• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Philosophy isn’t sorcery.

It’s a way of coming to terms with your fears and perhaps escaping them.

It’s a way of not giving in to the tohu (in Rashi’s† translation, the paralyzing “stupor”) or bohu (in the same translation, a depressing and desperate “solitude”).

It’s a “montage” that allows you to continue the war that Kafka spoke of and to try not to lose it. Here is your armor, there’s a combat machine, over there a way of strengthening your position or recovering another, or digging out your trench more effectively. It involves strategy, tactics, calculation, and, fundamentally, survival.

I’m being quite sincere about this.

Now it’s up to you to play.

*Paul Claudel, French poet, dramatist, and diplomat who was the French consul in China from 1895 to 1909 and in Japan from 1922 to 1928.

†Arielle Dombasle, Lévy’s wife.

*Maurice Garreau-Dombasle, who was the French ambassador to Mexico.

†Alexandre Kojève, Russian philosopher and statesman who had a great influence on twentieth-century French philosophy.

‡Collection of critical essays by Marcel Proust on authors he admired in which he opposed the biographical approach espoused by the nineteenth-century literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve.

*La Colline inspirée (The Sacred Hill, novel, 1913) and La Grande Pitié des églises de France (The Great Pity of the Churches of France, 1914), both later works by Maurice Barrès.

*The Carnot cycle is a thermodynamic cycle proposed by Nicolas Carnot in 1824. The point here is that this is not entropy (or, rather, no change in entropy).

†Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse (“Discourse on Inequality”) (“Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes”) and Essay on the Origin of Languages (Essai sur l’origine des langues).

*In Judaism, Sheol is the general abode of the dead (similar to the Greek Hades) while Gehenna refers to the place of eternal torment for the damned (hell).

*Gottfried Leibniz’s late philosophy, as set out in his text Monadology, a metaphysics of “simple substances.”

†Rashi (acronym for Rabbi Schlomo Yitzhaki): French rabbi whose biblical and Talmudic commentaries made him the foremost medieval Jewish scholar.

April 10, 2008

The region of Shannon does not, in itself, have any particular character. A large, sluggish river empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is surrounded by low hills covered with a patchwork of fields. But sixty-five miles north, you come to Connemara, which is to say you enter into a different world, with a light—alive, almost physical—that it is hard to believe can truly exist here on Earth. If you continue along the road, you go through the landscape, often shrouded in mists, of County Sligo, then one comes to Donegal, with its harsh scenery reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands, where the light is already that of the North. If one decides to leave Shannon and head south, in less than an hour’s drive you come to Killarney on the banks of Lough Leane. The banks are so beautiful that, on a state visit, Queen Victoria permitted her servants to get down from their carriages to admire the scenery at a spot that has since been known as Ladies’ View. From Killarney, it is easy to visit the jewels that are the Dingle Peninsula, Iveragh (though the Ring of Kerry is to be avoided in July and August), Beara, Durrus, and Mizen Head, the southernmost point, which closes the ring.

Shannon, in short, is an ideal point of departure for exploring the west of Ireland—a series of landscapes that to my eyes have no peer anywhere in the world and that it is unimaginable to think I will ever tire of. So I decided to leave County Dublin and, giving in to a surge of optimism (for if in theory I am a pessimist, in practice in my day-to-day life I demonstrate an enthusiasm, a naïveté that is often surprising), I moved my boxes of books into a house that is not habitable just yet and won’t be for several months, maybe until the end of the year.

Here I am, therefore, utterly powerless to respond to your letter in like