How to Write a Travelogue

The first two paragraphs of the first page of Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari:

All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again. Feeling that the place was so large it contained many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too -- feeling that there was more to Africa than misery and terror -- I aimed to reinsert myself in the bundu, as we used to call the bush, and to wander the antique hinterland. There I had lived and worked, happily, almost forty years ago, in the heart of the greenest continent.

To skip ahead, I am writing this a year later, just back from Africa, having taken my long safari. I was mistaken in so much -- delayed, shot at, howled at, and robbed. No massacres or earthquakes, but terrific heat and the roads were terrible, the trains were derelict, forget the telephones. Exasperated white farmers said, 'It all went tits up!' Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it -- hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can't tell the politicians from the witch-doctors. Africans, less esteemed than ever, seemed to me the most lied-to people on earth -- manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign experts, befooled by charities, and cheated at every turn. To be an African leader was to be a thief, but evangelists stole people's innocence and self-serving aid agencies gave them false hope, which seemed worse. In reply, Africans dragged their feet or tried to emigrate, they begged, they pleaded, they demanded money and gifts with a rude, weird sense of entitlement. Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded but I was never bored: in fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation. Such a paragraph needs some explanation -- at least a book; this book perhaps.

Nabokov on Linguistics

Hilarious and somewhat harsh assessment of linguistics from Nabokov's Pnin:

As a teacher, Pnin was far from being able to compete with those stupendous Russian ladies, scattered all over academic America, who, without having had any formal training at all, manage somehow, by dint of intuition, loquacity, and a kind of maternal bounce, to infuse a magic knowledge of their difficult and beautiful tongue into a group of innocent-eyed students in an atmosphere of Mother Volga songs, red caviare, and tea; nor did Pnin, as a teacher, ever presume to approach the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach that method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects -- Basic Basque and so forth -- spoken only by certain elaborate machines.

Nabokov on Literature

From this Amazon page I found the following Nabokov line that he delivered in a lecture on literature:

In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys -- literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author -- the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter.

Pessoa and Work

AP-3 from Pessoa's Book of Disquiet:

The anguish of a man afflicted by life's tedium on the terrace of his opulent villa is one thing; quite another is the anguish of someone like me, who must contemplate the scenery from my fourth-floor rented room in downtown Lisbon, unable to forget that I'm an assistant bookkeeper.

'Tout notaire a rêvé de sultanes'...

Every time I'm obliged by some official act to state my profession, I smile to myself at the irony of the undeserved ridicule when I declare 'office clerk' and no one finds it all strange. I don't know how it got there, but that's how my name appears in the Professional Register.

Epigraph to the Diary:
Guedes (Vincente), office clerk, Rua dos Retroseiros, 17, fourth floor.
Professional Register of Portugal

Hayek and Rationality

A quote of Hayek's found on the Language Log:

[Constructivist rationalism] produced a renewed propensity to ascribe the origin of all institutions of culture to invention or design. Morals, religion and law, language and writing, money and the market, were thought of as having been deliberately constructed by somebody, or at least as owing whatever perfection they possessed to such design. …

Yet... [m]any of the institutions of society which are indispensible conditions for the successful pursuit of our conscious aims are in fact the result of customs, habits or practices which have been neither invented nor are observed with any such purpose in view.

Man... is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in the society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations.

Heidegger and the I

In section 26 of Heidegger's Being and Time:

When others are encountered, it is not the case that one's own subject is proximally present-at-hand and that the rest of the subjects, which are likewise occurents, get discriminated beforehand and then apprehended; nor are they encountered by a primary act of looking at oneself in such a way that the opposite pole of a distinction first gets ascertained. They are encountered from out of the world, in which concernfully circumspective Dasein essentially dwells. Theoretically concocted 'explanations' of the Being-present-at-hand of Others urge themselves upon us all too easily; but over against such explanations we must hold fast to the phenomenal facts of the case which we have pointed out, namely, that Others are encountered environmentally. This elemental worldly kind of encountering, which belongs to Dasein and is closest to it, goes so far that even one's own Dasein becomes something that it can proximally 'come across' only when it looks away from 'Experiences' and the 'centre of its actions', or does not as yet 'see' them at all. Dasein finds 'itself' proximally in what it does, uses, expects, avoids -- in those things environmentally ready-to-hand with which it is proximally concerned.

And even when Dasein explicitly addresses itself as "I here", this locative personal designation must be understood in terms of Dasein's existential spatiality. In Interpreting this we have already intimated that this "I-here" does not mean a certain privileged point -- that of an I-Thing -- but is to be understood as Being-in in terms of the "yonder" of the world that is ready-to-hand -- the "yonder" which is the dwelling-place of Dasein as concern.

W. von Humboldt has alluded to certain languages which express 'I' by 'here', the 'thou' by 'there', the 'he' by 'yonder', thus rendering the personal pronouns by locative adverbs, to put it grammatically. It is controversial whether indeed the primordial signification of locative expressions is adverbial or pronominal. But this dispute loses its basis if one notes that locative adverbs have a relationship to the "I" qua Dasein. The 'here' and the 'there' and the 'yonder' are primarily not mere ways of designating the location of entities present-at-hand within-the-world at positions in space; they are rather characteristics of Dasein's primordial spatiality. These supposedly locative adverbs are Dasein-designations; they have a signification which is primarily existential, not categorial. But they are not pronouns either; their signification is prior to the differentiation of locative adverbs and personal pronouns: these expressions have a Dasein-signification which is authentically spatial, and which serves as evidence that when we interpret Dasein without any theoretical distortions we can see it immediately as 'Being-alongside' the world with which it concerns itself, and as Being-alongside it spatially -- that is to say, as desevering and giving directionality. In the 'here', the Dasein which is absorbed in its world speaks not towards itself but away from itself towards the 'yonder' of something circumspectively ready-to-hand; yet it still has itself in view in its existential spatiality.

Heidegger Sounding Like Schopenhauer

Towards the end of his essay, The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics, comes the following passage, redolent of Schopenhauer, from Heidegger:

1. The crux of the matter is the reinterpretation of the spirit as intelligence, or mere cleverness in examining and calculating given things and the possibility of changing them and complementing them to make new things. This cleverness is a matter of mere talent and practice and mass division of labour. The cleverness itself is subject to the possibility of organisation, which is never true of the spirit. The attitude of the litterateur and aesthete is merely a late consequence and variation of the spirit falsified into intelligence. Mere intelligence is a semblance of spirit, masking its absence.

...

3. As soon as the misinterpretation sets in that degrades the spirit to a tool, the energies of the spiritual process, poetry and art, statesmanship and religion, become subject to conscious cultivation and planning. They are split into branches. The spiritual world becomes culture and the individual strives to perfect himself in the creation and preservation of this culture. These branches become fields of free endeavour, which sets its own standards and barely manages to live up to them. These standards of production and consumption are called values. The cultural values preserve their meaning only by restricting themselves to an autonomous field: poetry for the sake of poetry, art for the sake of art, science for the sake of science.