1. “The trouble with intellectuals is that what starts as feelings ends in a hangover.” —Bertolt Brecht to Edwin Piscator 2. When Walter Benjamin asked Brecht, who was fleeing the Nazis, if he’d take refuge in Moscow, Brecht is supposed to have replied: “I am a Communist, not an idiot.” 3. In 1945, just after he had retired from UCLA with a meager pension, Arnold Schoenberg applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. He was rejected. H/t this essay by George Steiner.

Lately, I’ve had the feeling that the push to contextualize and historicize in the humanities and some of the social sciences has become a stumbling block to thought itself, to new ideas and original thinking. This is on my mind, I suppose, because next year, I’ll be giving the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Society for US Intellectual History; I’m thinking of titling it “Against Context, Against History” or perhaps just “In Defense of Taking Things Out of Context.” That needn’t be the case: ideally, historicism and contextualism should alienate us from a familiar past, should push us beyond conventional interpretations. They should force us to grasp the past in its pastness, and thereby render our present strange. […]