‘One day’s work with camera and actors taught me more than all the dozen books I read on filmmaking. I found out for myself how to catch the hushed stillness of dusk in a Bengali village, when the wind drops and turns the ponds into sheets of glass, and the smoke from the ovens settles in wispy trails over the landscape, and plaintive blows on conch shells from homes far and near are joined by the chorus of crickets which rise as the light falls, until all one sees are stars in the sky, and the fireflies that blink and swirl in the thickets.’
Satyajit Ray, quoted at Screen India
‘Turning back to the wretched rack-like bed again I whispered her name softly. With surprise and chagrin I discovered that she had utterly vanished. The waters had simply closed over her head. It was as if she had never existed, never inspired in me the pain and pity which (I had always told myself) would live on, transmitted into other forms perhaps - but live triumphantly on forever. I had worn her out like an old pair of socks, and the utterness of this disappearance surprised and shocked me. Could ‘love’ simply wear out like this? ‘Melissa’ I said again hearing the lovely word echo in the silence. Name of a sad herb, name of a pilgrim to Eleusis. Was she less now than a scent or a flavour? Was she simply a nexus of literary cross-references scribbled in the margins of a minor poem? And had my love dissolved her in this strange fashion, or was it simply the literature I had tried to make out of her? Words, the acid-bath of words! I felt guilty. I even tried (with that lying self-deception so natural to sentimentalists) to force her to appear by an act of will, to re-evoke a single one of those afternoon kisses which had once been for me the sum of the city's many meanings. I even tried deliberately to squeeze the tears into my eyes, to hypnotize memory by repeating her name like a charm. The experiment yielded nothing. Her name had been utterly worn out of use! It was truly shameful not to be able to evoke the faintest tribute to so all-engulfing an unhappiness.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’: ‘Clea’, Chapter I, p. 681.
‘radically orthodox theologians speak about themselves as the salvation of Christendom, and even of the world. The new centre, says Conor Cunningham, will "develop a new thinking for our time — for the time of our children, nay, for the time of children and indeed of their parents". As Spongebob Squarepants memorably said: “Well, good luck with that.” ’
Hugh Rayment-Pickard, ‘Church Times’, Friday September 2, 2005. Full text at ‘The Church Times’ website.
‘One day, the gods retreated. On their own, they retreated from their divinity, that is to say, from their presence. What remains of their presence is what remains of all presence when it absents itself: what remains is what one can say about it. What can be said about it is what remains when one can no longer address it: neither speak to it, nor touch it, nor see it, nor give it a present.
(One might even say that the gods retreated because one no longer gives a present to their presence: no more sacrifice, no more oblation, except by way of custom or imitation. One has other things to do: write, for example, calculate, do business, legislate. Deprived of presents, presence has retreated.)’
Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Between Story and Truth’, trans. Franson Manjali. ‘The Little Magazine’, Vol. II, issue 4. Full text at ‘The Little Magazine’ website.
‘If I have spoken of time it is because the writer I was becoming was learning at last to inhabit those deserted spaces which time misses - beginning to live between the ticks of the clock, so to speak. The continuous present, which is the real history of that collective anecdote, the human mind; when the past is dead and the future represented only by desire and fear, what of that adventive moment which can't be measured, can't be dismissed? For most of us the so-called Present is snatched away like some sumptuous repast, conjured up by fairies - before one can touch a mouthful.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Clea’, chapter I, p. 659.
‘it was to be as always simply the end of kindness and safety and moderate ways; the end of the artist's hopes, of nonchalance, of joy. Apart from this everything else about the human condition would be confirmed and emphasized; perhaps even a certain truthfulness had already begun to emerge from behind appearances, for death heightens every tension and permits us fewer of the half-truths by which we normally live.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Clea’, chapter I, p. 665.
‘His profession which valued only judgement, coolness and reserve, taught him the hardest lesson of all and the most crippling - never to utter the pejorative thought aloud. It offered him too something like a long Jesuitical training in self-deception which enabled him to present an ever more highly polished surface to the world without deepening his human experience. If his personality did not become completely diluted it was due to Leila; for he lived surrounded by his ambitious and sycophantic fellows who taught him only how to excel in forms of addresss, and the elaborate kindnesses which, in pleasing, pave the way to advancement. His real life became a buried stream, flowing on underground, seldom emerging into that artificial world in which the diplomat lives - slowly suffocating like a cat in an air-pump.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Mountolive’, chapter II, pp. 433-434.
‘A sudden loneliness smote him - for he realized that now, a an Ambassador, he must forever renounce the friendship of ordinary human beings in exchange for their deference. His uniform encased him like a suit of chain-armour. It shut him off from the ordinary world of human exchanges. ‘God!’ he thought. ‘I shall be forever soliciting a normal human reaction from people who are bound to defer to my rank! I shall become like that dreadful parson in Sussex who always feebly swears in order to prove that he is really quite an ordinary human being despite the dog-collar!’ ’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Mountolive’, chapter VI, p. 497.
‘We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.’
Kevin Kelly, Wired, August 2005, p. 33. Full text at the ‘Wired’ website.
‘the key catalyst was The Intruder, a short book in which the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on his own heart transplant operation. Hence a nexus of themes involving the heart and its metaphors, notably the heart-like image of the huge red paper globe burst at the launch of a ship in Pusan, spilling streamers like blood, and the surreal concreteness of human hearts as stray objects abandoned in the Jura landscape, frozen on ice or devoured by dogs. Ships also recur as a figure of the human body, in which the heart is both motor and passenger: the final ship in the film has as its cargo a coffin, or dead heart.’
Jonathan Romney, ‘Sight & Sound’, September 2005, p. 41.
‘Esprit had been founded in 1932 by the philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, who continued to edit the journal until his death in 1950. Mounier was the primary intellectual force behind personalism, a philosophical and social movement that developed in France during the 1930s as an effort to reconcile Catholicism with left-wing political ideals. Personalism focused on the nature and potential of the human person, conceived as an amalgam of material, social and spiritual dimensions ... He .. developed close ties to the Ecole des Cadres at Uriage, a centre of Resistance activity significantly inspired by personalist beliefs, which was incubating the ambitious project of renewing French culture and society after the war had ended. The leaders of Uriage believed that a highly trained and cultured professional elite would be needed to spearhead this renewal and unite the nation within a shared framework of moral values and common cultural inheritance ... 'graduates' of Uriage included Paul Flamand, director of Editions du Seuil, and Hubert Beuve-Méry, who founded the newspaper Le Monde after the Liberation in 1944.
Esprit .. quickly gained prominence as a focus for Roman Catholics looking to dissociate themselves from the disgrace of the Church's conservative right, which had openly collaborated with Vichy. Their wartime experiences certainly gave a renewed sense of energy, commitment and conviction to Mounier and the other members of the editorial group, who included the drama critic Pierre-Aimé Touchard, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the writer and literary critic Albert Béguin, the novelist Jean Cayrol, who would later draw on his experience of deportation to write the commentary for Alain Resnais' landmark documentary Nuit et brouillard, and the film critic André Bazin.’
Catherine Lupton, ‘Chris Marker: Memories of the Future’, pp. 15-17.
‘a .. significant aspect of cinema's fascination for Marker is what he regards as its capacity for revelation: the power to unveil deeper realities that expand and enrich the significance of the everyday world, but remain firmly grounded in its objects and appearances. This notion of the ordinary physical world as a medium of revleation was shared by the neo-Bergsonian critics and philosophers who had gravitated to Esprit from its foundation, notably Albert Béguin. Béguin's interest in the French poets Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy (a touchstone for the Esprit group) stemmed from the dual sense of reality he found manifested in their work, connecting 'things of this earth' to the realms of 'mystery and the mind'. Catholicism played a crucial role in motivating and interpreting this poetic vision of the world, and in Marker's reading of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc the object of revelation is indeed divine: the metaphysical struggle of the soul to attain grace through suffering and the confrontation with evil, incarnated in the physical play of expressions across the actress Renée Falconetti's face, in 'the grain of the skin, the tear, the drool, the hair, the glint of the eye'.’
Catherine Lupton, ‘Chris Marker: Memories of the Future’, p. 23.
‘what caught me and still catches me about Barth is that sense of exuberant bloody-mindedness, enlarged upon at huge length, the gusto, the verve of the theology, with all its outrageous misunderstandings of other people and its wonderfully sanctified egotism. It's a great performance, The Church Dogmatics, and Barth enjoys being Barth and spreading himself like this, and in that enjoyment does convey, I think, uniquely among twentieth-century theologians, a sense of the exhilarating otherness of God.’
Rowan Williams in Rupert Shortt, ‘God's Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation’, p. 15.
‘I wrote Theology and Social Theory at Lancaster. Radical Orthodoxy extends the approach taken in that book, where I was calling into question the idea that the right way forward, if you're relating theology to other disciplines, is to see them as having their particular areas of expertise, and theology as having its own discrete sphere of competence, and then to bring them together. My argument was that the social sciences, if you dig into their history, may have already taken all kinds of theological or anti-theological decisions that you need to be aware of. And conversely, I was influenced by Nicholas Lash's view that theology doesn't have its own special subject matter: it's much more a question of the way in which the epiphany of God makes a difference to everything. That's why you can't detach theology from a certain view of society.’
John Milbank in Rupert Shortt, ‘God's Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation’, p. 105.
‘There were men whose feelings dispersed in spray - became as fine as if squeezed through an atomizer: those who had frozen them - ‘pins and needles of the heart’; there were others born without a sense of value - the morally colour-blind ones. The very powerful were often like that - men walking inside a dream-cloud of their actions which somehow lacked meaning to them.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Mountolive’, chapter XIV, p. 597.
‘I had set out once to store, to codify, to annotate the past before it was utterly lost - that at least was a task I had set myself. I had failed in it (perhaps it was hopeless?) for no sooner had I embalmed one aspect of it in words than the intrusion of new knowledge disrupted the frame of reference, everything flew asunder, only to reassemble again in unforeseen, unpredictable patterns ....
‘To re-work reality’ I had written somewhere; temeritous, presumptuous words indeed - for it is reality which works and reworks us on its slow wheel. Yet if I had been enriched by the experience of this island interlude, it was perhaps because of this total failure to record the inner truth of the city. I had now come face to face with the nature of time, that ailment of the human psyche. I had been forced to admit defeat on paper. Yet curiously enough the act of writing had in itself brought me another sort of increase; by the very failure of words, which sink one by one into the measureless caverns of the imagination and gutter out. An expensive way to begin living, yes; but then we artists are driven towards personal lives noursihed in these strange techniques of self-pursuit.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Clea’, chapter I, pp. 657 - 658.
‘Balthazar claimed once that he could induce love as a control-experiment by a simple action: namely telling each of two people who had never met that the other was dying to meet them, had never seen anyone so attractive, and so on. This was, he claimed infallible as a means of making them fall in love: they always did.’
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Balthasar’, chapter XIV, p. 382.