I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not.
Nothing was forbidden for me.
In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
"
Rosario Castellanos (born 25 May, 1925; died 7 August, 1974) , pictured above in a photograph by Sara Facio
Nocturno
Para vivir es demasiado el tiempo;
para saber no es nada.
¿A qué vinimos, noche, corazón de la noche?
No es posible sino soñar, morir,
soñar que no morimos
y, a veces, un instante, despertar.
NocturneFor living, too much time;
For knowing, no time.What have we come to, night, heart of the night?
All we can do is dream, die,
Dream that we do not die
And, at times, for an instant, awaken.
A Universal BookA Universal Book! The naive ambition of such a project is amazing. According to the article, what is left of this is a small exhibit in a museum in Belgium.Mundaneum : A visionary precursor to the Internet made of index cards
“When the Mundaneum opened in 1910, its purpose was to collect all of the world’s knowledge on neatly organized 3 x 5 index cards. The brainchild of Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine, the vast project eventually totaled 12 million cards, each classified according to the Universal Decimal Classification system developed by Otlet.
Le Corbusier was one of many prominent figures enthralled by Otlet’s scheme of a “Universal Book.” He described it as a panorama of “the whole of human history from its origins,” and signed on to design an international “city of the intellect,” centered around the Mundaneum.”
Trembling, I read the next revealing passage:
… he put his arm around Julia. Presently she asked him if he would remove his arm. He immediately did so, with a smile.
It’s not said what was done with the arm after the fellow had removed it. Maybe it was left standing upright in the corner. Maybe it was thrown away. I don’t care.
- Philip K. Dick, The Eyes Have It (1953) [full text]
Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
~ Lisel Mueller ~
(Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)
Lives Ruined by Novels, esp. Jane Eyre
“In general, we do not like modern novels, though our duty as reviewers requires us to read not a few. The bulk of our recent novels or popular works of fiction compels us to form the acquaintance of very disagreeable people, with whom one cannot be intimate without losing something of the chastity and delicacy of the soul.
In addition to the faults of novels in general, novels written by women have the grave fault of tending almost uniformly to degrade woman. … women - who must be presumed to know…their own sex - depict women in their novels such as no honorable or high-minded man can love or esteem. … Women’s novels are very damaging to our respect for women by the recklessness with which they reveal the mysteries of the sex…rend from her the last shred of mystery, and expose her unveiled and unrobed to the gaze of the profane world… There are passages in Jane Eyre, for instance, which show that woman can enter into and describe with minute accuracy the grossest passions of man’s nature…To every young man…there is something mystic, almost divine, in womanhood … [t]his awe is both his protection and hers. Your feminine novels dispel the illusion, and prove to him that there is nothing more mystic in woman’s nature than in man’s, that her supposed divinity is only the projection of his chivalric imagination, and that, after all, she is only ordinary flesh and blood, kneaded of no finer clay than himself.”
New Catholic World, vol. 12, pages 547-548; 1871
Why Marlowe is still the chief of detectives
