Archives for February 4, 2020

From 2005:

I thought and thought, and suddenly it came to me: why not the bathroom? Not only is it tastefully decorated in cornflower blue and yellow, but it’s next to the living room, thus allowing me to show off for my visitors by leaving the door discreetly ajar. But would it be disrespectful to hang a presidential commission there? Though a friend assured me that many actors keep their Oscars in the bathroom, I wasn’t satisfied. Such a gesture smacked of phony humility. (As Thomas Mann allegedly said to a fellow writer who was eating a bit too much humble pie, “You’re not great enough to be that modest.”)

Read the whole thing here.

“I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.”

Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides