Motes

History carries an important lesson: we are in a game in which all the moves made today, wherever, have already been made – from the rejection of politics and the return to the religious, to the resistance to actions by a political power hostile to intellectual things, via the revolt against the grip of the media, or the disabused abandonment of revolutionary utopias.

–P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art

A pencil and a rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants.

–T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

One cannot be too afraid of the world, such as it is.

–T. W. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis (Critical Models)

Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel.

–Samuel Johnson

Another damned thick square book. Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon…

–The Duke of Gloucester, on the presentation to him of volumes 2 & 3 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

For Cinna the Poet, see under errata.

–Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love

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A revision in the undergrad syllabus, in response to something like an e-mailed cry of despair at having to read The Waste Land, Kora in Hell, Spring and All, and Tender Buttons seriatim. Perhaps time to reflect on why I keep assigning Books My Undergraduates Find “Difficult.”