Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is offered only once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way
with exactly the same kisses.
One day, perhaps, some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
- Wisława Szymborska, "Nothing Twice"
Mar 29, 2017
Mar 23, 2017
It is difficult to guard against madness
"I cannot be sure that this child will not turn my head if I go on hearing him often; he makes me realize that it is difficult to guard against madness on seeing prodigies. I am no longer surprised that Saint Paul should have lost his head after his strange vision."
- Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm on the six-year old Mozart, quoted in The Lives of the Great Composers, pg. 95.
- Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm on the six-year old Mozart, quoted in The Lives of the Great Composers, pg. 95.
Mar 21, 2017
A Ball of Shit
The family priest taught the young Rameau how to speak and read, so that the strange child could learn the Bible. Through this knowledge of language he was soon able to understand the holy man's philosophy, which, in brief, was that the world was a ball of shit adrift in a sea of sin and the sooner one passed to heaven the better. As the Gelreesh confessed, he took these lessons to heart, and so later in life when he helped free his patients' souls from excremental bondage, he felt he was actually doing them a great favor. It was from that bald and jowly man of God that the creature became acquainted with the power of pity.
- from "The Beautiful Gelreesh" by Jeffrey Ford (2003)
- from "The Beautiful Gelreesh" by Jeffrey Ford (2003)
Mar 11, 2017
Correct answers
"There was a restaurant critic who, when asked his opinion of certain Italian wines, answered that he drank only French wines. We may as well have restaurant writers who are vegetarians, or who eat only kosher food, or who cannot be bothered with fish because of the bones.
And when our critics are not averting their noses from what they did not learn to like at their mothers' knees or on the grand tour, they reserve judgment on what they eat until they have looked it up to see if it was made according to Hoyle. ... Some of these critics have never lost touch with their earliest educations, when the correct answers were in the back of the book."
- Seymour Britchky on restaurant criticism. His comments seem equally applicable to literary criticism.
And when our critics are not averting their noses from what they did not learn to like at their mothers' knees or on the grand tour, they reserve judgment on what they eat until they have looked it up to see if it was made according to Hoyle. ... Some of these critics have never lost touch with their earliest educations, when the correct answers were in the back of the book."
- Seymour Britchky on restaurant criticism. His comments seem equally applicable to literary criticism.
Mar 5, 2017
The World of the Story
These stories [detective stories] develop a growing sense of discrepancy, of something wrong which may lead to something worse. In most pure detective stories, the very worst is averted through the efforts of the principal character, and evil is quelled and punished. But in stories of suspense the worst often occurs, and its fearful truth lights up the world of the story like nocturnal lightning.
...
[The crime genre] is a free form of popular art, and like any other popular art it exists to be enjoyed. Its value lies first in its style and strength as a story, then in its revelation of the shapes and meanings of life in all their subtlety and surprise.
...
A strong popular convention like that of the suspense story is both an artistic and a social heritage. It keeps the forms of the art alive for the writer to use. It trains his readers, endowing both writer and reader with a common vocabulary of structural shapes and narrative possibilities. It becomes a part of the language in which we think and feel, reaching our whole society and helping to hold our civilization together.
- a few thoughts on the crime genre from Ross Macdonald, from his introduction to Great Stories of Suspense, 1974.
...
[The crime genre] is a free form of popular art, and like any other popular art it exists to be enjoyed. Its value lies first in its style and strength as a story, then in its revelation of the shapes and meanings of life in all their subtlety and surprise.
...
A strong popular convention like that of the suspense story is both an artistic and a social heritage. It keeps the forms of the art alive for the writer to use. It trains his readers, endowing both writer and reader with a common vocabulary of structural shapes and narrative possibilities. It becomes a part of the language in which we think and feel, reaching our whole society and helping to hold our civilization together.
- a few thoughts on the crime genre from Ross Macdonald, from his introduction to Great Stories of Suspense, 1974.
Mar 4, 2017
Maps of reality
As the American gangster and multiple murderer Charlie Birger stood on the scaffold in 1927, he looked wistfully at the sky and said: "It is a beautiful world, isn't it?" But he had noticed it too late. ...
Once a man has deliberately closed his mind to all kinds of data - like the blueness of the sky - he has left himself connected to external reality by a dangerously thin thread - the thread of his immediate purposes. And, odd as it sounds, he is now living in a kind of cave inside his own head. That cave contains an enormous number of filing cabinets, full of photographs of the outside world, and the walls are covered with 'maps of reality' - ideas of how to deal with the problems of living. Religious people have religious maps; politicians have political maps; psychologists have psychological maps. Ordinary people have maps derived from their parents, from people they admire, and from their own experience - the latter usually being the least important. And when confronted by a new situation, each of them skims quickly through a drawerful of old photographs, glances hastily at his maps, and then responds 'appropriately.'
- from A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson, 1984, pg 99.
Once a man has deliberately closed his mind to all kinds of data - like the blueness of the sky - he has left himself connected to external reality by a dangerously thin thread - the thread of his immediate purposes. And, odd as it sounds, he is now living in a kind of cave inside his own head. That cave contains an enormous number of filing cabinets, full of photographs of the outside world, and the walls are covered with 'maps of reality' - ideas of how to deal with the problems of living. Religious people have religious maps; politicians have political maps; psychologists have psychological maps. Ordinary people have maps derived from their parents, from people they admire, and from their own experience - the latter usually being the least important. And when confronted by a new situation, each of them skims quickly through a drawerful of old photographs, glances hastily at his maps, and then responds 'appropriately.'
- from A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson, 1984, pg 99.
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