Paula Fox on Human Activity

"Americans hold family values dear, even as they're killing their own children. I think that people in terrible situations lie to themselves about the situations they're in. I feel that lying is the great human activity; being right is the great human passion."
-- Paula Fox

The Clown

A comic figure remains comic only as long as his attempts at self-expression fail. When a comic figure succeeds in justifying himself, he ceases to be comic. An evil figure is also unknown, silent, if not misunderstood. A comic figure and an evil figure, then, are in the same pocket of the writer's bag of tricks.

The Pain of Authors

All books are written because the author carries a grievance. We can assume that romance novels are written because the author is peeved that love is not symmetrical, and fantasies because the author is ashamed of the drabness of reality. I write because it grieves me that the dead cannot be returned to life, and because there is so much silence in memory.

Language acquisition

Language acquisition depends upon the desire to communicate. The desire to communicate depends upon love. Therefore, the more deeply one loves -- whether the object is man, woman, child, or money, the more quickly and thoroughly the language will be known.

Francophilia

Francophilia is a condition that afflicts those whose class identification is in flux, and others with families that have recently come up in the world. In other words, loving everything French is the best way of being a snob.

Chinese

It has been a long time since I have read a Chinese short story or novel. But what I remember most about the experience was the silence. Reading French, German, Swedish or Russian texts, whether or not I recognize and understand the words I am reading, I hear sounds in my head as a soundtrack to whatever play of meaning I can summon, and perhaps they are violently unfaithful sounds, rising up reflexively from my anglophone mind without concern for the conventions of the language in question. But still, they are sounds -- a cacophony, a great flood of echoes and shouts, purrs and whispers, sometimes snarls. Reading Chinese, however, is silent, restful, meditative. When I don’t recognize a word in Chinese, the character says nothing. Other times, especially nowadays, I remember the meaning of a character very well, but by contrast, nothing of its sound. And then there is silence, as reading continues. This feels something like blindness.

Cities

Stockholm is a bourgeois city. Berlin is a working class city. New York is an aristocratic city, as is Paris. The difference lies not in how much money the inhabitants have, but in what relationship they have to bohemians. The people of the working class let bohemians do whatever they like. The bourgeoisie stifles bohemianism. And the aristocrats breathe down the bohemians’ necks, beckoning to them with promises of fame, glory, and transformation. The bohemians in such an aristocratic world behave as if they were swallowing amphetamines.