"And for those of you who've been emailing me asking me why I didn't do more with the Screwtape Letters, more like Gatsby..."

"... my answer to that is that the lack of interest in the question asked in this post shows why that project doesn't fly. The Gatsby project flew. It turned on minds that accepted the turn-on and took off."

The last line of my comment explaining why I have yet to fulfill what may seem to be a promise to complete an assignment I really only gave myself.

And this post gets not only a Gatsby project tag, but also a written strangely early in the morning tag.

It's okay if you don't volunteer to sit for my outside-of-law-school exams. I have plenty of exams written by nonvolunteers that I am duty-bound to read. This post is about a duty I felt I had to write the answer to my own exam, which I only gave because I wanted to write that answer. But if the question inspired no one else, then I tend to think that my answer would only have seemed weird or annoying or — the worst — unreadable.

Or is that the worst? The devil nags me to ask. The devil says: Wouldn't it be a fascinating new project to write a blog called "Unreadable Things"?

Notes on success from 2 Scotts — Adams and Fitzgerald — and one Bob.

"In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success."

Writes Scott Adams, who followed his passion and invested in a restaurant that failed, then started drawing a comic strip — "Dilbert" — as "just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try" and became passionate about cartooning as it began to make him rich.

So Adams advises us not to take the advice "Follow your passion." Then he moves on to rejecting the advice that one ought to have goals. What you need is a system.

That's a pretty amusing column at the link, and I see it's adapted from a book that's coming out next week — "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big."

***

There are only 2 Bob Dylan songs that use the word "success" and they are both on the same album which is probably the album that made the deepest impression on my mind when I was a malleable teenager, "Bringing It All Back Home":

1. "She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all."

2. "Get dressed, get blessed/Try to be a success/Please her, please him, buy gifts/Don’t steal, don’t lift/Twenty years of schoolin’/And they put you on the day shift...."

Naturally, after 12 years of schoolin', I went to art school. After 16 years of schoolin' and 5 years unschooling, I went to law school. There's a "Bringing It All Back Home" "Highway 61" song with the word "lawyers":

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known...

After 19 years of schoolin', it took 20 years of professing — looks liked or not — to get to blogging, which included, inter alia, The Gatsby Project, which never officially ended, so here's another sentence:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

"The Screwtape Letters" is not an egg salad sandwich.

In yesterday's Boardwalk Café, Saint Croix said:

I should have said this in the Scalia post — the devil made me not do it — but one of the interesting things about The Screwtape Letters is the insight that a devil is simply an angel with free will.

Thus if you believe in an afterlife — and an overwhelming number of people believe in an afterlife — you should acknowledge devils. They are simply angels who are in rebellion with God. Which God allows, because God believes in free will for humanity.

What a fantastic book The Screwtape Letters is.

I would pay money for Althouse to blog that book!

Pay money to get me to blog about something? That's been done... to get me to eat an egg salad sandwich. I'd written a post — back in 2005 — listing "10 things I've never done," and #2 was "Eaten egg salad, devilled eggs, or cold hard-boiled eggs" — hmm, interesting second appearance of the Devil in this post! — and somehow that led to my saying you'd have to pay me $200 to eat an egg salad sandwich, and some commenters got together and collected $200 and PayPal'd it to me, and I blogged — vlogged! — The Eating of the Egg Salad Sandwich.

But I didn't want to eat an egg salad sandwich. Reading the "Screwtape Letters" is something I would like to do. I read it years ago — and I'm old so that "years ago" in the history of Althouse is almost half a century ago — but I'd like to read it again, especially with the ability to blog it and the context of Scalia's recent remarks about it.

So I added it to my Kindle. You can add it too: here. And if you use that link, you'll be sending me a little money (without paying more). If you like this blog, you can funnel money to me by entering Amazon through the Althouse portal and buying something, anything, at some point before clicking away. But to get me to blog on specific topics, you could attempt the Egg Salad Method. That might work for some things — bloggable, vloggable things, for the right price. You could also just ask, as Saint Croix did, and it might work, if I'm interested enough. This blog is all and only about what interests me.

So I bought "The Screwtape Letters" and read a few pages last night. Here's the first thing I highlighted, and I'll put it here out of context, because you know that I like isolating sentences from their context — so sue me — for the purposes of discussion. That's what we did last winter with The Gatsby Project, which actually has one post that got the "egg salad" tag. It was the post with the "salads of harlequin designs." Remember?

I'm not saying these "Screwtape Letters" posts will only be isolated sentences in the manner of The Gatsby Project. But I am getting us started with this sentence, as the devil Screwtape advises his nephew devil on how to screw with some human being, referred to as "the patient":

"By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?"

ADDED:  I've got to put that sentence in the context of its paragraph, because as it stands, out of context, it creates the impression that the God-oriented position is the avoidance of reason and the acceptance of authority. That isn't so:

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s own ground. 

"The Enemy" = God. This is the Devil's perspective.

He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. 

So there's a distinction between "argument" and "really practical propaganda." Something rates as argument — and it works better for aligning with God — and something else is the Devil's territory. That is called "really practical propaganda." When are we to think that's argument, and God has a fighting chance, and when are we to think that's just practical propaganda, and we ought to be wary?

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.

A connection is made between propaganda (which is not true argument) and living in the moment, paying attention to the stream of immediate sense experiences. And true argument is connected to turning away from daily, worldly life, and attending to universal issues.

This reminds me that blogging — I said it just above — is really paying attention the stream of immediate experiences, though this form of following the stream (and creating a stream) is abstracted from one's own bodily senses, other than the vision of text and pictures on the screen and the touch of touch-typing.

I've got to admit — I've been saying it for years — that I think living in the real world and paying attention to it is exactly what one ought to do, and I am very skeptical of the kind of people who move too quickly to abstract ideals. That puts me in the position of C.S. Lewis's devils, and it's C.S. Lewis I mistrust.

"Back in Paris, friends asked if I'd met someone new and assumed I must have fallen in love."

"But the reason I was so radiant was that I'd decided to be celibate."

Does celibacy make you "radiant" because you decided to undertake it? Will radiance not ensue if celibacy simply befalls you?

Was she really "radiant"?

"Radiant" is a funny word, lobbed automatically at brides, and therefore suspicion-provoking when aimed at the celibate woman.

"Radiant" means — according to the unlinkable OED — "Sending out rays of light; shining brightly" or "Of the eyes, a look, etc.: bright or beaming (as with joy or love). Of a person, esp. a young woman or bride: giving off an aura of joyfulness or health; glowingly happy." Amongst the OED quotes is one from a book that we once reveled in here at the Althouse blog, "The Great Gatsby":

1925   F. S. Fitzgerald Great Gatsby vi. 132   Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl.

Authentically. Oh! There's that adverb. Celibate sounds so pure. But authentically? Who on earth knows when she has achieved authenticity... especially in the radiancy department. Those auras must emanate from real joy.

"Al Gore made $200 million. Good for him!"

Said Meade. Acknowledging that I got the reference, I said, "But he didn't do it alone..."

Meade has his computer screen open to Drudge, the right 2/3 of which looks like this right now:



It's all about smiles, as the dolphin in the lower right corner makes clear. Meade says, "Wow, George P. Bush looks like Nixon," and I say, "And Obama too... strangely." The Gore smile is waxen. For all I know the pic is of a wax depiction of the GoreBot, the ManBearPig we've come to dread.

Meanwhile, there's Leo, our new Gatsby, apparently "vibrantly alive." The word "vibrant" appears only once in "The Great Gatsby":

He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

I think you know what to do with that sentence. And if not, my belief in the harmony of the universe — or the mystical shades and echoes of pink dolphins or the reliability of the Althouse commentariat — tells me that betamax3000 will show you the way.

"Has Climate Change Created A New Literary Genre?"

Asks NPR.

If you think the answer to that question is the genre is already there, it's called science fiction, then you are missing the key word literary.

The linked article talks about a new novel — "Odds Against Tomorrow" — and what "literary" means is conveyed by statements like this by the author Nathaniel Rich:

"I think we need a new type of novel to address a new type of reality.... which is that we're headed toward something terrifying and large and transformative. And it's the novelist's job to try to understand, what is that doing to us?"

And:

"I don't think that the novelist necessarily has the responsibility to write about global warming or geopolitics or economic despair.... But I do feel that novelists should write about what these things do to the human heart — write about the modern condition, essentially."

Rich says "the novelist," but he means the literary novelist. This superior individual is the one who understands that it is his job to understand deeply what is happening deep inside. Those sci-fi genre writers might describe what happens to the exterior world, but the literary writer describes what that world does to us... to the heart... the human heart. What's the point of saying "human heart," by the way? Was it possible to to think we were talking about other beast's heart? Perhaps extra words seem literary.

"Odds Against Tomorrow" was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which I just mentioned 3 days ago in a discussion about self-publishing that made a distinction between sci-fi and "high-end literary fiction." Sci-fi might do well self-published as an ebook...

But high-end literary fiction? Think you can attract the readers of that kind of material without a brand like Farrar Straus & Giroux attached? It's "high-end" and "literary" because high-end literary experts have done the filtering. Without that, all you have is pretension from an earnest soul who is self-publishing. How do you get that absurdly clunky vehicle going?

Speaking of extra words seeming literary, "high-end literary fiction" was not my phrase. It came from a literary agent. A high-end literary agent. 

IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000 has some great "Climate Change Fitzgerald" material, riffing on the old "Gatsby" project sentences. For example: "Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering due to Climate Change."

This is a game we can all play. Here's mine, based on my favorite of all the old "Gatsby" sentences: "He went out of the room calling 'Ewing!' and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, extremely sweaty young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scant hair scorched blond by the overbearing sun of Climate Change."

"The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness..."

"... and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money."

I suspected that some of you might be hoping for another sentence from "The Great Gatsby." (Here on the Althouse blog, there's the "Gatsby" project, which happens these days when the mood strikes me, and consists of a sentence from the great novel, taken out of context, to be employed — however you wish — as a conversation piece.)

Today's sentence has a resonance of extravagant numbers: "many times a millionaire" and "an infinite number of women."

There's also the nice hard and soft. Our man is "physically robust" but "soft-minded." Hard and soft might correspond to male and female, but it's the male who is both hard and soft. Hard below the neck and soft above. And the women have enough stuff above the neck to suspect... to get a glimmer of what's going on. They are gold-diggers, but in this case it's only copper. Tawdry!

"For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing."

Why, that's a sentence from "The Great Gatsby." Couldn't you tell?

The unreality of reality... the world... founded securely on a fairy’s wing....

So... I Googled "unreality of reality," and the second thing that came up was a Wikipedia article titled "Reality in Buddhism."

Some consider that the concept of the unreality of "reality" is confusing. They posit that, in Buddhism, the perceived reality is considered illusory not in the sense that reality is a fantasy or unreal, but that our perceptions and preconditions mislead us to believe that we are separate from the elements that we are made of. Reality, in Buddhist thought, would be described as the manifestation of karma^{[citation needed]}.

Isn't it always like that? Citation needed!

Are you "wasting the most poignant moments of night and life"?

Well, then, come read this sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and talk to us about it — the sentence, the loneliness, the loitering, the solitary dinner:

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Enchanted and haunting speak of bewitching and ghosts. The twilight — the dusk — is magical, the most poignant moments, and yet the poor young clerks throw this time away. It's now that they should be connecting with other people, but they loiter, merely waiting for it to be late enough to eat dinner. Our narrator is alone, and his loneliness is exacerbated by seeing this loneliness in other men.

But where is the pain? The word most expressive of pain is poignant, and it is the poignant part of night and life that the narrator and the ineffectual clerks do not enter. 

A non-"Gatsby" sentence.

You know I have this "Gatsby" project where I blog a single sentence — out of context — from "The Great Gatsby" and we analyze it however we want — its narrative arc, its language, its weirdness, our own weirdness, whatever. I'm starting a new thing — we'll see what happens with this — where I give you a sentence from something else I'm reading. I'm not sure what kinds of sentence will make it into this project, but I'm going to start with this strikingly long sentence...

...from a writer I greatly admire, David Rakoff. The book is "Half Empty":

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness — a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair — then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on “adorable,” even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one… well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.

"The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners..."

"... as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long."

A garish image of death... in today's ripped-out-of-context sentence from "The Great Gatsby."

We picture the soul tearing out of the body. And the grisly, horrible corpse. Is it laughing at us?

"I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”

That's today's sentence from "The Great Gatsby," taken out of context, and it's a sentence that you can and should memorize. Next time you're planning to meet somebody somewhere and they want to know how they can recognize you, say: "I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes."

It's especially appropriate if you're not a man. 

"... my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs..."

I thought you'd enjoy this taken-out-of-context sentence from "The Great Gatsby":

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

U've got to run... out into the Wisconsin snow... which was the subject of another post about a "Gatsby" sentence weeks ago.  No time to venture my comments about the damp snake and all that. So have at it. I'll join you later. 

ADDED: Herding, eluding, climbing, racing. Very active, especially the underwear, which was so memorable compared to the substance of the argument. There was a big argument, but it eludes him now. The argument ran out of his memory even as the running, racing, sweat and the climbing snakelike underwear wormed their way in.

The snake is so entrancing that it seems wrong to get to the introduction-to-creative-writing purple-prose "intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back." What's the point of "intermittent"? Why tag the trite "beads of" onto "sweat"? And "cool" as an adverb seems so twee. Perhaps all that verbiage was necessary to make it okay to talk about his underwear and to say snake. Damp snake.

"There’s something very sensuous about it — overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands."

There. I've given you another sentence from "The Great Gatsby." I'm doing it now because over there in the "Whenever I think of Indianapolis" post, sydney said "Quick, do a Gatsby post so betamax has an outlet for his literary yearnings." If that makes sense to you, you must be a regular in these "Gatsby" project posts, and you know betamax3000 haunts the comments threads in his distinctly freaky style, which he's resorted to applying to the old "One Day at a Time" TV show in lieu of "The Great Gatsby."

Speaking of Indianapolis, I feel I need to infuse today's "Gatsby" sentence with a little meaning from the previous sentence. You should know that "it" refers to "New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away." That's New York City, of course, not the whole state. People in New York mean New York City when they say "New York." They call the state "New York State" if it's ever worth talking about. They probably never talk about Indianapolis (which probably means "Indiana City").

What kind of sensuous, overripe, funny fruits are falling into your hands... wherever you are when "every one's away"?

"Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside."

Today's "Gatsby" sentence. It almost feels as though we've seen this one already. I had to check to make sure it was new. It has that visual obscurity, that life slightly out of reach, that we feel we've seen so many times.

Forms leaned and voices sang. Laughter existed, disembodied from the laughers and disconnected from whatever the jokes were. And then there were cigarettes, little lights that made it possible to discern gestures. We couldn't really see the people — they were forms — and there was a bit of sound — but it was for jokes we never heard — and there were gestures, barely seen, marked by the glowing ends of cigarettes — and the gestures — unintelligible — could not be understood.

How distanced and left out we feel! Inside those taxis, there is real life, people going places, talking about things, leaving us behind.

"For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery..."

"... and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes."

That's today's sentence from "The Great Gatsby."

What kind of flowers does your world — artificial? — smell like? Is your snobbery perky and inoffensive? What kind of musicians are playing the music that sets the rhythm of your year? Assuming your life is sad and suggestive, what new tunes are summing things up for you?

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

That's today's "Gatsby" sentence.

Amount/can challenge/what. That's the subject/predicate/object. The most important word is heart. The heart is modified by ghostly. It's a man's ghostly heart which is a storehouse — a storehouse invulnerable to new things. New things come in the form of the opposite of stored-up ghostliness:  fire and freshness.

A ghost is the opposite of a living person. What is perceived here is the impossibility of living. (The impossibility of living once you have lived.)

"A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.'"

That's today's sentence from "The Great Gatsby," here in what we call the "Gatsby" project, where we look at a single sentence out of context and say whatever we want about. Let it beat in your ears for a while until you reach a sort of heady excitement, which is to say, you've got to work yourself into a bit of a mental frenzy wherein it seems really important to arrive at the conviction that there are exactly 4 kinds of people in the world: the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.

"It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close..."

"... in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself."

And by "West," F. Scott Fitzgerald meant the Midwest. He meant Wisconsin, and I'm here in Wisconsin, hammering out the latest post in the "Gatsby" project (wherein we isolate and chew over one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" every day... more or less). And I'm feeling hurried and disappointed and sheer nervous dread. Should I be here, in this post, or off onto the next post, or am I already sorry about that one, but — yeesh — this thing right here is so... horrible?

"I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s..."

"... and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands."

That other sentence — "At the hookah bar, Jordan and Emily Wernet, a 25-year-old freelance illustrator of comics and tattoos, joked about the grotesqueness of a hand appearing inside a belly and about 'parasites,' 'popping one out,' and 'horrible little grubs' in the midst of more serious conversation about their fears of relinquishing sole ownership of one’s own body" —  made some readers feel that there was a "Gatsby" sentence gestating somewhere inside the womb of my Blogger account, so I thought I'd better pop out this post. I hope you don't find it grotesque, this string of words that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full possession of the autonomy of authorship, determined to be, in fact, a sentence, worthy of a place in the pages of "The Great Gatsby."

And I hope it's not horrible that I ripped it out of his context and put it in my context as I, clasping tightly to my bloggerly autonomy, decided that this — this! — is a blog post. It is not for the professors, journalists, and literary critics to resolve the difficult question of when some quotes from this-or-that tossed together with some connective prose amount to a blog post. It's enough to say there's a divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question, and therefore it's up to me to decide what is worthy of publication here. My blog, my choice.

This "Gatsby" sentence has a simple structure. The subject is "I" and the predicate is "remember." How many sentences in the history of humanity begin "I remember...."? There's no end to where you can go from there (especially if you're not hung up on nonfiction and truthtelling). So string along the memories — the memorabilia, the "things... worthy of being remembered."

I remember the Michael Jackson memorabilia, the Bruce Lee memorabilia, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorabilia, Malcolm X memorabilia, the Jimi Hendrix memorabilia, the $43,350 Rolex watch, the fur capes and parkas....

I mean... I remember the fur coats.... They — the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s — weren't wearing their fur in cape or parka form back in 1922.

Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings. Who are the unnamed girls and who are the "we"? There's the overspecificity of the people offstage, Ordways, the Herseys, and the Schultzes. There's the silly half-specificity of Miss This-or-That. These people — or, really, places (hence the possessive) — are, like fur coats and gloves, appurtenances to the human beings we are trying to see in this picture.

This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping. Hands appears twice in the sentence — the grotesqueness of a hand appearing — first, waving (connecting with others), and second, clasping a ticket (intent on getting to one's predetermined destination). The hands of the others reaching out are grubby and horrible and we've got a fear of relinquishing sole ownership of our long green tickets.