Epigraphs and aphorisms remind me of you
I’m up to the letter ‘L’ in Clive James’s book of over 100 essays, Cultural Amnesia, and I’m enjoying almost every page of it, so I’m also looking forward to seeing his one-man show at the Bruce Mason Centre on Thursday night. I disagree with him both about Robert de Niro’s acting and John Coltrane’s sax playing, but they are among the very few people mentioned in this book about whom I feel qualified to comment. One day, someone as well-read as Mr James, should such a person ever again exist, will write a book about insightful commentators of the 20th and 21st Century and, along with a number of other Clive James aphorisms, it will include this quotation:“The mass murderer is ever fond of theories that explain everything, and all the fonder if they can be acquired without study. There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into. People are drawn into these enthusiasms by no mechanism that has anything much to do with rational thought.”
posted by Chris Bell at 2:32 PM
7 Comments:
"There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into."
This applies on so many levels, not just to mass murderers.
I can think of a couple of ex girlfriends....
Absolutely right, Rob (not that I know any of your ex-girlfriends...). When I first wrote down this quotation, after one of those "Yes!" moments, it was just that single sentence I took note of. Then I realised it was bookended by a couple more, each of which practically stood up on its own. Mr James has taught me to recognise that as a sign of a great writer. I recommend his book highly.
I know that Clive is a very smart, well-read bloke, but he this obsession about desperately letting everone else know about it, which makes me slightly suspicious of his motives - does he have a huge ego to match his brain? Is he in it for the money?
Hello pipi.
He's usually modest about his own writing - or at least whenever I've heard him speaking about it; and it doesn't come across as false modesty, either.
Is he in it for the money? Writing a very dense and currently hardback-only 876-page book of essays about obscure literary and philosophical figures? Well, if he is, he must have missed the last couple of hundred years because by no standards would it be a very bankable proposition.
It's funny that you say he's desperately letting everyone know he's smart because I've read a number of books of his collected reviews and had no idea until I read Cultural Amnesia that he was well-read.
On his motives, I'd say he's just doing what he does. I'd like to live in a world were there were more vocal smart people and fewer vocal idiots.
Not much to ask, I feel, although perhaps you would question my motives, too.
Hi Chris,
Nah, I don’t question your motives.
Clive James is probably one of the smartest self-educated people on the planet. He taught himself French by reading Proust and translating one word at a time from French dictionary. It took him 15 years, he says, but he can now read fluently.
It’s just that there is a lapel-grabbing, ‘look at me I’m clever’ quality to his public persona. You don’t catch Stephen Hawking, er, hawking his latest tome at the Bruce Mason, now do you?
True, but then Stephen Hawking is not a self-taught scientist. And I don't think his show would be especially entertaining.
We should be more upbeat than downbeat about any writer who can mass-market a book about obscure literary, philosophical and other forgotten figures in a time where celebrity has gone beyond cult status into something altogether less savoury. If, as Clive James says, his real skill is the ability to turn a phrase until it catches the light, we should bask in that reflected light. What he's actually saying in the book is "Look at these people - weren't they clever. Bet you've never heard of them."
He's mostly right.
Hi Chris,
Fair enough – I guess I should read the book before passing my (totally inconsequential) judgement.
Can I have it when you’re finished ?
I don’t want to knock Clive James particularly. Maybe he is the polymath he appears to be. Who is the real Clive James – TV critic, poet, autobiographer, historian, media personality, chat show host, stand up comic? Maybe all of the above. I guess time will tell.
Cheers,
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