The
English have always prized the lovably idiosyncratic individual over those arid
entities known as ideas. If they aren’t able to extricate the man or woman
‘behind’ the work, they tend to feel a little cheated. Their fondness for
biography, a superior version of what the media know as ‘human interest’ goes
hand in hand with their philistinism.
Terry
Eagleton
[…] 'Probably this whole settlement is drunk around us at this moment. Almost everyone'.
He dreaded the monthly arrival of pensions. 'Single parents get an allowance for each child, so a man with five children and no wife can feel a millionaire! He'll drink himself sick while the children starve. The women do it too. Everybody. And when the vodka gives out, they'll search for anything. There's an American machine oil which is bought galore here. Our machines are all broken, of course, but people drink this fluid by the bottle. Within two or three hours they're asphyxiated. If they get to the hospital I can save them, but they die in their homes in the street'.
Thubron, In Siberia
Among the native peoples a myth exists that in the extremest cold words themselves freeze and fall to earth. In spring they stir again and start to speak, and suddenly the air fills with out-of-date gossip, unheard jokes, cries of forgotten pain, words of long-disowned love.
Thubron, In Siberia
… I became mesmerised by the taiga. Its snow-glazed desolation seemed only to deepen its vastness: one fifth of the forest of the entire earth. Often it runs over a thousand miles deep from north to south, and the suffocating closure of its trees, crowing out all distances, any perspectives, has driven people literally mad. Magnetic anomalies can doom even a sane traveller here, while his compass-point swings uselessly. Others start walking in a mania to escape – this is the 'taiga madness' – but return to their own tracks, until they drop exhausted or lose themselves in quicksand.
Colin Thubron, In Siberia
The richest people in Potalovo are the children. They drive tractors and bulldozers, own houses, sail ships. The fact that all these possessions are wrecked makes no difference. They are a simulacrum of the adult world. So the children keep house in burnt-out cottages, or climb into the cabins of tractors and roam the tundra on vanished wheels. Sometimes they man the bridge of the beached and derelict cargo ship, and steer for the Arctic sea. Only when they stop being children do they realise that they are inhabiting a world in ruins.
At the age of twelve or thirteen, said Nikolai, they start to drink.
Colin Thubron, In Siberia
There is something very strange about Boswell, something that has been interpreted in two different ways. I’m going to look at the two extreme views: the one of the English essayist and historian Macaulay, who wrote around the middle of the nineteenth century, and that of Bernard Shaw, written, I believe, around 1915, or something like that. Then there is a whole range of judgments between those two. Macaulay says that the preeminence of Homer as an epic poet, of Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, of Demosthenes as an orator, and of Cervantes as a novelist is no less indisputable than the preeminence of Boswell as a biographer. And then he says that all those eminent names owed their preeminence to their talent and brilliance, and that the odd thing about Boswell is that he owes hispreeminence as a biographer to his foolishness, his inconsistency, his vanity, and his imbecility.
He then recounts a series of instances in which Boswell appears as a ridiculous character. He says that if these things that happened to Boswell had happened to anybody else, that person would have wanted the earth to swallow him up. Boswell, however, dedicated himself to publicizing them. For example, there’s the scorn shown to him by an English duchess, and the fact that members of the club he managed to join thought there could not be a person less intelligent than Boswell. But Macaulay forgets that we owe the narration of almost all those facts to Boswell himself. Now… in the case of a short composition a fool can utter a brilliant sentence but it seems quite rare for a fool to be able to write an admirable biography of seven or eight hundred pages in spite of being a fool or, according to Macaulay, because he was a fool.
Now, let us take a look at the opposite opinion, that of Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw, in one of his long and incisive prologues, says that he is the heir to an apostolic succession of dramatists, that this succession comes from the Greek tragedians—from Aeschylus, Sophocles, through Euripides—and then passes through Shakespeare, through Marlowe. He says that he is not, in fact, better than Shakespeare, that if he had lived in Shakespeare’s century he would not have written works better than Hamlet or Macbeth; but now he can, for he cannot stand Shakespeare, because he has read authors who are better than him. Before, he mentioned other dramatists, names that are somewhat surprising for such a list. He says we have the four Evangelists, those four great dramatists who created the character Christ. Before, we had Plato, who created the character Socrates.
Then we have Boswell, who created the character Johnson. “And now, we have me, who has created so many characters it is not worth listing them, the list would be almost infinite as well as being well known.” “Finally,” he says, “I am heir to the apostolic succession that begins with Aeschylus and ends in me and that undoubtedly will continue.” So here we have these two extreme opinions: one, that Boswell was an idiot who had the good fortune to meet Johnson and write his biography—that’s Macaulay’s—and the other, the opposite, of Bernard Shaw, who says that Johnson was, among his other literary merits, a dramatic character created by Boswell.
… what Boswell planned, or in any case what he carried out, was completely different: to make Johnson’s biography a drama, with several characters. There is [Sir Joshua] Reynolds, there is [Oliver] Goldsmith, sometimes the members of the circle, or how would we call it, the salon, of which Johnson was the leader. And they appear and behave like the characters in a play. Indeed, each has his own personality—above all, Dr. Johnson, who is presented sometimes as ridiculous but always as lovable. This is what happens with Cervantes’s character, Don Quixote, especially in the second part, when the author has learned to know his character and has forgotten his initial goal of parodying novels of chivalry. This is true, because the more writers develop their characters, the better they get to know them. So, that’s how we have a character who is sometimes ridiculous, but who can be serious and have profound thoughts, and above all is one of the most beloved characters in all of history. And we can say “of history” because Don Quixote is more real to us than Cervantes himself, as Unamuno and others have maintained. …. And at the end, Don Quixote is a slightly ridiculous character, but he is also a gentleman worthy of our respect, and sometimes our pity, but he is always lovable. And this is the same sensation we get from the image of Dr. Johnson, given to us by Boswell, with his grotesque appearance, his long arms, his slovenly appearance. But he is lovable.
….Now, in the same way that we have seen how Johnson is similar to Don Quixote, we have to think that just as Sancho is the companion Quixote sometimes treats badly, we see Boswell in that same relation to Dr. Johnson: a sometimes stupid and loyal companion. There are characters whose role is to bring out the hero’s personality. In other words, often authors need a character who serves as a framework for and a contrast to the deeds of his hero. This is Sancho, and that character in Boswell’s work is Boswell himself. That is, Boswell appears as a despicable character. But it seems impossible to me that Boswell didn’t realize this. And this shows that Boswell positioned himself in contrast to Johnson. The fact that Boswell himself tells anecdotes in which he appears ridiculous makes him not seem ridiculous at all, for if he wrote them down, he did it because he saw that the purpose of the anecdote was to make Johnson stand out.
Perhaps Boswell simply felt it as an aesthetic necessity that to better showcase Johnson, there should be a very different character alongside him. Something like in the novels of Conan Doyle: the mediocre Dr. Watson makes the brilliant Sherlock Holmes stand out even more. And Boswell gives himself the role of the ridiculous one, and he maintains it throughout the entire book. Yet, we feel a sincere friendship between the two in the same way we feel it when we read Conan Doyle’s novels. It is natural, as I have said, that this would be so; for Johnson was a famous man and alone, and of course he liked to feel by his side the friendship of a much younger man, who so obviously admired him.
From Borges's lecture on Boswell and Johnson.
On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people – you are dancing emotionally, on a platform created by a large corporation. People’s feelings bounce back and forth – happy Stakhanovites, ignoring and denying the system of power. […] We look back on [Stalin’s] socialist realism not as innocent but as a dramatic expression of power; it expresses the superiority of the state, which was the guiding belief at the time. I think sometime in the future people will look back at the millions and millions of descriptions of personal feelings on the internet and see them in similar ways. This is the driving belief of our time: that ‘me’ and what I feel minute by minute is the natural centre of the world. Far from revealing that this is an ideology – and that there are other ways of looking at human society – what Twitter and Facebook do is reinforce the feeling that this is the natural way to be.
Katherine Viner interviews Adam Curtis (via)
A writer, particularly a young and inexperienced writer, feels himself under an obligation to give his reader the fullest answers to all possible questions. Conscience will not let him shut his eyes to tormenting problems, and so he begins to speak of ‘first and ultimate things.’ As he cannot say anything profitable on such subjects—for it is not the business of the young to be profoundly philosophical—he grows excited, he shouts himself to hoarseness. In the end he is silent from exhaustion.
Leo Shestov (via)
Our taste for literature which arises from [the imagination of disaster] is a natural one, yet it has in it this danger, that we may come to assume that evil is equivalent to reality and may even come, in some distant and unconscious way, to honor it as such.
Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (via)
This advertisement [the WWF panda] is an instance of the image of reasonableness English people project very successfully. I believe they induce in themselves an enormous moral security, which always prevents them from faulting themselves for anything worse than stodginess or ineptitude or excessive vulnerability to foreign influences. Hearing themselves expound as slick as you please on every great question of the age, abhorring racism, despising the thought of nuclear deterrence, scorning nationalism and militarism, appalled at the spectacle of poverty, they must feel that their gift to the world of moral enlightenment exculpates the racism, poverty, nationalism, and so on with which their own country is grievously afflicted.
Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country (via The Vaulted Fool)
I can't listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things. Said Lenin.
Living in a single attic room at The Hague for the last seven years before his death at forty-four, Spinoza was known to sometimes go as long as three months without once stepping out of doors.
Nothing preposterous can ever be said that hasn't already been said by one of the philosophers. Said Cicero.
How many things there are in this world that I do not want. Said Socrates, strolling through a marketplace in Athens.
Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books.
Very great is the number of the stupid. Said Galileo.
Rank vegetable growth, Rebecca West called the sentences of Henry James. One feels that if one took cutting of them one could raise a library in the garden.
O, what a number of lies this young man has told about me. Said Socrates, the first time he heard Plato read one of his dialogues. Says a legend recorded by Diogenes Laertius.
The only writing I've ever been jealous of. Said Woolf of Mansfield.
Keep apart, keep apart and preserve one's soul alive – that is the teaching of the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within a world. Wrote George Gissing.
As if written illegally, under fear of the police. Bertold Brecht said of Kafka's fiction.
In a letter from Florence Hardy, mentioning that her husband is at his desk: Writing an intensely dismal poem with great spirits.
A Wayward Nun, Dickinson called herself.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it. Said Gertrude Stein.
Copies of all the now long lost plays of Sophocles and Euripides still existed at Constantinople until 1203. When the city's churches and libraries were indiscriminately ravaged and torched by the abortive Fourth Crusade.
The value of a classical education, according to a mid nineteenth-century dean of Christ Church, Oxford, one Thomas Gaisford: That it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have no shared its advantages.
We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice. Said Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Byron, briefly, on Southey: Twaddle. On Wordsworth: Drivel. On Keats: Flay him alive.
There's nothing to say that hasn't been said before.
We say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only. Says Burton in the Enuuch.
Mendelssohn on Liszt: Few brains.
One should always read with a pen in one's hand. Says Delacroix in the Journals.
Tchaivoksky, leaving Bayreuth after the first full four-day performance of The Ring: As if I'd been let out of prison.
[Dostoevsky], while writing The Idiot. They demand from me artistic finish, the purity of poetry, and they point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them take a look at the conditions under which I work.
Tolstoy, in his diary, on George Bernard Shaw: His trviliality is astounding.
The world as perceived by Rimbaud: Full of grocers.
God does not inhabit healthy bodies. Said Saint Hildegard of Bingen.
Pound on Milton: Disgusting, coarse-minded, asinine. On Dryden: A lunkhead.
When Chagall paints you do not know if he is asleep or awake. Somewhere or other inside his head there must be an angel.
Lawrence Sterne's love letters to his mistress: Which he sometimes copied word for word from letters he had earlier written his wife.
A latrine, Baudelaire called George Sand.
Diogenes, explaining why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers: Because they think it possible that they themselves might become lame and blind, but they do not expect to turn out philosophers.
Dante tires one quickly. It is like looking at the sun. Said Joyce.
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. Said Russell.
Woolf: I have the feeling that I shall go mad. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it, but cannot fight any longer.
Putridity and corruption. Said Kierkegaard re [Hegel's lectures, published version].
According to his own wish, Liszt's funeral was conducted without music.
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Said Isak Dinesen.
I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanatoriums. Said Scott.
My memory and intellect have gone to wait for me elsewhere. Wrote Michaelangelo to Vasari at eighty-three.
David Markson, Vanishing Point
The epigraph to Satantango is a single sentence: “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.” Krasznahorkai offers only an oblique attribution—”F.K.”—but its source is Kafka’s novel The Castle. In the eighth chapter of Kafka’s novel, called “Waiting for Klamm,” a “gentleman” asks K to leave: “‘But then I’ll miss the person I’m waiting for,’ said K., flinching.” To which the gentleman replies: “You’ll miss him whether you wait or go.” And K’s triumphant riposte is this: “Then I would rather miss him as I wait.”
In the novel, it’s an example of how K has the defiant courage of his self-defeat. As an obscurely attributed epigraph, however, the sentence becomes stranger: a near oxymoron—whose tone could be despairing or euphoric. “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.” It is a miniature example of Krasznahorkai’s style—where the everyday is revealed as a tragicomic mystery.
from Adam Thirwell's review of Krasznahorkai's Satantango in the New York Review of Books
I have always argued that the difference between prose and poetry in our age is quite different. Some of the best
poets are prose writers, that is, they do everything that poetry
used to do and doesn’t now. Poetry is prosy now, and not as
interesting as prose, I think—not even close. I’m also reminding people
that this is a homemade object—the cuckoo clock, it says
something, things speak themselves as well. That’s because I’m anti
writing as merely written. I want the oral tradition. You go back to
John Donne’s prose, or any of those writers, you get plenty of
that, you get rhyming, alliteration, you get all kinds of other
connections, all other devices of suggestion, and echoing, and so forth,
because they were talking to hundreds, sometimes a thousand people
in a church. Their sermon had to go out verbally and they had
to use all the mnemonic devices they could, because they wanted
to embed the so-called message. It was the word, it was the “living word,” and all that, that they wanted to stress. It was the
same time the opera begins, masques and so forth. They were
trying to figure out how music and its nature, and language and its
nature, could cohabit. It is for me a great moment because of that.
Ford Maddox Ford has a good passage in one of those endless
books he wrote on the history of English literature about how
prose changed after the protestants won the war in England, how
prose went down the hill as the [former] king of the
hill.
[…]
When you put things on the margin, as
poetry and fiction have certainly been, you free them in many
cases, in many ways, and it’s great to be over there, in a sense, but
it also causes damage. It’s a great incentive, if you’re over on the
margin and feel you should be the center, and then those who are on
the margin, know they’re on the margin, that’s the way it’s
going to be, and they have their desperate little ways to pretend
that the margin is really the center. And there’s the final thing
when the novel was in the center for a while, people like Dickens,
and even up through late James. There was a sense of the social
responsibility of the writer, the impact—people paid attention. Recently,
in Latin American literature, novelists were attended to. A little
anecdote: While talking to Carlos Fuentes about that sort of thing,
and trying to get at why there was such an explosion in Latin
American literature, he said, “We are making our literature. We are
behind the times.” Gertrude Stein said that the United States was the
oldest country in the world because it’s been in the twentieth
century the longest. And they were just getting to this, and Fuentes was
right.
The novelists were celebrated people, and are, even still.
The weight of being somebody who is attended to. [When a writer] came
out on the stage, an athletic complex, usually, to read, the
place would be packed with twenty thousand people. And when they
finished reading, bouquets of flowers would be piled at his feet, and
so orth. And the writer, serious writers would be read by half the population.
In China, the same sort of thing. I was introduced to a
young woman, whose first book had just come out, and she was sort
of disappointed in its sales. She sold a hundred thousand
copies of her first book of poetry. Everybody in China reads. You would
see people everywhere, perched somewhere, reading. And they would run
out of paper, the whole country would run out of paper there
were so many. But the problem is that only in less developed
societies are novelists and poets valued. The Russians are losing that
fast. And they should be, because we writers don’t know what we’re
talking about. Some writers are wise people, I guess, and have
something of intellect to offer to society, but no more than any other
group. You want to listen to Tolstoy? I don’t think so. But then what?
What are the young writers writing for? They’re writing for their
peers in their seminars, the workshops, that’s who. It’s pitiful.
Barth was writing for the greats of the past, whom he had
read, and, again. Fuentes or Vargas Llosa, they read Don Quixote,
I mean. And they’re given ambassadorships, they run for president.
They are important people, so they have to do important things.
And now what we do to something important, we sign a petition
not to arrest a Chinese radical. Big deal. I think it’s
naturally a very difficult thing.
One last thing, when you make less grand the activity, it
becomes a hobby, and it actually multiplies the number of people
writing poems, tons and millions of people are writing poems, all
kinds of people are writing novels, because it’s not hard. The
Yeats poem “Adam’s Curse,” we’re down on our knees scrubbing the
kitchen floor. No, we’re not. They’re writing little poems about
being mistreated by their husband or wife. At least the
Restoration poets wrote about getting into bed.
[…]
When Valéry was in a similar position and was called a Symbolist,
he said, “But we all write differently. What is in common? We dislike
the same things.” That’s true of this group, too. We share
certain dislikes.
I’m on Adorno’s side: that real change has to be structural or formal. And that’s why he
favored Schoenberg over Stravinsky. Stravinsky was a perfectly
bourgeois composer, and he borrowed his motifs, and of course people
held that against him, I don’t—as long as you’re good, that’s
fine. And Adorno and his friends are wrong to say he shouldn’t do
that.
Schoenberg had another structure, and that had, as it’s
merits, not being Stravinsky, or the tradition, the eclectic quality
of Stravinsky, too. You take Schoenberg, however—he was
dictatorial. The positive side of Schoenberg was not very good, I think,
as a model of other things. And to defend the twelve-tone system you just have to point to the fact that you can write
masterpieces with it. It doesn’t mean you have to use it all the time. Fact
is, it’s a rather a specialized occasion, type of formal design. It’s like the
Bauhaus: military, chilling, or the tendency of modern architects to
say, “Live in my house! It’ll be good for you!” These architects
thought that they would make better people. Even Frank Lloyd Wright did.
[…]
You remember the anecdote about Gertrude Stein and the
little bell ringing in her head that told her when she was in the
presence of a genius? And it rang for her with Picasso and Alfred
North Whitehead. Well, it rang once for me: Wittgenstein. It was
just as well to be tongue-tied in his presence because he didn’t want
to hear from you anyway. What we did was listen to him. He
would talk about an issue as if we weren’t there. When I repeat
it, describe it, it sounds so phony, but we listened to him think out
loud, for our benefit. It was, in fact, genuine. It was as if you
could suddenly follow [Wallace] Stevens, say, deciding whether to keep or
remove a word. We listened while he struggled with the pros and cons
of some sort of interpretation of some epistemological problem,
mainly. I was very skeptical, but I immediately saw, I think, that
this guy was something.
William Gass, Rain Taxi interview
First person present tense — a convention that makes
sense in French, which hates its preterite, but none in English, where our real
present is present progressive: Not “I pick up the envelope from the table” but
“I am picking up the envelope from the table.” Who could bear to read a story,
let alone a novel, in the true present tense of natural spoken English? So we
get stories written in this artificial, impossible voice. The voice we use for
jokes and anecdotes — “A guy walks into a bar, see” — but not the voice we use
for truth — “No, he really did.” As soon as we want to be believed, we move to
the past tense. But our most pretentious fiction is in the language of jokes.
Regular readers generally know they’re being excluded
when present tense is used for narrative. It’s a shibboleth for the
overeducated, the true believers.
The sad thing is that because young readers
don’t yet recognize the shibboleths, overtaught but underskilled writers of YA
fiction often get away with first person present tense. It worked for Hunger
Games because the story was so powerful; but the choice hampered the sequels.
It’s simply not a natural narrative choice in English; most writers confess
that they are faking it because they use pluperfect for the narrative past when
the past of present-tense narrative is the simple preterite or present perfect.
Orson Scott Card, interviewed
To have a sense of the perpetual only in the negative, in what does harm, in what thwarts being. Perpetuity of threat, of frustration, of longed-for and failed ecstasy, of an absolute glimpsed and rarely achieved; yet sometimes transcended, skipped over, as when you escape God …
The superior saints did not insist on working miracles; they acknowledged them reluctantly, as if someone had forced their hand. Every time we come upon something existing, real, full, we want to have the bells rung, as on the occasion of great victgories or great calamities.
You have dared call Time your 'brother', take as your ally the worst of torturers. On this point, our differences explode: you walk in step with Time, while I precede or drag after it, never adopting its manners, unable to think of it without experiencing something like a speculative sorrow.
The basis of society, of any society, is a certain pride in obedience. When this pride no longer exists, the society collapses.
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.
My mission is to kill time, and time's is to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
The obession of lastness apropos of everything, the last as category, as constitutive form of the mind, the last as category, as constitutive form of the mind, as original deformity, even as revelation …
I long ago used up whatever religious resources I had. Deisscation or purification? I am the last to say. No god lingers in my blood …
At the bird market. What power, what determination in these tiny frantic bodies! Life resides in this bit of nothing which animates a tuft of matter, and which nonetheless emerges from matter itself and perishes with it. But the perplexity remains: impossible to explain this fever, this perpetual dance, this representation, this spectacle which life affords itself., What a theatre, breath!
All these people in the street make me think of exhausted gorillas, every one of them tired of imitating man!
Hesiod: 'The gods have hidden from men the sources of life'. Have they done well, or ill? One thing is certain: mortals would have not have had the courage to continue after such a revelation.
[…] Deliverance? One does not attain it, one is engulfed by it, smothered in it. Nirvana itself -an asphyxia! Though the gentlest of all.
As soon as we consult a specialist, we realize we are the lowest of the low, the reject of Creation, a crud. We should not know what ails us, still less what we die of. Any specification in this realim is impious, for by a word it does away with that minimum of mystery which death and even life are meant to conceal.
Fever inspires a man's work – for how long? Often passion causes certain works to date, whereas others, produced by exhaustion, survive age after age. Timeless lassitude, eternity of cold disgust!
The proof that man loathes man? Enough to be in a crowd, in order to feel that you side with all the dead planets.
The only profitable conversations are with enthusaisms who have ceased being so – with the ex-naive… Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward Knowledge – that impersonal version of disappointment.
He who, having frequented men, retains the slightest illusion about them, should be condemned to reincarnation, in order to learn how to observe, to see, to catch up …
In order to mold man, it was not with water but with tears that Prometheus mixed his clay […]
Man is unacceptable.
The crucial moment of the historical drama is out of our reach. We are merely its harbingers, its heralds – the trumpets of a Judgement without a Judge.
At this moment, I am alone. What more can I want? A more intense happiness does not exist. Yes: that of hearing, by dint of silence, my solitude enlarge.
'To make an attempt upon one's days' – how accurate this French expression for suicide. What we possess is just that: days, days, and that is all we can attack.
Desolation is so linked to what I feel that it acquires the facility of a reflex.
It is not normal to be alive, since the living being as such exists and is real only when threatened. Death in short is no more than the cessation of an anomaly.
A curious dream over which I prefer not to linger. Someone or other would have dissected it. What a mistake! Le the nights bury the nights.
Hope is the normal form of delirium.
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
The originality of a being is identified with his particular way of losing his footing […]
What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
To torment oneself in the middle of the night, to perform every known sort of exercise, to swallow pills, tablets, capsules – why? In hopes of eclipsing that phenomenon, that deadly apparition known as consciousness. Only a conscious being, only a weakling, could have invented such an expression as to be engulfed in sleep, a gulf indeed but a rare, inaccesible one, a forbidden, sealed gulf, into which we would so like to vanish!
If the waves began to reflect, they would suppose that they were advancing, that they had a goal, that they were making progress, that they were working for the Sea's good, and they would not fail to elaborate a philosophy as stupid as their zeal.
In hell, the least populous but severest circle of all must be the one where you cannot forget Time for a single moment.
At the Jardin des Plantes, I stood for a long time meeting the immemorial gaze of an alligator's eyes.What enchants me in these reptiles is their impenetrable hebetude, which allies them to stones: as if they came before life, preceded without heralding it, as if they even fled from it …
To die at sixty or at eighty is harder than at ten or thirty. Habituation to life, there's the rub. For life is a vice – the greatest one of all. Which explains why we have so much difficulty ridding ourselves of it.
He who has not suffered is not a being: at most, a creature.
[…] boredom evokes an evil without site or support, only that indefinable nothing that erodes you … A pure erosion, whose imperceptible effect slowly transforms you into a ruin unnoticed by others and almost unnoticed by yourself.
We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. they alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
There is no other world. Nor even this one. […]
Time corrodes not only everything that lives, but even itself, as if, weary of continuing and exasperated by the Possible, its best part, it aspired to extirpate that as well.
To publish groans, exclamantions, fragments … makes everyone comfortable. The author thereby puts himself in a position of inferiority in relation to the reader, and the reader is grateful to him for it.
Looking at someone's photographs taken at different ages, you glimpse why Time has been called a magician. The operations it accomplishes are incredible, stupefying – miracles, but miracles in reverse. This magician is actually a demolisher, a sadistic angel with the human face in his keeping.
What you write gives only an incomplete image of what you are, because the words loom up and come to life only when you are at the highest or the lowest point of yourself.
from E.M Cioran's, Drawn and Quartered
In a traditional system, culture exists only in the act of its transmission, that is, in the living act of its tradition. There is no discontinuity between past and present, between old and new, because every object transmits at every moment, without residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it. To be more precise, in a system of this type it is not possible to speak of a culture independently of its transmission, because there is no accumulated treasure of ideas and precepts that constitute the separate object of transmssion and whose reality is in itself a value. In a mythical-traditional system, an absolute identity exists between the act of transmission and the thing transmitted, in the sense that there is no other ethical, religious, or aesthetic value outside the act itself of transmission.
An inadequation, a gap between the act of transmission and the thing to be transmitted, and a valuing of the latter independently of the former only when tradition loses its vital force, and constitute the foundation of a characteristic phenomenon of non-traditional societies: the accumulation of culture. For, contrary to what one might think at first sight, the breaking of tradition does not al all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence that it never had before. Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility, and so long as no new way has been found to entire into relation with it, it can only be the object of accumulation from now on.
[…] it is the transmissibility of culture that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future wihout being hindered by the burden of the past.
from Agamben's Man Without Content
[A]n oft-quoted passage from The Recognitions, spoken by the novel’s protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon:
This passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour . . . what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology?
[…] Gaddis, who justified his decision to enter the public sphere later in life by saying that ‘the time of being the reclusive unapproachable writer is not only over but to press it on could very well appear as a coy plea for attention’.
From a review of Gaddis's letters by Emmet Stinson
… any revolution prevails only if it pits itself against an unreal order. The same is true of any advent, any historical turning point. The Goths did not conquer Rome, they conquered a corpse. The Barbarians' only merit was to have had a nose …
Despite everything, it would be sweet to know that twilight success in which we might escape the succession of generations and the parade of tomorrows, and when, on the ruins of historical time, existence, at last identical with itself, will again become what it was before turning into history.
As long as history follows a more or less normal course, every event appears as a whim, a faux pas of Time; once it changes cadence, the slightest incident assumes the scope of a sign.
If we insist that history must have a meaning let us seek it in the curse that weighs upon it, and nowhere else.
After so many defeats and conquests, man is beginning to put himself out of date. He still deserves some interest only insofar as he is tracked and cornered, sinking ever deeper. If he continues, it is because he hasn't the strength to capitulate, to suspend his desertion forward (the very definition of history).
What ruins us, no, what has ruined us, is the thirst for a destiny, for any destiny whatever …
The charm of a life without reflexion, of existence as such being forbidden to us, we cannot bear that others should delight in it. Deserters of innocence, we turn against whoever still resides within it, against all the beings that, indifferent to our adventure, loll in their blessed torpor. And the gods – have we not turned against them as well, outraged to see that they were conscious without suffering from the fact, while for us consciousness and shipwreck are one and the same thing.
No more schools; on the other hand, courses in oblivion and unlearning to celebrate the virtues of inattention and the delights of amnesisa.
What cannot be translated into mystical language does not deserve to be experienced.
It is my elocutionary defects, my stammerings, my jerky delivery, my art of mumbling – it is my voice, my transeuropean r's, that have impelled me by reaction to take some care with what I write and to make myself more or less worthy of an idiom I mistreat each time I open my mouth.
One does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something.
Existing is plagiarism.
True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
To exist is a colossal phenomenon – which has no meaning. This is how I should define the stupefaction in which I live day after day.
We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.
At the Zoo. – All these creatures have a decent bearing, except the monkeys. One feels that man is not far off.
Musical Offering, Art of the Fugue, Goldberg Variations: I love in music, as in philosophy and everything, what pains by insistence, by recurrence, by that interminable return which reaches the ultimate depths of being and provokes there a barely endurable delectation.
To send someone a book is to commit a burglary – a case of breaking and entering. It is to trample down his solitude, what he holds most sacred, for it is to oblige him to desist from himself in order to think about your thoughts.
To be is to be cornered.
E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered
Since I crossed the Rhine, I seem to be dead inside, not a single feeling comes the surface. I'm an auomaton; my soul has been removed…. There are no mountains here with an open view. Hill after hill and broad valleys, everywhere a hollow mediocrity; I can't get used to this landscape, and the city is abominable…. Incessant headaches and fever, barely a few hours of inadequate rest. I don't go to bed before two A.M. and then constant sudden awakenings, a sea of thoughts that consume my senses… My mental faculties are completely worn out. Work is impossible…. I'm afraid of my own voice – and of my mirror…. I'm alone, as in a grave; when will your hand awaken me?
Buechner, letter, anticipating the prose style of Lenz.
The last, laconic sentence of the novella merely informs us: 'So lebte er hin' ('And so he lived on'). Not happily ever after, as in a fairy-tale, but numbed out, resigned to fate, condemned (like Beckett's characters) simple to endure that 'living on' (or Fortleben) which, according to Walter Benjamin, characterizes the afterlife of originals in translation.
Goethe observes in a letter: 'Lenz is among us like a sick child, and we rock and dandle him and give him whatever toy he wants to play with'. Realizing that his role at Weimar, as he puts it in his play Tantalus, is 'to serve as a farce for the gods', he retires to the rural hamlet of Berka for the summer …
Buechner's reading of Lenz's innovative Sturm and Drang prose dramas is evident in many of the formal features of his play […] in the utterly un-Aristotelian distribution of the dramatic action into a series of fragmentary episodes or tableaux whose rapid-fire scene and mood changes acquire an almost stroboscopic or hallucinatory intensity.
No wonder Gutzkow wrote him upon hearing that he had written his masterpiece, Danton's Death, 'in five weeks at most'; 'You seem to be in a great hurry. Where do you want to get to? Is the ground really burning under your feet?' Or as Camille Desmoulins remarks in Danton's Death: 'We have no time to waste'. To which the world-weary Danton retorts, quoting Shakespeare's Richard II: 'But it is time that wastes us'. This state of urgency (or emergency) is the hallmark of Buechner's finest writing. Danton's Death is the fastest moving historical drama in the entire modern repertory and the precipitous paratactic pace of Lenz is unmatched by anything in nineteenth century prose until Rimbaud's Illuminations.
Richard's Sieburth's afterword to his translation of Buechner's Lenz
He raced this way and that. A song of hell triumphant was in his breast.
[…] [H]e was now standing at the abyss, driven by an insane desire to peer into it over and over, and to repeat this torture.
At times he walked slowly and complained his limbs had grown very weak, then he would pick up astonishing speed, the landscape was making him anxious, it was so narrow he was afraid he would bump into everything.
… the world he has wanted to benefit from had a gaping rip in it, he had no hate, no love, no hope, a horrible emptiness, and yet a tormented desire to fill it. He had nothing. Whatever he did, he did in full self-awareness, and yet some inner instinct drove him onward. When he was alone he felt so terribly lonely he constantly spoke to himself aloud, called out, grew afraid again, it seemed to him as if the voice of a stranger had spoken to him. […]
… The incidents during the night reached a horrific pitch. Only with the greatest effort did he fall asleep, having tried at length to fill the horrible void. Then he fell into a dreadful state between sleeping and waking; he bumped into something ghastly, hideous, madness took hold of him, he say up, screaming violently, bathed in sweat, and only gradually found himself again. He had to begin with the simplest things in order to come back to himself. in fact he was not the one doing this but rather a powerful instinct for self-preservation, it was as if he were double, the one half attempting to save the other, calling out to itself; he told stories, he recited poems out loud, wracked with anxiety, until he came to his senses. […]
…. [I]t was the abyss of irreparable madness, an eternity of madness. […]
The half-hearted attempts at suicide that he kept on making were not entirely serious, it was less the desire to die, death for him held no promise of peace or hope, than the attempt, at moments of excruciating anxiety or dull apathy bordering on non-existence, to snap back into himself through physical pain. […]
Can't you hear it, can't you hear that hideous voice screaming across the entire horizon, it's what's usually called silence and ever since I've been in this quiet valley I can't get it out of my ears, it keeps me up at night, oh dear Reverend, if I could only manage to sleep again. […]
He seemed quite rational, conversed with people; he acted like everybody else, but a terrible emptiness lay within him, he felt no more anxiety, no desire; he saw his existence as a necessary burden. – And so he lived on.
from Georg Buechner, Lenz
[With reference to Jabès's The Book of Questions] A host of imaginary rabbis. They have names ('names of listening'), but are not individualized, They are not characters. Not even the shadowy kind of character that Yukel is ('you are a shape moving in the fog…. You are the toneless utterance among anecdotal lies'). Most of them do not speak more than once, though a few are allowed to dispute for several pages. Even then they do not really become persons. What they say is not necessarily consistent. They do not represent a position. They are not authorities. Gabriel Bounoure calls them 'candidates for presence, but hesitant to quit their status of shadows'.
Voices, rather. A chorus. Of commentary and interpretation. Of exchange. a chorus that points to the phenomenon of voice as such or, rather, to the phenomenon of changing voice, changing pespective. In a rhythm of voice – absence of voice – voice. This is why, in his later books, the rabbis, privileged interpreters though they are, disappear. They become absorbed into the white space between paragraphs, between aphorisms.
Waldrop, Lavish Absence
Even when his time is his own, later, Edmond Jabès works in snatches, in fragments. No matter where, in cafés, in the métro, while walking, at dinner, on little bits of paper, on matchbooks, napkins, in his mind.
Waldrop, Lavish Absence
Three rhythms layer [Jabès's The Book of Questions]. On the micro-level, there is the rhythm of the individual line or sentence. A rhythm that, in te verse, comes out of the tension between sentence and line, and in the prose, out of the tension between speech and the more formal syntax of writing[….]
On the structural level, there is the rhythm of prose and verse and, more importantly, of question and answer, question and further question, question and commentary, commentary on commentary and, later, aphorism after aphorism.
Rhythm of midrash, of the rabbinical tradition. Not a dialectic aiming for synthesis, but an open-ended spiralling. A large rhythm, come out of the desert, a rhythm of sand shifting as if with time itself.
Then, there is a third rhythm. It is on the level of the book: a rhythm of text and blank space, of presence and absence.
Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence
'How can I know if I write in verse or prose', Reb Elati remarked. 'I am rhythm'.
Jabès, The Book of Questions
The meandering word dies by the pen, the writer by the same weapon turned back against him.
'What murder are you accused of?' Reb Achor asked Zillieh, the writer.
'The murder of God', he replied. 'I will, however, add in my defence that I die along with Him'.
Jabès, The Book of Yukel
A young disciple asks his master, 'If you never give me an answer, how shall I know that you are the master and I the disciple?' And the master responds, 'By the order of the questions'.
Jabès, interviewed by Jason Weiss
Even in 'normative' Judaism, the opening of interpretation is extraordinary…. The rabbinical word remains ever open, unfulfilled, in process. Yet there is great risk here; this inner dynamic accounts for both the creativity of Judaism and its own inversions and undoing. Where is the line between interpretation and subversion? I have elsewhere called this a 'heretic hermeneutic', which is a complex of identification with the text and its displacement. Jabès's book is precisely this identification with the Sacred Book and its displacement. The Book is now opened to include even its own inversions.
Susan Handelman, The Sin of the Book
Mallarmé wanted to put all knowledge into a book…. But in my opinion this book would be very ephemeral, since knowledge in itself is ephemeral. The book that would have a chance to survive, I think, is the book that destroys itself, that destroys itself in favour of another book that will prolong it.
Edmond Jabès, interviewed by Paul Auster
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