‘I don't think your wedding day should, really, be the happiest day of your life ...
Stop telling us something is the happiest day of our lives. You can start stopping doing it when we leave school, with those ridiculous valedictories that tell us, basically, that it's never going to get better or happier. What, that was it? ...
The happiest day of your life, surely, should come later. Not at 18, or 28, or 38. Way, way later; it should be something to look forward to ...
On top of a mountain, near the end of the day, end of the life, with someone you truly love. Or just sitting there, on your eightieth birthday, floppy cushions and comfortably spilt coffee, and you read something, in a book or a paper, or a letter, and realise that everything you ever thought, ever, was completely wrong, and you have the grace to start laughing.’
Euan Ferguson, The Observer, 31 August 2003. Full text at the Observer website.
‘A top behaviouralist, Daniel Kahneman, won last year's Nobel prize in economics for pointing out the differences between Homo sapiens and H. economicus. Real people tend to judge their well-being relative to others, not in absolute terms; their actions depend on the way choices are presented; they fear loss more than they crave gain. Such insights form the core of what is known as “prospect theory”. Some economists think that prospect theory can overthrow two centuries of neoclassical thought. Others say that it only gives credence to the idea that people repeatedly make daft mistakes. Is there a way of settling the dispute?
Some recent work should at least help. It explores the "endowment effect", one of the chief tenets of prospect theory. Put simply, this means that people place an extra value on things they already own ...
The implications of this are profound. To take one example, the Coase theorem, which argues that initial allocations of wealth do not matter as long as markets allow people to trade their stakes — the rationale for government auctions of everything from radio spectrum to mobile-telephone licences — would no longer be valid.’
Euan Ferguson, The Observer, 31 August 2003. Full text at the Observer website.
‘During the 1970s the word "globalization" was never mentioned in the pages of the New York Times. In the 1980s the word cropped up less than once a week, in the first half of the 1990s less than twice a week – and in the latter half of the decade no more than three times a week. In 2000 there were 514 stories in the paper that made reference to "globalization"; there were 364 stories in 2001, and 393 references in 2002. Based on stories in the New York Times, the idea of being "anti-globalization" was not one that existed before about 1999.’
Stanley Fischer, 'Globalization & Its Challenges', p. 3, n.4. Full text at Institute for International Economics website.
‘Earlier this year, Stanley Fischer, formerly of the Massachusets Institute of Technology and the IMF, now a senior executive with Citigroup, delivered the prestigious Richard Ely lecture at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association ...
The poor, on average, are catching up. And the main reason is that two of the poorest countries in the world — China and India — have both (a) enormous populations and (b) rapid growth in incomes per head in the years in question.’
Stanley Fischer, 'Globalization & Its Challenges', p. 3, n.4. Full text at Institute for International Economics website.
‘One critic called Bosch "the first spark of that bonfire, Salvador Dali." Dali, who, as a student in Madrid, knew the works of Bosch, felt compelled to deny the influence. "I myself am the anti-Hieronymus Bosch," he proclaimed.’
Stanley Meisler, 'The World of Bosch'Full text at Stanley Meisler's website.
‘at least with physical pain, because it is independent of thought, thought can dwell on it, note that it has diminished, that it has momentarily ceased. But with this pain the mind, merely by recalling it, recreated it. To wish not to think about it was still to think about it, still to suffer from it.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 278
‘Middle-class families who hire cleaners and nannies so women are free to go out to work are contributing towards a new exploitative "servant economy", a leading American feminist claimed last night.
Barbara Ehrenreich, whose international bestseller Nickel and Dimed tells how she spent a year trying to earn a living from menial jobs in the United States, said the new "servant culture" was destroying families in the developing world and inculcating racism in children in the west.’
Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian, August 12 2003. Full text at Guardian website.
‘Even the very simple act that we call 'seeing a person we know' is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly have the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), pp. 22-23.
‘he could not be consoled for the loss of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my grandfather: 'It's odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can't think of her for long at a time.' 'Often, but only a little at a time, like poor old Swann', had become one of my grandfather's favourite phrases, which he uttered of the most different sorts of things.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 19.
‘in his conversation he endeavoured never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about things, but to furnish material details that had some sort of value in themselves and allowed him not to show his real capacities. He was extremely precise when it came to the recipe for a dish, the date of a painter's birth or death, the nomenclature of his works.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 213
‘At an earlier time one dreamed of possessing the heart of the woman with whom one was in love; later, to feel that one possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make one fall in love with her ... At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), pp. 199-200.
‘that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in sudden reversals of fortune, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life. No doubt it progresses within us imperceptibly, and the truths that have changed its meaning and its appearance for us, that have opened new paths to us, we had been preparing to discover for a long time; but we did so without knowing it; and for us they date only from the day, from the minute in which they became visible. The flowers that played on the grass then, the water that flowed past in the sunlight, the whole landscape that surrounded their appearance continues to accompany the memory of them with its unconscious or abstracted face.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 184.
‘And so it was from the Guermantes way that I learned to distinguish those states of mind that follow one another in me, during certain periods, and that even go so far as to share out each day among them, one returning to drive out the other, with the punctuality of a fever; contiguous, but so exterior to one another, so lacking in means of communication among them, that I can no longer comprehend, no longer even picture to myself in one, what I desired, or feared, or accomplished in the other.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), pp. 183-184.
‘Bauman sees the chief weakness of the modernist impulse as being its refusal to live with the problems, the messiness of history.’
Stuart Sim, 'The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism', p. 195
‘the books that constitute the Hitler Library were discovered in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden — haphazardly stashed in schnapps crates with the Reich Chancellery address on them — by soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division in the spring of 1945. After a lengthy initial evaluation at the U.S. military "collecting point" in Munich the books, numbering 3,000, were shipped to the United States and transferred in January of 1952 to the Library of Congress ...
Why, with hundreds of Hitler biographies, had not more scholars visited the Third Reich Collection? It is referenced by none of the leading Hitler biographers — not Alan Bullock, not John Toland, not Joachim Fest. Ian Kershaw, whose recent two-volume Hitler biography has won international acclaim, told me in the summer of 2001 that he visited the collection once, in the early 1990s, but "decided against any consultation of the volumes in it, and in the event did not refer directly, so far as I recall, to the collection in my biography." In retrospect, Kershaw concedes, he should probably have at least mentioned the collection in a footnote ...
Hitler never inventoried his books, and the only detailed accounting of his libraries comes courtesy of the former United Press correspondent Frederick Oechsner, who met Hitler repeatedly and was evidently able to acquaint himself intimately with the Führer's book collections. "I found that his personal library, which is divided between his residence in the Chancellery in Berlin and his country home on the Obersalzberg at Berchtesgaden, contains roughly 16,300 books," Oechsner wrote in his best-selling book This Is the Enemy (1942) ...
The Predictions of Nostradamus belongs to a cache of occult books that Hitler acquired in the early 1920s and that were discovered in the private quarters of his Berlin bunker by Colonel Albert Aronson in May of 1945 ...; the books remained in Aronson's attic until his death, at which point they were bequeathed to his nephew, who donated them to Brown University in 1979 ...’
Timothy W. Ryback, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2003. Full text at The Atlantic website.
‘In 1935, Eden and Hitler discovered at a dinner that they had served in trenches opposite one another and happily sketched out their respective positions on the back of a dinner card; Eden's French counterpart felt a deal of trouble could have been saved if only Eden had managed to shoot Hitler there and then.’
R. W. Johnson, review of 'Eden: The Life & Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon' by D. R. Thorpe & 'The MacMillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950-57' ed.Peter Catterall. ‘London Review of Books’, 22 May 2003.
‘here was a time when people had a place and knew their place; and then there was a time, which we are still living in, when for various reasons they didn't, when more and more people had to find a place in the world instead of simply inheriting one, when prestige was up for grabs. The project of the modern, unmoored individual is to find his value in the eyes of other people, and to resent this. It is a predicament that breeds new forms of megalomania and new forms of servility. The whole notion of ambition, of what people might want for themselves, is transformed.’
Adam Phillips , review of 'The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme' by Robert Ferguson & 'Paranoid Modernism' by David Trotter, London Review of Books, 22 May 2003.
‘Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them ... by drawing them out of us in an indistinct from that does not teach us to know them.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 155.
‘very soon that love welled up in me again like a reaction by which my humiliated heart was trying to put itself on the same level as Gilberte or bring her down to its own. I loved her, I was sorry I had not had the time or the inspiration to insult her, hurt her, and force her to remember me. I thought her so beautiful that I wished I could retrace my steps and shout at her with a shrug of my shoulders: "I think you're ugly, I think you're grotesque, I loathe you." ’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 143.
‘in the environs of Combray there were two 'ways' which one could go for a walk, in such opposite directions that in fact we left our house by different doors when we wanted to go one way or the other: the Méséglise-la-Vineuse way, which we also called the way by Swann's because we passed in front of M. Swann's estate when we went in that direction, and the Guermantes way.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 135.
‘those exceptional moments when we thirst for something other than what we have, and when people who from a lack of energy or imagination cannot find a source of renewal in themselves ask the next minute that comes, the postman as he rings, to bring them something new.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 117.
‘But the great thing is that you can see all in one glance things you can't usually see except one without the other, like the course of the Vivonne and the ditches at Saint-Assise-lès-Combray, which are separated by a screen of tall trees, or the different canals at Jouy-le-Vicomte .... Each time I've gone to Jouy-le-Vicomte, of course, I've seen a bit of the canal, and then I've turned a corner and seen another bit, but by then I could no longer see the preceding bit. I could put them together in my mind, but that didn't have much of an effect for me. But from the Saint-Hilaire belfry it's different, the whole area seem to have been caught in a great web.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), pp. 107-108.
‘Our belief that a person participates in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), pp. 100-101.
‘We are very slow to recognize in the particular features of a new writer the model that is labelled lsquo;great talent’ in our museum of general ideas. Precisely because these features are new, we do not think they fully resemble what we call talent. Instead, we talk about originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realize that all of this is, in fact, talent.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 102.
‘In the 1860s, the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce began lecturing on the work of George Boole, the fellow who gave his name to Boolean algebra. In doing so, Peirce brought symbolic logic to the United States and radically redefined and expanded Boole's algebra in the process. Boole had brought logic and mathematics together in a particularly cogent way, and Peirce probably knew more about Boolean algebra than anyone else in the mid-nineteenth century.
By the 1880s, Peirce figures out that Boolean algebra could be used as the model for electrical switching circuits. The true/false distinction of Boolean logic mapped exactly to the way current flowed through the on/off switches of complex electrical circuits. Logic, in other words, could be represented by electrical circuitry. Therefore electrical calculating machines and logic machines could, in principle, be built. One of Peirce's students, Allan Marquand, actually designed, but did not build, an electric machine to perform simple logic operations in 1885.’
Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine, 'Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer', (2nd edn, 2000), p. 7.
‘Babbage's colleague, patroness, and scientific chronicler was Augusta Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron, pupil of algebraist Augustas De Morgan, and the future Lady Lovelace. A writer herself and an amateur mathematician, Ada was able through her articles and papers to explain Babbage's ideas to the more educated members of the public and to potential patrons among the British nobility. She also wrote sets of instructions that told Babbage's Analytical Engine how to solve advanced mathematical problems. Because of this work, many regard Ada as the first computer programmer. The U. S. Department of Defense recognized her role in anticipating the discipline of computer programming by naming its Ada programming language after her in the early 1980s.’
Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine, 'Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer', (2nd edn, 2000), p. 4.
‘She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called petites madeleines that look as though they have been moulded in the grooved valve of a scallop-shell. And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of a sad future, I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me ...
And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was the taste of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because that day I did not go out before it was time at Mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my Aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime-blossom ...
And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me (though I did not yet know and had to put off to much later discovering why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old grey house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage-set to attach itself to the little wing opening on to the garden that had been built for my parents behind it (that truncated section which was all I had seen before then); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square, where they sent me before lunch, the streets where I went to do errands, the paths we took if the weather was fine.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), pp. 47, 49, 50.
‘It is the same with the past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless.The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 47
‘So it was that, for a long time, when, awakened at night, I remembered Combray again, I saw nothing of it but this sort of luminous panel, cut out from among indistinct shadows ... as though Combray had consisted only of two floors connected by a slender staircase and as though it had always been seven o'clock in the evening there. The fact is, I could have answered anyone who asked me that Combray also included other things and existed at other hours. But since what I recalled would have been supplied to me only by my voluntary memory, the memory of my intelligence, and since the information it gives about the past preserves nothing of it, I would never have had any desire to think about the rest of Combray. It was all really quite dead for me.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 46
‘The record for the hottest day ever in Britain has been broken as temperatures soared to 37.9C (100.2F). The record was registered at Heathrow airport at 1500 BST on Sunday, meaning the hottest day since records began about 130 years ago in 1875. The previous record, of 37.1C recorded at Cheltenham in 1990, had been broken 90 minutes earlier ...
The Met Office's chief weather forecaster Nigel Reed explained why the weekend has been so hot. A cold front out to the west of the UK has been "pulling in exceptionally warm air that's been over northern France the last couple of days," he said. "The longer a hot spell lasts the higher the temperature gets each day, typically about a degree each day." ’
BBC News, 10 August 2003. Full text at BBC News website.
‘for a little while now, I have begun to hear again very clearly, if I take care to listen, the sobs I was strong enough to contain in front of my father and that did not burst out until I found myself along again with Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is quieting down around me more and more now that I can hear them again, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamour of the town during the day that one would then they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 40.
‘These revolving, confused evocations never lasted for more than a few seconds; often, in my brief uncertainty about where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed, any better than we isolate, when we see a horse run, the successive positions shown to us by a kinetoscope.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 11.
‘For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep." And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit.’
Marcel Proust, ‘The Way By Swann's’, trans. Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2002), p. 7.
‘A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth ... His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate.’
Vladimir Nabokov, 'Pnin', quoted by Martin Amis, ‘Experience’, p. 116
‘[Nabokov] said ... that a good translator must be (a) reasonably competent in the 'out of' language, (b) hugely skilled in the 'into' language, and (c) a man.’
Martin Amis, ‘Experience’, p. 31
‘They don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about.’
Kingsley Amis, 'Jake's Thing', quoted in Martin Amis, ‘Experience’, p. 29
‘the relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.’
Václav Havel, speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4 1994. Full text
‘There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit.’
Václav Havel, speech on receiving the Open Society Prize. Full English translation at the New York Review website
‘both [Andrew Shanks and Stanley Hauerwas] decline to see the secular as a space of absence, a beningly untenanted place where citizens can at last relate to each other in innocence of their confessional burdens and prejudices. Secularity is the unreflective world setting its own agenda.’
Rowan Williams, Times Literary Supplement, July 4 2003. Full text at TLS website.
‘the Jewish post-Shoah poet Nelly Sachs, described by Shanks as arguably the most serious theological poet of the past century’
Rowan Williams, Times Literary Supplement, July 4 2003. Full text at TLS website
‘To use his favourite expression, most religious talk is insufficiently "shaken" (the category of shakenness derives from the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, who has been effectively deployed by Shanks in his earlier work).’
Rowan Williams, Times Literary Supplement, July 4 2003. Full text at TLS website.
‘Augustine says: "You were within me, but I was outside myself." When the children playing in the garden in Milan sing "Tolle lege, tolle lege", "take it and read, take it and read", Augustine breaks down in tears, because he now knows what he could always have known: that God, the Spirit, was not there 'all the time' distantly in some far off object which he could not reach. The Spirit was there all the time in the seeking itself, in the desire for God, in the disappointment at not finding him, in the unhappiness of unsatisfied desire; in the very intensity of the desire for God.’
Denys Turner, ‘Faith Seeking’, p. 113.
‘St Theresa of Avila describes the spiritual condition of the smug, those who have arrived in the third mansion of her ‘Interior Castle’, because they have achieved a measure of self-control, an orderly condition of soul, desire is more or less regulated and will the master. But because they lack humility and self-knowledge, they are self-satisfied prigs. They are relatively temptationless; but have achieved this condition only by confining themselves within carefully defined boundaries of spiritual possibility.’
Denys Turner, ‘Faith Seeking’, pp. 101-2
‘those who seek God in ways will find ways and lose God’
Meister Eckhart, quoted by Denys Turner, ‘Faith Seeking’, p. 102
‘A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.’
George Eliot, ‘Silas Marner’, Part I, chapter 4
‘Perhaps, Iris pondered, all literature, all art misleads: the false unity of the art-work sanctioning an equally false sense of unity within its client.’
Peter J. Conradi, 'Iris Murdoch: A Life', p. 546
‘Recall the idea of Até which was so real to the Greeks. Até is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering. Power is a form of Até. The victims of power, and any power has its victims, are themselves infected. They have then to pass it on, to use power on others. This is evil, and the crude image of the all-powerful God is a sacrilege. Good is not completely powerless. For to be powerless, to be a complete victim, may be another source of power. But Good is non-powerful. And it is in the good that Até is finally quenched, when it encounters a pure being who only suffers and does not attempt to pass the suffering on.’
Iris Murdoch, 'The Unicorn', chapter 12. Quoted Peter J. Conradi, 'Iris Murdoch: A Life', p. 454
‘What can be more grave than Solomon's words? What more finished than Job? . . . When we read these in Greek they have some meaning; when in Latin they are utterly incoherent. But if any one thinks that the grace of language does not suffer through translation, let him render Homer word for word into Latin. I will go farther and say that, if he will translate this author into the prose of his own language, the order of the words will seem ridiculous and the most eloquent of poets almost dumb . . . . ’
St Jerome, preface to Latin translation of Chronicle of Eusebius. Quoted by Susan Sontag, Times Literary Supplement, June 13 2003. Full text at TLS website.
‘Our duty ... is not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities of our spiritual life as it in fact is, but to seek that place, that task, those people, which will make our spiritual life .... grow and flourish.’
quoted, Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Life’, p. 423
‘They knew theoretically where all the rooms were, but never had a sense of quite dominating the house, and had a fantasy that there might be someone else living in some part of it they had never found.’
quoted, Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Life’, p. 411.
‘Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife
he would have written sonnets all his life?’Lord Byron, 'Don Juan' III, stanza viii. See full text online.
‘The Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe once said that you do not understand prayer at all unless you can see that it is a complete waste of time. It is a complete waste of time as our existence is a complete waste of time; our existence if caught up in the divine play, because it has no point, no purpose, no utility.’
Denys Turner, ‘Faith Seeking’, p. 33.
‘Women and gay men in her fiction are often willing to allow the world to touch them. There are also 'touchy' and vain persons, some (not all) of them men. Is not 'touchiness' a defensive symptom of our refusal to permit the world, precisely, to touch us? What other novelist would give to her character a thought about 'how moving a dog's nostrils were, moist and dark', identifying herself with all of that dog's intense, involuntary sensitivity and responsiveness? Iris - oddly - defines the good man in the 1980s, both in The Good Apprentice and also in interview, as 'cold and dead', by which she partly means chaste. She herself learnt not to be 'touchy' or easily upsettable.’
quoted, Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Life’.
‘Over many pages of reflection, she reaches towards a distinction between a 'frozen' and an 'unfrozen' past. So long as one lives, one's relationship with one's past should keep shifting, since 're-thinking one's past is a constant responsibility', an operation of conscience in evidence, for example, when it comes to thinking about one's enemies.’
quoted, Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Life’, p. 275, quoting Iris Murdoch's journals, 17 October 1947.
‘Sartre reduced love to a 'battle between two hypnotists in a closed room.’
Peter J. Conradi, 'Iris Murdoch: A Life', p. 271, quoting Iris Murdoch's journals, 1947.
‘This message she found also in Freud: that we, and our motives, are dark to ourselves. ‘I am obscure to myself. I don't coincide with my life.’
Peter J. Conradi, 'Iris Murdoch: A Life', p. 267, quoting Iris Murdoch's journals, 4 November 1947.
‘there have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions. It was perhaps not until the nineteenth century, in the English novel, that we find people who are likely to spend a whole lifetime without being hit by bombs, who have a tranquil life in which history does not intervene. But, aside from this period, there have always been many things happening externally, and peoples' private lives are always thrown into disorder. The "Iliad" is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.’
Raymond Queneau, interview with Georges Charbonnier. Full text at the Dalkey Archive Press website.
‘Part of what doubtless fascinated her was the way he commandeered his students' lives, humiliated and sometimes excommunicated them. She wrote to Queneau that the atmosphere around Wittgenstein was 'emotional and esoteric'; and later spoke of him as evil: he had abandoned old friends, 'harshly criticized Jewish refugee-philosophers' - probably his combative ex-disciple Friedrich Waissman - ruined careers by telling promising students to give up philosophy - including Smythies. Wittgenstein, she later noted, could, like Kreisel, 'destroy the very inward part of someone's self-respect'. He was ferocious and destructive.’
Peter J. Conradi, 'Iris Murdoch: A Life', p. 263
‘she before long found in Simone Weil's Need for Roots and Gravity and Grace a way of thinking that put decentring and displacement at the centre. One of the worst evils committed by totalitarian dictators entailed the uprooting of entire peoples; yet the moral life itself was a task of unselfing, ascesis, or voluntary deracination. Weil resolves the paradox by speaking of 'moral levels' above which the agent cannot proceed without danger. Only for the saintly, Weil appeared to argue, can virtue have no fixed address.’
Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Life’, p. 260
‘the theologian Karl Barth had .. an intense liaison with Fraülein von Kirchbaum which, though ... chaste, hurt his marriage, excluding his wife and condemning her to loneliness.’
Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Life’, p. 256
‘perhaps the most interesting ‘answer’ to Tarkovsky is the more recent work of Béla Tarr, most notably his masterpiece Sátántango (1997). Although he employs many of the same techniques as Tarkovsky with comparable authority, he could be described as the Russian’s negative mirror image. In the nihilistic vision of atheist misanthrope Tarr, the promise of salvation is a dangerous illusion often used as a weapon of power and frequently leading to confusion and violence. Even at its bleakest, Tarkovsky’s universe is suffused with faith and the idea of transcendence.’
Maximilian Le Cain, ‘Andrei Tarkovsky’ Full text at Senses of Cinema.
‘Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, begun in 1732 and published for many years, made Franklin prosperous and well-known throughout the colonies. In this annual book of useful encouragement, advice, and factual information, amusing characters such as old Father Abraham and Poor Richard exhort the reader in pithy, memorable sayings. In "The Way to Wealth," which originally appeared in the Almanack, Father Abraham, "a plain clean old Man, with white Locks," quotes Poor Richard at length. "A Word to the Wise is enough," he says. "God helps them that help themselves." "Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy, and wise." Poor Richard is a psychologist ("Industry pays Debts, while Despair encreaseth them"), and he always counsels hard work ("Diligence is the Mother of Good Luck"). Do not be lazy, he advises, for "One To-day is worth two tomorrow." Sometimes he creates anecdotes to illustrate his points: "A little Neglect may breed great Mischief....For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail." Franklin was a genius at compressing a moral point: "What maintains one Vice, would bring up two Children." "A small leak will sink a great Ship." "Fools make Feasts, and wise Men eat them."’
Kathryn van Spackeren, 'An Outline of American Literature'. Full text at ‘From Revolution to Reconstruction’ website.
‘The first thing that happened to the original Protestant work ethic is that it became secularized. The praise of work remained, but the spiritual and social purposes of work were lost. Work itself ceased to be viewed as a calling from God, the ideal of moderation gave way to an ambitious pursuit of wealth, and self-reliance replaced a sense of stewardship. The new attitude is fully evident in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard proverbs, which asserted, for example, that 'God helps them that help themselves' and that 'early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’
Leland Ryken, 'Work & Leisure' in Alister E. McGrath, ‘The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought’ (1993).
‘Getting drunk: there was no doubt that that was always the quest. Being drunk had its points, but getting drunk was the good bit. Kingsley has written often and poignantly about that moment when getting drunk suddenly turns into being drunk; and he is, of course, the laureate of the hangover.’
Martin Amis, ‘Experience’, p. 336.
‘The Yosemite valley in California was set aside by Abraham Lincoln as the world's first public wilderness. As the historian Simon Schama records: "The brilliant meadow floor which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants." The first whites to enter the valley were the soldiers sent to kill them. Eden, in an inversion of the biblical story, was thus created by man's expulsion. The colonists redefined the Ahwahneechee's managed habitat as wilderness in order to assert both a temporal and spiritual dominion over it.
America's Garden of Eden, in other words, is in fact its Canaan, the land of milk and honey whose indigenous people had first to be eliminated before the invaders could claim it as their birthright. The Mosaic doctrine of terra nullius (the inhabitants possess no legal rights to their land), which permitted the Lord's appointed to "smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth", has become the founding creed of the usurper all over the world. It continues to inform the land seizures in modern Israel, seeking now to turn itself into a walled garden; it continues to guide the expropriations upon which much of the global tourism industry is based....
Paradise is the founding myth of the colonist. Unable to contemplate the truth of what we do, we extract from our fathomless collective guilt a story of primordial innocence.’
George Monbiot, The Guardian, 5 August 2003. Full text at the Guardian website.
‘The images themselves are like symbols, but unlike accepted symbols they cannot be deciphered. The image is like a clot of life, and even the author may not be able to work out what it means, let alone the audience. Pushkin's "My sadness is radian" is not a symbol but a an image. Tolstoy's dying Ivan Ilych feels as if he is confined inside a narrow intestine pipe, and cannot get out. What he feels is what the sick man says. As long ago as the Middle Ages Japanese writers were decrying the interpretation of symbols in art. And quite rightly! The fewer symbols the better! Symbolism is a sign of decadence.’
Andrei Tarkovsky, 'The Director's Chair' interviews. Full text at Director's Chair website.
‘Renaissance art, both north and south of the Alps, produced a large body of devotional imagery in which the genitalia of the Christ Child, or of the dead Christ, receive such demonstrative emphasis that one must recognize an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds. In many hundreds of pious, religious works, from before 1400 to past the mid-16th century, the ostensive unveiling of the Child's sex, or the touching, protecting or presentation of it, is the main action. And the emphasis recurs in images of the dead Christ, or of the mystical Man of Sorrows. All of which has been tactfully overlooked for half a millenium.’
Leo Steinberg, 'The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion' (2nd edition, 1996), p. 3.
‘Apology is a new political enthusiasm, especially when it concerns the sins of the past; it unites two different forms of speech, both of them deeply intertwined with ideas about self-examination and self-disclosure, with, in short, ways of remembering oneself: a theological and sacramental language of repentance and atonement, on the one hand, and on the other, the psychoanalytic practice of the "talking cure" and the psychotherapy group meeting to help relieve bereavement, mental distress, and the victims of abuse. The French have even introduced a new word, répentance, to describe these contemporary acts of apology and atonement.’
Marina Warner, Times Literary Supplement, August 1 2003.