Without Lifting A Finger

“Don’t you like music?” Franz asked. “No,” said Sabina, and then added, “though in a different era . . .” She was thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence. Noise masked as music had pursued her since early childhood. During her years at the Academy of Fine Arts, students had been required to spend whole summer vacations at a youth camp. They lived in common quarters and worked together on a steelworks construction site. Music roared out of loudspeakers on the site from five in the morning to nine at night. She felt like crying, but the music was cheerful, and there was nowhere to hide, not in the latrine or under the bedclothes: everything was in range of the speakers. The music was like a pack of hounds that had been sicked on her. At the time, she had thought that only in the Communist world could such musical barbarism reign supreme. Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noi...

Something else raised him above the others as well: he had an open book on his table. No one had ever opened a book in that restaurant before. In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

And it was her he was thinking of now, standing at the Bislett traffic circle, his hand bloody (ridiculous) from the ribs of the umbrella and himself at his wits’ end, not knowing which way to turn as he stood in the light rain that made little splashes of mud for the passing cars. The disaster had occurred. He knew that the principal would attempt to trivialize the whole affair and have the support of the faculty, who would attempt to persuade him to continue by saying that this was something that could have happened to anyone. But it had not happened to just anyone. It had happened to him, and for him it meant that he had fallen out. Fallen out of society, quite simply. He knew he would never again set foot in Fagerborg High School. Not in any other school either, in his capacity as a teacher. How, then, would she who was his wife be able to cope? She who had just started a three-year education at the College of Social Affairs and depended on his income? For this means it’s all over,...

What had made a young man with such hunger for life throw himself into the study of philosophy? Do those with the greatest zest for life often choose to study philosophy? If that is so, why do the ones with the greatest hunger for life choose human thought as their field? Instead of, say, studying to be engineers? When Elias Rukla thought about this, it struck him that those of his classmates from high school who had begun to study engineering were not noted for any exceptional zest for life, even though they had chosen a profession that would set them up for becoming men of action. They were the ones who would construct and build, get the wheels to roll and the machines to run, and make the people under them obey their orders, because unless they were obeyed, the wheels would not turn, the machines not run, and the buildings not be built, one might say. But on reflection, Elias found that the classmates who had now become engineers possessed no particular appetite for life at all, the...

They stormed into Krølle, which was Johan Corneliussen’s favorite restaurant at the time, five minutes before the downhill race started. This basement restaurant had a TV. It was enthroned on top of a cabinet on the wall. They sat down at one of the tables for two, Johan in such a way that he could look straight at the TV set, Elias directly across from him, so that he had to turn around to look at the same TV. The downhill race in St. Anton. One after another they turned up on the screen, in helmets and Alpine gear, before they threw themselves down the mountainsides of (or among) the Alps. Heini Messner, Austria. Jean-Claude Killy, France. Franz Vogler, West Germany. Leo Lacroix, France. Martin Heidegger, Germany. Edmund Husserl, Germany. Elias Canetti, Romania. Allen Ginsberg, USA. William Burroughs, USA. Antonio Gramsci, Italy. Jean-Paul Sartre, France. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austria. Johan Corneliussen knew the strengths and weaknesses of all the racers and continually informed Elia...

Perhaps I'm a bit late to the party, but today I thought I'd mention three book reviews that have been penned (quite generously) about some of my books throughout the years. The first two are online, so you can easily follow the links (see below): both were written by the author and co-publisher (with his wife Isabel) of the online journal Off Course , Ricardo Nirenberg. The first review Ricardo wrote was for my very first book: The Last Man (published in 2012). He writes that it's hard to decide which poem in the book is his favorite, but finally settles on "Algorithm" -- an early poem that I wrote while I was teaching high school mathematics. "It is hard or impossible to decide, yet -- for sentimental reasons, as the song goes -- I think one of my favorite pieces in this book is titled ALGORITHM." And then he includes the entire poem: ALGORITHM  Take any segment and drop out the middle third. Take the remaining thirds and repeat the process, i.e. take ...

In the middle of Act IV. Where Mrs. Sørbye appears in Ekdal’s home and announces that she is going to marry Werle, the merchant, and where Ekdal’s lodger Dr. Relling is present, and he read (himself, instead of asking one of his pupils to do it, which he did at times for the sake of appearances, but he preferred to do it himself): “Relling (with a slight tremor in his voice): This can’t possibly be true? Mrs. Sørbye: Yes, my dear Relling, indeed it is.” As he was reading he felt an unendurable excitement because all at once he thought he was on the track of something to which he had not previously paid any attention when trying to understand The Wild Duck. For twenty-five years he had gone through this drama by Henrik Ibsen with eighteen-year-olds in their last year of high school, and he had always had problems with Dr. Relling. He had not fully grasped what he was doing in the play. He had seen that his function was to proclaim elementary, unvarnished truths about the other character...

 

Relling.  So much the worse for him. Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke. [To HEDVIG, who comes in from the sitting-room.] Well, little wild-duck-mother, I'm just going down to see whether papa is still lying meditating upon that wonderful invention of his.

 

Rereading Ibsen's Wild Duck  as a prologue to rereading Dag Solstad's novel  Shyness & Dignity , and came across this childhood dream that the young Ibsen supposedly had. The Gustave Dore etching was a bonus.;) The Biblical Vision of Henrik Ibsen https://medium.com/christian-history-and-culture/the-biblical-vision-of-henrik-ibsen-d627a2ce758

From the beginning (first chapter) of Klaus Mann's autobiography: Memories are made of peculiar stuff, elusive and yet compelling, powerful and fleet. You cannot trust your reminiscences, and yet there is no reality except the one we remember. Every moment we pass through derives its meaning from the preceding one. There would be no present nor future if the past were blotted out in the minds of men. It is our capacity for recollection which stands between us and chaos — a rather fragile bulwark, we must admit.

The music began; the couples bowed and advanced and interchanged. The assistant postmaster directed the dance; great heavens, he was actually directing it in French, and pronouncing the nasal vowels with incomparable distinction! Ingeborg Holm was dancing just in front of Tonio Kröger, in the set nearest to the glass door. She moved to and fro in front of him, stepping and turning, forward and backward; often he caught a fragrance from her hair or from the delicate white material of her dress, and he closed his eyes, filled with an emotion so long familiar to him: during all these last days he had been faintly aware of its sharp enchanting flavor, and now it was welling up once more inside him in all its sweet urgency. What was it? Desire, tenderness? envy? self-contempt? . . . Moulinet des dames! Did you laugh, fair-haired Inge, did you laugh at me on that occasion, when I danced the moulinet and made such a miserable fool of myself ? And would you still laugh today, even now when I h...

Yesterday: Another Morning with the Glorious (and almost always Entertaining) Reddish Egret @ Bolsa Chica. Fishing is an Art Form. Enjoy your weekend!💗 #rlswihart  #bolsa  #bolsachicawetlands  #reddishegret  #fishingisanartform #egretsofinstagram  #poetry  #nature #beauty #readmorepoetry2025💗

A wonderful poem by Theodor Storm came into his mind: “I long to sleep, to sleep, but you must dance.” What a torment, what a humiliating contradiction it was to have to dance when one’s heart was heavy with love . . .

As he beheld the sweet youthful creature who had so entranced him he felt disgust at his own aging body, the sight of his gray hair and sharp features filled him with a sense of shame and hopelessness. He felt a compulsive need to refresh and restore himself physically; he paid frequent visits to the hotel barber. Cloaked in a hairdressing gown, leaning back in the chair as the chatterer’s hands tended him, he stared in dismay at his reflection in the looking glass. “Gray,” he remarked with a wry grimace. “A little,” the man replied. “And the reason? A slight neglect, a slight lack of interest in outward appearances, very understandable in persons of distinction, but not altogether to be commended, especially as one would expect those very persons to be free from prejudice about such matters as the natural and the artificial. If certain people who profess moral disapproval of cosmetics were to be logical enough to extend such rigorous principles to their teeth, the result would be rath...