Sometimes the key of fully appreciating a book is choosing the right place and right time to read it. Such is the case with Eva Brann’s book Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts & Twofold Speech (2016). Brann, a classics professor at St. John’s College, normally writes the kind of challenging book that I would be hesitant to buy, but I swapped publisher Paul Dry at Paul Dry Books my own Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit for a copy of the Brann book. Bartering can be as good as cash for writers except the appliance repairman wouldn’t except a boxful of D & Os for fixing my washer last week.
I’ve always had a fondness for quotes and aphorisms, but Brann’s brief notes on such widespread topics as Death, Home, Kookiness and Morals demands more meditative reading. This is the kind of book where you read a passage, you think, you read again, and tell yourself either, “Oh, I get it!” or “I am not deep enough to understand this. Sigh.” and move on. You cannot do that kind of reading on the train (Sorry MARTA Book Club) or after a day at work, which fills your mind up with all kinds of rubbish. This book must be read before everyone else in the house gets up and you are at your favorite spot with your morning coffee. (Mine is shown here.) It becomes a predawn mediation -- sans breathing, stretching or praying. This book deserves that you put yourself in a position to concentrate.
Brann’s book is a series of aphorisms, which comes from the Greek for de-limitation and is defined as, “a brief expression of a much-pondered opinion, succinctly and suggestively phrased.” I could have yellow-highlighted the whole book, but are just a few samples of personal favorites:
On Intellectuals
‘Thinking outside the box’, the mantra of the creativity folks, doesn’t work. As soon as thought leaps out, the box expands and they’re as inside as ever.
On Memoirs
How much sweeter to be serenely sure of having been underestimated than to have to sink through the floor shamed by clueless overpraise.
Respect we deserve to get; adulation we deserve not to forget.
On Home
Two Human Types: It’s better to come home to anybody than nobody/ It’s better to come home to no one than the wrong one.
Other Paul Dry Books (which are on sale)
Note: Until August 8th, you can get $10 discount at Paul Dry Books for orders over $30.
(Use code SUMMER2017). I’ve read quite a few of this publisher’s offerings: two books of essays by Gabriel Zaid, Ill Met By Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, a thriller about the Crete resistance against Nazis in World War II, and humorous fiction by Irish writer Lord Dunsany and a fine book by Margaret Kaufman, the latter which is reviewed in the blog here.
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