Without Lifting A Finger

“But those orange trees were planted,” said Judith. “They’re not nature.” “When the sun shines through and plays in the leaves, I forget that,” said John Ford. “I also forget myself and my existence. Then I wish that nothing would ever change, that the leaves would go on moving forever, that the oranges would never be picked and everything would stay just the way it is.” “Then I suppose you’d like people to go on living as they have always lived?” Judith asked. John Ford gave her a gloomy look. “Yes,” he said. “We would. Up to a century ago the people who thought about progress were the people who had the power to bring it about. Until recently new ideas originated with the powerful; with princes, industrialists, public benefactors. Today the men with power have ceased to be benefactors of mankind; at best they do things that benefit certain individuals. Today all the new ideas come from the poor and powerless. The men with the power to change anything have stopped thinking. So no chan...

: ... it was as though a whole nation had set its lips to a giant flute—a long-drawn-out screech so bestial and brutal, but at the same time, what with the billowing clouds of black smoke and the vastness of the Mississippi, so proud, so grandiose, that, embarrassed and yet bodily shaken, I could only look off to one side. So overpowering was that signal that, splintered by fear, I lived a dream of America that up until then I had only heard about. It was a moment of expertly organized resurrection, in which the things around me ceased to be unrelated, and people and landscape, the living and the dead, took their places in a single painful and theatrical revelation of history. Theatrically flowed the Mississippi, theatrically the tourists moved from deck to deck, while an old man’s deep, far-carrying voice told the story of the great riverboats over the loudspeaker: the new era of travel and commerce they had initiated, steamboat races, black slaves loading firewood by the light of the...

When the child saw a representation of nature, one of the painter’s pictures, for example, she never thought of asking whether there really was such a scene, and if so where, because the copy had replaced the original forever. I remembered that, unlike her, I myself as a child had always wanted to know where the object represented actually was. In our house, for instance, there was an oil painting of a glacier landscape with a mountain hut at the lower edge. I had always been convinced that this landscape and this hut existed in nature; I even thought I knew where the painter must have stood, and when someone told me the picture was pure imagination I couldn’t believe it.

I kept looking to see when the Ohio license plates would give way to Indiana plates, when instead of THE BUCKEYE STATE the plates on the cars we passed would say something else. Then there began to be more and more cars from THE HOOSIER STATE. Once we were in Indiana, the dry mud began to flake off my trousers, but still my impatience grew; I counted the milestones that still separated us from Indianapolis, because they were the only sign of change in the unchanging landscape.

Suddenly it seemed to me that the country we had been driving through was country that one could also arrive in.

“I’ve lost interest in buying clothes,” I said. “I hardly look at shop windows any more. In the past I wanted to wear something different every day, now I wear the same thing for months. As for my shirt, there was no laundry service at the hotel yesterday.” “What have you got in your bag?” Claire asked. “Underwear and books,” I said. “What are you reading now?” “Green Heinrich by Gottfried Keller.” She hadn’t read it and I said I’d read parts of it to her. “Maybe tonight, before we go to bed,” she said. “Where will that be?” I asked. “In Donora, south of Pittsburgh,” she said. “I know a motel there, it’s off the road, it will be quieter for the child. I hope we get that far, it’s almost three hundred miles and the Allegheny Mountains are in between. Have you learned to drive in the meantime?” “No,” I said. “Never again will I let anybody examine me. The thought of someone asking me questions and making something depend on my answers has become intolerable to me. In the past, say ten ye...

The child had her first schoolday toward the end of winter, in midterm. This had not been planned by the adult, it just happened. The school also happened to be a special sort of school—intended, that is, only for children of the one “people” deserving of the name, the people of which, long before its dispersion to the four corners of the earth, it was said that, even “without prophets,” “without sacrifices,” “without idols”—and even “without names”—it would still be a “people”; and whom, in the words of a later biblical scholar, those wishing to know “the tradition,” the “oldest and strictest law in the world” would be obliged to consult. It was the only actual “people” to which the adult had ever wished to belong.

Besides, it was plain that some of the children, even the smallest, were not right for one another. There may have been no “wicked” ones, but certainly all were not “innocent” (at the most, there were some who had started at an early age to wash their hands in innocence). All knew what was wrong and did wrong, not only in passion but also with premeditation, yet even then without consciousness of wrongdoing—with the result that their actions were often more sinister than those of the most sordid scoundrels, and just as revolting. It couldn’t be denied that among the children—regardless of sex—there were some who from the start were quite at their ease playing the executioner in word and deed, with the adults looking on; they performed their act of destruction with cool expertness and when it was done walked calmly away as from an official function. And it was equally unquestionable that none of the children liked being scolded, made fun of, or beaten—in other words, victimized.

He was later to come into contact with far worse prophets of childlessness, singly and in pairs. For the most part they were sharp-sighted, and thanks to their own terrifying freedom from guilt, they were able to say in technical language what was wrong with the child-parent relationship; some of them actually made a profession of their insight. In love with their own childhood and its continuance, they proved on closer acquaintance to be grownup monsters. After every encounter with them, it took the man a long time to purge his mind and soul of their analytical certainties, which cut into him like cankers. He cursed those mean, self-righteous prophets as the scum of modern times, and swore to hate them and combat them forever. The ancient dramatist supplied him with the appropriate curse for them: “Children are the soul of all men. He who has not learned this suffers less, but his well-being is of the wrong kind.” (Something else again, it goes without saying, is the good-hearted, lov...

Yes, I wanted to tell a story (and I enjoyed studying dissertations). For often, in reading and writing, I had seen the truth of storytelling as a clarity in which one sentence calmly engenders another and in which the truth—the insight that came before the story—is perceptible only as a gentle something in the transitions between sentences. Moreover, I knew that reason forgets, the imagination never. For a time I thought of treating particular aspects—the mountain and me, the pictures and me—and setting them down side by side as unconnected fragments. But then I rejected such fragmentary treatment because it would have resulted not from a possibly unsuccessful striving for unity but from a deliberate method, known in advance to be safe. Then, in Grillparzer’s The Poor Minstrel, I read: “I trembled with a longing for unity.” A desire for the One in All was rekindled in me. For I knew that unity is possible. Every single moment of my life hangs together with every other—without intermed...

The mountain comes into sight before you even get to Le Tholonet. It is bare and monochrome, more radiance than color. The outlines of clouds can sometimes be mistaken for high mountains: here it is the other way around.

There is a painting by Cézanne which has been referred to as The Great Pine. (He himself never gave his paintings titles, and seldom signed one.) It shows a tall, solitary pine by the Arc River southeast of Aix. This was the river of his childhood. After bathing, he and his childhood friends would sit in its shade; later, at the age of twenty, he asked Emile Zola, who had been one of these friends, in a letter: “Do you remember the pine on the bank of the Arc?” He even wrote a poem to the tree. In it the mistral blows through the bare branches; and the picture, too, suggests the wind, particularly in the way the lone tree slants. That tree, more than just about anything else, might be titled: “Out in the Open.” It transforms the ground from which it rises into a plateau, while the branches, twisted in all directions, and the infinitely varied green of its coat make the empty space around it vibrate. The Great Pine is depicted in other paintings, but never is it so solitary. In one of t...

Like primeval man, he moved on to partake elsewhere of the daylight that was beginning anew on every object. The eyeball of a man coming toward him, a shimmering metal box, and the pale moon seemed joined into a triangle. Too much light.

Sorger had gone outside with the cat, which was following him and seemed that day “to know a thing or two.” On the beach, sticks of driftwood had been set down, or perhaps been accidentally washed ashore, in a circle. It occurred to him that the Indians might have made these circles to demarcate themselves from this holiday and what it commemorated, and at that point the whole settlement struck him as a secret magic circle in which he, now initiated, was making his last rounds.

Even in his work, he preferred drawing to photography, because it was only through drawing that he came to understand the landscape in all its forms; he was invariably surprised to see how many forms revealed themselves in what seemed at first sight to be a dull and monotonous vista. A place took on meaning for him only when he drew it line for line—as faithfully as possible, without the schematizations and omissions that had become customary in his science—and it was only then that he could claim with a clear conscience, if only to himself, to have been there.

A letter box in classic yellow, as tall as a man, with two slots, one for local mail, the other for all points of the compass, stood outside on the pavement, within easy reach. From his seat by the window, open to the summer air, he could have thrust his letter through the open window into the ‘all points’ slot. But he just sat there and observed the letter box, as well as the activity around it. As night closed in, the number of people posting letters increased. Then came a period during which they streamed to the box from all sides, one after the other, finally clustering around the box, forming a queue, especially in front of the slot for long-distance and foreign post. Letters to official agencies and so on, with pre-printed addresses, were in the minority; most of the envelopes displayed handwriting. So after an era in which letter- writing had dried up. seemingly for good, letters were being written again. Can you believe it? The crowd grew larger and larger. ‘End of days?’ The f...

 ‘The last human being,’ the actor said to himself, ‘one way or other. Is this supposed to mean that we humans are done for, I and the others, the world of human beings? Is that possible? Is that permissible? Can it be true? No, it mustn’t be true, mustn’t be true.’ And then: ‘Watch what you’re blabbering about, even if only to yourself. Blabbering is not merely blabbering, saying is not merely saying; words, even those that go unspoken, are not merely words. Hush, my friend!’

In my reading I've passed from Ishiguro's Floating World to Handke's Great Fall. Not that Floating World wasn't thought-provoking: I guess I was just too lazy to post any excerpts.:) &&& The bursting of jewelweed if one barely brushed against it: a temporal threshold in the year, in the summer, as the hazel catkins, which had just opened, drifting in the otherwise imperceptible breeze, marked a temporal threshold in early spring, and the gentle crunching of nut shells marked a temporal threshold in early autumn. Once he had been aware of innumerable such temporal thresholds in the year. But meanwhile he had forgotten them all. He no longer knew them, or did not want to know them; for him, they had lost their meaning. There remained only one temporal threshold he could not and did not want to forget: the circling of an eagle, high up and higher still in the sky, calm spirals in the blue, drifting away and finally returning and circling again, while down on th...

Bloch noticed that each time he mentioned something and talked about it, the two of them countered with a story about their own experiences with the same or a similar thing or with a story they had heard about it. For instance, if Bloch talked about the ribs he had broken while playing, they told him that a few days ago one of the workers at the sawmill had fallen off a lumber pile and broken his ribs; and if Bloch then mentioned that his lips had had to be stitched more than once, they answered by talking about a fight on TV in which a boxer’s eyebrows had been split open; and when Bloch told how once he had slammed into a goalpost during a lunge and split his tongue, they immediately replied that the schoolboy also had a cleft tongue.

Downloaded this novella because Handke alluded to Morike and this was all that's available. Morike was known more as a poet, but he wrote this little piece. The only piece on Kindle available in English. I visited the Mozart Museum in Prague more than 20 years ago, so I thought I'd give it a try. Very short. Already half way through. * ‘It’s seventeen years now since I saw Italy. What man who has seen it, and seen Naples above all, does not remember it for the rest of his life, even if, like myself, he was still half a child at the time! But scarcely ever have I experienced so vivid a recollection of that beautiful evening by the Gulf as today, in your garden. Every time I closed my eyes, there it was – quite plain and clear and bright, its last veil lifting and drifting away, that heavenly panorama spread out before me! The sea and the sea-shore, the mountain and the city, the motley crowd of people on the embankment, and then that wonderful complicated game with the b...