And cleverness has become something like a currency online, where hordes of commenters and commentators compete for likes and subscribers with world-weary analyses and smug jokes. What should we make of this apparent degradation?
When you write with a fountain pen, you experience writing as a truly physical activity, one that affects all your senses. There’s the sort of chalky, silty smell of the ink; the scratch of the pen dragging across the page; the feel of the barrel and the cap you screw on at every pause in writing lest the ink dry faster; the glint of the wet ink that goes to matte while you examine your words. The only sense you don’t experience with a fountain pen is taste—at least I’d hope not. Having to attend to all these sensations, I think you can come close to the sort of improved mental processing neurologists ascribe to walking. And you can do it without even leaving your desk.
Folks (FOLKS), I do not want a punny Wordle. Wordle should not be cutesy, or themed, or even ironic. Wordle should stay hard and weird. No hints! Especially no thematic hints! People on Twitter should post their scores and we should be able to scoff privately. Haha what a loser it took him four guesses! When the word is “feast” you then must wonder—did he intentionally take four guesses, so as not to appear lame??
“The Twist of a Knife” is a race-against-the-clock, classic crime fiction cocktail. While paying homage to the genre’s Golden Age, Horowitz also gives a nod to Alfred Hitchcock, adopting his voyeuristic approach to storytelling and building tension as Hitchcock did in “The 39 Steps” and “Saboteur” in which innocent protagonists go on the run. Borrowing from here and there — including from himself — Horowitz has, paradoxically, created something wholly original.
A prolific correspondent and artful curator of his own life, the British novelist John le Carré left behind a trove of personal letters when he died, age 89, at the end of 2020. There were letters to family members, to politicians, to actors, to fellow novelists, to current and former spies, to star-struck strangers seeking advice, to lifelong friends and to Jane, his wife of 48 years who died, of cancer, two months after he did.
Tim Cornwell, the third of le Carré’s four sons, took on the mammoth task of organizing this unwieldy mass. The result, “A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré,” published by Viking on Dec. 6, shows the author, one of the last great practitioners of the increasingly obsolescent art of letter-writing, at his erudite, opinionated, pugilistic, witty and self-reflective best.
Like one in 10 people, Judith Thurman writes with her left hand. This “used to be considered a malign aberration,” she points out in the introduction to her new essay collection; even when she was a girl, in the McCarthyist 1950s, there were social disadvantages (of more than one kind) to being a “leftie.” Yet this now-unremarkable token of difference seems to have instilled in her a lasting affinity for people — especially women — who, in their lives and careers, have been vilified for swimming against the current.