There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so intimately with the object that it thereby becomes theory. – Goethe On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. – Virginia Woolf, The Waves I have lost some friends by death … others through the sheer inability to cross [...]
Archive for October, 2008
Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks :: Saddy Halloween
Posted in Quotes, tagged Quotes on October 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Book Review :: Fiction and the Weave of Life :: John Gibson
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson, Literature, Philosophy, Philosophy of Literature on October 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 9780199299522. Reviewed by Frank B. Farrell, Purchase College, State University of New York Analytic philosophy of literature and deconstructionist thought make strange bedfellows, but they join in making matters difficult for the literary humanist. The analytic philosopher, using investigations regarding truth, reference, [...]
Glimmer of a myriad lost sensations
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Andre Gide, Gide, Literature, Quote, The Immoralist on October 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
It was a fine day, I felt well rested, not at all weak. I was happy, or rather in high spirits. The air was calm and warm, but I took my shawl anyway, so that I might ask someone to carry it and thereby strike up a new acquaintance. I have mentioned that the park [...]
Alas, I had started to love life
Posted in Quotes, tagged Andre Gide, Gide, Literature, Quote, The Immoralist on October 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I came back, bent over, found the clot, picked it up with a piece of straw and placed it in my handkerchief. I looked at it. It was a nasty dark colour, almost black, sticky and horrible . . . I thought of Bachir’s beautiful, glistening blood . . . And suddenly I felt a [...]
Body Over Mind
Posted in Quotes, tagged Andre Gide, Gide, Literature, Quote, The Immoralist on October 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I am going to talk at some length about my body. I am going to talk about it so much that you will think at first that I am neglecting the mind entirely. The omission is quite intentional; it is how it was. I don’t have the strength the lead a dual life, I said [...]
98. Noam Chomsky :: from Stuff White People Like, the book
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Christian Lander, Irony, Noam Chomsky, Sarcasm, Stuff White People Like on October 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
If it were possible to dole out white sainthood, Noam Chomsky would certainly be one of the first people to receive the honor, along with Michael Stipe and Conan O’Brien. Though Chomsky has long been a hero to white people for his work in linguistics, he entered into the rarefied air of white history with [...]
I had to fight against everything: my salvation depended on myself
Posted in Quotes, tagged Andre Gide, Gide, Literature, Quote, The Immoralist on October 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I didn’t believe I had tuberculosis. I preferred to attribute my first haemorrhage to a different cause. To tell the truth, I didn’t attribute it to anything at all, I avoided having to think about it, did not, in fact, think about it much, and considered myself, if not cured, then at least well on [...]
Knowing how to free oneself is nothing; the difficult thing is knowing how to live with that freedom
Posted in Quotes, tagged Andre Gide, Gide, Literature, Quotes, The Immoralist on October 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
My dear friends, I knew I could rely on your loyalty. You came running to my call as I would have done to yours. Yet we have not seen each other for three years. I hope that our friendship, which has survived this absence so well, will also survive the tale I am about to [...]
I see the sun, I see the shade
Posted in Quotes, tagged Andre Gide, Gide, Literature, The Immoralist on October 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
There the hourless days slipped by. How many times during my solitude have I recalled those slow days! . . . Marceline next to me, reading, writing; me doing nothing, watching her. Oh, Marceline! . . . I watch: I see the sun, I see the shade, I see the edge of the shadow move. [...]
Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the memory of happiness
Posted in Quotes, tagged Andre Gide, Literature, Quotes, The Immoralist on October 22, 2008 | 1 Comment »
You understand, don’t you, or do I need to say it again, that I was a novice in matters of love? Perhaps it was the novelty that gave our wedding night such grace . . . For, in my memory, it is as if that first night were the only one, so much does the [...]
Flurried Humans Relieve Olympian Boredom
Posted in Quotes, tagged Golden Bowl, Henry James, Literature, Princess Casamassima, Quotes on October 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
It seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about us; we should partake of the superior nature of the all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so long as flurried humans are not, for the positive relief of bored Olympians, mixed up with them. – Henry [...]
Epiphanies :: James Joyce
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Epiphanies, James Joyce, Joyce on October 21, 2008 | 1 Comment »
(( I )) [Dublin: at Sheehy's, Belvedere Place] Joyce – I knew you meant him. But you’re wrong about his age. Maggie Sheehy -(leans forward to speak seriously) Why, how old is he? Joyce – Seventy-two. Maggie Sheehy – Is he? * (( II )) [Dublin: at Sheehy's, Belvedere Place] Fallon -(as he passes)- I [...]
Words and Expressions Commonly Misused :: Strunk and White
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Grammar, Strunk and White, The Elements of Style on October 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Many of the words and expressions listed here are not so much bad English as bad style, the commonplaces of careless writing. . . . [T]he proper correction is likely to be not the replacement of one word or set of words by another but the replacement of vague generality by definite statement. The shape [...]
Empty pain in anticipation :: Epicurus
Posted in Quotes, tagged Epicurus, Hedonism, Quotes on October 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because [...]
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