“People buy a diary because the author is famous, while I wrote mine in order to become famous. That is where the misunderstanding lies.”
(Witold Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament, trans. Alastair Hamilton, p. 120.)
Yearly Archives: 2008
buona ventura
(Caravaggio, Musei Capitolini, Rome, 1594.)
towards an etymology of mathematical notation
“André Weil, in fact, invented for this book the universal notation we use today for the empty set: ∅.
This symbol comes from the Norwegian alphabet, which Weil had encountered in his travels. The Bourbaki text on set theory thus introduced this new mathematical symbol.”
(Amir Aczel, The Artist and the Mathematician: the story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed, p. 93.)
three aphorisms
“Fourier thought that our dream of a golden age that never was is a vision of his Période Amphiharmonique. In our time we long not for a lost past but for a lost future.”
“For every lack of civilization we pay dearly with boredom, outrage, death.”
“Butler’s insight was that the machine enslaved us, changing all work to drudgery. All work became pandering to the reproduction of the machines.”
(Guy Davenport, Apples and Pears, p. 64, p. 77, p. 163.)
kafka in davenport
“Instead, he prays. Have mercy on me, O God. I am sinful in every corner of my being. The gifts thou has given me are not contemptible. My talent is a small one, and even that I have wasted. It is precisely when a work is about to mature, to fulfill its promise, that we mortals realize that we have thrown our time away, have squandered our energies. It is absurd, I know, for one insignificant creature to cry that it is alive, and does not want to be hurled into the dark along with the lost. It is the life in me that speaks, not me, though I speak with it, selfishly, in its ridiculous longing to stay alive, and partake of its presumptuous joy in being.”
(Guy Davenport, “The Chair”, p. 59 in Apples and Pears and Other Stories.)
young deacon
(attributed to Desiderio, Young Deacon (St. Lawrence or St. Leonard?), ca. 1455–60, San Lorenzo, Florence.)
arbitrary boundaries
“He was so much against slavery that he had begun to include prose and poetry in the same book, so that there would be no arbitrary boundaries between them.”
(Ishmael Reed, epigraph to Paul Metcalf’s Both.)
birds
“Eagles, wilde Turkeis much bigger than Engliſh, Cranes, Herons white and ruſſet, Hawkes, wilde Pigeons (in winter beyond number or imaginaton, my ſelfe haue ſeene three or four hourse together flockes in the aire, so thicke than even they haue ſhaddowed the skie from vs), Turkie Buſſards, Partridge, Snipes, Owles, Swans, Geeſe, Brants, Ducke and Mallard, Droeis, Shel Drakes, Cormorants, Teale, Widgeon, Curlewes, Puits, beſides other small birds, as Blacke birde, hedge ſparrowes, Oxeies, woodpeckers, and in winter about Chriſtmas many flockes of Parakertoths.“
(Paul Metcalf, Waters of the Potowmack, p. 378 in Collected Works, vol. II.)
desire
“La grande douleur de l’homme, qui commence dès l’enfance et se poursuit jusque à la mort, c’est que regarder et manger sont deux opérations différentes. La béatitude éternelle est un état où regarder c’est manger.”
(Simone Weil, “Contradiction”, in La Pesanteur et la Grace, epigraph to William S. Wilson’s “Desire” in Why I Don’t Write Like Franz Kafka.)
a stage to be passed through
“As time goes by, we drift away from the great texts, the finished works on which an author’s reputation is build, towards the journals, diaries, letters, manuscripts, jottings. This is not simply because, as an author’s stature grows posthumously, the fund of published texts becomes exhausted and we have to make do not only with previously unpublished or unfinished material but, increasingly, with matter that was never intended for publication. It is also because we want to get nearer to the man or woman who wrote these books, to his or her being. We crave an increasingly intimate relationship with the author, unmediated, in so far as possible, by the contrivances of art. A curious reversal takes place. The finished works serve as prologue to the jottings; the published book becomes a stage to be passed through – a draft – en route to the definative pleasure of the notes, the fleeting impressions, the sketches, in which it had its origin.”
(Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence, p. 111.)