“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.

There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”

(Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai, p. 19.)

“ ‘There are no duties of remembrance,’ says the Jean-Luc Godard film Éloge de l’amour, ‘only a right to forgetfulness.’ ”

(Camille de Toledo, Coming of Age at the End of History, trans. Blake Ferris, p. 27.)

“Suddenly a hundred years will be past; how then can we not practise? How much longer will this life last? Yet still we do not practise, but remain heedless. Those who leave behind the lusts within the mind are called mendicants. Those who do not long for the mundane are called those gone forth into homelessness. A practitioner entangled in the net of the six senses is a dog wearing elephant’s hide. A person on the path who still longs for the world is a hedgehog entering a rat’s den.”

(Wonhyo, trans. Robert Buswell from Hanguk pulgyo chǒsǒ I: 841a–3, p. 21 in Buddhist Scriptures, ed. Donald Lopez.)

“. . . and the whole thing would be perfect material for a comedy if it didn’t contain a problem that had been troubling him, D., for a long time, a logical problem loosely involving a mirror telescope he had installed in his house in the mountains, an unwieldy thing that he occasionally pointed at a cliff from which he was being observed by people with field glasses, with the effect that, as soon as the people observing him through their field glasses realized that he was observing them through his telescope, they would retreat in a hurry, an empirical confirmation, in short, of the logical conclusion that anything observed requires the presence of an observer, who, if he is observed by what he is observing, himself becomes an object of observation, a banal logical interaction, which, however, transposed into reality, had a destabilizing effect, for the people observing him and discovering that he was observing them through a mirror telescope felt caught in the act, and since being caught in the act produces embarrassment and embarrassment frequently leads to aggression, more than one of these people, after retreating in haste, had come back to throw rocks at his house as soon as he had dismantled the telescope, a dialectical process, said D., that was symptomatic of our time, when everyone observed and felt observed by everyone else, so that a very suitable definition of contemporary man might be that he is man under observation – observed by the state, for one, with more and more sophisticated methods, while man makes more and more desperate attempts to escape being observed, which in turn renders man increasingly suspect in the eyes of the state and the state even more suspect in the eyes of man; similarly each state observes and feels observed by all the other states, and man, on another plane, is busy observing nature as never before, inventing more and more subtle instruments for this purpose . . .”

(Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Assignement: or, on the observing of the observer of the observers, pp. 15–17.)

“Truth has undoubtedly proved stranger than fiction on occasion, but, as a correspondent wrote to The Times in 1844, ‘she has certainly never committed so outrageous a plagiarism as in the present case.’

The case was that of Captain Thomas Dudley, Edwin Stephens and Edmund Brooks, of the yawl Mignonette, on trial for their lives. Their crime – murder and cannibalism. Sensational enough in Victorian England, but fantasy was added to the trial when it was discovered that the victim of the horrifying act, the cabin boy of the Mignonette, bore the same name as that of an Edgar Allan Poe character, who was also killed and eaten in similar circumstances and about whom Captain Dudley had been reading during the ill-fated voyage.

Dudley, Stephens, Brooks and the cabin boy, Richard Parker, were at the mercy of a scorching sun and freezing night for more than three weeks – with virtually no food or water. Their story is told with a penetrating psychological insight which brings their agony immediately to life – agony both of mind and body. Captain Dudley, said those who knew him, was a God-fearing man, ‘a man of exemplary character, able to tackle any job requiring skilled seamanship, courageous and with real power of command.’ He was prepared to draw lots and risk sacrificing himself to save his starving companions; he openly admitted the killing and accepted full responsibility for it, and his action must promote disturbing reflections in the minds of everyone capable of self analysis.

This remarkable story does not end with the trial of Captain Dudley and his crew. It continues with another of life’s coincidences, played out among the islands of the Great Barrier Reef with a romance that evokes all the imagery of a Conrad novel – ant that master would surely find a wealth of material here.”

(jacket copy for Donald McCormick’s Blood on the Sea: The Terrible Story of the Yawl “Mignonette”, 1962.)