Without Lifting A Finger

There were certainly many more "clips," but I read it quickly and was perhaps a bit lazy. I also watched the film (for the first time), trying to compare. Though I love Coetzee for his language, his stories always seem a bit too contrived. But who am I to criticize. *** Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: ‘Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.’ His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. * He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, whil...

That’s the way man is, cher monsieur . He has two faces: he can’t love without self-love. *   They need tragedy, don’t you know; it’s their little transcendence, their apéritif. *   “One doesn’t talk back to one’s father”—you know the expression? In one way it is very odd. To whom should one talk back in this world if not to what one loves? In another way, it is convincing. Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would never be an end to it. Power, on the other hand, settles everything.    

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.

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 ...

ee um fah um so foo swee too eem oo  

I paged through books in search of relief. I found Brecht’s lines about the city I was living in myself: Reflecting, so I hear, on hell  My brother Shelley found it to be a place  Much like the city of London. I  Who live not in London but in Los Angeles  Find, reflecting on hell, that it must be  Even more like Los Angeles.

Rereading "selectively." * I was amazed at how lovingly Alina looked at her husband. You can’t fake eyes like that. The riddle of Eva Braun. How can women sincerely love criminals, crooks, and ruffians? Will anybody ever be able to explain this?

Hadji Murat  (or alternatively  Hadji Murad , although the first spelling better captures the original title in  Russian :  Хаджи-Мурат [ Khadzhi-Murat ]) is a short novel written by  Leo Tolstoy  from 1896 to 1904 and published posthumously in 1912 (though not in full until 1917). The  protagonist  is  Hadji Murat , an  Avar  rebel commander who, for reasons of personal revenge, forges an uneasy alliance with the Russians he had been fighting. [Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadji_Murat_(novel)]