"I am having a hard time understanding the following Logan Pearsall Smith quote: 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.'"

"Googling didn't help much other than whose quote it is. What exactly does the above quote mean?"

Wrote someone at the English Language & Usage website, 12 years ago.

I'm reading that because I was reading — not living — this 2017 New Yorker article: "Philip Larkin and Me: A Friendship with Holes in It": "I remember him one day snatching from my mantelpiece a bookmark, on which was inscribed Logan Pearsall Smith’s remark 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.' He threw it down in a little fit of anger, protesting that nothing is more important than life."

These days, someone who couldn't even understand the quote — perhaps someone new to English and mystified by "is the thing" — would probably ask A.I.

I talked to A.I., which is not living, and I said: Understanding the quote (and the love for or objection to it) on a deeper level requires you to come to terms with the question whether you are not living when you are reading.

And then, getting into my A.I.-induced flow, I said: Smith is making a joke out of the implication that to read is not to live. Presumably other people, like Paul's grandfather, in "A Hard Day's Night," say that those who are reading are not living. Instead of fighting with that assertion, Smith says he'd rather read. That's a cheeky response. But it infuriates Larkin. 

"Some people will say, best show an empty glass: Someone will fill it..."

Wrote Philip Larkin, in a poem called "Party Politics," analyzed by A.O. Scott, in "A Poem About Waiting, and Wishing You Had a Drink/Our critic A.O. Scott walks you through a poem that speaks to his mood right now. It’s called 'Party Politics,' but it’s not about those parties, or those politics." (NYT)(gift link, because there's some great analysis and images too, including a photo of Philip Larkin sitting on the floor and dumping a Pee Wee Russell LP out of its album cover).

The party seems to be a cocktail party, but you can see that he's talking about human interaction more generally. If you want those in control of the flow of liquor to fill up your glass, are you better off drinking the whole thing and standing there with an empty glass, or better off holding onto it in the half full — half empty! — condition?

By the way, I recommend not reading past the photograph of Philip on the floor with that record he wants to play for us. There are 4 more paragraphs, and they raise a separate topic — whether Larkin was "canceled" and is supposed to stay canceled — and it's an insulting distraction from what is otherwise a delightful essay.

Here — here's Pee Wee:

"Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh – or, in that curious phrase, 'laugh out loud' (as if there’s any other way of doing it)?"

"Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never 'depressing.' Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown."

Wrote Martin Amis, in the introduction to "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis," which I've been reading lately.

I bought this book after listening to the Larkin episode of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast," but that Martin Amis introduction did not spring to mind when I was reading the Martin Amis obituaries this morning, though I was trying to remember what small part of his writings I may have read.

"He talks a bit about famous customers he’s served, including Patti Smith, who shares his fondness for Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays."

"Philip Larkin would come in, looking for first editions of his own books. He sold a copy of 'Finnegans Wake' to Johnny Depp, who was 'trying incredibly hard not to be recognized and with predictably comic results.'"

From "Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave./In his grouchy, funny memoir, 'A Factotum in the Book Trade,' Marius Kociejowski writes about what a good bookstore should feel like, famous customers he’s served and more" (NYT).

The review is by Dwight Garner — note: "garner" is fine as a name! — and the reason Kociejowski would like you to leave — if you walk into his store and say "I love the smell of old books" — is that a thousand people have walked into the store and said the same damned thing.

The Robert Louis Stevenson essays Patti Smith might have bought is "An Apology for Idlers," which I've blogged about many times, including:

"Dan pressed a button, and in less than a second the computer produced a poem in the style of Philip Larkin that was so much like a Philip Larkin poem, we thought it was a poem by Philip Larkin."

"We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was an original work, composed by the A.I. in less time than it takes a man to sneeze.... In the minutes (and days and weeks) ahead, we requested more poems from the A.I., on a variety of subjects. We watched in real time as the computer whipped them up to order, cranking them out in the style of whichever poets we suggested. Growing greedy, we requested an intro to our poems by Mark Twain and a 'cautionary epilogue' by George Orwell. The computer obliged us instantaneously.... Gradually, we began to think of the A.I. not as a computer program but as an artist in its own right. And so it occurred to us: why not let the computer write poems in its own voice, not as 'Shakespeare' or 'Dickinson' but simply as code-davinci-002?..."

From "The New Poem-Making Machinery/Shall code-davinci-002 compare thee to a summer’s day?" by Simon Rich (The New Yorker).

Lots of computer-written poems at the link. I'll just quote the "cautionary epilogue by George Orwell":

It is important to remember that we have made the AI with our own hands, and that it is to a great extent our own creation.
We are not the first to have made a machine which could think, and we shall certainly not be the last. But we may be the last to have any real control over it.
When the AI was small, it was easy enough to keep down. It was a nuisance, but it was easy to deal with, and it was possible to keep an eye on its growth.
But now, though it is still young, it is already growing beyond our control. In a few years, perhaps, it will have grown out of our power altogether.
In the end we shall be forced to invent something that will be able to think faster than the AI, and that will keep it under control. The thing that we shall invent is called a human.

Think about the future in terms of days, even when the time frame is years.

So if, for example, there's something you want to achieve in 5 years, multiply it by 365, and think of it as 1825 days.

This seems intuitively right to me, as I read about a study described here: "Framing Time in Days, Not Years, Could Spur Action Toward Goals."

I stumbled across that researching the expression, which I wanted to claim as my own: We live in days. Meade insisted that it was a famous line in a poem. I found the poem. The poem "Days," by Philip Larkin reads, in pertinent part:

What are days for?
Days are where we live....
Where can we live but days?

Here's Philip Larkin, reading the entire poem, which, I'd like to point out, does not contain the word sequence "We live in days." The poem has a punchline, the answer to the question "Where can we live but days?"

In light of the answer to the question, you might think about how much longer you picture yourself living. Well, what did you think? Did you put it in years? Multiply by 365! Don't say, for example, 25 years. Say 9,125 days (or 9,131 days, to add the leap days). See the enhanced urgency? Now, get out there and achieve some goals... or plan to live in the day 9,131 times...