The Skating Rink

We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we wind up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.

Roberto Bolano, The Skating Rink
2009

The Witness

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder -- and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?


"The Witness," Jorge Luis Borges
1960

What is a Classic?

In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits.


T.S. Eliot, "What is a Classic?"
1944

Travels with Herodotus

When we look at lifeless temples, palaces, and cities, we can't help but wonder about the fate of their builders. Their pain, their broken backs, their eye gouged out by errant splinters of stone, their rheumatism. About their unfortunate lives, their suffering. But the very next question that invariably arises is: Could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? Without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? In short, was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man? And yet, does not that monumentality owe its existence to some conviction that what is negative and weak in man can be vanquished only by beauty, only through the effort and will of his creation? And that the only thing that never changes is beauty itself, and the need for it that dwells within us?


Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus
2004

Travels with Herodotus

A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again. It starts much earlier and is never really over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.


Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus
2004

The Lost

For everything, in time, gets lost....But for a little while some of that can be rescued, if only, faced with the vastness of all that there is and all that there ever was, somebody makes the decision to look back, to have one last look, to search for a while in the debris of the past and to see not only what was lost but what there is still to be found.


Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
2006

Proust Letter

"Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth."


Marcel Proust

The Curtain

But Flaubert went even further in his investigation of everyday banality. It is eleven in the morning. Emma arrives at her rendezvous in the cathedral and wordlessly hands Leon, her still-platonic lover, the letter saying she wants no more of their encounters. Then she moves off, kneels, and begins to pray; as she stands up a tour guide approaches and offers to show them around the church. To sabotage the rendezvous, Emma agrees, and the couple is forced to stop at a tomb, look up at the equestrian statue of the dead man, move along to other tombs and other statues, and listen to the guide's recitation, which Flaubert reproduces in all its foolishness and boring length. In a fury, unable to take any more, Leon breaks off the tour, pulls Emma out onto the church square, hails a cab, and there begins the famous scene of which all we see or hear is a man's voice now and then from inside the carriage ordering the driver to turn down yet another new road so that the journey goes on and the lovemaking never ends.

One of the most famous erotic scenes in literature is set off by an utter banality: a silly bore and his dogged chatter. In the theater a great action could only be born of some other great action. The novel alone could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.


Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
2005

Middlemarch

Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their own vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.


George Eliot, Middlemarch
1871

Middlemarch

"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."


George Eliot, Middlemarch
1871

Middlemarch

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.


George Eliot, Middlemarch
1871

Another Country

"I'm beginning to think," she said, "that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet -- you drink a little of it every day. Once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it -- that's the trouble. And it can, it can" -- she passed her hand wearily over her brow again --"drive you mad." She walked away briefly, then returned to their corner. "You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we're what we are."

James Baldwin, Another Country
1960

Another Country

"I mean, I think you've got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise there's no possibility of achieving the life you want." He paused. "Or think you want."

"Or," said Vivaldo, after a moment, "the life you think you should want."

"The life you think you should want," said Eric, "is always the life that looks safest."


James Baldwin, Another Country
1960

Another Country

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who se his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

James Baldwin, Another Country
1960

Another Country

At the same time, it occurred to him that the question was not really what he was going to "get" but how he was to discover his possibilities and become reconciled to them.


James Baldwin, Another Country
1960

Another Country

Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness.

James Baldwin, Another Country
1960

Middlemarch

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not wrought itself on the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.


George Eliot, Middlemarch
1871

Songs of Experience

Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself to have any care
But for another gives its ease
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.

Love seeketh only self to please
To bind another to its delight
Joys in another's loss of ease
And builds a heaven in hell's despite.


William Blake, Songs of Experience
1794

Middlemarch

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us, and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.


George Eliot, Middlemarch
1871