A Question Worth Asking

"Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?" – Tom Mallon, at the American Scholar.

He has nine other questions about the future of the humanities in America. He’s much too gloomy about the web, I think. But he’s right to worry about the increasing lack of quiet, time and space to think and read.

The Pre-Natal Abyss

My reader isn’t the only one concerned with the nothingness before conception. This is the first paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, "Speak, Memory". Haunting money quote:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.