[Commonplace books: Thomas Farnaby, 17th-century]
I'm not sure how interested we should be in the idea of interest. It's such a secular category of mental activity--it implies such an emptying out of content. One can't imagine Dante or Pascal being 'interested' in something. Pascal's 'interest' in roulette was a terrifying confrontation with the omnipresent immanence of his creator, a face-to-face interview with God. You would no more ask him if it was 'interesting' than you would ask a matador if he was 'interested' in bulls, a man in a crow's nest on a windjammer during a gale whether he was 'interested' in reefs, a ballet dancer at the apogee of his leap whether he is 'interested' in gravity, a whore checking the balance of her savings account whether she is 'interested' in men. It's a condition of our banality that we are so interested in things; that we assume that the idea of interest has any force. None of the most important events in our life is 'interesting'--birth, copulation, death. A man standing on the edge of the abyss has passed beyond interest in the void.
[Interest: John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure]
Posted by stronzo on 08.29.2012
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