In the essay “Street Haunting,” published in 1927, Virginia Woolf describes nighttime walks through London as a kind of escape from the self. A city dweller, drawn to the “irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow,” takes to the street to join the “vast republican army of anonymous trampers.” Woolf goes on, “The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” For Woolf, this is a matter not merely of voyeurism but of empathy: the street-haunter cherishes the “illusion,” nourished by rambling, “that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.”
The problem is this: For a small but vocal number of people online, any opinion they dislike is, essentially, being expressed by somebody in their home. “Let people enjoy things,” as a way of saying “learn basic conversational dynamics,” is a banal but true statement. But in practice, “let people enjoy things” means something else: it is rude or inappropriate to dislike something. And it’s this overstep that I do, in fact, have a problem with.
Much like pizza, one does not simply order (or make) the amount of fried chicken they plan to consume that evening. To do so would be short-sighted, foolish, and—as I have already covered—stupid. Ordering a single meal’s worth of fried chicken deprives one of cold fried chicken, and cold fried chicken tastes good. Ordering what society tells us is “too much fried chicken” is responsible meal planning, actually.
How long has it been since you’ve sat down and really listened to that song? (I had to do it to write this article, so you have to do it to read it — I’m sorry, but those are the rules.) More than three decades later, it provokes several different variations on the philosophical question, “How did this get made?” Also: Is Billy Joel … rapping? Did he just rhyme “Malcolm X” with “British politician sex”? Does he always pronounce “Berlin” with an accent on the first syllable, or is he just stretching it to fit the syntax of the song? What’s up with the urgent, unbridled passion he summons to growl “Trouble in the Sueezzzz”?
The novelist Tash Aw was 15 when he noticed the difference. He knew that his classmates at school weren’t all ethnically Chinese like him. There were Tamil kids who played hockey, “Malay rocker boys” who cut out pictures of Metallica from magazines and glued them to their textbooks. But now, as they all geared up to sit their O-level exams in a publicly funded school in Kuala Lumpur, Aw realised that the divisions between them weren’t so neat. There was a boy whose parents were illiterate and worked as labourers in a rubber tree plantation. Other kids, from richer families, would be sent the following year to plush boarding schools in England, regardless of how they fared in the exams.
The many themes which come together in this valuable work meet on the background of the influence of Italian Renaissance philosophy on 16th-century English culture in general, and on Shakespeare in particular — the same author I met in my father’s house in Florence, the birthplace of Italian Neoplatonism and of Marsilio Ficino. There goes the familiarity I had felt in reading: I didn’t just feel at home — I was.