February 2012
10 posts
“For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere,...”
– from My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
“The gratifying aspect of the image is that it constitutes a limit at the edge of...”
– from Two Versions of the Imaginary.
“Just as Houellebecq is obsessed with what he considers art’s inability to...”
– from Scott Esposito’s review at BookForum.
“A composer cannot be anxious, Massimo, he said. An artist cannot be anxious. To...”
– An extract from Infinity: The Story of a Moment published in The Reader Magazine No. 34
“I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has...”
– Letter to Max Brod, 1922.
“The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all...”
– From Experience.
“During my studies in Freiburg I found myself saying to a friend that if there is...”
– From the preface to The Bodily Dimension in Thinking by Daniela Vallega-Neu.
January 2012
11 posts
“To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which...”
– Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street.
“If … Derrida does not share the same theoretical assumption that makes any...”
– from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
“Told M. about the night, unsatisfactory. Accept your symptoms, don’t...”
– Kafka, 23 January 1922
“& what else do you need to know you are almost tempted to ask, it all can be...”
– from Flowerville
“Rereading these lines, I realize that I have already lost sight of Robert...”
– from On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race
“He discovered something about the space of the work that had to carry all the...”
– from The Experience of Proust
December 2011
5 posts
“When the book seemed to be going well: ‘there rises before me my special...”
– EM Forster in Concerning EM Forster by Frank Kermode
“If the question of the book achieves its greatest radicality in Mallarmé, it is...”
– from Jacques Rancière’s Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren.
“Today I got Kierkegaard’s Buch des Richters. As I suspected, despite...”
– Kafka, Diaries 1913.
“It wasn’t until I read your book on Romanticism that I began to understand...”
– Saul Bellow, writing to Owen Barfield in July 1975.
November 2011
8 posts
“Despair, more than any other feeling, establishes a correspondence between our...”
– from Tears & Saints, EM Cioran
“BERNHARD: By the way, I have still never been to a cemetery here. Do you want to...”
– A grave slip in a translation of Monologue auf Mallorca.
“I like it when people are making records because they have to be made.”
– John Peel, Desert Island Discs, 1990.
Q: The observations you made in Romanesque churches and monasteries in Italy, Spain, and France are important. This trip also seems to be a journey toward spirituality.
A: Spirituality is a word we should not use too often. But toward the spirit, yes. I have always thought it strange that Goethe, in his Trip to Italy, speaks with horror and rejection of the Romanesque figures in Verona and...
“Closeness and the power to communicate depend upon the force of separation; to...”
– Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, part III.
“There two recommended ways of telling children stories, but there are also a...”
– Kierkegaard, Papers & Journals, 1837
October 2011
5 posts
“Paradox is the intellectual life’s authentic pathos, and just as only...”
– From Kierkegaard’s Journals and the quotation gracing the homepage of D. Anthony Storm’s Commentary on Kierkegaard. Scroll to the final paragraph of the introduction to read a distressing update.
“I think continually of those last paintings, miracles of frenzied impotence,...”
– Beckett on the paintings of Bram van Velde, letter to Georges Duthuit, September 1951.
“She is his Dead Self: he is alive in her and dead in himself.”
– Henry James, Notebooks, February 1895.
September 2011
4 posts
“The letters show us an admirable human being, punctiliously polite to colleagues...”
– From Nicholas Grene’s review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956.
“Franz Kline: You don’t paint the way someone, observing your life, thinks...”
“Human beings are playthings. Our lives are prisons. When language is at our...”
– Abbé of Saint-Cyran, quoted in Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows.
August 2011
6 posts
“If one ceased publishing books in favour of communication by voice, image, or...”
– From The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot. Posted response to this continuing fatuity.
“When I ask myself what there may have been to show for my long tribulation, my...”
– Henry James, 11 August 1895
The title of [Peter Handke’s] first collection of poems, Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt (The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, 1969), implies the oscillation between subjective lyricism and objective empiricism that would become characteristic of Handke’s oeuvre.
Meister der Dämmerung, Malte Herwig’s engaging new biography, suggests that it is possible...
“I simply wish to argue that, in order to form an idea of the novel, it is...”
– from The Novel is a Work of Bad Faith (1947) by Maurice Blanchot (trans. Michael Holland)
July 2011
8 posts
The eye’s plain version is a thing apart, The vulgate of experience. Of this, A few words, and and yet, and yet, and yet –
Wallace Stevens
And yet. No ‘and yet’, no matter how anxiously and tensely you look at me.
Kafka