Gears and springs

From Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024):

A story about someone who discovers that a truth has been kept from him by someone else reveals nothing particularly interesting about what it is to be human (except that some people are liars). A story about someone who has kept the truth from himself  immediately becomes a work as complex as any watch, with innumerable gears and springs that labor just below the surface of a deceptively lethargic face.

We spotted this book on the front table at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore and bought copies for our household’s two-person reading club. Lilla begins with Plato and Sophocles and moves forward to the nostalgia of fascism’s yearning for a glorious past. A book for these times.