You can’t impart a lesson until you admit that you’ve learned nothing. The freelancer’s dilemma.
Your work in your 20s is neither as good as you think nor as wretched as you claim.
Don’t strive for originality; don’t fret over what’s fashionable.
Envy will be your most lasting, most reliable, and most fulfilling relationship.
You lose when contrarianism goes from useful tool to guiding ethic.
Two types of philistines: one who browbeats you for your refinement, another who shames you for your vulgarity. Abide them in dignified silence, pray for their quiet deaths.
Intellectuals advocate for intelligence but cannot fight stupidity. Stupidity is too clever. It takes many forms, appears in the last place you’d expect it, and leaves you demoralized at how far it spreads.
Freedom is the courage to run through the fire exit; fame is yelling “Fuck me? Fuck you!” while doing so.
It’s not enough to read people with whom you disagree in theory. Embrace the unforgivable on paper: the pompous dialectician, the shrill pundit, the revolutionary grifter, the plain atrocious stylist. Educate yourself on their wickedness, but don’t delight in their flaws.
No one resigns; they pivot.
Success hinges on being able to pivot from your mom to their mom.
Know the difference also between a striver and an achiever. A striver is an embittered achiever; an achiever is an oblivious striver. Yet both are entitled, venomously clever, never to be emulated, and to be avoided when you can afford to.
Having a sense of humor is a more valuable asset to survival and long-term contentedness than being funny, or being cool.
Most intellectuals go their whole working lives without a direct impact on external events. When they do it is at a time they do not expect, brought about by people they do not trust, for causes that sicken them.
Befriending those with whom you violently disagree is a sign of security—mostly of the material kind.
Anyone who uses words like “dilettante” or “genius” almost certainly abuses them.
Accusers of snobbery are often correct while also needing a wider vocabulary.
Accustom yourself to an understanding of power as an intangible concept of which you accuse others of having too much.
Aloofness is a learned skill. Trained aloofness adorns you in cuts. Untrained aloofness drowns you in syrup.
Where you went to college doesn’t matter because intellectuals are perpetually in high school.
Whether out of scarcity or abundance, parties always feel like dreams.
Heroics are a matter of fortune; deference, of discipline. Victory in an intellectual dispute may not depend on your decisive action; your decisive action may even put that victory at risk. Not that you’re useless. Someone whose destiny is triumphant is ever in need of someone whose destiny is auxiliary.
Taste is subjective and communal, decorative and essential, an internal sense and an external trait, a license and a medium. Taste is a Swiss army knife for surviving in the cultural wild and dominating its weaker species.
Pessimists can be impressive survivors or absurdly lucky posers. Actually, so can optimists.
I have nothing to say about irony, just as no one has anything ironic to say.
You can affect the airs of an intellectual all you want, but the role of intellectual is dictated from without, often from above. This is clarified when the right to be an intellectual is rescinded. Rescinding the right, however, does not rescind the role. If anything, the role becomes more visible.
Discovering and defining a crisis clutters the headspace needed for the mental doomsday prepping for when a real crisis arrives.
If panic is your temperament and alarmism is your tone, a prose style of elegance and reasonableness strikes a good balance. No one will heed your warnings either way.
Know the difference between culture war and cultural obliteration. The former has no end; the latter has no middle.
Just as you have your private battles you conceal from everyone around you, so too does any random stranger wage their own private culture war, the stakes of which may not be as high, nor the scope as vast, to everyone’s tolerance, but they are in each person well worth the metaphorical victory, and more than just the metaphorical carnage in between.
The pedant is an insatiable predator. If you leave the door open even just a little, they will blow it off its hinges. If the door is closed and locked, they will break through it with an ax. Once you have been sufficiently corrected, they will move to the next door. A correct world is apparently a doorless world.
As a reader, demand respect from your author. As an author, demand intelligence from your reader. A reader who seeks validation is not to be trusted. A reader who is frightened chooses to be frightened.
After a time, close contact with other intellectuals reveals its redundancy. As their peer, they charm, disappoint, and gossip about you no differently than how you charm, disappoint, and gossip about your own reflection.
Style is the fantasy that results from a pornographic coupling between thought and voice. And good style, like good smut, never buys into the fantasy and always cleans up whatever it vomits out.
Some find their voice in the flowing river of discourse; others in the scorched lakebed of satire.
Be ever the alchemist who turns lead to gold. But instead turn a slight into a gift and a rejection into a pardon.
Obscure prose is what the reader makes of it. Two readers read one passage. For one reader it may be dull, impenetrable dead end; for the other reader, an intriguing, seductive new adventure.
Lyricism is strategic obscurity. Not all strategies are successful.