the intellectual & writer life

John Keats, whose portrait by Severn captures exactly this quality of absorbed attention, gave us another language for it. His “negative capability”, the capacity to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” is, in essence, Weil’s attention under a different name. Both describe a mode of... See more

Samuel Johnson said the aim of criticism was to improve opinion into knowledge

An essay is not the process of translating a fully-formed idea into words on a page; it is the process of discovering and testing an idea by challenging it with form, syntax, structure. The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental condition of... See more

The real question, then: is writing a product or an art ? Obviously, it can be either, and is often both; it’s probably most like a vast product-art spectrum, with most writing falling somewhere in the middle. I’m a firm believer in the idea that labour has value and deserves to be compensated, so it’s not that I think “real” artists should forgo... See more

Elitism is the belief that some books are better than other books and that it is better to read those books. This is not necessarily an argument for only reading those books.

Without internally stored knowledge, the brain's natural error-detection mechanisms lie dormant. We become not just dependent on external tools but vulnerable to their failures, unable to distinguish sense from nonsense.

Simply understanding is an ideal of the man who has a capacity to know truth but not the chance, the skill, or the guts, as the case may be, to communicate them with political effectiveness. Knowledge that is not communicated has a way of turning the mind sour, of being obscured, and finally of being forgotten. For the sake of the integrity of the... See more