literary quote of the day (11/26/10)
One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels.
Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
One finds it hard to decide what Gradus alias Grey wanted more at that minute: discharge his gun or rid himself of the inexhaustible lava in his bowels.
Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
God help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, haealthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguised old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between two figments. Oh, I may do many things!
“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.
Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/10/go-with-god
“To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible. Whatever the practical source, the end result is the same. You are privileged to enter a time—four years!—during which your main job is to listen to lectures, attend seminars, go to labs, and read books.
It is an extraordinary gift. In a world of deep injustice and violence, a people exists that thinks some can be given time to study. We need you to take seriously the calling that is yours by virtue of going to college. You may well be thinking, “What is he thinking? I’m just beginning my freshman year. I’m not being called to be a student. None of my peers thinks he or she is called to be a student. They’re going to college because it prepares you for life. I’m going to college so I can get a better job and have a better life than I’d have if I didn’t go to college. It’s not a calling.” …
You cannot and should not try to avoid being identified as an intellectual. I confess I am not altogether happy with the word intellectual as a descriptor for those who are committed to the work of the university. The word is often associated with people who betray a kind of self-indulgence, an air that they do not need to justify why they do what they do. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is the dogma used to justify such an understanding of what it means to be an intellectual. But if you’re clear about your calling as a student, you can avoid this temptation. You are called to the life of the mind to be of service to the gospel and the Church. Don’t resist this call just because others are misusing it.
Fulfilling your calling as a Christian student won’t be easy. It’s not easy for anyone who is serious about the intellectual life, Christian or not. The curricula of many colleges and universities may seem, and in fact may be, chaotic. Many schools have no particular expectations. You check a few general-education boxes—a writing course, perhaps, and some general distributional requirements—and then do as you please. Moreover, there is no guarantee that you will be encouraged to read. Some classes, even in the humanities, are based on textbooks that chop up classic texts into little snippets. You cannot become friends with an author by reading half a dozen pages. Finally, and perhaps worse because insidious, there is a strange anti-intellectualism abroad in academia. Some professors have convinced themselves that all knowledge is just political power dressed up in fancy language, or that books and ideas are simply ideological weapons in the quest for domination. Christians, of all people, should recognize that what is known and how it is known produce and reproduce power relations that are unjust, but this does not mean all questions of truth must be abandoned. As I said, it won’t be easy.”
–Stanley Hauerwas
“The Lord is wonderful."
Marilynne Robinson, Home
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esx916cb2Rs?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]
“And besides,” he almost writes, “This book is my mentor. Don’t you see? For you to want to throw it out the window is like saying you want to hurt one of my nearest and dearest friends. I met a Jesus I never knew in this book; the one who says, ‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross!’ (171). Can’t you see I need a Jesus who says such words? How desperate I am for the Jesus who suffers beside me through my dark night of the soul.”
Robby Christopher Prenkert, On the Wonder of Mentors Never Met: A Memoir of a Reading Life, Part I
Rage:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon–
The Greek warlord–and godlike Achilles.
Homer, Iliad
“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine."
Alex, in Everything Is Illuminated
The world of machines is running
Beyond the world of trees
Where only a leaf is turning
In a small high breeze.
Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths, 1988”
He closed his eyes and the night ran together in his mind and he remembered the rifle in the corner and thought: I’ll throw it in the creek tomorrow. I never want to see it again. He would be asleep soon. He saw himself standing on the hill and throwing his rifle into the creek; then the creek became an ocean, and he stood on a high cliff and for a moment he was a mighty angel, throwing all guns and creulty and sex and tears into the sea.
Andre Dubus, “The Intruder”
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the windowpane”
John Shade, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
and a bonus quote, since I missed yesterday…
“My commentary to this poem, now in the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many subliminal debts to me."
Charles Kinbote, in Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
“It was a dark and stormy night."
Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
So let us leave. Let us get to the Plymouth with an impolite quickness–let us fly, as witnesses of eras past might say. Because at home, the hard and escalating war has paid a visit. And it’s Swede, my darling sister, who has met it at the door.
Leif Enger, Peace Like a River
I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Every man has within his own reminiscences certain things he doesn’t reveal to anyone, except, perhaps, to his friends. There are also some that he won’t reveal even to his friends, only to himself perhaps, and even then, in secret. Finally, there are some which a man is afraid to reveal even to himself; every decent man has accumulated a fair number of such things. In fact, it can even be said that the more decent the man, the more of these things he’s accumulated. Anyway, only recently I myself decided to recall some of my earlier adventures; up to now I’ve always avoided them, even with a certain anxiety. But having decided not only to recall them, but even to write them down, now is when I wish to try an experiment: is it possible to be absolutely honest even with one’s own self and not to fear the whole truth? Incidentally, I’ll mention that Heine maintains that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to lie about himself. In Heine’s opinion, Rousseau, for example, undoubtedly told untruths about himself in his confession and even lied intentionally, out of vanity. I’m convinced that Heine is correct; I understand perfectly well that sometimes it’s possible out of vanity alone to impute all sorts of crimes to oneself, and I can even understand what sort of vanity that might be.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground
"…I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp."
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6t594P6myw?fs=1&hl=en_US&w=480&h=385]
Crying, in the loneliness of the night
Dying, in the emptiness of this life
Sweet, sweet mercy
Shine on me.
Can you hear me?
Please, be near me
Michael Pritzl, “Sweet Mercy”