Without Lifting A Finger

But what makes Montaigne a very great figure is that he succeeded, God knows how—for Montaigne very likely did not know that he had done it—it is not the sort of thing that men can observe about themselves, for it is essentially bigger than the individual's consciousness—he succeeded in giving expression to the scepticism of every human being. For every man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own scepticism, that which stops at the question, that which ends in denial, or that which leads to faith and which is somehow integrated into the faith which transcends it. And Pascal, as the type of one kind of religious believer, which is highly passionate and ardent, but passionate only through a powerful and regulated intellect, is in the first sections of his unfinished Apology for Christianity facing unflinchingly the demon of doubt which is inseparable from the spirit of belief.

Dropped Hawthorne for now (he just toured the no-longer Crystal Palace in London) and have picked up another Bernhard. Apparently his last novel. Extinction . * The epigraph is by Montaigne: I feel death ever pinching me by the throat, or pulling me by the back. * Two clips: I had given Gambetti five books that I thought would be useful and necessary to him in the next few weeks, telling him to read them slowly and carefully: Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, Kafka’s The Trial, Thomas Bernhard’s Amras, Musil’s The Portuguese Woman, and Broch’s Esch or Anarchy. * For a thinking person it is possible first to arrive at an ideal concept of art by way of nature, and then to arrive at the ideal contemplation of nature by way of the ideal concept of art.