#ravelstein

[meaningfall]

— How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Tody Young

[thequietabsolute]

‘His students had to be cured of the disastrous misconceptions, the standardised unrealities imposed by mindless parents.’

[queenlua]

He had real intelligence, you see, a working, persistent mind, whereas I was only occasionally, fitfully, intelligent. What he thought out, and thought through, sat upon a foundation of tested principles. — How shall I put it . . . As birds went, he was an eagle, while I was something like a flycatcher.

[queenlua]

tfw you love your friend but they’re kind of an insufferable know-it-all:

My feeling was that you couldn’t be known thoroughly unless you found a way to communicate certain “incommunicables”—your private metaphysics.  My way of approaching this was that before you were born, you had never seen the life of this world. To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development. I had waited for millennia to see this. Then when I had learned to walk—in the kitchen—I was sent down the street to inspect it more closely [. . .]

Anyway... this was the world. I had never seen it before. Its first gift was the gift of itself. Objects gathered you to themselves and held you by a magnetic imperative that was simply there. It was a privilege to be permitted to see—to see, touch, hear. This would not have been impossible to describe to Ravelstein. But he would have answered dismissively that Rousseau had already covered the same turf in his Confessions or his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. I didn’t feel like having these first epistemological impressions anticipated or dismissed.

[queenlua]

the Ravelstein character in this novel is so delightfully unhinged.  imagine having this fucking dude as your phd advisor:

I am bound as an honest observer to make plain how Ravelstein operated. If he cared about you, it was in this perspective that he would sketch you. You wouldn’t have believed how much thought he devoted to each and every case, the closeness with which he observed the students he had accepted for higher or esoteric training, those willing to break with the orthodox social science majority which dominated the profession. If students followed Ravelstein, they would find jobs hard to get. So you had to think how to provide for the young people who were chosen. Professionally speaking, they had made an erratic choice. Ravelstein often asked my opinion. “What if Smith were to pair up with Sarah? He’s got some queer tendencies but he’ll never be a queer.  Now Sarah is a very serious young woman—disciplined, hard-working, loves her books.  No genius but she’s got a lot going for her.  She may have just the touch of masculinity that would make young Smith happy.”

[queenlua]

With a little encouragement Ravelstein would reveal Battle’s confidence—or anyone else’s.  He would say, quoting a late friend of ours, “When I do it, it’s not gossip, it’s social history.”

[thequietabsolute]

Everything we see we translate into Freud's language. Now, which is being trivialised, his vocabulary or our observations.

－ Saul Bellow, from Ravelstein [2000.]

[thequietabsolute]

The brain is a mirror and reflects the world.

－ Saul Bellow, from Ravelstein [2000.]