I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don’t have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do.
All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are gong to come tumbling out before you. I’m going to divulge them. What a juicy work that is, ‘divulge.’ Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.
And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that’s just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It’s unstoppable, it’s uncorkable. There’s no way to make it end.
That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war’s beginning phase. It’s truer and more frightening that way – when you’re afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.
Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That’s one of their nicest qualities – their brute persistence.
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen – like the iPod Touch’s – although the pixel density could and should be much higher.
But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.
I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people’s eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies – and it is free, and it is fast.
I wrote about World War II because I didn’t understand it. I think that’s the reason that historians are drawn to any subject – there’s something about it that doesn’t make sense. I wanted to work my way through what happened slowly, and look at everything in the order in which it took place.
You can register a political objection in a number of ways.
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
Each decision – to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender – was made at some point in somebody’s day.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.