Re: The new, improved Sophie's Choice...

Robbie,

You write "peculiar needs" in quotes, as if I wrote it somewhere. Did I?
Where? I can't find it.

And I think your choices relate to mine, in many ways, much as chocolate does
to vanilla. I would just never feel any need to defend my habit of eating
chocolate as "sensible" in any way or in terms of its "worth" compared to eating
vanilla.

And I'm not at all "uncomfortable" with the questions -- I just see no need
to answer them and I also see and have seen the act of answering them as often
leading, as I said, to soft vagaries and sad reductivism in the name of
categories and measurements and the rhetoric of "more" and "less" -- none of which I
see any particularly compelling reason to attach to art (or love).

In part, I say this because such strategies can lead us into the language of
competition, of winners and losers, as demonstrated quite nicely (and better
than I could have ever dreamed) in your own comparison between my posts here
and the writing of Lucretius.

Why you feel compelled to compare these two very different sets and sorts of
writings in very different places and as very different acts, other than to
get in a cheap and easy shot about "better" and "worse" or "more" and "less," is
almost a mystery. Almost, but not quite. I do see why. And it's the same
reason that I feel it might be wiser, for me at least, to be wary of this
approach to measuring texts and pitting them in competition with one another.
That's not what art and writing and music and films (and love and beauty) are for
me. That's not how I engage with them. And your last paragraph reveals
nicely why.

Thanks,

--John

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Received on Mon Dec 15 15:57:14 2003