Monk

Plato

2016-10-18T00:43:45Z

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“Those who acquire [the art of writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”

-- Plato, “Phaedrus” (Tr. Walter Hamilton)

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William Blake

2016-10-09T03:29:56Z

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If Art was Progress We should have had Mich. Angelos & Rafaels to Succeed & to Improve upon each other. But it is not so. Genius dies with its Possessor & comes not again till Another is Born with it.

Milton, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Rafael, the finest specimens of Ancient Sculpture & Painting & Architecture, Gothic, Grecian, Hindoo and Egyptian, are the extent of the human mind. The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that Art can go beyond the finest specimens of Art that are now in the world, is not knowing what Art is; it is being blind to the gifts of the spirit.

-- William Blake

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[Source: [Northrop Frye, “Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake”]

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Henry Miller

2016-10-06T20:56:44Z

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INTERVIEWER

Is surrealism what you mean by the phrase “into the night life”?

MILLER

Yes, there it was primarily the dream. The surrealists make use of the dream, and of course that’s always a marvelous fecund aspect of experience. Consciously or unconsciously, all writers employ the dream, even when they’re not surrealists. The waking mind, you see, is the least serviceable in the arts. In the process of writing one is struggling to bring out what is unknown to himself. To put down merely what one is conscious of means nothing, really, gets one nowhere. Anybody can do that with a little practice, anybody can become that kind of writer.

-- Henry Miller at The Paris Review

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Sylvia

2016-10-06T00:24:37Z

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“I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother.”

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“So he accuses me of ‘struggling for dominance’? Sorry, wrong number. Sure, I’m a little scared of being dominated. (Who isn’t? Just the submissive, docile, milky type of individual. And that is not he, Not me.) But that doesn’t mean I, ipso facto, want to dominate.”

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“Also, in spite of the fact that he has tried with a vengeance to enter into my appreciation of art and my writing interests … he recently states that a poem ‘is so much inconsequential dust.’ With that attitude, how can he be so hypocritical as to pretend he likes poetry?”

-- Sylvia Plath, the Journals

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Hitler

2016-10-04T22:00:34Z

“The fellow is a catastrophe, but that’s no reason not to find him interesting as a personality and destiny.”

-- Thomas Mann

“There’s never been so much Hitler.”

-- Norbert Frei (2005)

I myself thought that I got my fill of Hitler with William Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. Sure, Hitler is a fascinating character, in a morbid sort of way, but my life was too short to spend that much time on the maniac. However, we have another big biography that has come out on the grand Fuehrer, and with the similar rise of a somewhat Hitler-like Trump in our presidential politics this year, my interest in the man and his nazism has been reawakened, at least enough to take in Volker Ullrich’s “Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939”.

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“Hitler will always be with us, with those who survived, those who came afterwards and even those yet to be born. He is present - not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are capable of.”

-- Eberhard Jackel (1979)

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The Supreme Court

2016-10-04T01:24:36Z

It is a little interesting to see that the stalwart conservative William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was feeling darkly disillusioned toward the end of his career and life.

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In truth, Rehnquist was a tired old man in the spring of 2004. And he had grown cynical about the work of the Court. Over the years, his opinions had become more terse and cryptic because he had come to think that only the results, not how the justices explained them, really mattered. As Rehnquist told one colleague, who was shocked by the chief’s gloom, “Don’t worry about the analysis and principles in the case. Just make sure that the result is a good one this time around - because those principles you announce will be ignored in the next case.”

-- Jeffrey Toobin, “The Nine”

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Camus

2016-10-01T23:22:37Z

“There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths.”

-- Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

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Bonfire of the Vanities

2016-10-01T02:49:18Z

"As a writer, Tom Wolfe operated on the premise that atmosphere was character, that you knew almost all you needed to know about someone by the way he dressed, how he decorated his apartment."

-- Julie Salamon, "The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco"

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James Ellroy

2016-09-29T23:57:39Z

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INTERVIEWER

You’ve called Dashiell Hammett “tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?

ELLROY

Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me.

-- James Ellroy at The Paris Review (Fall 2009)

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James Branch Cabell

2016-09-29T00:55:34Z

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."

-- James Branch Cabell

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Pessoa

2016-09-29T00:42:58Z

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“Life, for me, is a drowsiness that never reaches the brain. This I keep free, so that I can be sad there.”

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“The more I contemplate the spectacle of the world and the ever-changing state of things, the more profoundly I’m convinced of the inherent fiction of everything, of the false importance exhibited by all realities.

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“I’ve never forgotten that phrase from Haeckel, the biologist, whom I read in the childhood of my intelligence, that period when we’re attracted to popular science and writings that attack religion. The phrase is more or less the following: the distance between the superior man (a Kant or a Goethe, I believe he says) and the common man is much greater than the distance between the common man and the ape.”

-- Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet”

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To be clear, I do not align myself with that last proposition about the superior man and ape, but it is a striking proposition, and perhaps not a bad way to heat up a conversation, or possibly end one.

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Thomas Mann

2016-09-28T16:11:26Z

“The gods gave you subtle thoughts and loosened your tongue to speak them so that they intertwine like bodies in a dance.”

-- Thomas Mann, “Joseph and His Brothers” (Tr. John E. Woods)

Of course, these are words that could be applied to Mann himself, the magician.

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Plato's Riddle

2016-09-27T20:37:38Z

“What is that which eternally is, which has no origin? And what is that which arises and passes away, but in truth never is?”

-- Plato, “Timaeus”

[Source: Arthur Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation” (Tr. E. F. J. Payne)]

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Woodrow Wilson

2016-09-27T01:30:29Z

“Society must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask … is permission - in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word - to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”

-- Woodrow Wilson (1912)

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Mark Twain

2016-09-26T16:16:07Z

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

-- Mark Twain

[Source: The film "The Big Short" (2015)]

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Don DeLillo

2016-09-25T20:57:55Z

"I find I’m more ready to discard pages than I used to be. I used to look for things to keep. I used to find ways to save a paragraph or a sentence, maybe by relocating it. Now I look for ways to discard things. If I discard a sentence I like, it’s almost as satisfying as keeping a sentence I like. I don’t think I’ve become ruthless or perverse—just a bit more willing to believe that nature will restore itself. The instinct to discard is finally a kind of faith. It tells me there’s a better way to do this page even though the evidence is not accessible at the present time."

-- Don DeLillo at The Paris Review (Fall 1993)

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E. M. Cioran

2016-09-25T00:42:33Z

Always keen for the provocative statement, Cioran speaks of the Jews in this excerpt.

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“If they do not possess a monopoly on subtlety, the fact remains, nonetheless, that their form of intelligence is the most disturbing there is, the oldest; it is as if they know everything, have always known everything, since Adam, since … God.”

-- E. M. Cioran, “The Temptation to Exist”

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Sylvia

2016-09-24T02:15:14Z

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Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say “living and feeding a man’s insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life - don’t have time to write”? Or will I stick to the damn stuff and practice? Read and think and practice?

-- Sylvia Plath, the Journals

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Andrew Sullivan

2016-09-23T01:10:27Z

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.”

-- Henry David Thoreau

Andrew Sullivan, the erstwhile king of bloggers, writes a long article on quitting the game and seeking relief at a meditation center. It's the argument about how the Internet is sucking our life into an e-vortex and we need to do a better job of establishing a balance between our online lives and our real lives. The excerpt below is largely a quote from the comic Louis C. K. on why he does not allow his children to have smart-phones.

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“You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he [Louis C. K.] said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”

He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”

-- Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine

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I really do miss his old blog, though. I was a steadfast follower. I got a lot of my best stuff and quotes from him.

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Camus

2016-09-21T22:38:21Z

“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.”

-- Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Dreams can be like that, too.

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Dino

2016-09-20T22:48:56Z

“When a Bing Crosby movie ever came to Steubenville, I would stay there all day and watch. And that’s where I learned to sing, ‘cause it’s true I don’t read a note,” he would say. “I learned from Crosby, and so did Sinatra, and Perry Como. We all started imitating him. He was the teacher for all of us.”

-- Dean Martin

[Source: Nick Tosches, “Dino: Living High In the Dirty Business of Dreams”]

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W. S. Merwin

2016-09-20T17:18:30Z

while the rain fell all around us
I listened to you breathing
I wanted to remember
the sound of your breath
but we lay there forgetting

-- W. S. Merwin, "The Sound of Forgetting"

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Michel Houellebecq

2016-09-20T02:20:21Z

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INTERVIEWER

Do you think of yourself as a poet as well as a novelist?

HOUELLEBECQ

Not really. It’s sad to say, but when you write novels that have a certain impact, you start to sense that editors are publishing your poems out of charity. And it becomes embarrassing.

INTERVIEWER

But you do put poems in all your novels.

HOUELLEBECQ

But it doesn’t work. I’ve always tried to put poems in my novels, but I’ve never really succeeded.

INTERVIEWER

You have said, “The struggle between poetry and prose is a constant in my life. If you obey the poetic impulse, you risk becoming unreadable. If you disobey, you’re ready for a career as an honest ‘storyteller.’”

HOUELLEBECQ

You might get the impression that I have a mild contempt for storytelling, which is only somewhat true. For example, I really like Agatha Christie. She obeys the rules of the genre at first, but then occasionally she manages to do very personal things. In my case, I think I start from the opposite point. At first, I don’t obey, I don’t plot, but then from time to time, I say to myself, Come on, there’s got to be a story. I control myself. But I will never give up a beautiful fragment merely because it doesn’t fit in the story.

-- Michel Houellebecq at The Paris Review (Fall 2010)

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Vince Foster

2016-09-19T04:17:57Z

“Before we came here, we thought of ourselves as good people.”

-- Vince Foster

Foster is the Clinton aide and friend that committed suicide near the beginning of the administration in the summer of 1993, touching off another round of scandal, perhaps the most vicious of all. The quote comes from an interview he gave a few weeks before his suicide.

[Source: George Stephanopoulos, “All Too Human”]

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Pessoa

2016-09-19T03:35:56Z

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We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept - our own selves - that we love.

This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself.

-- Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet”

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