William Gaddis and the Classical World

The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality...William Gaddis, The Recognitions.

I end my nights with Gaddis, not knowing now how I ever lived without him.

I don't know that I've ever read a book like The Recognitions, in which there's a book in almost every sentence.

Thank you Dan DeVries for leading me to Gaddis, though I don't think you were really leading me, that in reality you were only mentioning a writer from whom you got a great deal as a reader.

I talk to get something off my mind.

I write to get something into my mind.

I realize that I read for the same reason I write, not "for information" as C. says he reads, an admirable reason for reading, but for transformation.

Last night I was watching the US Open on tv. I googled James Blake, who announced his retirement from professional tennis the day before the tournament began and was deep into the 5th set against Ivo Karlovic, who I googled after I googled James Blake. There was information there and I was grateful for it.

I'm doing a lot of reading about the classical world--Werner Jaeger's Paideia, Mary Beard, Ingrid Rowland, the Oxford Dictionary of The Classical World, a book which I can open anywhere and get more information from one page than I know what to do with--because I'm doing a lot of writing about the classical world.

I think of the classical world as a place I would have liked living in, perhaps more than I like living in the world I'm actually living in. I'd live in Miletus on the southwest coast of what is now Turkey and talk with Anaximander, a philosopher who rejected both Air and Water as being the 'first principle'of life and chose instead apeiron, not a definite element but which (in his own words) "includes everything in itself, and guides everything."  It was the first time a human being conceived of a cosmos, a community whose meaning and purpose is the continuous process of coming-to-be and passing-away.

I read this concept as a grand ideal, a discovery that has nothing to do with telescopes or any other kind of empirical research but could only be made in the depths of the human soul: the idea that Being is divine, despite the terror of impermanence and annihilation that Anaximander lived with in his time and that I live with in mine.