Good reading, as C. H. always wrote well. It feels like he was very selective about what he put in and left out. In any case, he doesn't disappoint.
Quotes:
I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written about the same events, or who have a decent expectation of anonymity, or who are such appalling public shits that they have forfeited their right to bitch.
For those I have loved, or who have been so lenient and gracious as to have loved me, I have not words enough here, and I remember with gratitude how they have made me speechless in return.
I HOPE IT WILL not seem presumptuous to assume that anybody likely to have got as far as acquiring this paperback re-edition of my memoir will know that it was written by someone who, without appreciating it at the time, had become seriously and perhaps mortally ill.
I am forced to make simultaneous preparations to die, and to go on living. Lawyers in the morning, as I once put it, and doctors in the afternoon
I suspect that it doesn’t very much matter what one reads in the early years, once one has acquired the essential ability to read for pleasure alone.
Then there was one of Methodism’s many paradoxes, which was its historic identification with the working class.
In writing and reading, there is a gold standard. How will you be able to detect it? You will know it all right.
It can be good to start with a shipwreck. Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.
A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself.
The first real kick he gets from a cop is often a huge moment of truth to a young member of the middle class…
I began to discern one of the elements of an education: get as near to the supposed masters and commanders as you can and see what stuff they are really made of.
So there it was: Cuban socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another.
You do not forget, even if you come from a free and humorous society, the first time that you are with unsmiling seriousness called a “counter-revolutionary” to your face.
People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary.
will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves.
Let us say one quarter of the time allotted to political confrontations and dramas, another devoted to reading books on any subject except the ones I was supposed to be studying, another quarter on seeking out intellectual heavyweights who commanded artillery superior to my own, with the residual twenty-five percent being consumed by the polymorphous perverse. It could have been worse.
Within moments, Margaret Thatcher and I were face to face. Within moments, too, I had turned away and was showing her my buttocks.
The alteration of perspective was the most useful thing. In northern Europe it was, roughly speaking, a case of the free West versus the “satellite states” of the East. In Cyprus, though, the illegal occupying power was a member of NATO. In Portugal, the fascist regime itself was a member of NATO. Likewise in the case of Greece. In Spain, the main external relationship of the system was with Washington. Thus it was possible to meet Communists who, in these special circumstances, not only made sense but had heroic records and were respected popular figures.
Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison.
Escorted into Videla’s presence, I justified my politeness and formality by telling myself that I wasn’t there to make points but to elicit facts. I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush.
Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business.
Nothing is possible in such a universe, and that is precisely what the torturers know…
Over at City Lights bookstore in North Beach you could see a man chatting with customers and looking like Lawrence Ferlinghetti: it was Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
One always has the vague illusion of taking or making one’s own decisions, the illusion itself running in parallel with the awareness that most such calls are made for you by other people, or by circumstances, or just made
On the one side was the very ugliest bit of the new American empire, represented by the Haig-Kirkpatrick alliance of uniformed bullies and power-sucking pseudo-intellectuals. They spoke for the Argentine torturers who were—as they then well knew but we did not—already acting as the herders and trainers for a homicidal crew that the world would soon know as the Nicaraguan contras. (It really counts as an irony of history that it was Mrs. Thatcher’s bellicosity that robbed the neo-cons of their favorite proxy, compelling the then-unknown Oliver North to finance the contras from hostage trading with the Iranian mullahs instead, and very nearly demolishing the presidency of her adored “Ronnie.”)
To become a Washingtonian is to choose a very odd way of becoming an American. It felt at first like moving to a company town where nothing ever actually got itself made.
the claustrophobic world in which he had to live for some years was a prefiguration of the world in which we all, to a greater or lesser extent, live now.
leaden prose always tends to be a symptom of other problems
The curse-word “fascism” is easily enough thrown around, including by me on occasion, but I give you my oath that it makes a difference to you when you see the real thing at work.
All those who have had similar or comparable experiences will recognize the problem at once: it is not possible for long to be just a little bit heretical.
A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called “meaningless” except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so.
I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me.
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity’s most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.
Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.
Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV.
I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted and where there is either too much law and order or too little.
Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won’t be easily available.
In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son, and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.
even the British Royal Family scrapped its Saxe-Coburg-Gotha titles and became the House of Windsor, conveniently metamorphosing other names like “Battenberg” into “Mountbatten.”
This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named “myxomatosis,” into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents
you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.
1812 Napoleon had issued his emancipation decree, liberating the Jews from ancient church-mandated legal disabilities.
What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland.
And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion
The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it.
Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be “saved” or “redeemed.” (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be.
If a difference of principle goes undiscussed for any length of time, it will start to compromise and undermine the integrity of a friendship.
I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart.
From this kind of leathery awareness, nature itself protects the young, and a good thing, too, otherwise they would be old before their time and be taking no chances.
The old slogans still sometimes strike me as the best ones, and “Death to Fascism” requires no improvement.
Physical courage is in some part the outcome of sheer circumstance.
The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated,
I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified.
It is not so much that there are ironies of history, it is that history itself is ironic.
It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.
To be an unbeliever is not to be merely “open-minded.” It is, rather, a decisive admission of uncertainty that is dialectically connected to the repudiation of the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics. But that’s my Hitch-22.
It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them. After various past allegiances, I have come to believe that Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self-criticism.
