reading and writing | Wait until next year

Cathedral Et Chartres

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So much distance is meant by it:
just as with the backdrop of a scene
the world is meant; and as through that scene
the hero strides, cloaked in his action’s mantle: —

so the darkness of this doorway strides acting
onto the tragic theater of its depths,
as boundlessly and seething as God the Father
and just as He transforming wondrously

into a Son, who is distributed here
among many small, almost unspeaking roles,
all taken from misery’s repertoire.

For it’s only (this we know) from
the blind, the cast-out, and the mad
that, like a great actor, the Saviour emerges.

Excerpt from The Portal, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow

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Patriotism

To love means to esteem—even perhaps to overestimate—the object of love. To love with open eyes, critically, is something only very few people are capable of doing. Most people’s love is blind. Most people who love their fatherland, their nation, do so blindly. Not only are they incapable of seeing the faults of their nation, their country, they are even inclined to see its faults as instances of human virtue. This is called “National self-confidence.”

Joseph Roth (1934)

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They give away more than they can possibly keep

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I can see what is engaging the newspaper reader’s attention: the recent sensational reports from Budapest. They have been given a bold headline. They are presented in a fluffy, tempting, positively beguiling layout, in numerous little paragraphs, each one of which has its own alluring subtitle. Like all news, they give themselves away before they can be transmitted: and they give away more than they can possibly keep.

It is impossible to see them as anything by sensationalist. They are about the passing of false bills, but they don’t tell the whole story. They are scrupulously accurate and yet they withhold a few details. They describe the character of the counterfeiter, but they don’t know his name. They refer to “well-placed sources”, but where and how they are placed they don’t say. Of course, it’s the things you’re not told that arouse your interest. The gaps in the news are the interesting bits.

“A Man Reads the Paper” – Joseph Roth (1926)

Image from the Smithsonian Institution, via Flickr

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Private mythology

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed in the Paris Review

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Nearly the end of the decade, although it doesn’t feel like it. I can’t tell whether it’s my age, or the age I live in, but this decade doesn’t feel like it has the shape or feel of those of the last century. I’m not sure in thirty years I’ll be able to hear a piece of music or look at a photograph from this time and be able to identify the decade, where I think I could do that with the 1960s or 1980s, say.

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