Gelernter's tortured prose and cringe-worthy nostalgia make him easy to dismiss - which is unfortunate, since there's a serious and respectable idea buried beneath his verbiage. From Rousseau to Balzac, Freud and beyond, unexpressed sexuality (and the unrequited longing that stems from it) has been seen as a supremely creative and idealizing force. Gelernter, in his moralizing, wants to make it into the sine qua non of romantic love, which it's not. But there is something about it amazingly real...ask anyone - sometimes the most intoxicating part of a love affair is not the consummation, but the imagined pleasure and happiness, suffused with desire, that precede it.

As for Gelernter's converse claim that sexual abandon actively destroys the possibility of romantic love...I don't think that's true. But some people, and not only addled conservatives at war with modernity, worry that it might be.

"From the amorous point of view Véronique belonged, as we all do, to a sacrificed generation. She had certainly been capable of love; she wished to still be capable it, I’ll say that for her; but it was no longer possible. A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era. Véronique had known too many discothèque, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one leads, obviously, a slag’s life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the young, and so one hates them. Condemned to remain unavowable, this hatred festers and becomes increasingly fervent; then it dies down and fades away, just as everything fades away. All that remains is resentment and disgust, sickness and the anticipation of death."

Michel Houellebecq, L’Extension du Domaine de la Lutte

A personal postscript...I recently had a poignant conversation with a dear friend of mine - approaching thirty (like me), newly-ABD, Jewish, devoutly secular, who's had her share of fun. She wrote to me, "It's funny how over the years, I am attracted to fewer and fewer people, have much less genuine, lasting emotion..." This is not all bullshit, my friends.

For you skeptics out there, Mark Lilla had a superb two-part piece in the New York Review of Books a few years back on the thought and legacy of Strauss. My capsule summary: everything you've heard about Leo Strauss is bullshit. Since the NYReview is hardly a neocon house organ, maybe you'll believe them. Check it out.

De gustibus non est disputandum, right?

Well, no. As Pauli put it, you're not even wrong.

...Cigarettes are sublime.

As Klein writes, there is "a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the 'bad' taste the smoker quickly learns to love. Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility."

Scoff if you must, but there is something to it.

It's Emily, not Martha.

I've been forwarding this around all day - far and away the best retrospective out there. Spot-on.

I heard it's apocryphal, but so what...

"No man should be killed for what he writes," said Rushdie, "but for Dan Brown I can make an exception."

Andy, you make some fine points, and clearly, questions of gender are often raised on this brilliant and searching show. But "[i]n the end, the show is a funeral service for our messed-up brand of masculinity?" Really? Forgive me, but only one inducted into the mysteries of gender and media studies can take that seriously. (I am myself an apostate.)

Like every work of art, "The Sopranos" far outstrips the theoretical preoccupations of its interpreters - and thank God for that. If the hoary and tendentious trope of "masculinity" occupied as large a place as you imply, its end would be a deliverance, not an occasion worthy of tribute and commemoration.

For those who missed it, David Remnick penned a fine encomium to its teeming diversity and "largeness" last week. (Below.)

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/06/04/070604taco_talk_remnick

From the "Autobiography":

"Our People set about catching Cod, & haul’d up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food; and on this Occasion, I consider’d … the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seem’d very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, & when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smeled admirably well. I balanc’d some time between Principle & Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do."

In this schema, it's self-consciousness, not sentience, that determines the ethic of meat-eating. It proceeds from the elementary proposition that one is worthy of rights only insofar as one is capable of respecting them. To reformulate your ethic: self-consciousness is a reasoned hierarchy based on reciprocity. You may disagree, but this position is equally worthy of respect.

I suppose I have to add...the foregoing in no way means that I condone factory farming and the like. I believe treating animals as inanimate matter degrades animals and human beings alike. It only means that I don't consider, as J.M. Coetzee and perhaps Isa does, that history will "someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their ordinary lives in the shadow of Treblinka."

Can the ethic of sentience make such a distinction? I think not.

Nice...I read it online myself, but I figure I've bought Gopal plenty of beers, so I don't feel guilty.

Thanks for your posts - they're always a great read.

Saturday is a fine novel, but avoid The Kite-Runner at all costs. Apart from the scenes of pre-war Afghanistan, which are nicely sketched, it's full of mawkish, overdetermined treacle. Put it this way: if you see the movie (which is undoubtedly on its way), you will miss nothing at all.

Personally, I'd skip the Pynchon too...life is short, the book is long, and hysterical realism is not my thing.