The (Most) Nabobist

I love this guy’s words. This is the only short I could find online now and 4 years ago when I first found it. If you need a good laugh, as I do today, read it.

Some Thoughts on Clint Eastwood and Heidegger

I’m crazy about Clint Eastwood, and if that automatically sounds chic, it’s just going to have to sound that way. There’s something intrinsically fair about him. He’s no intellectual, but he’s willing to learn. For example, I have a feeling that if you met him and Heidegger crept into the conversation, he wouldn’t come up with one of those dumb Hollywood remarks along the lines of “Heidi-who?” He would, with quiet intelligence, say, “What’s that name?” and scribble it down on a little piece of paper. Not a memo either, or one of those “From the Desk Of” things, just a little piece of scratch paper. Maybe he’d borrow it from somebody. And he wouldn’t hand that scratch paper to any secretary, either. The next day, he’d go down to the library—a small library out there where’s he got all those acres—and check out a volume of Heidegger and read it himself.

The Way We Are in The New Yorker, 2007-02-19.

The last time our water went off, it was early summer. I got up at my regular hour, and saw that Hugh was off somewhere, doing whatever it is he does. This left me alone to solve the coffee problem—a sort of Catch-22, as in order to think straight I needed caffeine, and in order to make that happen I needed to think straight. Once, in a half-sleep, I made it with Perrier, which sounds plausible but really isn’t. On another occasion, I heated up some leftover tea and poured that over the grounds. Had the tea been black rather than green, the coffee might have worked out, but, as it was, the result was vile. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d try more than once, so this time I skipped the teapot and headed straight for a vase of wildflowers sitting by the phone on one of the living-room tables.