Without Lifting A Finger

I remembered Goethe’s Italian Journey which I had read, and Römer told me a great deal about the people and customs, and the past of Italy. He hardly ever read a book except for the German translation of Homer and an Italian edition of Ariosto. He asked me to read the Homer and I did not wait to be asked twice. To begin with, I could not get on with it; of course I thought it was all very beautiful, but I was too little used to a work of such simplicity and on so grand a scale, and I could not persevere with it for long at a time. But Römer pointed out to me how Homer, in every action and situation, used just what was necessary and appropriate, how every vessel and every article of clothing which he described was also at the same time in the finest taste imaginable, and finally how, with him, every situation and every moral conflict, though of an almost childlike simplicity, was steeped in the choicest poetry. ‘Nowadays people are always longing after what is exquisite, interesting and...

But the chief point was that he declared himself to be a scorner of women, and he waged continual war with them for trying, with their sensual allurement and their frivolity, to rob men of their virtue and their seriousness. As a Cynic, he was always pestering the women and girls with his unconventionalities; as an Epicurean, with erotic witticisms; and as a Stoic, he said rude things to them, but nevertheless, where three of them were gathered together, there he was always to be found.

Another fruitful source of strange tales was Roman Catholicism, with its legacy of deserted cloisters and the still surviving monasteries which were to be found here and there in the region that was still Catholic. To these tales the members of the orders inhabiting these monasteries contributed much, especially the Capuchin monks who to this day work hand in hand with the executioners in the exorcizing of devils, and in other such arts, among the superstitious peasants of the reformed faith. In a few remote districts at that time, there prevailed a spiritless, decayed type of Protestantism; the inhabitants did not hold themselves above the Catholics, looking down on them as deluded folk, but they faithfully shared their belief in all the fables, though they held them to be in substance evil and deserving of repudiation, and they did not laugh at Catholicism, rather they feared it as something sinister and heathenish. It was impossible for them to recognize a free thinker as a man who ...

A man always sets a double value on what Fate has deprived him of, and so my mother’s long tales used to fill me more and more with longing for the father who died before I knew him. My clearest recollection of him goes back, curiously, a full year before his death, to a single lovely moment when he carried me on his arm, one Sunday evening in the fields, pulled a potato plant out of the earth and showed me the little swelling tubers, already trying to awaken in me the knowledge and love of the Creator. I still see the green coat and the bright metal buttons close to my cheek, and his shining eyes which attracted my wondering gaze away from the green plant that he was holding aloft.

A bit scattered. The stepping stones pretty much go: Coleridge, D. Wordsworth, Keller, Solstad. * Excerpt from Solstad's Shyness & Dignity :      It was not that they were bored, it was rather that look of injury through which their boredom became manifest. There was nothing strange about being bored in a Norwegian class where a drama by Henrik Ibsen was being studied. They were, after all, eighteen-year-olds who were supposed to acquire a liberal education. They were youths who could not be viewed as fully developed individuals. To characterize them as immature, therefore, would not offend anyone, neither themselves nor those with authority over them, at any rate when considered from a sober and objective viewpoint. These immature individuals were placed in school in order to obtain knowledge about classical Norwegian literature, which it was his to offer them. He was, in fact, officially appointed to do just that. The main problem with such a job was tha...