just a reader.

January 8, 2006

Lewis felt the first blue tendrils tugging at his knees. Following the unhappy logic of such states, the mood became its own cause. The evening after he left Wheeling, he too sharply reprimanded his corporal for having failed to secure bread in the town. When he sent the man back the six miles to get it, and the damned felow was late on his return, Lewis began to fear he had deserted out of pique. This provoked the usual self-reproaches about Lewis's limitations as a leader, his aloofness, etc. When the corporal did return, Lewis felt grateful to him, which grossly unmilitary sentiment provoked additional self-reproaches about his womanliness, his mercurial temperament, etc. etc.

Beyond a certain point, those etceteras would begin to breed like vermin. Lewis fought against it. He sent himself the task of describing an artificial Indian mound, a few miles downriver from Wheeling. But while at the site, he hadn't enough time to do more than begin his description, so he left the pages blank in his notebook. Then he never filled them. He did write scientifically about the contrary wind; he noted the incidence of goiter in a certain neighborhood; but those five empty pages were a nightly rebuke. A journal, it seemed, was a record of what Lewis didn't think, what Lewis didn't do. Then one morning, journalizing became another thing that Lewis didn't do.

Brian Hall, I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company.

December 8, 2005

She turned again to them, both arms held out to the radiant night.

Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding.

December 7, 2005

Then even his luggage belonged to him again, and he strode through the barriers, more high-hearted than he had ever been as a child, into that city which the people from heaven had made their home.

James Baldwin, Another Country.

December 6, 2005

He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.

Annie Dillard, The Living.

(Inspiration for this new category:  Philip Hensher, via Arts & Letters Daily, via OGIC).

LibraryThing

July 23, 2005

'What was that thing the organist played when we went up?' Malcolm asked. 'Rather a nice tune, I thought.'

'It sounded like Hiawatha's wedding feast,' said Rhoda in a worried tone, 'Coleridge Taylor, you know. But I don't think it could have been that.'

'Mr. Lewis was improvising,' said Mrs. Swan. 'There were nearly a hundred communicants, I should think, and I dare say his thoughts wandered. I suppose the music wasn't really so very unsuitable, in a way; many Indians are Christians, aren't they?'

'These were Red Indians, surely,' said Malcolm.

They seemed to be getting into rather deep water, so Mabel changed the subject by mentioning that there was to be a procession at the eleven o'clock service.

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels.

July 18, 2005

Jean-Pierre leaned back in an arm-chair, eyes closed and finger-tips joined in a prayer-like attitude, listening to the jazz as if it had been Bach.

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels.

July 17, 2005

He often thought what a good thing it would be if the wearing of masks or animals' heads could become customary for persons over a certain age. How restful social intercourse would be if the face did not have to assume any expression - the strained look of interest, the simulated delight or surprise, the anxious concern one didn't really feel. Alaric often avoided looking into people's eyes when he spoke to them, fearful of what he might see there, for life was very terrible whatever sort of front we might put on it, and only the eyes of the very young or the very old and wise could look out on it with a clear untroubled gaze.

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels.

July 12, 2005

'I don't feel like an egg,' said Deirdre unhelpfully. ' I'd like something different.'

There was an expectant silence round the table.

'Some rice, all oily and saffron yellow, with aubergines and red peppers and lots of garlic,' went on Deirdre extravagantly.

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels.

July 11, 2005

She sometimes felt, as she climbed the worn linoleum-covered stairs, that she was worthy of a more gracious setting, but then there are few of us who do not occasionally set a higher value on ourselves than Fate has done.

Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels.

July 5, 2005

She had stood a pair of candles on the old cottage piano, and further tricked it out with a piece of music, the banality of which, together with a certain hypnotic sweetness, partly accounted for its being a performer's first choice when shaking the dust off a long-neglected talent.

Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm.

June 11, 2005

On the appointed Tuesdays, Jake often strolls up Market Street and plucks delicacies from the food marts—poached salmon fillets and ripe, lime-scented avocado halves stuffed with chilled cocktail shrimp. Some days he'll go pure aphrodisiac, picking up a dozen oysters on the half shell or a pint of Siamese ceviche, with the fruit of the sea pickled in equal parts lime juice and soy. Almost always he dips into Slavin's Tropical Health Mart for a quart of their house salad: guava, mango, and cherimoya, with pomegranate seeds and slices of blood orange and fried plantain.

Bart Schneider, Beautiful Inez.

June 9, 2005

Fred bent over her trunk and picked up something which proved to be a score, clumsily bound.  "What's this?  Did you ever try to sing this?"  He opened it and on the engraved title-page read Wunsch's inscription, "EINST, O WUNDER!"  He looked up sharply at Thea.

"Wunsch gave me that when he went away.  I've told you about him, my old teacher in Moonstone.  He loved that opera."

Fred went toward the fireplace, the book under his arm, singing softly:--

"EINST, O WUNDER, ENTBLUHT AUF MEINEM GRABE, EINE BLUME DER ASCHE MEINES HERZENS;"

June 7, 2005

TO MATTHISSON.

Vienna, August 4, 1800.

MOST ESTEEMED FRIEND,

You will receive with this one of my compositions published some years since, and yet, to my shame, you probably have never heard of it. I cannot attempt to excuse myself, or to explain why I dedicated a work to you which came direct from my heart, but never acquainted you with its existence, unless indeed in this way, that at first I did not know where you lived, and partly also from diffidence, which led me to think I might have been premature in dedicating a work to you before ascertaining that you approved of it. Indeed, even now I send you "Adelaide" with a feeling of timidity. You know yourself what changes the lapse of some years brings forth in an artist who continues to make progress; the greater the advances we make in art, the less are we satisfied with our works of an earlier date. My most ardent wish will be fulfilled if you are not dissatisfied with the manner in which I have set your heavenly "Adelaide" to music, and are incited by it soon to compose a similar poem; and if you do not consider my request too indiscreet, I would ask you to send it to me forthwith, that I may exert all my energies to approach your lovely poetry in merit. Pray regard the dedication as a token of the pleasure which your "Adelaide" conferred on me, as well as of the appreciation and intense delight your poetry always has inspired, and always will inspire in me.

When playing "Adelaide," sometimes recall

Your sincere admirer,

BEETHOVEN.

From The Project Gutenberg EBook of Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Vol. 1 of 2,  by Lady Wallace.

May 31, 2005

Supper

Spaghetti with butter and dried basil

Spring cabbage with dill

Boiled onions with bran, herbs, soya oil, tomatoes and beaten egg

Cold tinned sliced corned beef

Retsina

From The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch.

May 29, 2005

Lunch

Hot buttered toast with anchovy paste

Baked beans and kidney beans with
        chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil

Bananas and cream with white sugar

Hard water-biscuits with
        New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese

Muscadet wine

From The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch.

May 12, 2005

He thought, as he watched her, that in all his life he had never seen a more seductive thing than the unconsidered gesture with which she folded back her sleeve. He saw the brown outer skin of her arm, as she turned her wrist, the surprising vulnerable white of the inward flesh and the veined curve inside the elbow. Her reaching hand and forearm, momentarily transfigured by water, had seemed in that instant to form part of the design — the design attributed to Pisano but probably even older. These simple actions moved him by their involuntary power, their immense accomplishment. He was amazed too by the magnitude of his own response, which gave her gesture real consequence. Although he had spoken to her earlier of his romantic temperament, he was as shaken by this pang of authentic sentiment as if he had encountered a friend totally unchanged after an absence of twenty years.

Shirley Hazzard, The Evening of the Holiday.

April 18, 2005

Art isn’t religion, but it has something important in common with religion: it’s a form of soulcraft. Souls can only be changed one by one, and each one is as supremely important as the next. Hence there are no small audiences, only small-souled artists. Blessed are the arts that can be experienced by a mere handful of people at a time, for theirs is the kingdom of beauty at its most intense and precious. Orson Welles might not have made Citizen Kane if he’d remembered that, but he probably would have been a happier man—and a better artist.

Terry Teachout, "Eternally Obsolete," About Last Night, April 18, 2005.

April 8, 2005

The mountains were full of marble quarries and there were shops selling alabaster. We used to sit in the square at a café where the waiter looked exactly like photographs of the young Kafka. Iris took a great interest in him. Unlike most Italian waiters, he moved with diffidence, as if uncertain of what he was carrying or where to put it. He seemed to like us, but his smile was distrait, a little tormented, as if he were planning some work he knew he would never finish. His head was always surrounded by wasps, which he made no attempt to brush away, as if they were visible embodiments of the angst within him. "Perhaps he will put us both in one of his stories," said Iris.

John Bayley, Elegy for Iris.

April 5, 2005

Polly knew you were meant to listen to music purely as music and not have it remind you of other things, but the melody—austere and rather mournful—made her think about herself, about her present sadness, her fear that her life would never be innocent again, and about Lincoln, who was an artist, too. As for the others in the Solo-Miller party, with the exception of Henry, Jr., who looked slightly moronic, and Henry Demarest, who was a plain, old-fashioned music-appreciator, the look of the higher mind was all over then. Beate seemed absolutely elevated. Music to them was philosophy, mathematics. They liked to be challenged by brain food of a very sublime order. And best of all was criticizing the performance at dinner. Wendy adored a bad performance, especially of anything written for the flute, an instrument she loathed. A bad flute player was all her joy: “So breathy and spitty,” she liked to say.

Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness.

Rereading: Gaudy Night

Masters, undergraduates, visitors; they sat huddled closely together on the backless oak benches, their elbows on the long tables, their eyes shaded with their fingers, or turned intelligently towards the platform where two famous violinists twisted together the fine, strong strands of the Concerto in D Minor. The Hall was very full; Harriet's gowned shoulder touched her companion's, and the crescent of his long sleeve lay over her knee. He was wrapt in the motionless austerity with which all genuine musicians listen to genuine music. Harriet was musician enough to respect this aloofness; she knew well enough that the ecstatic rapture on the face of the man opposite meant only that he was hoping to be thought musical, and that the elderly lady over the way, waving her fingers to the beat, was a musical moron. She knew enough, herself, to read the sounds a little with her brains, laboriously unwinding the twined chains of melody link by link. Peter, she felt sure, could hear the whole intricate pattern, every part separately and simultaneously, each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night.

Davenport on Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein did not argue; he merely thought himself into subtler and deeper problems. The record which three of his students have made of his lectures and conversations at Cambridge discloses a man tragically honest and wonderfully, astoundingly absurd. In every memoir of him we meet a man we are hungry to know more about, for even if his every sentence remains opaque to us, it is clear that the archaic transparency of his thought is like nothing that philosophy has seen for thousands of years. It is also clear that he was trying to be wise and to make others wise. He lived in the world, and for the world. He came to believe that a normal, honest human being could not be a professor. It is the academy that gave him his reputation of impenetrable abstruseness; never has a man deserved a reputation less. Disciples who came to him expecting to find a man of incredibly deep learning found a man who saw mankind held together by suffering alone, and he invariably advised them to be as kind as possible to others. He read, like all inquisitive men, to multiply his experiences. He read Tolstoy (always getting bogged down) and the Gospels and bales of detective stories. He shook his head over Freud. When he died, he was reading Black Beauty. His last words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life.''

Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination, via Wood's Lot.

Blacklined: The Portrait of a Lady

“You seem to me troubled,” said Ralph.

“I am troubled.”

“About what?”

For a moment she answered nothing; then she broke out— “: “Do you think it good for me suddenly to be made so rich? Henrietta doesn’t.”

“Oh, hang Henrietta!” said Ralph, coarsely. “, “If you ask me, I am I’m delighted at it.”

“Is that why your father did it—for your amusement?”

“I differ with Miss Stackpole,” Ralph said,went on more gravely. “I think it’s very good for you to have means.”

Isabel looked at him a moment with serious eyes. “I wonder whether you know what iswhat’s good for me—or whether you care.”

“If I know, depend upon it I care. Shall I tell you what it is? Not to torment yourself.”

“Not to torment you, I suppose you mean.”

“You can’t do that; I amI’m proof. Take things more easily. Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question your conscience so much—it will get out of tune, like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don’t try so much to form your character—it’s like trying to pull open a rosebud.tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best, and your character will form take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable income isincome’s not one of them.” Ralph paused, smiling; Isabel had listened quickly. “You have”You’ve too much power of thought—above all too much conscience,” Ralph added. “It’“It’s out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet your fever. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It’s never wrong to do that.”

She had listened eagerly, as I say; and it was her nature to understand quickly.

“I wonder if you appreciate what you say. If you do, you take a great responsibility.”

“You frighten me a little, but I think I amI’m right,” said Ralph, continuing to smilepersisting in cheer.

“All the same, what you say is very true,” Isabel went on. pursued. “You could say nothing more true. I amI’m absorbed in myself—I look at life too much as a doctor’s prescription. Why, indeed, should we perpetually be thinking whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a hospital? Why should I be so afraid of not doing right? As if it mattered to the world whether I do right or wrong!”

“You are”You’re a capital person to advise,” said Ralph; “you take the wind out of my sails!”

She looked at him as if she had not heard him—though she was following out the train of reflectionreflexion which he himself had kindled. “I try to care more about the world than about myself—but I always come back to myself. It’s because I amI’m afraid.” She stopped; her voice had trembled a little. “Yes, I amI’m afraid; I can’t tell you. A large fortune means freedom, and I amI’m afraid of that. It’s such a fine thing, and one should make such a good use of it. If one shouldn’t, one would be ashamed. And one must always bekeep thinking—it’; it’s a constant effort. I amI’m not sure that it’it’s not a greater happiness to be powerless.”

“For weak people I haveI’ve no doubt it’s a greater happiness. For weak people the effort not to be contemptible must be great.”

“And how do you know I amI’m not weak?” Isabel asked.

“Ah,” Ralph answered, with a blush which flush that the girl noticed, “if you are, I am I’m awfully sold!”

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.

Blacklined: The Portrait of a Lady

She was playing something of Beethoven’sSchubert's—Isabel knew not what, but she recognised BeethovenSchubert—and she touched the piano softly and discreetly, but with evidenta discretion of her own. It showed skill. Her touch was that of an artist, it showed feeling; Isabel sat down noiselessly on the nearest chair and waited till the end of the piece. When it was finished she felt a strong desire to thank the player, and rose from her seat to do so, while at the same time the lady at the piano stranger turned quickly round, as if she had becomebut just aware of her presence.

“That is “That's very beautiful, and your playing makes it more beautiful still,” said Isabel, with all the young radiance with which she usually uttered a truthful rapture.

“You don’t think I disturbed Mr. Touchett, then?” the musician answered, as sweetly as this compliment deserved. “The house is so large, and his room so far away, that I thought I might venture—, especially as I played just—just du bout des doigts.”

“She is “She's a Frenchwoman,” Isabel said to herself; “she says that as if she were French.” And this supposition made the stranger visitor more interesting to our speculative heroine. “I hope my uncle isuncle's doing well,” Isabel added. “I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better.”

“I am The lady smiled and discriminated.  “I'm afraid there are moments in life when even BeethovenSchubert has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments.”

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.

Holding On to the Air: An Autobiography

('Annotations of a reader past': a new category excerpting passages marked by the unknown prior owner of a used book)

If there was a sense of futility about this great love, a sense of it being an impossible vision, I didn't feel it. When I danced, the romance, the tenderness, the embraces, and the caresses were full-blown, full-blooded passion. They were, after all, the first time I had ever been embraced, caressed, needed, wanted, and loved as a woman, and nothing could have been more real to me. It was only in my coming and going that I was elusive, while together our love was unquestionable.

....

My favorite was the story of Pyrrha. [....] The oracle had destroyed everyone except Pyrrha because of their baseness, and she had gone to the oracle crying, “I'm so lonely, I'm so lonely.” The oracle told her to go to the river, pick up the rocks and throw them over her shoulder, but never look back. Pyrrha obeyed, and that image of faith and courage impressed me.

....

But as I instinctively knew, I loved the stage not becaues it provided an escape from myself or my humdrum life but because when the curtain went up I could be whoever I wanted to be, and that was true freedom—to be myself.
      As time went on I came to understand something about Balanchine that was contrary to the frequent analysis of him as a man who required and requested “mechanical” dancers without “personality” and “soul.” (He was not opposed to real soul, only its common substitute: ego.)

Suzanne Farrell (with Toni Bentley), Holding On to the Air: An Autobiography.

More from Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen

Having written the previous sentence I stretched out my hand for Northanger Abbey and found it wasn't there. I had left my copy somewhere, in Abu Dhabi, or New York or Colchester, how am I to know? Whereupon I wept, reproached, and disrupted the entire household and became obsessed with the notion that I had not enough bookcases.

Fay Weldon,  Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen.

Recently read: Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen

How can I possibly tell you how to run your life? I am a novelist and your aunt, not a seer. I suppose I could offer a few general rules. For example:

1. Love your mother if you possibly can, since she is the source of your life.
2. Love men if you possibly can, since they are the source of your gratification.
3. Reform yourself, as well as the world.
4. Agree with your accusers, loudly and clearly. They will shut up sooner.
5. Worry less about what other people think of you, and more about what you think of them.

Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen.

Rereading: Goodbye Without Leaving

It is painful to think about those days. It is like yearning for a lover you will never see again and to whom you never got to say goodbye.

. . . .

To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.

. . . .

That powerful clear voice of Bessie Smith almost knocked me backward. As I listened I realized how very dirty those old dirty songs were, like "I'm Wild About That Thing" and "You've Got to Give Me Some." It turned out they were written under a pseudonym by a nephew of the Madagascar royal family—the world of music was full of such anomalies. Sunshine suddenly flooded me. I was an anomaly too. It was all okay.

. . . .

The greatest minds in history had grappled with this God issue, but it was not a big deal to Johnny. This was his greatness and his flaw.

. . . .

Oh, Little Franklin! The look of happiness on his face when he saw me waiting made my heart open and close like a sea anemone.

. . . .

I sighed. My life was a cloud of gnats.

. . . .

She gave me a little flowered square and I wiped my eyes. There is nothing so morally tepid, I thought, than weeping over something horrible that happened to someone else and will never happen to you.

. . . .

I was sort of a blank slate and Leo was a school. I needed the experience of him. He would kiss me and I would turn into Hannah Arendt. I would definitely be a better person for it.

. . . .

"Listen, Geralds. The Church has sacraments. You take the sacraments and you pays the price."
I sighed. How neat, I thought. How consoling. Even horrible emotional pain would have a reason, some terrible law one was compelled to obey.

. . . .

"'"Nenni!" said the Cat. "I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me."'"
My voice wavered and the words swam on the page, but it did not matter: my little boy had finally gone to sleep.

. . . .

I followed my boy, whose coppery hair flopped into his eyes. I thought of what he would be, what I had been, of the old man he would turn into whom I would never know. The journey seemed impossibly strange, amazingly long, and over in a flash.

Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving.

Milosz on Arthur Quinn

When I, already past middle age, taught Dostoevsky at Berkeley, Arthur, who was then a young assistant professor, came to my lectures. A practicing Catholic, he found something for himself in the religious problems posed by the Russian writer. Another way of looking at this would be that he had need of a clear opposition to the Maoist madness of the Berkeley revolution, and my lectures offered this. That is how our friendship began.

Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz's ABC's.

Now reading: The Confidence of British Philosophers: An Essay in Historical Narrative, Arthur Quinn

Humanistic histories are often accused of being popular, rhetorical, and sententious by those proud of histories that are esoteric, indifferent, and amoral. These accusations are accurate, only they should be perceived as praise.

From the Preface.

Quinn on Milosz on Dostoyevski

Since there was not sufficient student interest to have him teach Polish literature exclusively [at the University of California at Berkeley], he was assigned one of his department's most popular courses, that on Dostoyevski. In teaching this course he found that he was faced with rhetorical problems not dissimilar to Dostoyevski's own.

“Among my students very few think of themselves as Christians. The majority are indifferent toward Christianity, so that in teaching Dostoyevski I have always been aware of a paradox: for some, that course was a first encounter with matters of religion, yet nearly all shared something with those Russian intellectuals whose attitudes Dostoyevski abhorred.” So he “openly acknowledged the existence of good and evil, a stance they dismissed as irredeemably reactionary.” Each year, then, irredeemably reactionary Professor Milosz would have to guide as many as one hundred California students through the major novels of Dostoyevski, and in the process would try to teach them something of Christianity, and of their own freedom, and consequently their responsibility, at least in part, for the good and evil in their lives.

Each year, for instance, he would explain to them the moral intricacies of Crime and Punishment. He would explain to his students that Raskolnikov could kill the old pawnbroker only because he thought of her abstractly, as a pawnbroker, not as a person. He would explain too that Raskolnikov was saved only because Sophia persisted in loving him, persisted in responding to him not as a type, a criminal, but as a unique person, a person to her of infinite worth. Milosz would have to explain to these students that Dostoyevski had not invented this theme of rebirth himself, but had found it in the New Testament during his prison years, specifically in the writings attributed to the apostle John. Crime and Punishment was a novelistic meditation on John's gospel, especially on the episode of the raising of Lazarus. Milosz would tell them the story of Lazarus: how Martha had come out to meet Jesus after Lazarus had died, how she had gotten all the right answers to his questions (Jesus was the Son of God, the dead will rise again at the end of time, and so on), and yet he had remained largely unmoved; then Mary came, and she too got her catechism right, but she did something more, she fell to the ground and wept—then Jesus wept, too. Abstract answers in John were not enough.

Arthur Quinn, book review of Czeslaw Milosz's Visions from San Francisco Bay.

Still reading...The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Through the ten years of his illness Father worked steadily on a long study of Beethoven's sonatas. He wrote somewhat better than he spoke, but even while writing he would suffer more and more memory lapses until finally no one could understand the text—it was made up of words that did not exist.

Once he called me into his room. The variations from the Opus 111 sonata were open on the piano. "Look," he said, pointing to the music (he had also lost the ability to play the piano), "look." Then, after a prolonged effort, he managed to add, "Now I know!" He kept trying to explain something important to me, but the words he used were completely unintelligible, and seeing that I didn't understand him, he looked at me in amazement and said, "That's strange."

I knew what he wanted to talk about, of course. He had been involved with the topic a long time. Beethoven had felt a sudden attachment to the variation form toward the end of his life. At first glance it might seem the most superficial of forms, a showcase for technique, the type of work better suited to a lacemaker than to Beethoven. But Beethoven made it one of the most distinguished forms (for the first time in the history of music) and imbued it with some of his finest meditations.

True, all that is well known. But what Father wanted to know was what we are to make of it. Why did he choose variations? What lay behind his choice?

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Still reading...The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Now reading: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

August 17, 2004

"Paper has more patience than people." I thought of this saying on one of those days when I was feeling a little depressed and was sitting at home with my chin in my hands, bored and listless, wondering whether to stay in or go out. I finally stayed where I was, brooding. Yes, paper does have more patience, and since I'm not planning to let anyone else read this stiff-backed notebook grandly referred to as a "diary," unless I should ever find a real friend, it probably won't make a bit of difference.

Now I'm back to the point that prompted me to keep a diary in the first place: I don't have a friend.

Let me put it more clearly, since no one will believe that a thirteen-year-old girl is completely alone in the world. And I'm not. I have loving parents and a sixteen-year-old sister, and there are about thirty people I can call friends. [....] No, on the surface I seem to have everything, except my one true friend. All I think about when I'm with friends is having a good time. I can't bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things. We don't seem to be able to get any closer, and that's the problem. Maybe it's my fault that we don't confide in each other. In any case, that's just how things are, and unfortunately, they're not liable to change. This is why I've started the diary.

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.

August 11, 2004

To many the form of this "exposition" will perhaps seem strange; it will seem to them too strict to be edifying, and too edifying to be strictly scientific. As to this latter point I have no opinion. As to the first, however, this does not express my opinion of the matter; and if it were true that the form is too strict to be edifying, that, according to my conception, would be a fault. It is one question whether it cannot be edifying to everyone, seeing that not everyone possesses the capacity for following it; it is another question whether it possesses the specific character of the edifying. From the Christian point of view everything, absolutely everything should serve for edification. [....] All Christian knowledge, however strict its form, ought to be anxiously concerned; but this concern is precisely the note of the edifying. Concern implies relationship to life, to the reality of personal existence, and thus in a Christian sense it is seriousness; the high aloofness of indifferent learning, is, from the Christian point of view, far from being seriousness, it is, from the Christian point of view, jest and vanity. But seriousness again is the edifying.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Walter Lowrie trans.), from the Preface.

Still rereading...The Moviegoer

As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying. For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself—if indeed asskicking is properly distinguished from edification.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.

August 9, 2004

In my thirty-nine years on this earth, the Holy City of Mecca had been the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being.

In that peace of the Holy World—in fact, the very night I have mentioned when I lay awake surrounded by snoring brother pilgrims—my mind took me back to personal memories I would have thought were gone forever . . . as far back, even, as when I was just a little boy, eight or nine years old. Out behind our house, out in the country from Lansing, Michigan, there was an old, grassy "Hector's Hill," we called it—which may still be there. I remembered there in the Holy World how I used to lie on the top of Hector's Hill, and look up at the sky, at the clouds, moving over me, and daydream, all kinds of things. And then, in a funny contrast of recollections, I remembered how years later, when I was in prison, I used to lie on my cell bunk—this would be especially when I was in solitary: what we convicts called "The Hole"—and I would picture myself talking to large crowds. I don't have any idea why such previsions came to me. But they did. To tell that to anyone then would have sounded crazy. Even I didn't have, myself, the slightest inkling. . . .

Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Still rereading...The Moviegoer

Sam is spieling in pretty good style, all the while ironing out the tablecloth into shallow gutters with the blade of his knife. A new prefatory note creeps into his voice. It is like a symphony when the "good" part is coming, and I know that Sam is working up to one of his stories. These stories of Sam used to arouse in me an appreciation so keen and pleasurable that it bordered on the irritable. On the dark porch in Feliciana he told us once of the time when he made a journey up the headwaters of the Orinoco and caught a fever and lay ill for weeks. One night he heard an incredibly beautiful voice sing the whole of Winterreise. He was sure it was delirium until the next morning when he met the singer, an Austrian engineer who sang lieder better than Lotte Lehmann, etc. When he finished I was practically beside myself with irritable pleasure and became angry with the others because they were not sufficiently moved by the experience.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.

Still rereading...The Moviegoer

"He's quite a guy," Joel told me. "Do you know what he told me after lying under a cliff for thirty six hours with two inches of his femur sticking out? He said: Queenie, I think I'm going to pass out and before I do, I'm going to give you a piece of advice—God, I thought he was going to die and knew and was telling me what to do with his book—and he said quite solemnly: Queenie, always stick to Bach and the early Italians—and passed out cold as a mackerel. And by God, it's not bad advice."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.

August 4, 2004

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn't even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary's pages. I'd never realized so many words existed! I didn't know which words I needed to learn. Finally, just to start some action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I'd written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Rereading: The Moviegoer

Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man's world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.

August 3, 2004

They all liked my attitude, and it was out of their liking for me that I soon became accepted by them—as a mascot, I know now. They would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, the same way people would talk freely in front of a pet canary.

Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Ten books

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X.
The Diary of A Young Girl, Anne Frank.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig.
Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings, Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger.
Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis.
Protagoras, Plato.
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor.
Henry Mitchell On Gardening, Henry Mitchell.

(list cross-posted from Bookish Gardener)

Still reading...My Father and Myself

A third pedagogic view of me may be added. I wish I could recall this master's name. He was a reserved, sardonic, rather attractive, unsmiling man as I remember him, upon whom the charm of my appearance had failed to have the disarming effect it had upon everyone else. Bowing low to me instead of taking my proffered hand when I went to say goodbye, he remarked, with a faint, chilly smile, ‘Pride will have a fall, Ackerley, pride will have a fall.’ Rebukes such as this are too seldom administered; I never forgot this shocking remark and think always with respect of the now anonymous man who troubled himself to make it.

J. R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself.

Still reading...My Father and Myself

I remember sitting with my father one afternoon in the Bois, watching the procession of people go by. If I had known and thought about him then as much as I have learnt and thought about him since his death, what an interesting conversation we might have had. For here was the city of his romantic youth, hither he had brought Louise after his desertion of de Gallatin, here he had married her and lived with her and her parents in the Boulevard de Courcelles until she died, hither he had escorted my mother thirty-one years ago. The place must have been full of memories for him, happy and sad, and if I could have that day again, I hope I should make better use of it.

J. R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself.

Now reading: My Father and Myself, J.R. Ackerley

The apparently haphazard chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as history, came to me rather bunched up towards the end of the story. Artistically shocks should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual effect. To afford them this I could not tell my story straightforwardly and have therefore disregarded chronology and adopted the method of ploughing to and fro over my father's life and my own, turning up a little more sub-soil each time as the plough turned. Looking at it with as much detachment as I can command, I think I have not seriously confused the narrative.

From the Foreword.

June 18, 2004

The omission of an expected conjunction is called an asyndeton. Caesar is supposed to have said about Gaul: "I came, I saw, I conquered." Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address, "That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Caesar seems to have omitted his conjunction to speed things up; he is emphasizing how quickly the conquest of a place follows from its being sighted by a great and ambitious general. Lincoln's omission is more subtle—or so it seems to me. Usually the items on a list are different but related things: eggs, butter, cheese. Sometimes they achieve a unity in which their distinctiveness is lost to all but the analytic mind, a good cheese omelet. Or perhaps we might even decide that they are but manifestations or expressions of the same thing. Lincoln would have us see these three aspects of government as constituting an inseparable whole. The asyndeton helps him do this.

Of course, these two distinguishable usages of asyndeton are not mutually exclusive. Lincoln's asyndeton contributes to the striking brevity of his address. And the psychoanalytically subtle among us will point out that at some level seeing is organically connected with conquering (and many other things as well).

Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech.

June 17, 2004

Literary and artistic geniuses supply us with many instances in which, in a sudden flash, the crude material at hand is shot through with vision, and the complicated plot of a drama, the full significance of a character, or the complete glory of a statue stands revealed, as if, to use R. L. Stevenson's illustration, a jinni had brought it on a golden tray as a gift from another world. Abraham Lincoln, striking off in a few intense minutes his Gettysburg address, as beautiful in style and perfect in form as anything in human literature, is as good an illustration as we need of the way in which a highly organized person, by a kindling flash, has at his hand all the moral and spiritual gains of a lifetime.

Rufus M. Jones, "The Mystic's Experience of God," Jubilee: One Hundred Years of the Atlantic.

June 16, 2004

A wasting breath of humiliation blew bleakly over his soul to think of how he had fallen, to feel that those souls were dearer to God than his. The wind blew over him and passed on to the myriads and myriads of other souls on whom God's favour shone now more and now less, stars now brighter and now dimmer, sustained and failing. And the glimmering souls passed away, sustained and failing, merged in a moving breath. One soul was lost; a tiny soul: his. It flickered once and went out, forgotten, lost. The end: black cold void waste.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.