Profusion

Over the weekend I bought the May issue of The New York Review of Books. I'm increasingly wary of the way in which buying this excellent review (of which a number of articles are always available to read online here) has become something of a routine. It only lends assistance to the enemy in the War on Capitalism (I'm losing, by the way) and since I don't have time to read all the articles in any given edition I've now stockpiled a number I'd like to do justice to. My strategy henceforth will be to triumphantly fail to buy one or two (or more) editions as a reminder that completism can become something of a fetish.

The troubling thing about actually reading the paper is that I invariably wind up wanting to buy at least three or four of the tomes under review which is all very well when they relate to a field in which I previously had some interest but sort of troubling when I've been introduced to quite a new area which I otherwise would have been avoiding with cheerful ignorance. In this edition A. C. Grayling's piece on books relating to chimpanzees had me thinking that I really needed to take a much closer look at the work of Jane Goodall and I'm going to feel a bit guilty if, as is likely, I don't.

The problem is of course that we are privileged to live in an age when so much is available to us (with probably dreadful costs to future generations and, more pressingly, present generations not born with our good fortune) to the extent that it's ridiculous to see the situation as a problem. A cheerful forgetfulness is the way to cope with the (non-existent) problem compounded with as full a focus as can be achieved on what does come into view in order to do it at least some justice.

In the meantime, I'm going back to those chimps and that rather extraordinary lady who paid them such fruitful attention. There're baboons in there as well, I might add. (To be honest, the complete article is just a ten minute read so I don't know what I'm making such a fuss about all told.)