Reader's Digest: January 12, 2023
Over the break, I read books and essays. Some were essays about books, like this one by Jonathan Drummond, reviewing Jody Rosen on bicycles in the TLS. Here is a passage from Rosen’s book:
When you ride a bicycle, you’re airborne. The wheels that spin beneath you slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, holding you aloft. Your bicycle will not take you on a voyage to the moon, but it is not quite earthbound either.
Some were essays repackaged as books, like The Right to Be Lazy by Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, whose profession of Marxism allegedly caused Marx to exclaim: “One thing is certain: I am not a Marxist!”
I was hoping for a philosophical defense of idleness, a rejoinder or riposte to the seeming redemption of work in Marx’s Grundrisse: under communism, “[what] appears as a sacrifice of rest may also be called a sacrifice of idleness, of unfreedom, of unhappiness.” Instead, Lafargue objects to the French declaration of the “right to work,” building a sketchy economic argument for a shorter workday, with moments of brilliance that anticipate complaints by (some) anthropologists about the scourge of agricultural labour, along with hints of David Graeber on the bourgeois retinue of bullshit jobs.
The division of labour brings us to a third, extraordinary volume: not an essay but a novella by Helen DeWitt, published in a 60-page hardback that looks like a children’s classic.
The French understand wine, cheese, bread. The Belgians understand chocolate. The Italians understand coffee and ice cream. The Germans understand precision machines.
It’s an appropriately enigmatic excerpt from an absorbingly subtle, suspenseful book about moral education that manages to be structurally complex despite its brevity, with prose as hard and sharp as cut glass. Its wrong-footing reflection on the circularity of second nature—how can we critically assess our own upbringing from any perspective but that of our own upbringing?—reminds me of a joke we tell prospective graduate students at MIT:
We know that there are many good places to get a PhD in Philosophy, and we can’t promise that coming here is a better decision than going anywhere else. What we can predict is that if you do, you’ll end up thinking it was.