Mao’s performance in Moscow was designed to antagonise the Soviets. He was on his worst behaviour throughout the visit, despite his hosts’ generosity. When the Soviets sent two planes to transport the delegation, and lavished the travellers with caviar, fish and chips, sandwiches and vodka, Mao’s response was: ‘It’s not to our liking.’ While in Russia, he would touch only the Hunanese food cooked by his own chef. Khrushchev arranged for Mao to stay in the finest room of Catherine the Great’s former palace, a luxurious labyrinth of corridors and vast reception rooms glittering with chandeliers. Mao expressed his disdain by eschewing the en suite bathroom in favour of a chamber pot (brought all the way from China). When Khrushchev invited him to a performance of Swan Lake, viewed from the Soviet leader’s special box, Mao announced – by his doctor’s account – that he was leaving at the end of the second act, grousing: ‘Why don’t they just dance normally?’
Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (2019)
Author: LV
When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect—we even demand—that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. […] We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. […] We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. […] Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.
Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (1961)
It seems a dangerous position for an animal to be in, stripped of instinct. What possible use could there be in having lost the mother wit to be in the world? What conceivable advantage might lie in a way of being that has no way?
Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (1998)
Work, Lewis Hyde writes, is distinct from labour. Work is something we do by the hour, and labour sets its own pace. Work, if we are fortunate, is rewarded with money, but the reward for labour is transformation. “Writing a poem,” Hyde writes, “raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labours.” This list reveals to me my problem. I want to give my life to labour, not work.
Or the other way around. The meanings of labour and work are reversed in Andrea Komlosy’s Work: The Last 1,000 Years. Both words can be traced back to Latin, she writes, which gave every Indo-European language two words for work. In Latin, labour meant arduous toil, and the word laborare came from the swaying of slaves under heavy loads. Opus, which became our work, was creative and productive. This work was satisfying, a source of pleasure and a sense of accomplishment.
Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (2020)
Since people find it difficult, and rightly so, to live with something that takes their breath away and renders them speechless, they have all too frequently yielded to the obvious temptation to translate their speechlessness into whatever expressions for emotions were close at hand, all of them inadequate.
Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement (2003)
Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that, to conceal their infirmity, they set to work to clap vigorously as soon as ever they saw one or two persons applauding?
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)
What we know about ourselves and remember is not as decisive to our life’s happiness as it is believed to be. One day, what others think they know about us assails us – and then we realize that that is more powerful. It is easier to deal with a bad conscience than a bad reputation.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
The theology of possession was complicated and messy. All were agreed that only with divine permission was the Devil able to enter into anyone. This was a simple consequence of the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. The French demonologist Jean Bodin declared, ‘It may also occur that Satan is sent by God, since it is certain that all punishment comes from Him.’ On the other hand, both the possessed themselves and those involved in their deliverance were apt to give the firm impression that, in their case at least, the Devil was firmly in control, or at best, that God and the Devil were involved in a battle which it was possible for either to win.
Philip C. Almond, The Devil: A New Biography (2014)
Well into the nineteenth century, experts were likelier to think that fiction reading caused madness than cured it. A doctor warned in 1806 that reading ‘affects the organs of the body, and relaxes the tone of the nerves.’ As late as 1877, another expert ‘could tell of one young woman of my acquaintance, of fine education,’ ‘who gratified a vitiated taste for novel-reading till her reason was overthrown, and she has, in consequence, been for several years an inmate of an insane asylum.’
Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019)
But why bother, in this day and age […] with such a quixotic notion as the truth? Every sobersided history is at least half sleight-of-hand: the right hand waving its poor snippets of fact, out in the open for all to verify, while the left hand busies itself with its own devious agendas, deep in its hidden pockets.
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (1993)
