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