Pessoa

Mr. Pessoa, in today's excerpt, strikes a more cheery, triumphalist note, a sort of youthful note.

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"This dawn is the first dawn of the world. ... There was never this hour, nor this light, nor this person that's me."

-- Fernando Pessoa, "The Book of Disquiet"

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Modern Art

"The best writing of our contemporaries is not an art of creation, but an act of evocation, peculiarly saturated with memories."

-- Harry Levin (1912-1994)

A characteristic, striking statement of twentieth-century art and modernism, from literature to music. There is this sense, I think, that it has all been done, and we are left to do a sort of commentary, or maybe a restless mashing of different elements. He seems to have been writing particularly on James Joyce's "Ulysses", which he called "a novel to end all novels". For Thomas Mann, struggling with these limitations, he felt that all novels can only be parodistic or ironic, never truly creational.

Well, maybe it's like love. There is nothing original about falling in love, but it is nevertheless special when you do it. Every child, moreover, still has to outgrow Santa Claus and happiness and the idea of a meaningful world, and for that person it is like the first time in the world. In exploring life and our feelings, maybe we can still leave our own fingerprints with our own efforts, along with the particular accents and spirit of our generation. Of course, you also can always go into science, or business, or drinking.

[Source: Ronald Hayman, "Thomas Mann: A Biography"]