Correspondence with his wife

I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don't have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worthwhile, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.


Letter from Stefan Zweig to his wife Frederike
August 3, 1925

Lack of Character

For example, taking situationism [as a theory of personality] seriously might inhibit the experience of a certain unreserved love; the situationist might be less able to feel, as Wittgenstein put it, "absolutely safe" in a relationship. But the loss of such experiences is a cost people should be willing to pay. For the costs on the other side are greater: Commitment to globalism [of traits within personality] threatens to poison understandings of self and others with disappointment and resentment on the one hand and delusion and hero-worship on the other.

In fact, engaging situationism can enable loving relationships, because affection for others would not be contingent on conformity to unrealistic standards of character. With luck, a situationist tuning of the emotions could increase our ever-short supply of compassion, forgiveness, and fair-mindedness. And these are things that are worth having in greater abundance.


Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, John M. Doris
2002

Survival in Auschwitz

We have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old wise ones, instead of warning us "remember that you must die," would have done much better to remind us of this great danger that threatens us.


Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
1958

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what


"For the Anniversary of My Death," W.S. Merwin
1967

Art Class

While it is the métier of middle-class intellectuals to propose intellectual, individual solutions to problems that are in fact social and collective, it must be acknowledged that these tensions rest on real social antagonisms. They relate to the vast inequality in the distribution of material -- and thus cultural and intellectual -- resources in the world. And the pressures they represent are therefore sure to grow more unmanageable until something changes materially. In this sense, what art needs is not a "new theory" at all, but rather new initiative in relating practically to the actual forces that affect it.


"Art Class," Ben Davis
August 24, 2007

Nobel Acceptance

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know that they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft - to create a world - if he uses his secret wounds as a starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine - that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center.


Speech to the Swedish Academy, Orhan Pamuk
December 11, 2006

Five by Kafka

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.


Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Genius of Culture

If anyone wanted to imagine a genius of culture, what would the latter be like? He would manipulate falsehood, force, the most ruthless self-interest as his instruments so skilfully he could only be called an evil, demonic being; but his objectives, which here and there shine through, would be great and good. He would be a centaur, half beast, half an, with angel's wings attached to his head in addition.


Human, All too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Friedrich Nietzsche
1878

Letter

This life is a perpetual chequer-work of good and evil, pleasure and pain. When in possession of what we desire, we are only so much the nearer losing it; and when at a distance from it, we live in expectation of enjoying it again.

We like so much to hear people talk of us and of our motives, that we are charmed even when they abuse us.


Marie de Sevigne
Letter dated September 22, 1680

Heauton Timorumenos

Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto.

(I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.)


Heauton Timorumenos, Publius Terentius Afer
(Terence, 195-159 BC)