Dhammapada dixit

"These children belong to me, these riches belong to me", thus says the foolish man, and his life is full of woe. Truly, one does not belong to oneself. Wherefore the children? Wherefore the riches?

The Dhammapada is a versified Buddhist scripture traditionally ascribed to the Buddha himself. It's literary value is disputed, but the wisdom of some of its sayings, like the quote above, seems to me beyond doubt.

I once tried to advise to this effect a woman who lived in an unhappy marriage and, as a result, pinned all her love, happiness and hope on her innocent baby son. Foreseeing a miserable youth and adulthood for the boy, a fraught relationship between the two, and a possible heart-rending break up of the sort I have known, I wrote to her: your son is not yours.

She wrote back, Oh, I assure you he is.

A kashan prayer rug

A pair of these, at Christie's, estimated at 800-1200 pounds. What a steal!

Michel agrees with Theo

Michel Houellebecq answers Theo Angelopoulos:

According to him the interest our society pretends to show in eroticism is completely artificial. Most people in fact are quickly bored by the subject but they pretend the opposite out of bizarre inverted hypocrisy. Our civilization suffers from vital exhaustion. In the days of Louis XIV, when the appetite for living was great, official culture placed the accent on denial of flesh and pleasure. Such a discourse could no longer be tolerated today. We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvelous and exciting; and it is abundantly clear that we rather doubt it.

I get the impression he considers me a fitting symbol of this vital exhaustion. No sex-drive, no ambition; no real interests, either. I don't know what to say to him: I get the impression that everyone is a bit like that. I consider myself a normal kind of guy.

I am not overfond of historicism, but agree with the claim that people are dull (no drive, no ambition, no interests). Plus, the modern overstress of eroticism strikes me also as incredible, but for a different reason: unlike Houellebecq's speaker of the passage above (a priest and therefore presumably celibate), I do know firsthand something about the sex life they have and thus know that most of it is profoundly not worth having, let alone overemphasizing.

But then their lives are profoundly not worth having, either, and against the backdrop of the life's worthlessness and boredom dull, repetitive, mechanical, textbook sex is fine, I suppose.

Last summer in Marienbad

The camera glides slowly, soundlessly through the hall, towards the chandelier and then underneath it. In the film's black and white photography it looks like glowing gigantic thousand-armed squid in some terrifying darkness-deep of the ocean. But it also looks like a Persian calligraphic inscription carved in molten light against a filigree background. As the eye dives beneath the chandelier, the shimmering outline of another appears down the hall.

A few kilos of dates for a funeral

isn't a great film -- lonely disfigured man who falls in love with a beautiful dead woman lying buried in the snow is too much of a literary concept for me: Hafez meets postmodernism. But the photography - in black and white -- is beautiful. Consider this 7 second shot (7 seconds!): crows in densely falling snow.




But the best are the credits written in a weirdly wonderful calligraphy, not to be deciphered by mere beginners like myself without the clues provided by the subtitles. So here they are with the subtitles. Note the final N in Nazaralian, drawn as a circle with its dot inside. It floats far above the line of the script on which it belongs. And Mohsen Namjou, written in two sharply descending diagonal lines. Or Mohsen Tanabandeh written on a curving line, like a saber.

Michel dixit

There are some authors who employ their talent in delicate description of varying states of soul, character traits, etc. I shall not be counted among these. All that accumulation of realistic detail, with clearly highlighted characters hogging the limelight, has always seemed pure bullshit to me, I'm sorry to say. Daniel who is Herve's friend, but who feels a certain reticence about Gerard. Paul's fantasy as embodied in Virginie, my cousin's trip to Venice... One could spend hours on this. Might as well watch lobsters marching up the side of an aquarium and it suffices for that to go to a fish restaurant.

(Michel = Houellebecq, of course).

Holland dixit

Holland Cotter on the art industry:

Never has there been so much product. Never has the American art world functioned so efficiently as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model.

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

Many of those specialists are, directly or indirectly, on the industry payroll, which is controlled by another set of personnel: the dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and — crucial in the era of art fairs — event planners who represent the industry's marketing and sales division. They are the people who scan school rosters, pick off fresh talent, direct careers and, by some inscrutable calculus, determine what will sell for what.

Not that these departments are in any way separated; ethical firewalls are not this industry's style.

I am glad that others have observed the problem of the interested art critic.

Souren dixit

Souren Melikian on art objects:

Objects are a better gauge of the true collectors' frame of mind because, unlike paintings, they do not lend themselves to hype as easily as pictures, where world-famous names give auction press offices something that can be celebrated in simple terms.

If someone has never looked at Augsburg and Nuremberg silver gilt vessels of the 17th century, it is impossible to describe in two snappy sentences what makes the greatness of a cup and cover done in Nuremberg around 1630 by Leonhard Vorchammer. By the time you have said that this kind of object is known in German as a Dürer Pokal because its design goes back to Albrecht Dürer in the 15th century, and that this piece of abstract sculpture paradoxically seems to be swirling thanks to its twisted motifs in the central area, you have lost your listener's attention. Add that it is a 17th-century example of Gothic Revivalism, and you will wither under the stare of contemptuous boredom.

I have written extensively about this elsewhere: the unjust hyper-recognition of painting and the hypo-recognition of other decorative arts.

In a letter to von Kottwitz I wrote today

Atiq Rahimi in a RF interview (I have been listening a lot to RF lately, how much better it is than the BBC -- the BBC struggles to be middle brow, the RF struggles to be anything but that; or perhaps the French middle brow is considerably higher than the English?) surprised me with a tired old saw. The interviewer asked him whether he felt Afghan or French (how European of him); and he said -- duh -- "Afghan in France, French in Afghanistan". Poohlease. I used to say (and think) this kind of drivel when I was 18 -- before I set off on my Asian life (and all that's followed). Now, 20 years later, this strikes me as silly in the extreme. But that's just the thing: Atiq Rahimi is somewhat behind. He's merely bilingual.

I wonder, btw, whether Barthes -- such a specialist on culture -- was bilingual? (You were probably right to leave him at light petting stage).

Von Kottwitz is monolingual and his tri-cultural experience consists in having been born and raised in NY, educated in Indiana, and (briefly) employed in Houston. There are objective limitations to how far our discussion of culture can proceed.

Watercolors

I spent several weeks studying but will now give up. I don't like the technique. It is fast -- and I have always imagined the pleasure of painting to lie in slow, meditative, painstaking labor; it lacks detail (details just cannot be done in watercolor); it is impressionist -- i.e. its objective is "impression" or "suggestion", letting the viewer mind fill in the detail which the image only suggests through a kind of sleight of hand, while what interests me is precisely the detail; and it is wasteful -- it takes no time at all to cover a sheet of paper and no effort at all to go through a whole album in an afternoon. Give me oil.

Innocence

The New York Times reviewer of Innocence surprises: "the line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier", s/he says.

Boulverse, I read on. The images that the reviewer finds troubling are "shots of the girls' legs, those peek-a-boo moments when the camera all but noses under their skirts"; and... small girls in underwear.

A total and absolute mystery.

Peek-a-boo moments? Really?

Nosing under skirts? When? Where?

And then: ten year old children in underwear -- sexy? Does the reviewer have a particularly hairy mind or am I particularly sexually unaware?

But the critique should not surprise; it is wholly and typically American, of course: to the American mind everything seems to carry sexual intent. (They read Lolita in America, don't they?)

It must be very tiring to have such an oversexed mind.

But then, suddenly, there comes a twist: the reviewer closes by recommending a film entitled Fast Times At Ridgemont High as a better alternative to Innocence. It is a better movie, s/he says, because in it "girls have bodies and boys".

I suppose girls having sex is OK, then. And if so, what exactly is the problem with Innocence? Girls not having sex?

I am confused.

The point of the film which the critic so vehemently attacks is actually spelled out in capital letters in the title (for the benefit of the attention deficit disordered): the movie is not about fast times; it is about the time before we even begin to suspect that such a thing as a fast time might exist. It is about beginning to suspect that there are things we do not know. Beginning to suspect and perhaps even beginning to ask, hesitantly and half-heartedly about those suspected things, yet being still prepared to accept "later", "not now", and "forbidden" as final answers.

A reviewer on IMDB puts it like this:

"William Blakes collection of poems on innocence and experience charts the replacing of the former with the latter. He shows us how innocence cannot be appreciated til you are experienced, but how experience completely taints any notion of innocence, and the same is with this precise film."

There is a kind of saudade here, a hopeless longing for the irretrievably lost innocence of the past.

But saudade is not an American emotion anymore perhaps than innocence.

*

Innocence, by the way, is a very beautiful film. I watched it to the end and then hit the play button and watched it all over again.

I was not sexually stimulated.

From Tasso

Torquato Tasso, Gierusalemme Liberata, Book xvi, xiv-xv:

Deh mira (egli cantò) spuntar la rosa
Dal verde suo modesta e virginella,
Che mezzo aperta ancora e mezzo ascosa,
Quanto si mostra men, è più bella:
Ecco poi nudo il sen già baldanzosa
Dispiega: ecco poi langue, e non par quella,
Quella non par, che desiata avanti
Fu da mille donzelle e mille amanti.

Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un giorno
Della vita mortale ul fiore e'l verde:
Nè, perchè faccia indientro april ritorno,
Si rinfiora ella mai, nè si rinvendre.

Edward Fairfax, 1600, translates:

"The gently budding rose," quoth she, "behold,
That first scant peeping forth with virgin beams,
Half ope, half shut, her beauties doth upfold
In their dear leaves, and less seen, fairer seems,
And after spreads them forth more broad and bold,
Then languisheth and dies in last extremes,
Nor seems the same, that decked bed and bower
Of many a lady late, and paramour;

"So, in the passing of a day, doth pass
The bud and blossom of the life of man,
Nor e'er doth flourish more, but like the grass
Cut down, becometh withered, pale and wan:

And Piotr Kochanowski in 1616:

Widzicie różą, co wpół wychylona
Dopiero swoje opowiada przyście
I wpół zawarta a wpół rozwiniona
Jeszcze niedosłe ukazuje liście.
Patrzcie jako się ledwie wypełniona
Rozwija, a już więdnie oczywiście;
Więdnie - i już sie nie godzi na wieńce
Ani na panny, ani na mlodzieńce.

Takci śmiertelnych rodzajów na świecie
Przemija ten kwiat wesołej młodości;
I choć się kwiecień wraca w każdem lecie,
On więcej nie kcie, i zbywa piękności.

On Beauty

In the usual sort of internet discussion, in which one gropes for ages to find out his opponent's position only to lose him or her just as one begins to make some traction, someone once argued against me that it was Plato's great contribution (to what?) to conceive of beauty as a concept.

I didn't think that was much of an achievement: Indoeuropean languages form nouns with great ease: small children do it, why not Plato. The more important further point which I was aiming to make, but couldn't because the offended champion of Plato suddenly disappeared, was that Indoeuropean languages make nouns out of adjectives without any regard as to whether doing so makes any sense or serves any purpose. And because nouns are easily made, and easily understood, such constructions appear to make sense -- strike us with a certain force of conviction -- even when they are actually utterly meaningless.

This is what trips up Mary Mothersill in her On beauty: she put a lot of energy into trying to narrow down the concept of beauty, which is not a concept but a meaningless grammatical construction. If she owe this to Plato, then she owes him a great deal of confusion; his supposed great contribution would therefore seem to be not to knowledge or understanding; but to rendering the debate confused and therefore potentially endless.

(Perhaps this is what my interlocutor had meant when he praised Plato for it: perhaps he is one of those pomo people who think that knowledge is impossible anyway but meaningless and circular discourse in itself represents value and should be kept up; and anything that does is therefore virtuous).

But, in truth, while it makes sense to say "X is beautiful" (it really means "I find X beautiful"), the term "beauty" makes no analytical sense at all. There is no such thing.

Mothersill spends a great deal of time trying to identify the "good-making characteristics" of the Wordsworthian phrase "trailing clouds of glory". (The term she takes to mean "beautiful-making", but this surely is a mistake since good and beautiful should not be presumed to be the same). Now, she looks for the good-making characteristics with the expectation that such characteristics might tell us something about beauty. In fact, nothing is further from the truth: if they could tell us anything at all it would be something about Mary Mothersill: about the sort of things she finds beautiful and therefore about the special manner in which her brain works. (Mine, by the way, works differently: "trailing clouds of glory" leaves me cold).

If one were to insist on making nouns using the word "beauty" one could propose that there is such a thing as "the experience of beauty" - a certain state of mind, similar in nature to such states as fear or sleepiness - "feeling" seems a better word to describe it than "emotion". One could add that the state is almost certainly produced in us by a dedicated brain gizmo, or set of brain gizmos working in tandem (because that's how the experiences of fear and sleepiness are produced); that the experience feels similar enough from person to person for us to be able to describe it ("phenomenologically") with reasonable hope that most our listeners will understand what we mean by comparing our description with their own experience; and that the experience serves an important role in natural selection and survival, helping us pick suitable sexual partners, wholesome food, safe dwellings, etc. One could then say that when we are faced with such objects, we experience beauty (or "we find them beautiful"; or "we say: they are beautiful").

But that really is all one could say about "beauty". As there is nothing a suitable sexual partner has in common with a wholesome apple, except that we find them both beautiful to look at, there is nothing we can abstract from their common characteristics. Indeed, there is often nothing that two suitable sexual partners have in common (since all the things that a large buxom blond and a petite brunette have in common are not their "beautiful-making characteristics" but ordinary primary and secondary sexual traits). The most the two can have in common is that they both excite the same experience of beauty in someone else's mind: i.e. stimulate the same gizmo but probably each by a different pathway.

And that is all that can be said sensibly using the Indoeuropean noun "beauty". Everything else is a waste of time -- as over two and a half millenia of western aesthetics clearly shows.

Our Mutual Friends

Our Mutual Friends, who are a homosexual couple, live, as the popular phrase has it, well over the top. They rent a huge traditional house in a gigantic garden, with all modicons, and pay well over the market price for it. They rent their car and their motorcycles. Since arriving a year ago, they have expanded their household staff from three to six and have tripled their salaries. They entertain lavishly, attend all the charity events, and hobnob with all the rich, famous, and glamorous. And they shop, shop, shop, always paying the top dollar (if not usually buying the top drawer).

They also say that they are at their rope's end.

And they say it frequently.

This has become a puzzle for most of us; and a worry for some who, Asian-like, wonder whether one day they'll have to step in and bail Our Mutual Friends one day.

Our Mutual Friends told me that -- that they do not make enough to afford their standard of living -- at our first meeting. They said "we still have to work". Mildly curious (there isn't any work one can do around here to support himself in such a style so anyone who works arouses curiosity) I asked what work; they said it was interior decoration for some clients back in the US, now mostly complete. Further inquiry revealed that there didn't seem to be any work going on. I decided the work was the usual fairy-tale of the habitually gainfully employed when they first find themselves in retirement -- purposeless and therefore, to their own eyes, mildly meaningless.

But it later emerged in discussions with other mutual friends that Our Mutual Friends were actually making efforts at raising funds. One proposed to sell his paintings (he paints abstract acrylics); the other suggested that they could have a garage sale to liquidate some fabrics and some minor collectibles. Neither was much of an effort, but it was an effort nevertheless; and all of it was attended by the unceasing complaints that there wasn't enough coming in.

In various discussions with other mutual friends I have always argued that Our Mutual Friends were putting on an act; that it was a pretense; a smoke-screen; a camouflage. The well off often resort to camouflage, I argued: it isn't only in order to keep a low profile against possible burglars or kidnappers, but also in order to protect themselves against ordinary envy, too.

Here I told an anecdote: while in college, I worked, among others, in a research lab with half-a-dozen other student-part-timers. Wages were poor and standard of living student-like. But one of us, Mary, turned out to be well off: she owned the house she lived in; it was bought, she told us, with her grandfather's legacy left to her. That and the sports car. And the tuition. And who knows what else. She worked in the lab, it turned out, for the experience; and perhaps for company, but not out of any kind of need.

The admission that she'd had it all from grandpa was to cost Mary dearly. Out of envy, she became everyone's favorite punching bag. I once witnessed someone at a party, drunk, telling her that she should be ashamed of herself that she had it so easy while we all barely managed to scratch our living. Mary once cried upon my shoulder about it; knight-like, I refused to take advantage of the situation, though Mary was not a bad looking girl; instead, I advised her in the future to hold her tongue. And I am sure she has.

I have therefore argued strenuously that Our Mutual Friends, unable to keep a low profile (and it is hard to keep a low profile when one loves living glamorously, which, for some reason, seems such a wonderfully gay crime) were engaging in a spot of deception about their true net worth; that, in other words, they were trying to have it both ways: to have the rich life but disclaim the resources necessary to have it. (Oh, pay no attention to this, it is all on credit you know, and about to be repossessed, too!)

Other mutual friends were not having any of this. Their conversation often turned here to other speculation: that perhaps Our Mutual Friends, being about sixty, were the first cohort of the modern American way of life, the cohort born in the prosperity which had followed World War Two; raised on the consume-til-you-drop ethos -- that special state of PR in which everyone tells you to spend and absolutely no one tells you to save; the cohort which arrives at the age of retirement having had a high current income all their lives, having spent all of it on a very high life-style, and having nothing other than the bare state pension to show for the lifetime of their labors.

I have known examples of this: over the last several years a fifty-one-year old lover confessed, with a note of panic in her voice, that she'd had to get serious about saving for her retirement and therefore could no longer afford to come and see me; a once-colleague from work, forty-nine, confided in me that though his annual income is in the top 1% bracket of the United States, he has nearly nothing in the bank (nine hundred dollars, to be exact) and a huge balance on his cards (thirty-thousand-plus) and that therefore a loss of his job would mean a financial Armageddon; and my aunt, sixty two, asked me how she could retire early on her lifetime savings of... twenty thousand bucks. (I could not see any way).

Marketing studies exist, executed for major investment banks, which show that these are not isolated cases but part of the general pattern: the high income-high consumption crowd, all those mid level managers on expense accounts and such, are in fact totally and utterly broke. Their salaries and bonuses go entirely into maintenance of their expensive life style.

Our Mutual Friends may be part of the same phenomenon. Now that they have retired, they do not know how to scale down the lifestyle, yet do not have enough to keep it up.

We all shook our heads over them: my elder West-European friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of the post-war years and have, through them, learned to save for the rainy day; my East-European friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of the communist era; and my South East Asian friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of -- well -- South East Asia. We all shook our heads at these Americans; and the American economic miracle which, it seemed to us, was now revealed to have been built on sand.

But then, our disputations about the financial position of Our Mutual Friends took a magically tragic turn when, in the car, standing at a traffic light, in the pouring rain, my friend Pong suddenly gasped: "I think they are going to commit suicide."

And then it all fell into place: yes, of course, that's what they will do: they will keep on spending at the current rate until there is nothing left and then they will pour themselves a sumptuous bath, open a bottle of Dom Perignon, and, with the tip of a fine silver blade, they will, like Petronius and Seneca before them, open their veins.

Perhaps it takes a great philosopher to conceive and execute such a plan. Spinoza was one to do so: though he'd not taken his life, he'd managed to die leaving behind him nothing but the 18 shillings it took to provide him with a decent burial. Childless, he had no one to leave his money to; and since in his life he had known no kindness from anyone, he'd seen no reason to leave his money to anyone. So he calculated his needs down the the last shilling, and when it was all gone, he died.

Théo Angelopoulos dixit

In an Radio France interview (La Voix Nue), Théo Angelopoulos, cinéaste:

Nous sommes a la epoque catatonique... il n'y a pas de la goût de la vie, de la joie de la vie. Il n'y a pas rien que nous excite. Je voie la jeunesse: elle n'y a pas de la courage, n'a pas de joie de vivre; n'y a pas rien apart la cariere. La jeunesse n'a pas de souffle. C'est la faute de la societe: la societe ils n'a il n'y a donne de pression... Nous vivons a la epoque tres triste. Le cinema d'aujourdui c'est plus en plus le cinema de compromis...

Easy to say he has lost a taste for life: all men are inclined to say that things were better in the past, when they were young (Angelopoulos is now seventy two).

Yet, though I do not remember what life was like in the 50's and 60's, when, he says, 'the streets of Paris seemed to sing' and only know the West of 80's and 90's, which Angelopoulos would probably qualify as "nowadays" (the dull, stifling nowadays); and for this reason cannot compare the nowadays to the (presumably) better, more interesting, more exciting past; yet, I recognize the thought as very familiar: the present of the West does seem to me dull.

Very, very dull.

And the youth do seem bored. Bored and boring (the distinction is purely grammatical, it means the same thing).

Some notes on cultural identity and the definition of culture

Abdellah does not observe Ramadan. But he springs to its defense: it purifies one, is good for health, and so forth. And Khadija, though she does not keep halal, defends the concept: in ancient times pork and various creepy-crawlies were not safe to eat, etc. Like most of their compatriots, my Moroccan friends defend from the criticism of outsiders religious practices which they themselves do not practice.

It is part of a mechanism which obtains everywhere in the world in precisely the same way: one is prepared to criticize his own country in front of foreigners provided that the foreigners will play along and strenuously object to the critique. The French will say in front of you "France is corrupt to its very core!" or "The French are lazy!" as long as you do your bit and exclaim: "Mais, non!" But let the foreigner say that the French are corrupt, and the French will make a 180-degree and jump to defend the honor of France.

This is precisely that my Maroccan friends are doing: they are defending Morocco from foreign critique. Imagined critique, in my case, since neither halal nor Ramadan appear worthy of critique to my mind; they are just two more of the odd practices people practice all over the world. They range pretty low in oddness on that oddity scale which includes ritual cannibalism and child-marriages. And why not let people indulge in whatever oddities strike them?

What is interesting here is why Abdellah and Khadija would defend religious practices they do not practice: because they identify them somehow as theirs. It reminds me of a Japanese student I once knew in the US: when asked to define the essence of Japaneseness, he (predictably) mumbled something about the Emperor. Asked to say more about it, he clammed up. He clammed up because, in fact, like most Japanese, he neither knew anything about the emperor, nor cared a fig. Yet, all Japanese are in the same boat: they all think the Emperor is somehow central to their identity. He isn't.

Our cultural identity is something much smaller, much plainer, much more basic, and much more homey than all of the high fellutin' stuff we imagine it to be.

A Pakistani fellow runs a blog about Islam; in it he describes a weekly practice from his childhood -- a close reading of the Quran. Once a week, a mullah came to the house and the family sat around on the floor, reading and discussing the Quran while eating mountains of parathas and buckets of curd. I wrote him a note about how much I missed the parathas and the curd; but he ignored it: he could not be bothered about silly things like parathas and curd because, he imagined, these things were inconsequential. What mattered to him was the Quran. Or rather he thought it should matter to him.

But that's a misperception: what matters to most Pakistanis is the parathas and the curd; the food, the dress, the way of sitting and greeting. Hence the brouhaha about the hijab: that the hijab has no Quranic source should be sufficient to show to everyone that the argument is not religious; it is a fight concerning an established daily practice; daily practice is what matters to us.

It is these things -- the small, pithy, seemingly inconsequential daily practices, so easy to miss when one focuses his sight on big picture things very far away -- that make up our shared cultural identity. It is also these things which provide greatest pleasure for those learning a new culture.

And this is where European philosophers err when they urge Judeo-Christian foundations of European culture. The true foundations of European culture are bread baked in loaves, grape wine and malt beer, bacon, pork trotter, chicken soup, kidney pie and sausages; tables, forks, beds on legs, houses with windows facing outside, fireplaces and hanging chandeliers.

In fact, viewed in this light, there is not one Europe, but two: the south with wheat bread, grape wine, coffee, olives and figs; and the north with rye bread, beer, cucumbers, cabbages and tea.

Our "great" philosophers have been right about spotting a great division within Europe, but they were wrong assigning this difference to the divide between Protestantism and Catholicism.

Apollo on Baxandall on Piero della Francesca

I was reading in bed this afternoon: my favorite writer (Baxandall), on my favorite painter (Piero della Francesca). Or rather trying to, but Apollo kept distracting me:

That Morocco is part of Europe

Georges Steiner, in his Une certaine idée de l'Europe:

Les cafés caractérisent l'Europe. Ils vont de l'établissement préféré de Pessõa à Lisbonne aux cafés d'Odessa, hantés par les gangsters d'Isaac Babel. Ils s'étirent des cafés de Copenhague, devant lesquels passait Kierkegaard pendant ses promenades méditatives, aux comptoirs de Palerme. Pas de cafés anciens ou caractéristiques à Moscou, qui est déjà un faubourg de l'Asie. Très peu en Angleterre, après une mode éphémère au XVIIIe siècle. Aucun en Amérique du Nord, sauf dans cette antenne française qu'est La Nouvelle-Orléans. Dessinez la carte des cafés, vous obtiendrez l'un des jalons essentiels de la "notion d'Europe".

Clearly, Georges has never been to Tangier.

The Steiner interview continued

Steiner’s claim that women can’t create on account of their being able to give birth is a great pink flabby baton with which to epater les femmes: it is so obviously false – and yet it is totally unfalsifiable because it is so sweeping and because anyone wishing to contest it has to first face the difficult job of proving that such a thing as creativity exists, what it means, and that it is worth having. What a way to kill several hundred afternoons in pleasant female company in sweet assurance of never having to concede a thing. It’s a lot like infuriating a turkey by opening and closing a red umbrella at it through a fine chickenwire mesh; very like it, yes, but a lot more fun.

But Steiner’s claim that women have too much “bon sense” to seek to excel in science or math is not, as the interviewer has it, macho. It’s so obviously bon sense. Of course it is bon sense not to waste one’s time on abstract scientific experiments or mathematical formulas when one can spend the same time in good company with people one loves. Especially when the good company is of opposite sex and the companionship of the intimate variety. I find this so obvious; why does not Laure Adler (the interviewer)? And if not, why not? What is the point of her insisting that women of course are as interested in math and science as men and that – NO, they do not have the better sense not to waste their precious time in competing in meaningless competitions for mostly empty scientific honors? Does she really want to equal men in math more than she wants to be happy?

As for me, I spent this afternoon in pleasant female company by the pool; it did not for a moment occur to me to quit the company, closet myself in my studio and work at a mathematical paradox of some sort or another instead. What would that prove? That I am unable to assure myself of pleasant female company? Or that I take no interest in the opposite sex?

Atiq Rahimi

Asked (on Radio France) that most European of questions -- whether he felt French or Afghan (what a silly question: why does one need to feel any such thing?) -- Atiq Rahimi replied with the old saw of all emigrants: I feel Afghan in France, French in Afhganistan.

I myself don't have any such feelings. Wherever I am, I am merely a passer-by. There is a great comfort in that, not having to belong, not being obliged by whatever the natives do. One can then pick and choose from what is on offer: float floats on Loi Krathong, but refuse to hate the Burmese, for example. The decision is purely one of pleasure; one is not compelled to it by any false desire to be in any particular way; to be anything other than what one is pleased to be.

Atiq would probably manage to feel this way, too, if he had lived in more than two places for any length of time. There is a sense in which emigration -- straddling two cultures -- is liberating -- one begins to see the limits of each of his two civilizations; but that is at best a half-way house to true freedom and that is something approached only asymptotically as one piles on his cultural exposure. The more cultures one learns, the more one learns to tell the difference between the local -- the accidental-- and the universal and never changing. And the more one can be neither Afghan nor French but -- himself.