RENATA ADLER, "MUDDLED FEAR AND VULNERABILITY [YET] CLEARHEADED OUTRAGE AND SCORN" #

I was simply blown away by the writing and the reminders to history.

Renata Adler, After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction (New York:New York Review Books, 2015) (From "Toward a Radical Middle: Introduction," July 1969:"No famous or privileged white revolutionaries have gone to jail for long just yet. But obscure and black radical have, in numbers--which raise questions, I think, not so much of politics as of fame, privilege and the inauthentic revolutionary." Id. at 1, 7. From "Searching for the Real Nixon Scandal" (reprinted from the The Atlantic Monthly, 1976): "No one suggested, in 1968, that the Vietnamese kickbacks though foreign banks, went into American politics." "As, of 1972, I think they clearly did. Turning away from detail, one is truck by the logic overall. It does not make sense, for example, that the President's fund-raisers would put by far the greatest pressure of any political campaign in our history on so many sources, individual and corporate, and reject a contribution from the most logical of them all: the administration of South Vietnam, which had the most to lose if the President's opponent (who had announced a willingness to go, it must be remembered, to Hanoi on his knees for peace) actually won. And although the President might have liked to announce the war's end before any ordinary election, by the time he sent Haig to undo Kissinger's late October accords, he knew he did not need, in 1972, any peace to win. At the same time, Nixon never seems to have felt any diminution of need for campaign contributions. In the fall of 1968, the South Vietnamese had only to dig in the heels and wait, while the war cost Humphrey the election. By the fall of 1972, if they want the support of the administration, I think they had to pay." Id. at 366, 403. "The impeachment inquiry did what it could, and the President was removed. But we were, I think, of legal and political necessity, at the tip of the wrong iceberg. The story that required the end of the Nixon presidency, I think, was not Watergate--or even 'other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.' It was Treason and Bribery. I don't know what follows from it. I think it is the bottom line, It has brought a disorientation beyond reckoning. People died for it, We are going to have to live, I think, with that." Id. at 406-407. Also, see Emily Witt, "Outspoken Indignation," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/17/2015.).

# From Michael Wolff's "Preface,"  to Adler, After the Tall Timber, at x.

Renata Adler, Pitch Dark, with an afterword by Muriel Spark (New York:New York Review Books, 1983, 2013).

Renata Adler, Speedboat, with an afterword by Guy Trebly (New York:New York Review Books, 1976, 2013).

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THOSE CHOOSING NOT TO EMPATHIZE

"What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy." J. K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), at 61).

HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS

Saul Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2015) (From "The Civilized Barbarian Reader" (1987): "I meant [Herzog] to show how little strength 'higher education' had to offer a troubled man. In the end he is aware that the has had no education in the conduct of life. [] Herzog's confusion is barbarous. [] But there is one point at which, assisted by his comic sense, he is able to hold fast  In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves--to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together." "The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the destruction of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas that frequently deny its very existence and that indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether." Id. at 351, 355. Also, see Martin Amis, "Something to Remember Him By," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/3/2015.).

CURSES OF THE SUFFERERS OF INJUSTICE

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth (New York: New American Library, 1989, 2002) ("The people shrank from her in fear: everyone knew that the curses of those who had suffered injustice were particularly effective, and they had all suspected that something was not quite right about this hanging. The small boys were terrified." Id. at 15.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON THE FIRST DAY OF CLASSES

William Dalrymple, In Xanadu: A Quest, with a new introduction by the author (London: The Folio Society, 1990, 2015) ("'Of course,' he said, 'to be a lawyer is not the most interesting of careers.' 'Really?' I said. 'I know some lawyers who love their jobs.' 'Oh don't be absurd,' he replied. 'Everyone knows lawyers are the dullest people in the world. The only thing to be said for it is that it pays well'" Id. at 165.).

AMERICAN LITERACY GREATNESS

Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (New York: Spiegal & Grau, 2015) ("This book is about the dozen creators of the American sublime... [T]hese writers represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism." Id. at 3. Also, see Cynthia Ozick, 'Shared Visions," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/24/2015.).

PURSUING MY LIBERAL RE-EDUCATION BY WORKING THOUGH THE GREAT BOOKS

Mortimer J. Adler, editor in chief, Great Books of the Western World, 1: The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas, Volume I (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990) (From Chapter 16, "Democracy": "The incompatibility of empire with democracy is on one side of the picture of the democratic state in external affairs. The other side is the tension between democratic institutions and military power or policy--in the form of standing armies and warlike maneuvers. The inefficacy traditionally attributed to democracy under peaceful conditions does not, from all evidences of history, seem to render democracy weak or pusillanimous in the face of aggression." "The deeper peril for democracy seems to lie in the effect of war upon its institutions and on the morality of its people. As Hamilton write in The Federalist: 'The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free." Id. at 238, 246. From Chapter 20, "Education": "Whether these skills as well as other useful arts are part of liberal education in the broader sense depends [] on the end for which they are taught or learned. Even the arts which are traditionally called liberal, such as rhetoric or logic, can be degraded to servility if the sole motive for becoming skilled in them is wealth won by success in the law courts." Id. at 296, 300. From Chapter 34, "History": "[T]he great books of history belong with treatises on morals and politics and in the company of philosophical and theological speculations concerning the nature and destiny of man. Liberal education needs the particular as well as the universal narratives. Apart from their utility, they have the originality of conception, the poetic quality, the imaginative scope which rank them with the great creations of the human mind." Id. at 546, 554.).

Mortimer J. Adler, editor in chief, Great Books of the Western World, 2: The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas, Volume II (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990) (From Chapter 73, "Prudence": "Of the qualities or virtues attributed to the intellect, prudence seems to be least concerned with knowledge and most concerned with action. When we call a man a scientist or an artist, or praise the clarity of his understanding, we imply only that he has a certain kind of knowledge. We admire his mind, but we do not necessarily admire him as a man. We may not even know what kind of man he is or what kind of life he leads. It is significant that our language does not contain a noun like 'sceintit' or 'artist' to describe the man who possesses prudence. We must use the adjective and speak of a prudent man, which seems to suggest that prudence belongs to the whole man, rather than just to his mind." "Prudence seems to be almost as much a moral as an intellectual quality. We would hardly call a man prudent without knowing his manner of life. Whether he behaved temperately would probably be more relevant to our judgment of his prudence than whether he had a cultivated mind. The extent of his education or the depth of his learning might not affect our judgment at all, but we probably would consider whether he was old enough to have learned anything from experience and whether he had actually profited from experience to become wise." Id. at 377, 377.).