The relationship of God to man is no more than that of a town drunk to one of his microbes.

— Jerome Loving, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

To feed eight children on philosophy!

— Mr. Ramsay

“Oh, but,” said Lily, “think of his work!”

Whenever she “thought of his work” she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew’s doing. She asked him what his father’s books were about. “Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. “Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.”

So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in the air. Naturally, if one’s days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

— James Lowell Russell

Seek the inner depth of things, and when they lead you to the edge of a great discovery, discern whether it arises from a necessity of your being. Either this discovery will strike you as superficial and you will shed it, or it will reveal itself as intrinsic to you and grow into a strong and honest tool of your art.

— Rilke, Viareggio, April 5, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

‘Make your peace with God, for earth is at bottom a silly place.’

‘That is good advice; I will follow it.’

— The Abbot’s Second Tale

“But let’s not fool ourselves, my friend, about diving off a cliff. Believe me, I know about these things! First of all, there’s the unspeakable terror involved. You may say it’s more frightening to go charging against a dragon, but my friend, my dear friend, I doubt it. Think how it feels on the cliff-edge, standing looking down. True, we’ve all had the urge to fall. But how grim, how ghastly the actuality! How excruciatingly dreadful! And then there’s the fall itself — first the unexpectedly painful banging of the heart. Many people, you know, die of heart attack long before they hit. And then the gasping for air. It’s difficult to breathe, believe you me, hurtling down thousands of feet toward the rocks. And then the landing! Aie! How would you choose to hit? On your head — ? Over in an instant, true, but can you actually conceive of — But landing on your feet would be no better, of course. Smash! In a split second your feet and legs are as nothing, fragile as glass, two blood explosions!, and the rocks are rushing toward your pelvis. Your back breaks — wang! — in a thousand places, your organs crash downward and upward and inward . . . Dear me! Bless me! Perhaps we should speak of drowning.”  The abbot stood stock-still, and the prince, too, stopped pacing.

“Drowning!” the abbot whispered. “The mind boggles! Are we seriously to believe that it’s brief, painless? Behold the drowned fisherman’s bugged-out eyes, his tightly clenched fists — though he floats, you may argue, like a babe in the womb! Time is subjective, as we’ve all observed. An instant can stretch out to a thousand years. And surely that’s one vast interminable instant when the lungs wail for air and the water starts ringing and thundering in the drowning man’s ears! Let us speak of poison.”

When the prince interrupted, his voice was weak. “I realize it’s difficult to kill yourself. You have to, you know, sort of trick yourself into it, one way or another, lie to yourself, become your own worst enemy, sneaking and shyly conniving against yourself, and even then it takes courage, a touch of craziness. Nevertheless, to walk up to a dragon, cool as you please — ”

“Yes, good,” said the abbot, “good, clear thinking. But let’s consider that. We’re assuming that to attack a dragon like Koog the Devil’s Son is suicide. That may be our first mistake. It may very well be that you’ll kill this Koog — that dwarf over there may know a trick or two, and our friend Armida may well have resources you haven’t yet guessed. She told us herself that she’s cunning and unnaturally strong. We must remember that. We must both of us always remember that, ha ha! So the dragon may prove a mere trifle after all. What do we really know, we poor finite mortals? You may find yourself slicing off the dragon’s head — and dragging it back here for all of us to see — with such ludicrous ease that your forced to guffaw — you and all your friends — at more ordinary mortals’ trepidations. That’s the thing, you see: the man who does battle with a dragon is, by definition, an exceptional man, necessarily a species of saint — indifferent about himself, a man concerned only about his brethren. Otherwise he wouldn’t be there, you see. Precisely! He’s a man ‘born again’ in a certain sense: a man who has learned that classic secret, that to save his life he has to throw it away. Now there’s a new twist on suicide, my prince! You don’t really throw your life away at all; instead you kill, as St. Paul says, the ‘old’ man — the carnal man, the self-regarding man — to give abundant life to the ‘new.’

“Put it this way: why not try it? If you fight Koog the Devil’s Son and win, against your wish — if you still even then, after that thrill, that glory, wish to end it all — come back to the monastery and I’ll suggest some adversary more fierce yet, perhaps even —   Monsters, sad to say, are never hard to come by. On the other hand, you owe it to yourself to take a crack at old Koog. That indifference to life that’s gotten into you can be a powerful weapon for God’s side. God loves the man who’s indifferent about himself, the charitable man. That’s the kind of fellow God looks after. Let me tell you a story.”

— John Gardner, In the Suicide Mountains

Just as bees gather honey, so we collect from all that happens what is sweetest — and we build Him. Even with the littlest, most insignificant thing, when it comes from love, we begin. We begin with effort and the repose that follows effort, with silence or a solitary joy, with everything we do alone without anyone to join or help us, we begin Him whom we will not live to see, any more than our ancestors could experience us. Yet they are in us, those long departed ones, they are in our inclinations, our moral blunders, our pulsing blood, and in gestures that arise from the depths of time.

— Rilke, Rome, December 23, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

When I get lonely, ahh, that’s only a sign
Some room is empty, and that room is there by design
If I feel hollow — that’s just my proof that there’s more
For me to follow — that’s what the lonely is for

— David Wilcox, “That’s What the Lonely is For”

“It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,” she said, looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved, flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red-hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever.

They came here regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief. First, the pulse of color flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water; and then, while one waited for that, one watched, on the pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly, a film of mother of pearl.

They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness — because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

We, when we feel, evaporate.
We breathe ourselves out and gone.
Like the glow of an ember,
the fragrance we give off grows weaker.
One could well say to us,
“You have entered my blood,
this room, this springtime is full of you. . . .”
What use is that when he cannot hold us
and we disappear into him and around him?

— Rilke, From the Second Duino Elegy

1. ULYSSES by James Joyce
2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
7. CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
8. DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
9. SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
10. THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
11. UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
12. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
13. 1984 by George Orwell
14. I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
15. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
16. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
17. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
18. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
19. INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
20. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
21. HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
22. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara
23. U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
24. WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
25. A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
26. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
27. THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
28. TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
30. THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
31. ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
32. THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
33. SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
34. A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
35. AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
36. ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
37. THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
38. HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
39. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
40. THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
41. LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
42. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
43. A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
44. POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
45. THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
46. THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
47. NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
48. THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
49. WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
50. TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
51. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
52. PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
53. PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
54. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
55. ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
56. THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
57. PARADE’S END by Ford Madox Ford
58. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
59. ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
60. THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
61. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
62. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
63. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
64. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
65. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
66. OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
67. HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
68. MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
69. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
70. THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
71. A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
72. A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
73. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
74. A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
75. SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
76. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
77. FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
78. KIM by Rudyard Kipling
79. A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
80. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
81. THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
82. ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
83. A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
84. THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
85. LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
86. RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
87. THE OLD WIVES’ TALE by Arnold Bennett
88. THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
89. LOVING by Henry Green
90. MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
91. TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
92. IRONWEED by William Kennedy
93. THE MAGUS by John Fowles
94. WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
95. UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
96. SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron
97. THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
98. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
99. THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

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In the spring of 1998 the Modern Library polled its editorial board to find the best 100 novels of the 20th century. The board consisted of Daniel J. Boorstin, A. S. Byatt, Christopher Cerf, Shelby Foote, Vartan Gregorian, Edmund Morris, John Richardson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Styron and Gore Vidal.

Criticism of the list includes that it did not include enough novels by women, and not enough novels from outside North America and Europe. In addition, some contend it was a “sales gimmick”, since most of the titles in the list are also sold by Modern Library. (Wikipedia)

“Please your Majesty,” said the Knave. “I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove that I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”

“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.”

— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12

Borges describes the apocryphal Menard’s attempt to write Don Quixote again: not to copy it, not to effect a pastiche. “His admirable ambition,” Borges writes, “was to produce a few pages that would coincide — word by word and line by line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”

Borges suggests . . . [that] it is the reader who determines the nature of a text through, among other things, attribution. The same text read as penned by one writer changes when read as penned by another. Don Quixote written by Cervantes (cultured seventeenth-century scholar) is not the same Don Quixote written by Menard (contemporary of William James). . . . No book is entirely innocent of connotations, and every reader reads not only the words on the page but the endless contextual waves that accompany his or her very existence. From such a point of view there are no “fakes,” merely different books which happen to share an identical text.

Borges’s own writings are full of such redemptive fakes. Among them, there are:

• Writers such as . . . Mir Bahadur Ali and Pierre Menard, and others, such as the English eccentric Herbert Quain, author of infinite fictional variations of one ur-novel.
• Adulterated versions of scholarly sources, as in the “translations” collected in various volumes under Borges’s name. . . . In these short texts, both sources and quotations used by Borges were transformed by him through interpretation and in translation. . . .
• Imaginary books carefully annotated, as in various sources given in his stories and essays, or quoted from, such as the unforgettable Chinese encyclopedia which imperturbably divides animals into “(a) those that belong to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) those that are domesticated, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous beasts, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a vase, (n) those that from a distance look like flies.” And, of course, such mythical fake creations as the parallel universe of Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and the Library of Babel.

And yet, all these fictions are never gratuitous: they are necessary inventions, filling in gaps that the history of literature neglected to fill. The Chinese encyclopedia quotation provided Michel Foucault with the starting point for Les Mots et les choses. “The Library of Babel” (and Borges himself, under the name Juan de Burgos) needed to exist before Umberto Eco was able to write The Name of the Rose. Herbert Quain is the required precedent for OULIPO. Menard is the obvious link between Lawrence Sterne and James Joyce, and it is not Borges’s fault that France forgot to give birth to him. We should be thankful to Borges for remedying such acts of carelessness.

Fake, then, in Borges’s universe, is not a sin against creation. It is implied in the act of creation itself and, whether openly recognized or adroitly concealed, it takes place every time a suspension of disbelief is demanded. “In the beginning was the Word” asks us to believe not only that “the Word was with God” but that “the Word was God,” that Don Quixote is not only the words read by Menard, but that he is also their author.

Life, which so many times provides us with fake representations, provided Borges himself with a perfect simulacrum of a Borgesian fictional device in which the reader imbues a certain text with the required perfection of an all-encompassing answer.

In April 1976, the second world convention of Shakespearean scholars met in Washington, D.C. The high point of the congress was to be a lecture on Shakespeare by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Riddle of Shakespeare,” and thousands of scholars fought like rock-band groupies for the privilege of occupying one of the seats in the largest hall available at the Hilton Hotel. Among the attendants was the theater director Jan Kott, who, like the others, struggled to get a seat from which to hear the master reveal the answer to the riddle. Two men helped Borges to the podium and positioned him in front of the microphone. Kott describes the scene in The Essence of Theatre:

Everyone in the hall stood up, the ovation lasted many minutes. Borges did not move. Finally the clapping stopped. Borges started moving his lips. Only a vague humming noise was heard from the speakers. From this monotonous humming one could distinguish only with the greatest pains a single word which kept returning like a repeated cry from a faraway ship, drowned out by the sea: “Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare . . .” The microphone was placed too high. But no one in the room had the courage to walk up and lower the microphone in front of the old blind writer. Borges spoke for an hour, and for an hour only this one repeated word — Shakespeare — would reach the listeners. During this hour no one got up or left the room. After Borges finished, everyone got up and it seemed that this final ovation would never end.

No doubt Kott, like the other listeners, lent the inaudible text his own reading and heard in the repeated word — “Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare” — the answer to the riddle. Perhaps there was nothing else to say. With a little help from ailing technology, the master faker had achieved his purpose. He had turned his own text into a resonant fake composed by an audience full of Pierre Menards.

— Alberto Manguel, from “Faking It” in A Reader on Reading

Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.

As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?

— Rilke, From the First Duino Elegy

When the god in his urgency assumed its form,
he was startled by the beauty of the swan,
so swiftly did he disappear within it.
But his deception drove him to act

before he could feel
what his unknown body was like.
The woman recognized who was upon her
and already knew what he demanded,

and what she, confused in her resistance,
could no longer withhold. His weight bearing down,
his long neck thrusting her hand aside,

the god released himself into his beloved.
Only then did he delight in his feathers
and, in that moment, become truly a swan.

— Rilke, New Poems

Oh, the joys of travel! To feel the excitement of sudden departure, not always knowing whither. Surely you and I are in agreement about that. How often did my life seem concentrated in that single moment of departure. To travel far, far — and that first morning’s awakening under a new sky! And to find oneself in it — no, to discover more of oneself there. To experience there, too, where one has never been before, one’s own continuity of being and, at the same time, to feel that something in your heart, somehow indigenous to this new land, is coming to life from the moment of your arrival. You feel your blood infused with some new intelligence, wondrously nourished by things you had no way of knowing.

— Rilke, Letter to a friend
February 3, 1923

Ever again, though we’ve learned the landscape of love
and the lament in the chuchyard’s names
and the terrible, silent abyss where the others have fallen;
ever again we walk out, two together,
under the ancient trees, ever again find a place
among wildflowers, under heaven’s gaze.

–Rilke, Uncollected Poems