Beyond Rivalry

I've been away since Sunday. Now I'm back.

** David Sedaris in The Austin Chronicle on the flap over a year ago about his 'embellished' stories:

"I take a story, put it on a scale, and say, 'OK, if this is 96 percent true, that's an acceptable ratio for ground beef, and it's more than acceptable for heroin and cocaine, so I'm going to call it nonfiction.'"

** In a fascinating article on Jacques Barzun in the 22 Oct. 2007 New Yorker, which I was reading at a friend's while away:

"Barzun wanted to do on the page what he did in the classroom: help the reader 'carry in his head something more than the unexamined history of his own life.' not because knowledge is inherently good or makes one a better person but because it fosters an independence of mind."

Barzun, who is over 100 years old, is quoted as saying: "Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing." He's refering to an irony of aging, that (now in the words of the article's author, Arthur Krystal) "when time is short, old age takes up a lot of time," what with "doctors' visits, tests to be suffered, results to wait for, ailments and medications to be studied."

For some this comes in old age; for some, much earlier (and for some, never).

**  From Ruth Rendell's Not of the Flesh (2008), which I'm finishing this weekend, Inspector Wexford says something along the same lines:

"Modern medicine is wonderful. I just wish we didn't have to hear about it day in and day out. In the Middle Ages they say people brought God into the conversation all the time, and with the Victorians it was death. We talk about our insides."