“Every European in India finds himself surrounded, whether he likes it or not, by a fair number of general manservants, called bearers. I cannot say whether their eagerness to serve is to be explained by the caste system, the tradition of social inequality or the demand for service on the part of the colonizers. However, their obsequiousness very quickly has the effect of making the atmosphere intolerable. If necessary, they would lie down on the ground to let you walk over them, and they suggest a bath ten times a day – if you blow your nose, eat fruit or dirty your fingers. Each time, they are there at once, begging for orders. There is something sexual in their anguished submission. And if your behaviour does not correspond to their expectations, if you do not behave on all occasions like their former British masters, their universe collapses: What, no pudding? A bath after dinner and not before? The world must be coming to an end . . . Dismay is written all over their faces. I would have quickly to countermand my original instructions, abandon my usual habits and forgo rare opportunities. I would eat a pear as hard as a stone or swallow slimy custard, since to ask for a pineapple would have caused the moral collapse of a fellow human being.”
(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman, p. 138.)
“We were then living in a strange period, such as usually succeeds revolutions or the decline of great reigns. It was no longer the gallant heroism of the Fronde, the elegant, dressed-up vice of the Regency, or the scepticism and insane orgies of the Directoire. It was an age in which activity, hesitation, and indolence were mixed up, together with dazzling Utopias, philosophies, and religious aspirations, vague enthusiasms, mild ideas of a Renaissance, weariness with past struggles, insecure optimisms – somewhat like the period of Peruginus and Apuleius. Material man longed for the bouquet of roses which would regenerate him from the hands of the divine Isis; the goddess in her eternal youth and purity appeared to us by night and made us ashamed of our wasted days. We had not reached the age of ambition, and the greedy scramble for honors and positions caused us to stay away from all possible spheres of activity. The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob. Led by our masters to those high places we breathed at last the pure air of solitude, we drank oblivion in the legendary golden cup, and we got drunk on poetry and love. Love, however of vague forms, of blue and rosy hues, of metaphysical phantoms! Seen at close quarters, the real woman revolted our ingenuous souls. She had to be a queen or goddess; above all, she had to be unapproachable.”
(Gérard de Nerval, “Sylvie: Recollections of Valois,” trans. Geoffrey Wagner, pp. 74–75 in the Exact Change Aurélia & Other Writings.)
“And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.”
(KJV)
“I hope better of the goodness of God. Perhaps we are approaching the predicted time when science, having completed its cycle of analysis and synthesis, of belief and negation, will be able to purify itself and raise up the marvelous city of the future out of the confused ruins . . . We must not hold human reason so cheap as to believe it gains by complete self-humiliation, for that would be to impeach its divine origin . . . God will no doubt appreciate purity of intention; and what father would like to see his son give up all reason and pride in front of him? The apostle who had to touch to believe was not cursed for his doubt!”
(Gérard de Nerval, “Aurélia,” trans. Geoffrey Wagner, p. 36 in the Exact Change Aurélia & Other Writings.)
“The premium on conciseness and concreteness made proper names a great value – so they came flying at you as if out of a tennis-ball machine: Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American), Hassan. Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision: On the one hand, the cat called King Spanky; on the other, the cat called Cat. In either case, the result somehow seemed false, contrived – unlike Tolstoy’s double Alexeis, and unlike Chekhov’s characters, many of whom didn’t have names at all. In ‘Lady With Lapdog,’ Gurov’s wife, Anna’s husband, Gurov’s crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog. They were too caught up in trying to bootstrap from a proper name to a meaningful individual essence – like the ‘compassionate’ TV doctor who informs her colleagues: ‘She has a name.&rlquo; ”
(Elif Batuman, from “Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar”.)
“But this knowledge of history did not deflect my sadness. She saw my whole despair and, one afternoon as I returned home from the club, she said: “Perhaps even now it is not too late. Change style. Learn to snap. Leave government service, plunge into jungles of commerce.”
(Donald Barthelme, “Snap Snap,” Guilty Pleasures, p. 33.)
“INTERVIEWER [Terry Southern]: And yet, as I understand this theory, its success does not depend upon any actual sensory differences between people talking, but rather upon psychological or emotional differences between them as readers, isn’t that so? I’m referring to the serious use of this theory in communicative writing.
GREEN: People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. After all, we don’t write letters now, we telephone. And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore.”
(Henry Green’s Paris Review interview, from summer 1958.)
“ ‘And then eloping’s out of date, it went out with horses.’
‘Oh dear now they’re all eaten poor things.’
‘Too many people on this island keep carnivorous pets Mary,’ he replied. ‘The waste is fearful.’ ”
(Henry Green, Nothing, p. 87.)
“Not that Mr Pomfret appeared to pay heed. A pale smile was stuck across his face while he looked about as though to receive tribute. But the attention of almost everyone in that room was still fixed on the awkward happy couple, and Elaine Winder smacked their backs and generally behaved as if she were in at a kill.”
(Henry Green, Nothing, p. 78.)
“It’s a curse of our culture, this addiction to smartness and knowingness. It’s not just Tarantino. Look at MTV. Look at Spy magazine. Look at the ads in The Sunday Times Magazine. What’s so great about being so knowing, so smug, so cocky? Why do we want to be cool and ironic? Why are we so afraid of emotions? It’s an American disease. Our emotions can help us out of traps. Emotions are the way of truth. We need works of art that defeat our intellectual and emotional habits, that force us to see and feel freshly. We need an education in emotion. That’s why we have artists. They can be our teacher, if we are willing to let them.”
(Ray Carney, “Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Contemporary Film,” p. 49 in The Baffler #8, 1996)