tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69913946396623025792024-02-08T07:26:37.191-08:00I read that somewhereThe blog where we don't speak for ourselves.MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.comBlogger262125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-68909159257948003382015-09-14T16:35:00.000-07:002015-09-14T16:35:14.043-07:00Letter from Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."
--Franz Kafka, 1904MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-65477628232029480972015-09-14T16:30:00.001-07:002015-09-14T16:30:41.815-07:00A History of Reading" 'Reading,' wrote Petrarch in one of his many letters, 'rarely avoids danger, unless the light of divine truth shines upon the reader, teaching what to seek and what to avoid.' This light (to follow Petrarch's image) shines differently on all of us, and differently also at the various stages of our lives. We never return to the same book or even to the same page, because in the varying light we change and the book changes, and our memories grow bright and dim and bright again, and we never know exactly what it is we learn and forget, and what it is we remember."
--<i>A History of Reading</i>
Alberto Manguel, 1996MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-87897611900235699962015-09-14T16:23:00.001-07:002015-09-14T16:23:30.090-07:00Reflections"What my first books were to me -- to remember this I should first have to forget all other knowledge of books. It is certain that all I know of them today rests on the readiness with which I then opened myself to books; but whereas now content, theme and subject-matter re extraneous to the book, earlier they were solely and entirely in it, being no more external or independent of it than are today the number of its pages or its paper. The world that revealed itself in the book and the book itself were never to be divided. So with each book its content, too, its world, was palpably there, at hand. But equally, this content and this world transfigured every part of the book. They burned within it, blazed from it; located not merely in its binding or its pictures, they were enshrined in chapter headings and opening letters, paragraphs and columns. You did not read books through; you dwelt, abided between their lines and, reopening them after an interval, surprised yourself at the spot where you had halted."
--"A Berlin Chronicle", in <i>Reflections</i>
Walter BenjaminMDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-88532138056901796382015-09-14T16:12:00.002-07:002015-09-14T16:12:37.395-07:00Rocket and Lightship"But then, the present is always lived ambiguously. It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth -- because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. Events give way to books and movies and television shows, gray becomes black and white, and in time the seeming clarity and monumentality of the past makes us feel shy, guilty, or resentful before it.
The best history writing reverses this process, restoring complexity to our sense of the past, helping us to understand that the people who fought the war were as imperfect as ourselves. This requires objectivity, but it should not breed detachment."
--<i>Rocket and Lightship</i>
Adam Kirsch, 2015MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-38463989995438999902013-07-07T16:06:00.001-07:002013-07-07T16:06:45.517-07:00The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work"In Catholic dogma, the definition of noble work had mostly been limited to that done by priests in the service of God, with practical and commercial labour relegated to an entirely base category unconnected to the display of any specifically Christian virtues. By contrast, the Protestant worldview as it had developed over the sixteenth century attempted to redeem the value of everyday tasks, proposing that many apparently unimportant activities could in fact enable those who undertook them to convey the quality of their souls. In this schema, humility, wisdom, respect, and kindness could be practised in a shop no less sincerely than in a monastery."
--Alain de Botton, <i>The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work</i>, 2009MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-82860688654079053652013-07-07T16:02:00.002-07:002013-07-07T16:02:06.052-07:00The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work "But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs, and of which Ariane was an exemplar. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs, but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves."
--Alain de Botton, <i>The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work</i>, 2009MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-50932635454841527912013-07-07T15:58:00.001-07:002013-07-07T15:58:51.924-07:00The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work"The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder. They fix that which is fugitive: the cooling shadow of an oak on a windless, hot summer afternoon; the golden-brown tint of leaves in the early days of autumn; the stoical sadness of a bare tree glimpsed from a train, outlined against a heavy grey sky. At the same time, it is forgotten aspects of our own psyches to which paintings can seem mysteriously conjoined. It can be our unspolen longings that surprise us in the trees, and our adolescent selves that we recognize in the hazy tint of a summer sky."
--Alain de Botton, <i>The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work</i>, 2009MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-16024595147108190482013-07-07T15:54:00.001-07:002013-07-07T15:54:09.214-07:00The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work"Nevertheless, no quayside can ever appear entirely banal, because people will always be miniscule compared to the great oceans and the mention of faraway ports will hence always bear a confused promise of lives unfolding there which may be more vivid than the ones we know here, a romantic charge clinging to names like Yokohama, Alexandria, and Tunis -- places which in reality cannot be exempt from tedium and compromise, but which are distant enough to support for a time certain confused daydreams of happiness."
--Alain de Botton, <i>The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work</i>, 2009MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-81537514425222958202010-09-27T18:08:00.001-07:002010-09-27T18:12:44.687-07:00Hegel on the Future of ArtHow many of us would seriously place Rauschenberg besides Rembrandt, Cage besides Bach? Stepping into a museum or concert hall we enter an aesthetic church, a sublime and rather chilly necropolis, stretching back across time, where Leonardo and Van Gogh, Palestrina and Beethoven join frozen hands. Part of this attitude is an often almost religious reverence and respect, but also a certain indifference. We sense that what truly matters lies elsewhere. What needs preserving does so precisely because it has lost its place in our world and must therefore be given a special place -- often at great expense.<br /><br />Karsten Harries, "Hegel on the Future of Art"<br />1974MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com91tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-56166675051021833052010-09-27T17:58:00.000-07:002010-09-27T18:04:00.991-07:00The End of Art[Post-aesthetic art] must be swallowed raw -- in post-aesthetic art the idea is raw and intellectually and emotionally undigested, and there is little or no art. Nuance and subtlety are expendable; the message is all, and it is ultimately a self-righteous one, calling for a new conformity and simplicity in its conception of the social truth. Indeed, the simpler the message the better, for a simple message is easier to communicate to the masses than a dialectically complex one. Ideas become slogans -- banner headlines -- in ideological art, if it can still be called art. For it seems more like a poor cousin of the mass media, lacking both their slickness and outreach. Indeed, the point is to be as "artless" as possible, for art, after all, is a distracting illusion appealing to the senses not the revolutionary-minded.<br /><br />Donald Kuspit, <i>The End of Art</i><br />2004MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com62tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-32484822992678879752010-09-27T17:49:00.000-07:002010-09-27T17:56:20.563-07:00The End of ArtIf, as Hegel writes, "it is the function of art to present ultimate reality to our immediate perception in sensuous shape," then in great music and great musical painting the sensuously immediate <i>is</i> ultimate reality. Revelation and presentation are reconciled. They are inseparable in aesthetic experience. Thus, great music and great musical painting are the most realized arts. They are artistic consciousness at its most unconditional, that is, unconditioned by worldly concerns.<br /><br />Donald Kuspit, <i>The End of Art</i><br />2004MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-72391486196662388352010-09-08T19:46:00.000-07:002010-09-08T19:51:17.957-07:00TinkersYour cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that <i>that</i> is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the axe bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.<br /><br /><i>Tinkers</i>, Paul Harding<br />2009MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-47542632925252152932010-09-08T19:28:00.000-07:002010-09-08T19:45:41.342-07:00TinkersTo Howard, this was the best part of the afternoon, when folds of night mingled with bands of day. He resisted the desire to stop the wagon and give Prince Edward an apple and sit quietly and become a part of the slow freshet of night, or to stop the wagon and simple remain on the bench and watch the shadows approach and pool around the wagon wheels and Prince Edward's hooves and eventually reach the soles of his shoes and then his ankles, until mule, cart, and man were submerged in the flood tide of night, because the secrets gathered in the shadows at the tree line that rustled and waited until he passed, and which made the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end and his scalp tighten when he felt them flooding, invisible, the road around him, were dispelled each time he turned his direct attention to them, scattered to just beyond his sight. The true essence, the secret recipe of the forest and the light and the dark was far too fine and subtle to be observed <i>with my blunt eye --water sac and nerves, miracle itself, fine itself: light catcher. But the thing itself is not forest and light and dark, but something else scattered by my coarse gaze, by my dumb intention. The quilt of leaves and light and shadow and ruffling breezes might part and I'd be given a glimpse of what is on the other side; a stitch might work itself loose or be worked loose. The weaver might have made one bad loop in the foliage of a sugar maple by the road and that one loop of whatever the thread might be wound from --light, gravity, dark from stars -- had somehow been worked loose by the wind in its constant worrying of white buds and green leaves and blood-and-orange leaves and bare branches and two of the pieces of whatever it is that this world is knit from had come loose from each other and there was maybe just a finger width's hole, which I was lucky enough to spot in the glittering leaves from this wagon of drawers and nimble enough to scale the silver trunk and brave enough to poke my finger into the tear; that might offer to the simple touch a measure o tranquillity or reassurance.</i><br /><br /><i>Tinkers</i>, Paul Harding<br />2009MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-89504622942402110962010-09-08T19:16:00.000-07:002010-09-08T19:28:00.778-07:00TinkersEarly man sought always methods of capturing time more precisely than casting the shadows of Apollo's chariot upon a graded iron disk (for when the sun sank behind the hills in the west, what then?), or burning oil in a glass lamp maked at intervals so the crude hours might be gleaned from the disappearing fuel. The reasonable, sensitive soul who perhaps one day while taking his rest along the banks of a bubbling brook came to hear, in that half-dream, half-wakeful state during which so many men seem most receptive to perceiving the pulleys and winches that hoist the clouds, the heavenly bellows that push the winds, the cogs and wheels that turn the globe, came to hear a regularity in the slivery song of water over pebbles, that soul is unknown to us. Let us remark, then, that it is good enough to induce him out of the profusions of the past, perhaps fit him with thick sandals and a steady hand, a heart open to nature and a head devoted to the advancement of men, and watch in admiration as he pokes and fiddles and persists at various machines until he arrives at a device which marks time by a steady flow of water through its guts.<br /><br /><i>Tinkers</i>, Paul Harding<br />2009MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-54467613974554368262009-09-23T18:37:00.000-07:002009-09-23T18:39:52.647-07:00The Skating RinkWe 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.<br /><br />Roberto Bolano, <i>The Skating Rink</i> <br />2009MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-84208535756930987412009-03-23T10:13:00.000-07:002009-03-23T10:16:54.678-07:00The WitnessThings, 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?<br /><br /><br />"The Witness," Jorge Luis Borges<br />1960MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-82935832039360637502009-02-21T13:22:00.000-08:002009-03-23T10:20:07.798-07:00What 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.<br /><br /><br />T.S. Eliot, "What is a Classic?"<br />1944MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-20034293611744444072009-02-21T13:14:00.001-08:002009-03-23T10:20:23.134-07:00Travels with HerodotusWhen 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?<br /><br /><br />Ryszard Kapuscinski, <i>Travels with Herodotus</i><br />2004MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-39314204664842503322009-02-21T13:10:00.000-08:002009-02-21T13:13:45.001-08:00Travels with HerodotusA 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.<br /><br /><br />Ryszard Kapuscinski, <i>Travels with Herodotus</i><br />2004MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-36667986607347177532009-02-05T11:17:00.000-08:002009-02-05T11:20:14.244-08:00The LostFor 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.<br /><br /><br />Daniel Mendelsohn, <i>The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million</i><br />2006MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-2110030360878086152009-02-04T16:18:00.000-08:002009-02-04T16:19:13.878-08:00Proust 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."<br /><br /><br />Marcel ProustMDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-38753489218845672962009-02-03T11:56:00.000-08:002009-02-03T12:03:24.965-08:00The CurtainBut 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />Milan Kundera, <i>The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts</i><br />2005MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-65938059344731812402009-02-01T10:53:00.000-08:002009-02-01T10:55:01.905-08:00MiddlemarchMen 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.<br /><br /><br />George Eliot, <i>Middlemarch</i><br />1871MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-24173199129926890712009-02-01T10:50:00.000-08:002009-02-01T10:53:15.554-08:00Middlemarch"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."<br /><br /><br />George Eliot, <i>Middlemarch</i><br />1871MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6991394639662302579.post-48694576199240618832009-01-19T08:22:00.000-08:002009-01-19T08:28:27.371-08:00MiddlemarchAn 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.<br /><br /><br />George Eliot, <i>Middlemarch</i><br />1871MDDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388767818784073710noreply@blogger.com1