December 30, 2005
Three Underlined Sentences
From Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking:
“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him.”
“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”
“Time is the school in which we learn.”
I did not realize until page 215—out of 227 pages—that I would finish the book on the same day, December 30, that Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne died two years ago. It is also the day I am moving in to an apartment with my girlfriend for the first time. Life does that sometimes.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
December 28, 2005
Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists
While in Miami early this month, I read Johann Hari’s NYTBR review of Paul Berman’s “remarkable book” Power and the Idealists (Soft Skull Press). Berman, an intellectual historian whose chief area of study is the “New Left,” would use Joschka Fischer’s transformation from ’68-era protester to Green Party leader and, eventually, German Foreign Minister: “If anyone can put [the 2001 revelation of Fischer’s role in a 1973 police beating] into its historical context, it's Berman. He is not only an alumnus of the rebellion; he is the keeper of its yearbook and its funeral director. In this free-standing sequel to his superb ‘Tale of Two Utopias,’ he revisits the European graduating class of Rebellion High.”
I’m extremely interested in the “afterlives” (to use Kristin Ross’s phrase) of 1968’s social upheavals, and so I asked for (and received) the book for Christmas. Unfortunately Hari’s review was not of Berman’s book, but rather of its first chapter, which is a slightly modified version of a September 3, 2001, article for The New Republic called “The Passion of Joschka Fischer.” Note the publication date: The article was written prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, and therefore stops more or less with Fischer’s decision to support NATO’s Kosovo intervention in the late ‘90s. It is a superb history of the thirty-year slide from radicalism to interventionist liberalism, deftly synthesizing the ideologies of innumerable left-wing factions into a very readable narrative.
Continue reading "Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists"