Seams

"Sometimes — quite often — the same people who are capable of a radical questioning of, say, economic neo-liberalism or the role of the state, are deeply conservative socially — about women, marriage, sexuality, our so-called ‘family values’ — sometimes they’re so doctrinaire that you don’t know where the establishment stops and the resistance begins. For example, how many Gandhian/Maoist/ Marxist Brahmins or upper caste Hindus would be happy if their children married Dalits or Muslims, or declared themselves to be gay? Quite often, the people whose side you’re on, politically, have absolutely no place for a person like you in their social, cultural or religious imagination. That’s a knotty problem… politically radical people can come at you with the most breathtakingly conservative social views and make nonsense of the way in which you have ordered your world and your way of thinking about it… and you have to find a way of accommodating these contradictions within your worldview."

- Arundhati Roy, in a 2005 interview with Tehelka

Overheard, A Heated Exchange In an Imaginary

Howard Jacobson: “Remember how superior art is to belief.”

Czeslaw Milosz: “Art is not a sufficient substitute for the problem of leading a moral life.” 

d) All of the above

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E.B. White

I've been circling ineloquently around this very thought for some years now, and after much unnecessary dialectical thinking and stress paralysis (do one, do the other, freak out and end up doing neither), I have, as always, settled on the most optimistic answer:

Do both.

Conundrum #2

Evocative vs. Provocative

Conundrum #1

I'd like us all to be grown-ups now, please, and stay forever young.