‘where passion should have been full of clues and keys it served only to slake our thoughts. It did not convey information as it usually does.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘Justine’ Part II, p. 112 in ‘The Alexandria Quartet’
‘At night you can hear her brain ticking like a cheap alarm-clock’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘Justine’ Part II, p. 113 in ‘The Alexandria Quartet’
‘Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘Justine’ Part II, p. 116 in ‘The Alexandria Quartet’
‘it is with God we must be the most careful; for he makes such a strong appeal to what is lowest in human nature - our feeling of insufficiency, fear of the unknown, personal failings; above all our monstrous egotism which sees in the martyr's crown an athletic prize which is really hard to attain. God's real and subtle nature must be clear of distinctions: a glass of spring-water, tasteless, odourless, merely refreshing: and surely its appeal would be to the few, the very few, real contemplatives?’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘Justine’ Part II, p. 117 in ‘The Alexandria Quartet’
‘John H. Pryor ... demonstrated the importance of the winds for understanding where the frontiers of Islam and Christendom lie’
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Times Literary Supplement, June 24 2005, p. 12
‘In 1951, Eric Hoffer published The True Believer, a book that deserves to be better known. It was an anatomy of the psychology of the true believer. Hoffer's main thesis was that the self-alienated seek fulfilment in ideological certainty. He quotes Pascal as saying that "one was well-minded to understand holy writ when one hated oneself." ’
Thaddeus Birchard, Church Times, 24 June 2005, p. 23
‘Whenever "religious people" are referred to my psychotherapy practice, they usually come to me highly defended, grandoise, fearful, omnipotent, trapped by shame, and impossible to work with. They are condemned by religous forms that appear to preach unconditional love, but operate a system of acceptance based upon right doctrine, right practice, and, of course, right sexuality’
Thaddeus Birchard, Church Times, 24 June 2005, p. 23
‘The modern translations that deliberately avoid AV style usually go much further in the direction of what the linguist and Bible-translator Eugene Nida called "dynamic equivalence translation", in which whole sentecnes are reconceived as if written in normal modern English, with subordinate clauses and avoidance of repetition ... Alter .. thinks that this misunderstands the nature of literary translation. The translator's job is not to make the reader believe that the text was written in normal modern English in the first place, but to suggest the flavour of the Hebrew; and this can be achieved only by a measure of imitation, and by refusing to "explain" the meaning of the original by paraphrase.’
John Barton, Times Literary Supplement, June 24 2005, p. 27.
‘ [Alter] cites [Everett] Fox as the outstanding exception to the general trend of a blandly readable English Bible—an extremist after Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, whose German Bible "flaunts Hebrew etymologies, preserves nearly all repetitions of Hebrew terms, and invents German words." ’
John Updike, ‘The New Yorker’, 1 November 2004. Full text at the New Yorker website.
‘As Alter argues, the meaning of the text is not separable from its register. He makes a pausible case for thinking that the Hebrew style of the Old Testament is not "normal everyday Hebrew" but a restricted and elevated variety of the language, not unlike the French of Classical tragedy. If he is right, then the text is simply mistranslated if it is put into colloquial English.’
John Barton, Times Literary Supplement, June 24 2005, p. 27.
‘But now confusion began to set in, and holding me gently by the hand he led me into the dense jungle of his illusions, walking among them with such surefootedness and acknowledging them so calmly that I almost found myself keeping company with them too.’
Laurence Durrell, ‘Justine’ Part II, p. 91 in ‘The Alexandria Quartet’
‘Nor, for the purposes of this writing, has he ceased to exist; he has simply stepped into the quicksilver of a mirror as we all must - to leave our illnesses, or evil acts, the hornets' nest of our desires, still operative for good or evil in the real world - which is the memory of our friends.’
Laurence Durrell, ‘Justine’ Part II, p. 91 in ‘The Alexandria Quartet’
‘He wrote in 1915 from Ottoline Morrell's country house that ‘Here one feels the real England - this old house, this countryside - so poignantly one is tempted to give in, and to stay there, to lapse back into the peacful beauty of bygone things, to live in pure recollection, looking at the accomplished past, which is so lovely.’ (Adding, just in time, ‘But one's soul rebels.’) ’
Ian Jack, Granta 90, Summer 2005, p. 9
‘in its many different locations, from the TV discussion to the bar, the seminar to the dinner table, modern society needs as much as ever some of the qualities developed under the aegis of the great salonnières: the ability to listen, to take turns, to be witty without being hurtful, to seek harmony rather than confrontation, to make the other members of the group happier with themselves and with life.’
Peter France, New York Review of Books, June 23 2005, p. 18
‘She made him follow her into sinister green lakes and the grey North Sea before season. It was another element, she used to say, as if it were an explanation or an enticement. Another element was precisely what he objected to lowering his skinny freckled frame into. It was the division between the elements that hurt most, the unfriendly surface, rising in a bitter cutting edge up his sunken goosefleshed belly as he advanced on tiptoe, to please her, into the unclear waters of the Essex coast in early June. He could never throw himself in, the way she did, the way she wanted him to. Submersion in another element, every day, making everyday special, was what she wanted and thought he should have. Well, he was fine with that now, as long as the other element wasn't cold water.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", pp. 37-8
‘It's only children, in fact, only infants who feel a wish and its fulfilment as one; perhaps this is what gives tyrants their childish air. They reach back for what they can't have. When they meet frustration, the man-slaying tantrum is never far away.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 38
‘People often drift into the square to act out their dramas. Clearly, a street won't do. Passions need room, the attentive spaciousness of a theatre. On another scale, Perowne considers, drawn now by sunlight and a fresh day into his usual preoccupation, this could be the attraction of the Iraqi desert - the flat and supposedly empty landscape approximating a strategist's map on which fury of industrial proportions can be let loose. A desert, it is said, is a military planner's dream. A city square is the private equivalent.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 60
‘It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid - and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place. As intimate and self-evident as the feel of his tongue in his mouth. Only he can go wrong in quite this way, and only he deserves to lose in just this manner.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 106
‘Sick buildings, in use for too long, that only demolition can cure. Cities and states beyond repair. The whole world resembling Theo's bedroom. A race of extraterrestial grown-ups is needed to set right the general disorder, then put everyone to bed for an early night. God was once supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides. Then sending us an actual child, one of His own - the last thing we needed. A spinning rock already swarming with orphans ...’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 122
‘Novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill like drystone walling or trout tickling.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 129
‘can anyone really know the sign, the tell of an honest man? There's been some good work on this very question. Perowne has read Paul Ekman on the subject. In the smile of a self-conscious liar certain muscle groups in the face are not activated. They only come to life as the expression of genuine feeling. The smile of a deceiver is flawed, insufficient. But can we see these muscles resting there inert when there's so much local variation in faces, pads of fat, odd concavities, differences of bone structure? Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 141
‘He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor. When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked mid-winter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", pp. 149-150
‘There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, or our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 171
‘She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 274
‘Most worthwhile things - parenthood, companionship, reading - have a good deal of boredom mixed up in them.’
Harry Mount, "Times Literary Supplment", March 25 2005, p. 31
‘Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast up on the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. ‘I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them,’ says he, ‘except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.’ Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes.’
J. M. Coetzee, "Elizabeth Costello", p.4
‘I. A. Richards remarked that Brooke's poetry had no ‘inside’ to it ... For Bayley, Edward Thomas is a counterexample to Brooke, and is commended not only for his poems but because he became in his poetry "the sort of man he really was" ’
Frank Kermode, "New York Review of Books", March 24 2005, p. 28
‘Formal proof is a notion developed in the early part of the 20th century by logicians such as Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, along with mathematicians such as David Hilbert (who can fairly be described as the father of modern mathematics) and Nicholas Bourbaki, the pseudonym of a group of French mathematicians who sought to place all of mathematics on a rigorous footing ...
The benefit of formal logic is that it is pure syntax. At no point does proceeding from one step to the next require understanding, let alone mathematical intuition.’
"Economist", April 2 2005, p. 69
‘In Herzog Bellow brought to perfection the art of fictional digression. When the hero goes to visit his lover, the lovely Ramona, he waits on the bed while she goes off to change into what Martin Amis would call her "brothel wear". In those moments Herzog reflects on the way the entire world presses in on him, and Bellow seems to set out a kind of manifesto, a ringing checklist of the challenges the novelist must confront, or the reality he must contain or describe. It also serves as a reader's guide to the raw material of Bellow's work. I came to know this passage by heart through re-reading, and borrowed it for the epigraph of a novel.’
Ian McEwan, Guardian G2, 7 April 2005. Full text at the Guardian website
‘For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You - you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.’
Saul Bellow, ‘Herzog’
‘The winner of all but three of the fifteen post-war general elections was predictable from well before the start of the final campaign even if the scale of the victory was uncertain. The exceptions were 1970, February 1974, and 1992.’
Paul Riddell, ‘Times Literary Supplement’, April 8 2005, p. 7
‘Une manière de filmer engage une manière de penser. Le film fait penser parce qu'il est lui-même en train de parler’
Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Cahiers du Cinema’, Avril 2005
‘Why the interest in Psyche among American poets, she wonders? Do they find something American in her, the girl who, not content with the ecstacies provided night after night by the visitor to her bed, must light a lamp, peel back the darkness, gaze on him naked? In her restlessness, her inability to leave well alone, do they see something of themselves?’
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Elizabeth Costello’, pp. 183-4
‘When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.’
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Elizabeth Costello’, p. 188
‘She hates sentences that hinge on the word because. The jaws of the trap snap shut, but the mouse, every time, has escaped.’
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Elizabeth Costello’, p. 191
‘Must one be too creaky to join the dance before one can see the pattern?’
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Elizabeth Costello’, p. 192
‘The right eye, the "tell" that lets us know how he is feeling inside, was relaxed and looked the same as the always amiable left eye.’
Simon Hoggart, Guardian, p. 1. Full text at the Guardian website
‘The last movement of the Fourth is a mishmash of contradictory elements: a funeral march reminiscent of Mahler's First and Seventh symphonies, Irving Berlin's "Always", a blazing climactic C major pedal point vaguely similar to the Gloria which greets Jocasta in Stravinsky's Oedipus, circus polkas, bird-calls out of The Magic Flute, a sombre fading conclusion a la Tchaikovsky's Sixth. The trivial and the sublime seem to have been mixed in a diabolical blender.’
David Schiff, Times Literary Supplement, May 6 2005, p. 4. Full text at the TLS website
‘Rather than viewing the withering criticisms of Freud and Marx as foreign, it is possible to see their criticisms, at least, if not their positive solutions, as aids in Christian critique. Merold Westphal in fact recommends them as Lenten readings, sharpening our awareness of sin ("Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism"). Using Westphal's utilization of radical postmodernists as an example, Garry Percespe characterizes in a lively way such dynamic appropriation:
"Westphal rejects postmodern assumptions, non sequiturs, fatal prejudices, and that which is offered without evidence. Out with the chaff. Or, to change the metaphor, having fired the furnace and burned off the dross, what Westphal believes he is left with is pure postmodern gold. This gold, it turns out ... is pirated Christian gold, for the postmodernists, it turns out, are thieves and plagiarizers. Just as Marx might have learned from Amos the prophet's unmasking of religious self-interest masking economic injustice, just as Freud and Sartre are modern theologians of original sin against their will, just as Nietzsche played a prophetic role in exposing Christian virtues as nothing but flittering vices, even so Westphal gives us Foucault and Derrida in the service of God, a stunning reversal which mimics, in its way, the consistent word of Scripture, where every idol is cast down and God makes all things new. (Gary Percesepe, "Against Appropriation: Postmodern Programs, Climants, Contests, Conversations" in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal, 78.)"
I should note that Percesepe, while having great appreciation for Westphal's project, expresses reservations about Westphal's success, couched in terms of a Derridean critique that the appropriated haunts the appropriator.’
Dan R. Stiver, ‘Theology after Ricoeur’, p. 159
‘The latest digital radio receivers, launched this month in Britain, feature TiVo-style pause, rewind, programme guide and timed recording functions.’
‘Why radio is worth watching’, p. 15, The Economist Technology Quarterly, June 11 2005
‘Raymond Boudon is the pre-eminent French sociologist of his generation. He is also a man with a mission. He loves the idea of sociology but hates most of what is produced under its name, at least if it is theory. There are three great sociologists: Tocqueville, Durkheim and Max Weber. After that it has all gone steeply downhill. That includes the workds of that other giant of French sociology, Pierre Bourdieu (who died in 2002), Boudon's long-time rival.’
Stein Ringen, Times Literary Supplement, June 17 2005. p.22
‘his questioning of the sharp distinction between "subject" and "object" of experience points forward to the ‘decentering of the subjects’ in more recent French philosophy.’
Eric Matthews, ‘The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty’, p. 2
‘Foucault sees negative theology as what he would later call a technology or politics of the self whose supposed movement outside language, the subject and the object only serves to confirm the unity and integrity of the interiority of being, speech and the individual.’
Arthur Bradley, ‘Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy’, p. 118
‘Forty-eight years old, profoundly asleep at nine thirty on a Friday night - this is modern professional life.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 7
‘Air travel is a stock market, a trick of mirrored perceptions, a fragile alliance of pooled belief; so long as nerves hold steady and no bombs or wreckers are on board, everybody prospers. When there's failure, there will be no half measures.’
Ian McEwan, "Saturday", p. 15
‘After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, Georges de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to the dog's fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook-and-loop system that the seeds have evolved to hitch-hike on passing animals and aid pollination, and he realised that the same approach could be used to join other things together. The result was Velcro: a product that was arguably more than three billion years in the making, since that is how long the natural mechanism that inspired it took to evolve.’
‘Technology that imitates nature’, p. 18, The Economist Technology Quarterly, June 11 2005
‘Our ability to spin gold from the dross of our experience means that we often find ourselves flourishing in circumstances we once dreaded ... We fear divorces, natural disasters and financial hardships until they happen, at which point we recognize them as opportunities to reinvent ourselves, to bond with our neighbours and to transcend the spiritual poverty of material excess’
Daniel Gilbert, cited by Carol Tavris, Times Literary Supplement, June 17 2005, p. 3
'The image stops the flow of time. The image ignores time, freeze-frames time. But the temporal dimension of the original subject is lost. The instant is preserved, fixed like a statue, and the living moment is forever represented by a lifeless eternity, impervious to change, to the lapse of time, to life.
Levinas initiates thought on time and the prohibition of images in his early text, 'The reality and its shadow'. He suggests that the prohibition of images is 'the highest command of monotheism'. The essay presents the image as an idol, haunting the shadows of reality, hiding in the timeless 'mean-while' (entre-temps). A statue, says Levinas, is the paradoxical perpetuation of a futureless moment. It is dead, nothing but a fixed caricature of life.'
Ruud Welten, 'Image and Oblivion: Emmanuel Levinas' Phenomenological Iconoclasm'. 'Literature & Theology', Vol 19, No. 1 March 2005, p. 63
'In the very age in which our language is becoming more precise, more univocal, more technical, better suited to those integral formalizations that are called precisely "symbolic" logic ... - it is in this age of discourse that we wish to recharge language, start again from the fullness of language. But this too is a gift from "modernity". For we moderns are men of philolology, of exegesis, of phenomenology, of psychoanalysis, of the analysis of language. The same age develops the possibility of emptying language and the possibility of filling it anew. It is therefore no yearning for a sunken Atlantis that urges us on but the hope of a re-creation of language. Beyond the wastelands of thought, we seek to be challenged anew.'
Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflections: I", trans. Denis Savage, in 'The Conflict of Interpretations', ed. Dohn Ihde, p. 288. Quoted by Dan R. Stiver, 'Theology After Ricoeur', p. 189
’The merit of reader-response theory is to show how a text does not say everything. If a text did, it would be too long and boring. An artful text says enough to help the reader be an accomplice in the production of its meaning.’
Dan R. Stiver, Theology After Ricoeur, p. 117.
’In Truth and Method, Gadamer was keenly interested in defending the sense of truth in art and in history as fully defensible against the mania for objectivity in the sciences. In this sense, he seemed to be furthering Dilthey's project. In the process, however, he completely undermined the Diltheyan distinction between two spheres of knowledge... Gadamer was reacting against the tendency to privatise and subjectivize the humanities in contrast to the hegemony of science in the arena of knowledge. ’
Dan R. Stiver, Theology After Ricoeur, p. 41.
’She gave me the impression of someone engaged in giving a series of savage caricatures of herself - but this is common to most lonely people who feel that their true self can find no correspondence in another.’
Laurence Durrell , The Alexandria Quartet, pp 60 - 61
’ Could you drop everything and start a new life? Choose one thing - only one - and stick by it? Make it your reason for living? Something all-embracing ... total - because your devotion makes it boundless?
No, this guy couldn't do it. He wants to grab everything - without giving anything up. He keeps changing direction for fear of missing the right one. And he's bleeding to death.'
Guido Anselmi in Fellini's '8½'