Without Lifting A Finger

"To be sure, we're too near the stage, and one is beginning to get sick of Sarah Bernhardt. But you expressed a wish that I should come. And your wish is my command. I'm only too glad to be able to do you this little service. What would one not do to please you, you are so kind." And he went on, "Sarah Bernhardt -- she's what they call the Golden Voice, isn't she? They say she sets the house on fire. That's an odd expression, isn't it?" in the hope of an enlightening commentary which, however, was not forthcoming.

When, before turning to leave the church, I genuflected before the altar, I was suddenly aware of a bittersweet scent of almonds emanating from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed on the flowers themselves little patches of a creamier colour, beneath which I imagined that this scent must lie concealed, as the taste of an almond cake lay beneath the burned parts, or that of Mlle Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their freckles. Despite the motionless silence of the hawthorns, this intermittent odour came to me like the murmuring of an intense organic life with which the whole altar was quivering like a hedgerow explored by living antennae, of which I was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging insects now transmuted into flowers.

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, except what lay in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its ori...

I've heard it never reads the same way twice.:) * "Come along and sit down here with us all on the verandah," said my grandfather, coming up to him. My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like good poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines. *  "I don't deny it," answered Swann in some bewilderment. "The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it, oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt ...

I called Peter Gutman. How does it happen, I asked him, that our civilization brings forth monsters? Thwarted life, he said. What else. Thwarted lives. I don’t know, I said. Maybe we’re born monsters? A storm is blowing from paradise, Peter Gutman said. It pushes the angel of history backward ahead of it. But it doesn’t turn him into a monster. But he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head, I said. No, he doesn’t, Peter Gutman said. That’s just it: he’s blind. Blind to history, I said. Blind to horrors, if you prefer, Madame. Thank you very much, I said and hung up. I thought: Being blind to horrors would be a good thing, who could live keeping all the horrors in mind. There has to be something like an expelling, extruding, exorcising of horror, I thought. I remembered how you couldn’t stop picturing your cleaning woman’s young son who had gotten stuck under a raft while swimming in the Warta and drowned, and how his mother had had to watch when they pulled the dead boy out of th...

Finished with Frisch (for now). Moving on to another favorite: Buchner's Lenz . I took just a few "clips." I always love Montauk . * Lynn will not get to know what his vice is. There will not be time for that. It needs a marriage, a long one, to reveal it . . . I did not turn her into a maidservant (I occasionally washed the dishes, carried out the trash cans, did the shopping, etc.) and I have never struck the woman I love. Her complaint is a different one, and it is deserved. It took me a year to see it. At first I thought her verdict grotesque: it was that in ten years I had done nothing to help her develop her potentialities. I lavished every attention on her: the easiest way of treating a woman, and the worst. I can see that. Her reproach strikes home, but not in the way she meant it. Obviously, I have been acting from the very start as if I were God Almighty, or at least Adam, from whose rib Woman was made: COME, FOLLOW, AND I WILL LEAD! This woman is not un...

Lynn will not get to know what his vice is. There will not be time for that. It needs a marriage, a long one, to reveal it . . . I did not turn her into a maidservant (I occasionally washed the dishes, carried out the trash cans, did the shopping, etc.) and I have never struck the woman I love. Her complaint is a different one, and it is deserved. It took me a year to see it. At first I thought her verdict grotesque: it was that in ten years I had done nothing to help her develop her potentialities. I lavished every attention on her: the easiest way of treating a woman, and the worst. I can see that. Her reproach strikes home, but not in the way she meant it. Obviously, I have been acting from the very start as if I were God Almighty, or at least Adam, from whose rib Woman was made: COME, FOLLOW, AND I WILL LEAD! This woman is not ungrateful, but desperate. What I had imagined to be our years of happiness suddenly seem like lost years. My vice: MALE CHAUVINISM. What else but my att...

Have lost track of how many times I've read Frisch's Man in the Holocene , but as with all my faves I find something new every time. Liked it so much I've continued on with another Frisch: Montauk . What's below are two "clips" I couldn't resist from Holocene. I have been to Frisch's Berzona, so I could feel it all the more. * Later in the day there is more thunder; and shortly afterward, hail. The white stones, some of them the size of hazelnuts, dance on the granite table; in a few minutes the lawn is a white sheet, all Geiser can do is stand at the window and watch the vine being torn to shreds, the roses, too— There is nothing to do but read. (Novels are no use at all on days like these, they deal with people and their relationships, with themselves and others, fathers and mothers and daughters or sons, lovers, etc., with individual souls, usually unhappy ones, with society, etc., as if the place for these things were assured, the earth for ...

The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.” “That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said.

Solemnly, and with ceremony, the vote was taken. “We stay here,” Irmgard said, with firmness. “In this apartment, in this building.” Roy Baty said, “I vote we kill Mr. Isidore and hide somewhere else.” He and his wife—and John Isidore—now turned tautly toward Pris. In a low voice Pris said, “I vote we make our stand here.” She added, more loudly, “I think J. R.’s value to us outweighs his danger, that of his knowing. Obviously we can’t live among humans without being discovered; that’s what killed Polokov and Garland and Luba and Anders. That’s what killed all of them.” “Maybe they did just what we’re doing,” Roy Baty said. “Confided in, trusted, one given human being who they believed was different. As you said, special.” “We don’t know that,” Irmgard said. “That’s only a conjecture. I think they, they—” She gestured. “Walked around. Sang from a stage like Luba. We trust—I’ll tell you what we trust that fouls us up, Roy; it’s our goddamn superior intelligence!” She glared at her h...

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people. (According to Freudiger’s calculations about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish Councils. This is of course a mere estimate, which, however, oddly jibes with the rather reliable figures we have from Holland and which I owe to Dr. L. de Jong, the head of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. In Holland, where the Joodsche Raad like all the Dutch authorities very quickly became an “instrument of the Nazis,” 103,000 Jews were deported to the death camps and some five thousand to Theresienst...

Oz was OK, but I eventually got tired of it: weaving (and never leaving) a lot of the same material over and over. A short novel but a lot seemed like filler. And the tease between Atalia and Shmuel: OK, I guess, but it too sometimes felt like filler. Now Borges' little "Three Versions of Judas" -- that's a nut to keep returning to (see "clip" below). From Borges Judas: The Ending:      Drunk with sleeplessness and his dizzying dialectics, Nils Runeberg wandered the streets of Malmo, crying out for a blessing -- that he be allowed to share the Inferno with the Redeemer.      He died of a ruptured aneurysm on March 1, 1912. Heresiologists will perhaps remember him: he added to the concept of the Son, which might have been thought long spent, the complexities of misery and evil.  

The progress of his disease was so gradual that he could deceive himself when comparing one day with another-the difference was so slight. But when he consulted the doctors it seemed to him that he was getting worse, and even very rapidly. Yet despite this he was continually consulting them. That month he went to see another celebrity, who told him almost the same as the first had done but put his questions rather differently, and the interview with this celebrity only increased Ivan Ilych's doubts and fears. A friend of a friend of his, a very good doctor, diagnosed his illness again quite differently from the others, and though he predicted recovery, his questions and suppositions bewildered Ivan Ilych still more and increased his doubts. A homeopathist diagnosed the disease in yet another way, and prescribed medicine which Ivan Ilych took secretly for a week. But after a week, not feeling any improvement and having lost confidence both in the former doctor's treatment an...

`What should I do? Trust Shamil and go back to him? He is a fox and would play me false. And even if he did not, I could still not submit to this ginger-haired double-dealer. I could not because, now that I have been with the Russians, he will never trust me again,' thought Hadji Murad. And he recalled the Tavlistan folk-tale about the falcon which was caught, lived among people and then returned to his home in the mountains. The falcon returned wearing jesses on his legs and there were bells still on them. And the falcons spurned him. `Fly back to the place where they put silver bells on you,' they said. ' we have no bells, nor do we have jesses.' The falcon did not want to leave his homeland and stayed. But the other falcons would not have him and tore him to death. Just as they will tear me to death, thought Hadji Murad.

In her letter Peter's mother first sent him her blessing, then greetings from everybody and the news of his godfather's death, and at the end she added that Aksinya (Peter's wife) had not wished to stay with them but had gone into service, where they heard she was living honestly and well. Then came a reference to the present of a ruble, and finally a message which the old woman, yielding to her sorrows, had dictated with tears in her eyes and the church clerk had taken down exactly, word for word: "One thing more, my darling child, my sweet dove, my own Peterkin! I have wept my eyes out lamenting for thee, thou light of my eyes. To whom has thou left me? . . . " At this point the old woman had sobbed and wept, and said: "That will do!" So the words stood in the letter; but it was not fated that Peter should receive the news of his wife's having left home, nor the present of the ruble, nor his mother's last words. The letter with the money in...

6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if Tony And there the photocopy—this version of a version—stopped. “So, for instance, if Tony”: end of the line, bottom of the page. If I hadn’t immediately recognised Adrian’s handwriting, I might have thought this cliffhanger a part of some elaborate fakery concocted by Veronica. But I didn’t want to think about her—not for as long as it was possible to avoid doing so. Instead I tried to concentrate on Adrian and what he was doing. I don’t know how best to put this, but as I looked at that photocopied page I didn’t feel as if I was examining some historical document—one, moreover, requiring considerable exegesis. No, I felt as if Adrian was present in the room again, beside me, breathing, thinking. And how admirable he remained. I have at times tried to imagine the despair...

Another good "clip" from Sense of an Ending . And a mysterious night viewing of the Severn Bore. For the third time (promise it's the last): Sorry for the Kindle jumble. * I don’t want to give the impression that all I did at Bristol was work and see Veronica. But few other memories come back to me. One that does—one single, distinct event—was the night I witnessed the Severn Bore. The local paper used to print a timetable, indicating where best to catch it and when. But the first occasion I tried, the water didn’t seem to be obeying its instructions. Then, one evening at Minsterworth, a group of us waited on the riverbank until after midnight and were eventually rewarded. For an hour or two we observed the river flowing gently down to the sea as all good rivers do. The moon’s intermittent lighting was assisted by the occasional explorations of a few powerful torches. Then there was a whisper, and a craning of necks, and all thoughts of damp and cold vanished as t...

Meanwhile he was a husband. Perhaps his union should have been emphasized before. The crown of life had been attained, the vague yearnings, the misread impulses, had found accomplishment at last. Never again must he feel lonely, or as one who stands out of the broad highway of the world and fears, like poor Shelley, to undertake the longest journey. So he reasoned, and at first took the accomplishment for granted. But as the term passed he knew that behind the yearning there remained a yearning, behind the drawn veil a veil that he could not draw. His wedding had been no mighty landmark: he would often wonder whether such and such a speech or incident came after it or before. Since that meeting in the Soho restaurant there had been so much to do — clothes to buy, presents to thank for, a brief visit to a Training College, a honeymoon as brief. In such a bustle, what spiritual union could take place? Surely the dust would settle soon: in Italy, at Easter, he might perceive the infin...

The rain increased. The drops pattered hard on the leaves, and outside the corridor men and women were struggling, however stupidly, with the facts of life. Inside it they wrangled. She teased the boy, and laughed at his theories, and proved that no man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour. Suddenly she stopped, not through any skill of his, but because she had remembered some words of Bacon: “The true atheist is he whose hands are cauterized by holy things.” She thought of her distant youth. The world was not so humorous then, but it had been more important. For a moment she respected her companion, and determined to vex him no more. They left the shelter of the laurels, crossed the broad drive, and were inside the house at last. She had got quite wet, for the weather would not let her play the simple life with impunity. As for him, he seemed a piece of the wet. “Look here,” she cried, as he hurried up to his attic, “don’t shave!” He was delighted with the permission. “I ha...

In my dreams I am again in the desert, plodding through endless space towards an obscure goal. I sigh and wet my lips. “What is that noise?” I ask when the guard brings my food. They are tearing down the houses built against the south wall of the barracks, he tells me: they are going to extend the barracks and build proper cells. “Ah yes,” I say: “time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.” He does not understand. * I cannot save the prisoners, therefore let me save myself. Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.