“Great Expectations and Middlemarch can’t be done now. They don’t feel to me like the atmosphere I’m living in now. I’m with William Carlos Williams and Joyce and others; whatever I’m ‘saying’ I have to give the feeling of time now, the multiple disastrous world now, the world that came awfully and finally out of World War II. But Great Expectations and Middlemarch – they show people losing their true centers, going after money or status or displaced ideals, letting errors multiply, self-deception, self-punishment even. Great novels. I reread them. They move me. They add to me. I see how the whole thing works out (more maybe than any book can pretend to today) – but it is that whole process that adds to me, not an abstractable credo or assent. A novel isn’t a sermon or a moral program – excuse the truism. My step-grandfather, who came from Maine, thought the old copybook maxims were the way to teach you how to live. I thought about this, this conviction of his; but the fact that it was a conviction of his told me more than any of the actual maxims ever could.”
(Joseph McElroy, interview with Tom LeClair in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983), p. 246.)
“Desire, therefore, can be useful to the man of letters, first by keeping him at a distance from other men and from resembling them, then by restoring some movement to a spiritual machine which otherwise, beyond a certain age, tends to seize up. None of this makes us happy, but we can examine the reasons that keep us from being so, reasons which would have remained hidden from us if not for these sudden irruptions of disappointment. And dreams cannot be made real, we know that; still, perhaps we would not form any without desire, and it is useful to have dreams so that we can see their collapse and learn from it.”
(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 166.)
“That was all I had noticed, apart from a strongly modelled nose (very unusual in young girls), recalling the beak of a baby vulture.”
(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 124. Cf. the Moncrieff/Kilmartin version.)
“Or rather, wasn’t Françoise somehow enclosed within me, for distinctions between people and their interactions hardly exist in that sepia darkness where reality is no more translucent than in the body of a porcupine, and where our minimal perceptions can perhaps give an idea of those of certain animals?”
(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 109.)
“ ‘I wonder,’ Howard said. ‘You have to believe, and then it will help you. It’s the same with the Lord. If you belief in the Lord, then there is a Lord for you; if you don’t believe in Him, there is no God for you – nobody who lights up the stars for you and directs the traffic in the heavens. Now, don’t let’s argue about such details; let’s come to the plain story.’ ”
(B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, p. 187.)
“ ‘Conscience,’ he began again reflecting on this word and speaking to himself, ‘conscience! What a thing! If you believe that there is such a thing as conscience, it will pester you and blast hell out of you, but, on the other hand, if you don’t believe in the existence of conscience, what can it do to you? And I don’t believe in it any more than I believe in hell. Makes me sick, so much thinking and fussing about nonsense. Let’s hit the hay.’ &rdquo
(B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, p. 248.)
“The principal influence on the origin of dialogue as a genre was of course Socrates: his associates wanted to bear testimony to the personality and teachings of a man who refused to write anything himself and whose philosophic ideals – in theory, at any rate – were of cooperative dialectic. Yet tensions between dialogue and democracy are immediately apparent in Socrates’ activities. In Plato’s Protagoras, the character of Socrates insists on conversing by way of short question and answer; yet in the Gorgias, we are told that such a method (brachylogy) is impossible with a large audience and can only take place with a select few. So Socratic dialectic, which arguably could not have flourished outside a democratic context, is nevertheless a pursuit of the leisured elite.
When we consider Plato himself, the most brilliant practitioner of the dialogue genre, the tensions and ironies multiply. Quite apart from the general irony that all dialogues written by a single author are in a sense monologues, Plato was one of democracy’s most implacable critics, and one of the central reasons for his hostility was that the Athenian democracy had put Socrates to death – at least partly, it could be claimed, because of the way he did dialogue, interrogating self-appointed experts and deflating their pretensions to knowledge. Yet Book One of the Republic can itself be read as an implicit critique of the historical Socrates’ style of dialogue (and of course Plato’s works do not just consist of brief question and answer: there are plenty of longer speeches, including, with tongue doubtless in cheek, one in the Protagoras about the origins of brachylogy). Furthermore, to add an extra layer to the complexity, Plato’s own dialogues, including the Republic, would almost certainly not be permitted into the ‘ideally just’ (and certainly not democratic) state outlined in the Republic: they break many of the censorship rules laid down there. Plato’s dialogues, in other words, simultaneously arise from the culture of democratic Athens and offer a robust critique of that culture, and would be banned by the philosopher-rulers whom Plato (apparently) advocates instead.”
(from Angela Hobbs, “Too much talking in class”, review of The End of Dialogue in Antiquity, ed. Simon Goldhill, p. 17 in the 18 & 25 Dec 2009 TLS.)
“They went up the river on the right shore. The whole road, an ugly dirt road at that, was covered with crude oil. It seemed to break through cracks and holes in the ground. There were even pools and ponds of oil. It came mostly through leaks in the pipes and from overflowing tanks which were lined up on the hills along the shore. Brooks of crude oil ran down like water into the river. Nobody seemed to care about the loss of these thousands and thousands of barrels of oil, which soaked the soil and polluted the river. So rich in oil was this part of the world then that the company managers and directors seemed not to mind when a well which brought in twenty thousand barrels a day caught fire and burned down to its last drop. Who would care about three or four hundred thousand barrels of oil running away ever week and being lost owing to busted pump lines, to filling tanks carelessly, or to not notifying the pumpman that while he has been pumping for days, sections of the pipe lines have been taken out, to be replaced by new ones. The more oil is lost, the higher the price. Three cheers, then, for broken pipes and drunken pumpmen and tank-attendants!”
(B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, p. 22.)
“But in Tacitus’s version of events, the death is marked, too, by a surprising and self-conscious lacuna: Tacitus tells us that Seneca, his ‘eloquence persisting at each final moment, summon scribes are dictated a considerable amount to them’, but that he,Tacitus, will ‘refrain from adapting’ this material, since it has already been published. (As it happens, Seneca’s final thoughts, whatever they were, have not been preserved.) This most notorious death scene has an absence at its heart: the extraordinarily prolific and voluble philosopher-playwright, whose writings dwell so often on how best to face our final moments, speaks right up to the end, but in words we cannot hear. Tacitus’s suggestive omission silences Seneca, and claims a kind of authority over him. This adds to the nuanced exploration of control in the passage: Seneca’s control of his own departure, Nero’s of Seneca, and Tacitus’s as narrating author, of them both.”
(Victoria Moul, from “A long, enduring end,” review of James Ker’s The Deaths of Seneca, p. 13 in the 23 April 2010 Times Literary Supplement.)
“[The artist] undertakes his artistic labour not as a personal effort on his own private behalf, but as a public labour on behalf of the community to which he belongs . . . It is a labour to which he invites the community to participate; for their function is not passively to accept his work, but to do it over again for themselves . . .
Individualism conceives a man as if he were God . . . but a man, in his art as in everything else, is a finite being. Everything that he does is done in relation to others like himself.”
(R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, pp. 315–6, quoted in Klaus Ottmann’s Yves Klein by Himself, p. 155.)