War & Peace: Prince Andrei

"Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for those who hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God preached on earth and which Princess Mary taught me and I did not understand--that is what made me sorry to part with life, that is what remained for me had I lived. But now it is too late. I know it!"

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Tarkovsky's Death and the Film "Stalker"

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TÜBINGEN, JANUARY by Paul Celan

T Ü BINGEN, JANUARY Eyes talked in- to blindness. Their  -- "a riddle, what is pure- ly arisen" --, their memory of floating H ö lderlintowers, gull- enswirled. Visits of drowned joiners to these plunging words: Came, if there came a man, came a man to the world, today, with the patriarchs' light-beard: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, ever- ever- moremore. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")* * Pallaksch A word that H ö lderlin, spending his last years in the home of a T ü bingen carpenter, was given to uttering in his dementia; it could signify Yes or No. [Poem Translated by John Felstiner; the explanation of Pallaksch is also from his "Notes" in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan ]  
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Hitchcock's Soda City

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Coetzee's "Costello": Koba the Bear and Paul West

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Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil . Ok, but not my fave chapter: traverses an age-old subject and doesn't turn up much that is new (I mean Hannah Arendt new). One bit I dog-eared (also threw a Howgarthian line in with an exclamation mark) because I liked it so much (especially if I could widen its scope). The underlining is mine:    The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus  that has marked her thinking of late:  the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour; it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. Specifically, she is no longer sure that people are
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