I am an allergic and reactive person, most outraged by the sorts of intellectual atrocities I myself commit. To say this is merely to assert the personal applicability of the now-hoary Hermann Hesse adage: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” Hesse is a figure whom I regard with suspicion, and again: it seems to me likely that this is due to our mutual habits of appropriation, though whereas he re...
