Pancake Person

classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway.

One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it.

This is a utilitarian vocabulary. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I most productively apply my talents to the problems of the world? It’s about resource allocation.

People are less good at using the vocabulary of moral evaluation, which is less about what sort of career path you choose than what sort of person you are.

In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests.

This kind of statement is so frustrating - it demeans both its subject and audience…

“In Chinese society, individuals have no identity apart from obligations to, and acknowledgment by, others. The clan and nation are the eternal pillars of identity. Western individualism—the idea of defining oneself independent of society—doesn’t exist.”

the marquise de Sévigné, known for her wit and brilliance as a letter writer, reportedly remarked at a dinner table, “There are three important things in life. The first is to eat well, and—I have forgotten the others.

AFTER school one Tuesday, 10 students assembled in a classroom to talk about the school and race. The school paid for snacks: Doritos and Oreo cookies, Coke and 7Up.

What did they think of the absence of racial diversity?

But finally there’s a sentimental side. I’ve started looking at him in a different way, knowing that we’ll soon be legally joined together; marriage is such a powerful symbol, it’s bound to affect even such reluctant grooms as us.

Scholar doesn’t rhyme with dollar.

they want to be part, but then feel diminished by this belonging; they need to feel superior to the group or relationship as well as being in it, they need to escape, but if they do, they are immediately anxious to return

1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures….
2. …Issues of composition, scale, proportion, detail are now moot.
The “art” of architecture is useless in Bigness.
3. In Bigness, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The humanist expectation of “honesty” is doomed….
Where architecture reveals, Bigness perplexes; Bigness transforms the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get.
4. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad.
Their impact is independent of their quality.
5. Together, all these breaks—with scale, with architectural composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethics—imply the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue.
It exists; at most, it coexists.
Its subtext is fuck context.

As a guest in homes of strangers, I have discovered bathroom libraries that took my breath away by their size and intellectual pretensions. It was unclear to me whether Plato’s dialogues in original Greek, together with Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel were there to impress the visitor, or in the case of another fellow who had a pile of memoirs by ex-presidents going back to Reagan, to make him laugh.

The only thing we would have contented ourselves with is if the University had contacted my father and, at least, cheered him up.