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From Pascal’s Pensees (60 in the Lafuma numbering) with the Penguin translation. Plaisante is too rich to ever translate satisfactorily, but I think the rendering here could do better at flagging it as ironic reapplication of a specialized term. Even assuming no one would read a note on the salon background, something as simple as … Continue reading A funny sort of justice whose limits are marked…
From Edith Wharton’s A Motor-Flight Through France, speaking of the Amiens cathedral: On the symbolic side especially it would be tempting to linger; so strongly does the contemplation of the great cathedrals fortify the conviction that their chief value, to this later age, is not so much æsthetic as moral. The world will doubtless always … Continue reading Symbols of the same effort toward a…
From Dino Buzzati’s The Bogeyman from the recent collection, The Bewitched Bourgeois (originally in Corriere della Sera as FINE DEL BABAU and later reprinted as Il Babau in Le Notti Difficili) Thus it comes as no surprise that Paudi spoke of the matter [of being visited by the Bogeyman] to several colleagues at the next … Continue reading Dino Buzzati’s Bogeyman
From a 1963 letter of Tokien’s (247 in the volume of letters) on the difficulties of putting the Silmarillion in publishable form. I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of The L.R. [Lord of the Rings] is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background : … Continue reading To go there is to destroy the magic, unless …
My edition of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Picador Travel Classics – a collection oddly more modern-oriented than the name suggests, to me at least) includes a charming preface by Evelyn Waugh that is fortunately short enough to quote in full: Mr Eric Newby must not be confused with the other English writer … Continue reading The English only have half (and wholly) killed themselves in order to…
From Arthur Schnitzler’s Death of a Bachelor (in the collection Night Games): “For God’s sake, read the ending,” commanded the doctor in a new voice. The businessman reached over, took the letter from the writer, who was feeling a kind of paralysis creep into his fingers, quickly dropped his eyes down to the end of … Continue reading Mysteriously, even exaltedly, irrelevant
From Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, a small comedic pause in between attempts to scale Mir Samir. I had schemed to memorize a number of expressions in the Kafir language and surprise Hugh when we met up with the people, but, in the midst of all our other preoccupations, the book … Continue reading I saw a corpse in a field this morning
A masterful portrait of an attorney from Book 1 of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1124-1161), this being the public defender for the man (and colleagues) accursed of murdering his wife. The notes are adapted from v.7 of the Oxford edition. One lawyer shall admit us to beholdThe manner of the making out … Continue reading Wheezes out law-phrase, whiffles Latin forth
From Richard A. Lanham’s Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (pg. 52-53). A needed reminder after over a year off of why I started doing this in the first place. In Walter Shandy, the commentators seem to agree, Sterne has created an antitype of this ideal portrait, an exhibi-tionistic, perfectly impotent theorist. “A full account … Continue reading Not wisdom but pleasure
Found in a small selection of Thomas Merton’s work called Silence, Joy but originally from his The Wisdom of the Desert (Saying 38): Once there was a disciple of a Greek philosopher who was commanded by his Master for three years to give money to everyone who insulted him. When this period of trial was … Continue reading Enter the city, said the wise man, it is all yours