The pertinence of a BLOG.

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. Procedural and depopulated. It's as if a neutron bomb went off and all you're left with are hospital corridors, where you're scanning the walls for familiar photographs.

Sometimes in the absence of emotion, your only recourse is to surround yourself with objects; assemble the relics about you. Wagner was wrong when he said, "Joy is not in things, it is in us." One can find joy in things, but it is a particular kind of joy--the joy of corroboration.

Rakoff, D. Fraud. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

This afternoon I did my Michael Moore impression: Oversized jeans from a recent weight loss, trucker’s cap, sweat shirt — in short Diogenes as a nebbish. Our Congresswoman, Lois Capps, yesterday resigned quite publicly from AARP over its endorsement of the Republican bill in Congress regarding Medicare. I hoped to get from our older neighbors a sense of how they felt about AARP generally after this endorsement and so as not to prejudice their replies asked them what they thought of the Medicare massacre bill and then if they intended to resign from AARP. “I suppose I should,” one Geezer reflected, suggesting that it might prove to be too much trouble. Another knew people who liked the local AARP meetings, never having attended one herself. For some reason this reminded her that she no longer thought Woody Allen was funny. In protest against the “Michael Jackson media circus” that played here yesterday including enough helicopters to have been the setting for yet another Vietnam movie, she had rented three “light comedy” videos and played them serially last night to shut out the world entirely, AARP and all. Without my Michael Moore outfit, I sent my brother-in-law in Chicago an e-mail link to Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times today in the hopes that it would shake him out of his usual complacency. It turns out that he had quit AARP sometime in the eighties because he had checked out its claim that it could cut the cost of his car insurance. In fact, he learned, the AARP insurance would have added $100 annually to his insurance cost. He was told that if he took the car insurance as a package, which included home insurance, he would realize the advertised savings. This claim, too, he found wanting by more than $100 annually. He wrote the AARP CEO for an explanation of this “false advertising” and never got an answer. Of course, he had never attended an AARP meeting.

Let's see if I got this right: a librarian (from Seattle, as I recall) has proposed a formula for dealing with the "so many books, so little time" problem. She says that until the age of fifty we are obligated to read the first fifty pages of a book that for one reason or another has grabbed our interest.; typically, from reading a review or at the strong recommendation of a friend. After fifty we are obligated to read only the number of pages corresponding to the years we have survived past that age, so that at 75, for example, we would owe only 25 pages to a book that has come to hand. I find the formula particularly helpful when confronted with a book that I have been led to believe will remake some part of my world, like "an alternative history of philosophy" proposed in the subtitle by "Evil in Modern Thought" by Susan Neiman (Princeton, 2002). I know that something important must be going on in these pages, but I also, after reading the requisite number of pages, know that it is to me incomprehensible, and likely to remain so. In these cases you are forced, as soon as the librarian's formula allows, to retreat to the comfort of the unaltered history of philosophy you know, and hope for the best.