New poems
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An axiom of the novel is that people whose lives are devoted to the competition for status—the bourgeois, the philistines—are inferior to those who devote themselves to the realization of an aesthetic or ethical ideal. The very fact of being a novel reader is the badge of this distinction: to be a reader, in this sense, is really to be a writer of one’s life, to try to shape one’s life in the image of the values promoted by what one reads. Yet the proud reader should remember that the pursuit of outward status and the pursuit of inward perfection can both be understood as ways of imposing direction, and therefore narrative, on a life. Both status and goodness are useful for this purpose because both are fundamentally unachievable: it will always be possible, and therefore necessary, to become 'higher' or 'better' than one is. These ways of imposing meaning on life are more similar to each other than either one is to the horrible vacancy of the vast majority of lives, which are composed simply of endless repetition. Compared to the peasant, the bourgeois is a kind of artist—and the artist is a kind of bourgeois.
—Adam Kirsch
—Adam Kirsch
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
