what's abominable

Ramming Vonnegut and Borges together, a recent travelogue (it's unfortunate, I think, that the latter character has been strangled by the university).

----

I've at least one experience in common with Vonnegut:

"It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, somthing they knew all the time."

Yes, I've had the experience too, albeit in a more northern country. Though I certainly don't share the skill of being able to create an easily graspable and insightful idea, I have been ridiculed for laziness and lack of thought. Like when I suggested "Louder than Bombs" was a good album.

Meanwhile, Borges, a darling of the literati writes:

"mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and affirm the universe."

And, then, three pages later,

"Thinking, meditating, imagining... are not anomalous acts - they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occassional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought is to confess our own languor our own barbarie."

You see why he's a darling -- but what's more clear than any of that? -- in any case, you'll say, "I'll listen when he tells me more about labyrinths, memory or mirrors, (but no more about Schopenaeur please). " Or, "You missed the point here" (which was, I'd admit, an exercise in the art of reading that aims at pulling the author out of the story). Okay, and this makes it all more profound?

I get pulled into these series of justifications... what a bore it must to be read, and, for me, to think it might somehow cure my embarrassment of being born.