Blog
1.17.26
I just read Changing My Mind by Julian Barnes.
It is a good primer for thinking about things that we have changed our minds about over time. For me it reminded me of many things that at first, I didn’t like but latter came to love: country music, the music of Tom Waits, Leon Golub’s paintings, centered politics, the writings of Wittgenstein, the books of Muriel Sparks – my personal list goes on.
Changing My Mind is a short book that opens onto a large and increasingly unfashionable idea: that thinking is provisional, that judgment evolves, and that intellectual seriousness includes the capacity to revise one’s views. In a cultural moment that often rewards certainty and punishes hesitation, Barnes makes a quiet but persuasive case for reconsideration as a form of integrity rather than weakness.
The book gathers essays and reflections that circle around art, literature, politics, and personal memory. What binds them is not a single argument but a disposition. Barnes is interested in how opinions are formed, how they calcify, and how they might responsibly be undone. He does not present change as revelation or conversion, but as accumulation. New facts, altered circumstances, and the simple passage of time reshape what once felt settled.
Barnes’s tone is characteristically lucid and wry. He is never polemical, rarely declarative. Instead, he models thinking as a process conducted in public, with all its hesitations and qualifications intact. This is especially evident in his writing on art and literature, where he resists the urge to offer final judgments. Taste, for Barnes, is historical and biographical. What moves us at twenty may bore us at fifty, and what once seemed marginal can later feel essential. Rather than apologizing for these shifts, Barnes treats them as evidence of a life attentively lived.
There is also an ethical dimension to Changing My Mind. Barnes suggests that the refusal to reconsider is not merely an intellectual failing but a moral one. To change one’s mind requires listening, humility, and an acceptance of fallibility. It acknowledges that other people, other experiences, and other arguments have the power to alter us. In this sense, the book feels quietly political without being programmatic. It offers a counterexample to the rigidity that dominates contemporary discourse, particularly in arenas where complexity is flattened into slogans.
What makes the book resonate is its scale. Barnes does not argue that everything is relative or that conviction is meaningless. On the contrary, he insists that strong opinions matter precisely because they are held provisionally. Commitment and openness are not opposites here but partners. One thinks seriously, decides seriously, and remains willing to rethink seriously.
For readers invested in criticism, teaching, or cultural leadership, Changing My Mind offers a valuable reminder. Authority does not come from being unchanging, but from demonstrating how thought responds to evidence, experience, and time. Barnes shows that revising one’s views can deepen rather than dilute one’s understanding.
In the end, the book is less about changing one’s mind than about respecting the conditions under which minds change. It is a modest, elegant defense of intellectual elasticity. Barnes does not ask us to abandon our beliefs, only to hold them in a way that leaves room for growth. In an era that often mistakes rigidity for strength, that may be its most radical proposal.