Thursday, February 15, 2007
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DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
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Maurice Barres: “…the magnificent self-assurance of imbeciles.”
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You can see the mountaintop from the valley, but the higher you climb and the closer you get to it, the less visible it becomes. After a while you may even be justified in suspecting it was a mirage. Something similar may happen to our ambitions.
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Childhood dreams have a tendency to become the nightmares of old age. Had I been a carpenter or bus driver I would have been more useful to my fellow men. Take it from me: if your ambition is to be a writer, I suggest you write to entertain. The masses want to be amused not to be reminded of their moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
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Tell a self-assessed smart man he is no better than a dupe and make an enemy for life.
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The author of a book, titled THE END OF DETROIT, on the radio this morning referred to recent development in the American auto industry as an “existential crisis.” There was a time when no self-respecting American pundit would have dared to use the word existential in a serious context. It took fifty years for the academics to catch up. What is the difference between a crisis and an existential crisis? Nothing. But the qualifier existential seems to lend the word crisis an authority it doesn’t have on its own.
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Don’t expect reality to catch up with you. It is you who must do the catching up.
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Marquis de Sade: “More often than not charity is a vice of pride rather than a virtue of the soul.”
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Friday, February 16, 2007
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SUMMING UP
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What can I tell you that you don’t already know or suspect but pretend otherwise? What can I add to what far better men than myself have already said?
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When asked if I dislike Armenians, I reply that I don’t know all of them. If I give the impression that I don’t particularly care for them it may be because I have never cared for dupes who pretend to be smart, or charlatans who will say and do anything for minimum wage (which happen to be two of my own youthful transgressions). When it comes to judging my fellow countrymen, I rely more on the judgment of our writers as opposed to pseudo-pundits, speechifiers, and sermonizers whose aim is not to speak the truth as they see it but to flatter their audience on whose goodwill and financial support they depend — and as everyone knows by now, brown-nosing pays and criticism leads to the poorhouse.
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When I speak of writers, I don’t mean poets who sang the eternal snows of Mount Ararat and the nobility of our “sun-flavored words,” but writers, who unlike me, lived among Armenians all their lives and wrote about and for them in Armenian. By contrast I live in the middle of nowhere, write in English, and I don’t go out of my way to meet them.
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When I read writers like Baronian, Odian, Massikian, Shahnour, and Zarian (especially the Zarian of the posthumously published diaries and notebooks) I cannot help thinking, yes, we have somehow managed to survive, but to what end? – besides lamenting our dead and bragging about our survival? (Do you see the shadow of a contradiction there somewhere?)
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About our survival: Should we ascribe it to our courage, initiative, solidarity (what solidarity?) adaptability, obstinacy, intelligence (don’t make me laugh!) and other positive factors, or to Turkish inefficiency?
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We live in a world where there are many more answers than questions, even if most of the answers are wrong. Consider the answers provided by religious and political leaders as a case in point. As for answers provided by science: even when the right answers are available, some people (like flat-earth theorists and astrology buffs) will prefer to believe in the wrong ones.
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Saturday, February 17, 2007
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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To speak of Genocide recognition as frequently, obsessively, and endlessly as we do is to imply that during more than two thousand years of history our most noteworthy achievement has been allowing ourselves to be butchered like sheep.
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Claude Bernard: “No one has contributed more to science than frogs.”
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In biographies of writers, the sentence that sooner or later pops up is “he read everything he could get his hands on.”
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Major decisions are based on countless little ones that make the major ones inevitable.
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If you plan to make an omelet, break eggs not windows and heads.
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Alain: “It is said that the next generations will be harder to govern. I certainly hope so.”
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Mathurin Regnier: “A wealthy villain is worth more than a poor gentleman.”
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I question the validity of all my past beliefs and no doubt in the future I will question the validity of my present beliefs of which I have none.
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Bertolt Brecht: “I don’t trust him. We are friends.”