Without Lifting A Finger

Two bits: "So we lived in the city. In the city the wretched feel less sad. One can live there a hundred years without being noticed, and be dead a long time before anybody will notice it. People have no time to inquire into your life. All are absorbed. Business, social relations, art, the health of children, their education. And there are visits that must be received and made; it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to hear that one or the other one. In the city there are always one, two, or three celebrities that it is indispensable that one should visit." *** "Thus we passed two years more. The method prescribed by the rascals had evidently succeeded. My wife had grown stouter and handsomer. It was the beauty of the end of summer. She felt it, and paid much attention to her person. She had acquired that provoking beauty that stirs men. She was in all the brilliancy of the wife of thirty years, who conceives no children, eats heartily, and is excite...

Think whatever you like of Tolstoy. Late Tolstoy: old crank, crackpot, seer? A little bit of everything, like all of us. Still, one thing he saw clearly: we are a mess. I was having a hard time "settling in" to the next read: then I landed in Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata . Though a bit dated -- what would he have turned his attention to now? -- much of it still rings true. I fall for almost anything beginning or ending with a train.:) * Two bits: "Well, I am going then to tell you my life, and my whole frightful history,--yes, frightful. And the story itself is more frightful than the outcome." He became silent for a moment, passed his hands over his eyes, and began:-- "To be understood clearly, the whole must be told from the beginning. It must be told how and why I married, and what I was before my marriage. First, I will tell you who I am. The son of a rich gentleman of the steppes, an old marshal of the nobility, I was a University pupil, a gra...

Got the time from a friend: 6 to 8. We were watching a so-so film with Rooney Mara (had to finish) and thought: they'll light it up toward the end. We left near 7 and the lights were already on. Walked to the bridge, squeezed through all the kids and Santa-searchers (he himself was lost in the crowd) and took Charlie over the bridge (one of his favorite pastimes). I took some pics (two turned out OK), we heard some canned Xmas carols coming from the lifeguard hut (I think I heard Mahalia), walked home. *

Most bookstores have gone the way of just about everything else: Poof! Who still remembers Dodd's. Anyway, I'll confess: I eventually started cozying up with my Kindle. Easier. Cheaper. Anyway, brave souls. There's something to be said for community, finding a hard-to-get gem on the musty shelves, holding a real book in your hands. *

A Letter  ( Ein Brief ), usually known as  The Letter of Lord Chandos  or the  Chandos Letter , is a prose work written by  Hugo von Hofmannsthal  in 1902. It is in the form of a letter dated August 1603 from a writer named Lord Philip Chandos (a fictional character) to  Francis Bacon , and describes Chandos's crisis of language. Plot Summary The letter begins with a summary of the great literary feats that Chandos once achieved. Then Chandos writes of his current mental state. He has reached a crisis point in his career concerning  language  and its ability to adequately express the human experience. Chandos has abandoned all future written projects, which he once proposed with exuberance, because of his inability to express himself in a meaningful fashion. Chandos describes the development of his crisis in stages. First came the loss of the ability to conduct academic discourse on matters of  morality  or  philosophy . N...

So many great "bits" that the whole letter should be inserted here. I'll resist (plus the sharing app is giving me a problem). This is only the last few paragraphs and "sign off" (unformatted). * You were kind enough to express your regret that no more books by me have been arriving “to make up for the loss of our companionship.” When I read that, I knew—not without a pang—that I would write no books either in English or in Latin in the coming year, the years after that, or in all the years of this life of mine. There is only one reason for this, a strange and embarrassing one; I leave it to your infinite intellectual superiority to give it a place among what to your clear eyes is an orderly array of mental and physical phenomena. It is that the language in which I might have been granted the opportunity not only to write but also to think is not Latin or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mut...

Tried to get my mate to rewatch the movie with me last night, but she wasn't in the mood for sad she said. The book is largely bloodless, if the subject is a bit dark and sad. We watched Anthony's last Hurrah instead (a very fragmented side of NYC I was not that interested in). Anyway ... * It was in the Kronenhalle, on a Saturday evening, I remember it exactly. The place was full—everyone who was anybody in Zürich and up for a meal was there. Waitresses scurrying around, the food on the trolley steaming, and the rumble of traffic sounding in from the street. I was sitting under the Miró, all unsuspecting, eating my liver dumpling soup, when the sales representative of one of the big fuel companies came up to me, said hello, and sat down at my table, just like that. He was slightly drunk and in high spirits, ordered a marc and told me, laughing, that my former first lieutenant had changed his profession; that he had taken over a gas station in Graubünden, near Chur—a bu...

Sorry about the formatting. Interrupted The Pledge for Larkin's darkish poems. This one's "mild" and more about nature than his cynicism (though still there). I like the archaic "builded." * Cut Grass Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer’s pace.

Bit late in posting these: been busy. Too busy. The current state of affairs. Anyway, I just call it the Doggie Parade, but I guess it has a fancier name. We had fun. Someday, if he ever gets trained, we'll take Charlie.:) ***