Opinion: Information Magpie

I often think of my good friend Jing, who I consider a childhood friend of sorts even though I met her in college. I would argue we are mostly still children in college, but Jingy has and continues to be a muse and inspiration in my life introducing me to new ideas, art, people, all things of beauty. She is one of those rare generous souls who never grows old and out of touch, who approaches all things new with the open-mindedness of childhood wonderment. She always shares her joie de vivre with those lucky enough to know her. While I spend most of my days lost in dreamy revelry or rumination (depending on my mood), I rely on her to remind me again of brilliant, sparking places, people, experiences surrounding me. I hope she is enjoying these happy days :) She recently sent me a quote from a Salman Rushdie book (which she introduced to me a few years back), which she used to describe herself in a self-deprecating way as:

 "a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool’s gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood’s rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide."

 And so I thought of her today when I came across this particular impassioned piece of writing about writers, and I decided to gather it like an information magpie honing in on a glittering shard in honor of Jingy. I think most things that are different and interesting can also be considered a little insane. Well that's an insanity I'll take then.

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Excerpt from Simone Weil by Susan Sontag:

"The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr."

The New York Review of Books: Simone Weil (Susan Sontag)