The Floating Library

For a few hours now the police would have their hands full looking after something as trivial as the lives of the city’s inhabitants and their reputations were temporarily in no danger. But if some, their fears allayed, remained in Jupien’s establishment, others were tempted not so much by the thought of recovering their moral [...]

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The hope of [the strong Nietzschean poet] is that what the past tried to do to her she will succeed in doing to the past: to make the past itself, including those very causal processes which blindly impressed all her own behaving, bear her impress. Success in that enterprise — the enterprise of saying ‘Thus [...]

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At this early hour of a June morning the library was empty. Mrs. Giles had to visit the kitchen. Mr. Oliver still tramped the terrace. And Mrs. Swithin was of course at church. The light but variable breeze, foretold by the weather expert, flapped the yellow curtain, tossing light, then shadow. The fire greyed, then [...]

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[In his rejection of objective, absolute Truth, Nietzsche] did not give up the idea that an individual might track home the blind impress all his behavings bore. He only rejected the idea that this tracking was a process of discovery. In his view, in achieving this sort of self-knowledge we are not coming to know [...]

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For the fact is that there is no humiliation so great that one should not accept it with unconcern, knowing that at the end of a few years our misdeeds will be no more than an invisible dust buried beneath the smiling and blooming peace of nature. – Proust, Time Regained

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For melancholy, take a ram’s head that never meddled with a ewe . . . boil it well, skin and wool together . . . take out the brains, and put these spices to it, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves. . . . It may be eaten with bread in an egg or broth. – Robert [...]

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But above all — and one saw this the moment one set eyes on him — the significance of his physiognomy had been altered by a formidable monocle. By introducing an element of machinery into Bloch’s face this monocle absolved it of all those difficult duties which a human face is normally called upon to [...]

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[C]onsidering the length of time that had elapsed she had not changed very much, that is to say her face was not too utterly demolished for the face of a human creature subject, as we all are, to deformation at every moment of her trajectory into the abyss towards which she had been launched, that [...]

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