“A week earlier I’d returned from Paris where Roland Barthes had told me of a rather disturbing fact that had created a vague feeling of mental claustrophobia, like a feeling you can escape from. From the administration of the Collège de France where he was giving his delightful lectures, he had been sent a list of all the College’s professors, arranged according to the date of retirement. For one of them, extremely young, the retirement date was 2006.

—For me it’s the first time the twenty-first century has put in an appearance—was Barthes’ comment. And in his voice there was all of his habitual irony, yet a little sadness too, which he tried to hide as though the feelings were out of place.”

(Michelangelo Antonioni, “Report about myself” in That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, trans. William Arrowsmith, p. 96.)

“. . . . Then I look towards the west, towards Monte Mario and the dome of St Peter’s, then to the south-west where can be seen the outline of the chariot which supports the roof cornice on top of the Palace of Justice, the so called ‘ugly’ palace. I look farther south where I can see the upper part of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, a monument which has always been very much criticised and spoken of ironically, like the Palace of Justice, but in comparison with the wretched things put up by certain modernist architects who proceed with their eyes fixed on the line of the horizon, such as Le Corbusier, Wright, Gropius and others, these two buildings, unlike the aberrations of certain modern architecture, are authentic masterpieces, worthy of a Bramante or a Brunelleschi.”

(Giorgio de Chirico, The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, trans. Margaret Crosland, pp.163–164.)

“Jill ran her fingers down the tough golden beard of history. It was fine being there, but she wished there had been boards on the floor. Professor Flint was late; it was already three o’clock. ‘Chow down!’ shouted the corporal, and all the men ran into the eating quarters. ‘Very tropical weather, Sergeant,’ said ‘Dutch,’ an unusual man who had been hanging around the camp a lot recently. The cord snapped, having suddenly come undone, and the hawsers slipped out onto the blue, frothy waters of Lake Superior.”

(first paragraph of Chapter 1 (“The Ring of Destiny”) of Kenneth Koch’s The Red Robins; p. 45 in his Collected Fiction.)

“Like Kierkegaard said, if man is not desperate, he should be. But he must live with it, not die. That seems right to me. I’m against suicide. I favor the Stoic idea that one must live with desperation. It’s also a Christian thing. A real Christian must be desperate. To accept being desperate is not a compromise. It means to live in desperation. To accept desperation means simply not to kill oneself. It doesn’t mean to live in peace. Desperation is a serious matter and requires a certain amount of play-acting as a way to live with desperation. The main thing is not to bother others.”

(From an interview with Alberto Moravia by Gaither Stewart, quoted in an article in Critique which seems to have lost most of its header information. Other pieces by him there: interviews with Dacia Maraini, Federico Fellini, Umberto Eco, and Natalia Ginzburg, as well as a piece on the Etruscans.)

“A dream party of some of the most celebrated people of the day, whom one can never hope to meet, or, if met, be remembered by: Einstein, Mr. Charles Chaplin, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Stella Benson, Mussolini, P. G. Wodehouse, Mistinguett, Lydia Lopokova and Jean Cocteau.

TOMATES À L’ESPAGNOL

*

CONSOMMÉ A L’INDIENNE

*

SAUMON EN SURPRISE

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POULET AUX CHOUX

*

GLACE AUX FRUITS”

(from Ruth Lowinsky, Lovely Food: a cookery notebook, 1931, The Nonesuch Press, London, pp. 54–55. This particular menu is llustrated with a drawing of “flat circles of chromium-plated metal arranged in tiers pierced for candles between which the heads of flowers are placed” by Thomas Lowinsky.)

“MARGARET. All right, Grandma ’ll tell us a story.

GRANDMOTHER. Sit, sit.

Once upon a time there was a poor little boy who had no father and mother; everything was dead and there was no-one left in the whole world. Everything was quite dead, so he went off, whimpering. All day and all night. And since there was no-one left on earth he decided to go up to heaven where the moon shone down so kind. But when he got to the moon it was a lump of rotten wood. Then he went to the sun, but when he got there it was a withered-up sunflower. And when he got to the stars they were little spangled midges stuck there, like the ones shrikes stick on blackthorns. So he went back to the earth, but the earth was an overturned pot. He was completely alone, and he sat down and cried. He’s sitting there still, all alone.”

(Georg Büchner, Woyzeck, p. 31, trans. John Mackendrick)