Without Lifting A Finger

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...

Finished with Frisch's Homo Faber . Started re-reading Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (via Kindle). Have also put Junger's Storm of Steel aside (don't worry, I'll come back to it--learned yesterday that Junger also visited Heidegger in Todtnauberg) in order to read a selection of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's writings (of course I was after his famous Ein Brief = A Letter, aka "The Lord Chandos Letter," but the volume from NYRB, intro by John Banville, threw in more than that). I've already read "A Letter" (which I already knew about some--because of Coetzee and my own stumbling research). The translator is also the "arranger" (Joel Rotenberg) of the selected writings, and he elected to put it last: Since this is a selection, the fourteen pieces are arranged according to my own notions of drama and pacing, rather than chronologically. In particular, "A Letter" appears to deliver a verdict on Hofmannsthal...

Ein Brief (also called "Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon") is a fictitious letter written by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Gutenberg has the entire letter in German: http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/997/1 Here is the section of the letter (it's jpeg thus a bit blurry) that prefaces Coetzee's postscript (another fictitious letter authored by Coetzee--or is it Coetzee's Costello--and titled "Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon): And here is Coetzee's translation (presumably): At such moments even a negligible creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart track winding over a hill, a mossy stone, counts more for me than a night of bliss with the most beautiful, most devoted mistress. These dumb and in some cases inanimate creatures press toward me with such fullness, such presence of love, that there is nothing in range of my rapturous eye that does not have life. It is as if everything, everythi...