Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.
I find it represents well the tension I often carry with what sort of time I will give to various pursuits. I already took some comfort in the limited time I spend reading 'current events' with the statement made by M. Swann in Proust's Swann's Way in response to value of reading 'the papers'.
The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it - oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees? . . . And then in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years . . . we should read that the Queen of Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Leon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at the right proportion between 'information' and 'publicity'.
Here Proust also refers to a 'division', or as he calls it a right proportion. I still hold to the position that I will be better equipped for political significance if I am formed by transformational texts (and contexts) and I am sensitive and alert to my immediate environment. And then I may well be able to understand what Stephen Harper is proposing for Canada.
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