An online commonplace book
The thing you should try to do in your writing is to be grateful for being alive. Just to be suffused with gratitude at what is given you.
– Dana Gioia
A masterclass on tap. Coincidence that two of America’s best writers, The Gioia brothers, are also openly very metaphysical?
In Roman Stoicism, I saw the hard wisdom of the men who raised me. They had suffered sorrow, poverty, and discrimination. Some had been beaten, extorted, or unjustly arrested. They took pride in their capacity for work and self-sufficiency. They remembered their troubles and deprivations, but they did not define themselves by their trauma. The were fatalistic, but happy. No one had much money or property, but they felt what they had sufficed. They were suspicious of luxuries. They viewed their troubles with laughter rather than anger. Stoicism wasn’t a philosophy. It was my family.
Dana Gioia
Similar to John Stuart Mills father James, Gioia absorbed the stoic lessons from the examples the men around him lived out.
From: Sentences from Seneca pg8
Every not-so-often, a person can distill a complex idea into one sentence.
It’s a rare event. But when it happens the idea snaps into your mind forever.
Today’s Econ Talk podcast episode was one such occasion.
Dana Gioia snapped my synapses when he shared this definition of the novel:
Now, the great thing of literature–and this is literature as distinct from film and other theater, which are forms of storytelling–but the beauty of the novel and poetry is that they essentially are our cultural machinery for articulating the inner lives of people. In effect, the novel is based on–the very definition of the novel, although people never talk about this–is based on irony. Which is to say, somebody’s outer life is doing this and their inner life is doing that.
It’s hard to think of a novel that doesn’t follow this idea. I’m sure there’s some experimental four hundred pager out there, but the novels I truly know all exhibit this tension between the characters inner and outer life.
In Tolkien’s The Hobbit – Bilbo duels between his craving for comfortable Shire life and his Took instincts for adventure.
In Jeff Smith’s Bone – Fone Bone longs to return to Boneville, but harbors a secret love for Thorn who could never follow him there (Graphic novels count too right?).
Or in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake – Gogol’s divided between the need to honor his parents and his traditional Indian heritage, and the allure of American success.
Irony threads through all of them. And novels will no longer read the same to me.
Russ Roberts and Dana Gioia’s conversation was inspiring throughout.
Listen in full below:
Floodlights and Goalposts 