Posted Monday night, January 12, 2021.
There was a time, not long ago, in fact, when work had complete hold over life, when I was my work, when I took so much pleasure in it that work was the recuperation for work itself. But that is gone now. Everything has changed.
---from “In the Light of What We Know” by Zia Haider Rahman.
Posted Saturday night, January 9, 2021.
In the waning days of the Cold War, temporarily retired part-time British spy Jerry Westerby, the honorable schoolboy of John le Carré’s novel “The Honorable Schoolboy”, affectionately nicknamed because of his boyish good looks and good nature, whose cover had been as a journalist, has made a private retreat to a village in Tuscany, where he’s “working” on a book, much to the consternation of a prying neighbor, the village postmistress. Another neighbor, Signora Sanders, who may have been Westerby’s father’s mistress, tries to satisfy the postmistress’ curiosity. It’s not clear she knows the schoolboy had been a spy, only that he worked for newspapers:
But what was he? What had he done with his youth? A journalist, said the Sanders, and gave what she knew of the family background. The father, a flamboyant figure, fair-haired like the son, she had met him again not long before his death...Like the son, he was never at peace: women and houses, changing them all the time; always roaring at someone, if not at his son then at someone across the street. The postmistress pressed harder. But in his own right---was the schoolboy distinguished in his own right? Well, he had certainly worked for some distinguished newspapers, put it that way, said the Sanders, her smile mysteriously broadening.
“It is not the English habit to accord distinction to journalists,” she explained…
But the postmistress needed more, far more. His writing, his book, what was that all about? So long! So much thrown away! Basketsful, the rubbish carter had told her...
Beth Sanders understood the intensity of isolated people, and knew that in barren places their intelligence must fix on tiny matters...Well, he certainly had travelled incessantly, she said…Today all journalists were travellers of course---breakfast in London, lunch in Rome, dinner in Delhi---but Signor Westerby had been exceptional even by that standard. So perhaps it was a travel book, she ventured.
But why had he traveled, the postmistress insisted, for whom no journey was without a goal; why?
For the wars, the Sanders replied patiently; for wars, pestilence, and famine. “What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?”
---from “The Honorable Schoolboy” by John le Carré.
Posted Thursday night, January 7, 2021.
"Really, you are not playing fair, Timofey. You know perfectly well you agree with Lore that the world of the mind is based on a compromise with logic."
---from "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov.
Posted Thursday night, January 7, 2021.
When I listen to my memories now, I believe that all they tell me are stories about themselves…
---from “In the Light of What We Know” by Zia Haider Rahman.
Posted Thursday night, January 7, 2021.
'It couldn't be that such a man as that should become a thief all at once. It's not human nature, sir; is it?'
'It is very hard to know what is human nature,' said the squire.
---from "The Last Chronicle of Barset" by Anthony Trollope.
Mined from the notebooks, Christmas day, Friday, December 25, 2020. Posted Monday night, December 29.
All the March sisters in "Little Women" come in for some ribbing from their author. Each sister makes herself a tad ridiculous with their vanities and minor character flaws and faults: Meg is vain about her looks and takes advantage of her place as the eldest to order her sisters about; Jo is vain about her free-spiritedness and too quick to lose her temper; and even the good-natured, self-effacing, eager to please Beth, is vain about her musical talent and her shyness sometimes seems more like cowardice and sometimes like the wrong sort of pride. But Amy, the youngest, is the special target of Alcott’s satire. Naturally, as the youngest, she sees herself as being in competition with her big sisters for their mother’s approval, but she is too given to praising herself and always ready to one-up the others. She wants to be seen as being as virtuous and self-sacrificing as the household saint Beth, as artistically talented as the budding playwright and novelist Jo, as lady-like, grown-up, and pretty as Meg, the family beauty, and smarter and wiser in the ways of the world than all three. “Poor Petrea” is a comic character in “The Home”, a novel Alcott had read and taken to heart when she was around Amy’s age at this point in the book:
If anyone had asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, “My nose.” When she was a baby, Jo had accidentally dropped her into the coal hod, and Amy insisted that the fall had ruined her nose forever. It was not big nor red like poor “Petrea’s”, it was only rather flat, and all the pinching in the world could not give it an aristocratic point. No one minded it but herself, and it was doing its best to grow, but Amy felt deeply the want of a Grecian nose, and drew whole sheets of handsome ones to console herself.
And a few pages later...
"I think being disgraced in school is a great deal tryinger than anything bad boys can do," said Amy, shaking her head, as if her experience of life had been a deep one. "Susie Perkins came to school today with a lovely red carnelian ring. I wanted it dreadfully, and wished I was her with all my might. Well, she drew a picture of Mr. Davis, with a monstrous nose and a hump, and the words, 'Young ladies, my eye is upon you!' coming out of his mouth in a balloon thing. We were laughing over it when all of a sudden his eye was on us, and he ordered Susie to bring up her slate. She was parrylized with fright, but she went, and oh, what do you think he did? He took her by the ear—the ear! Just fancy how horrid!—and led her to the recitation platform, and made her stand there half an hour, holding the slate so everyone could see."
"Didn't the girls laugh at the picture?" asked Jo, who relished the scrape.
"Laugh? Not one! They sat still as mice, and Susie cried quarts, I know she did. I didn't envy her then, for I felt that millions of carnelian rings wouldn't have made me happy after that. I never, never should have got over such a agonizing mortification." And Amy went on with her work, in the proud consciousness of virtue and the successful utterance of two long words in a breath.
---from “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott.
Posted Monday morning, December 28, 2020.
Even strong-willed romantic heroines like Lily Dale have the same problem we all have, knowing our own minds and keeping our opinions separate from the general opinions of the world around us...
I must not, if I can help it, let the reader suppose that she was softening her heart to John Eames because John Eames was spoken well of in the world. But with all of us, in the opinion which we form of those around us, we take unconsciously the opinion of others. A woman is handsome because the world says so. Music is charming to us because it charms others. We drink our wines with other men's palates, and look at our pictures with other men's eyes. When Lily heard John Eames praised by all around her, it could not be but that she should praise him too,—not out loud, as others did, but in the silence of her heart.
---from “The Last Chronicle of Barset” by Anthony Trollope.
Posted Monday morning, December 28, 2020.
Lily Dale, the romantic heroine of Anthony Trollope's novel "The Last Chronicle of Barset" is torn between two suitors neither of which she dares marry: a bad man, Adolphus Crosbie, whom she loves despite herself, and a good man, Johnny Eames, whom she doesn't love---can't love because of her feelings for Crosbie. She's settled the matter with herself by resolving not to marry either, or, anyone. But on a trip up to London, she finds that her feelings aren't the same in the city as they are in the country...
This coming up to London, and riding in the Park, and going to the theatres, seemed to unsettle her. At home she had schooled herself down into quiescence, and made herself think that she believed that she was satisfied with the prospects of her life. But now she was all astray again, doubting about herself, hankering after something over and beyond that which seemed to be allotted to her,—but, nevertheless, assuring herself that she never would accept of anything else.
Posted Tuesday night, December 15, 2020.
Picked up Anthony Trollope’s “The Last Chronicle of Barset” again the other night. Trollope has replaced Dickens as my Christmas season reading mainly because I have Dickens’ novels memorized by now and I can’t read more than a paragraph of any one of them before the whole book pops into my head. There’s way too much Trollope to memorize. I’d started “The Last Chronicle of Barset” last December but stopped, not because I lost interest, but because life here at the ranch got a little too interesting. (Mrs M’s condition suddenly, surprisingly worsened.) By the time things calmed down, it was past time for reading by the lights of the tree while listening to Christmas music. But a whole year has rolled around, the tree’s up and lit, and the music’s on. I had to read my way back into it, skimming here and there, working my way toward the bookmark I’d left at the beginning of Chapter XXXVIII (page 382, Oxford World’s Classics edition, 1988), reminding myself of the story---stories---and reintroducing myself to the Trollopian crowd of characters, until I reached the bookmark, and practically the first new scene I read was the one below. Clara Van Siever is preparing to pose for the painter Conway Dalrymple as the Biblical heroine Jael, under the supervision of her married friend Maria Broughton at Maria’s house. It’s a funny, situation comedic scene, but it becomes fraught when you know Maria’s indifferent and neglectful husband isn’t home, that Clara is scheming to marry Dalrymple, Dalrymplye and Maria are having an affair, that the reason the sitting is taking place at Maria’s and not at Dalrymple’s studio or Clara’s home is to keep it secret from Clara’s grasping, avaricious, and controlling and bullying mother who would be furious to learn that her daughter wanted to marry a poor artist and had set out to do it without her permission. To top it off, although in the Book of Judges, Jael is honored for percussively assassinating Sisla, the general of the Canaanite army threatening Israel, there’s a folk tradition that has Jael a seductress, adulteress, and betrayer, a later version of Delilah. Note as well, how both Clara and Maria casually attribute mercenary motives to Moses!
Very little drawing or painting was done on that day. In the first place it was necessary that the question of costume should be settled, and both Mrs. Broughton and the artist had much to say on the subject. It was considered proper that Jael should be dressed as a Jewess, and there came to be much question how Jewesses dressed themselves in those very early days. Mrs. Broughton had prepared her jewels and raiment of many colours, but the painter declared that the wife of Heber the Kenite would have no jewels. But when Mrs. Broughton discovered from her Bible that Heber had been connected by family ties with Moses, she was more than ever sure that Heber's wife would have in her tent much of the spoilings of the Egyptians. And when Clara Van Siever suggested that at any rate she would not have worn them in a time of confusion when soldiers were loose, flying about the country, Mrs. Broughton was quite confident that she would have put them on before she invited the captain of the enemy's host into her tent. The artist at last took the matter into his own hand by declaring that Miss Van Siever would sit the subject much better without jewels, and therefore all Mrs. Broughton's gewgaws were put back into their boxes. And then on four different times the two ladies had to retire into Mrs. Broughton's room in order that Jael might be arrayed in various costumes,—and in each costume she had to kneel down, taking the hammer in her hand, and holding the pointed stick which had been prepared to do duty as the nail, upon the forehead of a dummy Sisera. At last it was decided that her raiment should be altogether white, and that she should wear, twisted round her head and falling over her shoulder, a Roman silk scarf of various colours. "Where Jael could have gotten it I don't know," said Clara. "You may be sure that there were lots of such things among the Egyptians," said Mrs. Broughton, "and that Moses brought away all the best for his own family."
---from "The Last Chronicle of Barset" by Anthony Trollope. Chapter XXXVIII.
Posted Sunday night, December 6, 2020.
"Poshlust"?
Socially minded Russian critics saw in Dead Souls...a condemnation of the social poshlust emanating from serf-owning bureaucratic provincial Russia and thus missed the true point. Gogol’s heroes merely happen to be Russian squires and officials; their imagined surrounding and social conditions are perfectly unimportant factors…Moreover, their surroundings and conditions, whatever they may have been in “real life,’ underwent such a thorough permutation and reconstruction in the laboratory of Gogol’s peculiar genius that...it is as useless to look in Dead Souls for an authentic Russian background as it would be to try to form a conception of Denmark on the basis of that little affair in cloudy Elsinore.
---from “Nikolai Gogol” by Vladimir Nabokov, in “Lectures on Russian Literature”.
Posted Wednesday night, December 3, 2020.
A benevolent man contemplates his munificence while rationalizing the course of corruption that will lead to his undoing. From “An Outcast of the Islands” (1896) by Joseph Conrad, born 153 years ago today, December 3, 1857:
When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect. It was going to be a short episode—a sentence in brackets, so to speak—in the flowing tale of his life: a thing of no moment, to be done unwillingly, yet neatly, and to be quickly forgotten. He imagined that he could go on afterwards looking at the sunshine, enjoying the shade, breathing in the perfume of flowers in the small garden before his house. He fancied that nothing would be changed, that he would be able as heretofore to tyrannize good-humouredly over his half-caste wife, to notice with tender contempt his pale yellow child, to patronize loftily his dark-skinned brother-in-law, who loved pink neckties and wore patent-leather boots on his little feet, and was so humble before the white husband of the lucky sister. Those were the delights of his life, and he was unable to conceive that the moral significance of any act of his could interfere with the very nature of things, could dim the light of the sun, could destroy the perfume of the flowers, the submission of his wife, the smile of his child, the awe-struck respect of Leonard da Souza and of all the Da Souza family. That family’s admiration was the great luxury of his life. It rounded and completed his existence in a perpetual assurance of unquestionable superiority. He loved to breathe the coarse incense they offered before the shrine of the successful white man; the man that had done them the honour to marry their daughter, sister, cousin; the rising man sure to climb very high; the confidential clerk of Hudig & Co. They were a numerous and an unclean crowd, living in ruined bamboo houses, surrounded by neglected compounds, on the outskirts of Macassar. He kept them at arm’s length and even further off, perhaps, having no illusions as to their worth. They were a half-caste, lazy lot, and he saw them as they were—ragged, lean, unwashed, undersized men of various ages, shuffling about aimlessly in slippers; motionless old women who looked like monstrous bags of pink calico stuffed with shapeless lumps of fat, and deposited askew upon decaying rattan chairs in shady corners of dusty verandahs; young women, slim and yellow, big-eyed, long-haired, moving languidly amongst the dirt and rubbish of their dwellings as if every step they took was going to be their very last. He heard their shrill quarrellings, the squalling of their children, the grunting of their pigs; he smelt the odours of the heaps of garbage in their courtyards: and he was greatly disgusted. But he fed and clothed that shabby multitude; those degenerate descendants of Portuguese conquerors; he was their providence; he kept them singing his praises in the midst of their laziness, of their dirt, of their immense and hopeless squalor: and he was greatly delighted. They wanted much, but he could give them all they wanted without ruining himself. In exchange he had their silent fear, their loquacious love, their noisy veneration. It is a fine thing to be a providence, and to be told so on every day of one’s life. It gives one a feeling of enormously remote superiority, and Willems revelled in it. He did not analyze the state of his mind, but probably his greatest delight lay in the unexpressed but intimate conviction that, should he close his hand, all those admiring human beings would starve. His munificence had demoralized them. An easy task. Since he descended amongst them and married Joanna they had lost the little aptitude and strength for work they might have had to put forth under the stress of extreme necessity. They lived now by the grace of his will. This was power. Willems loved it...
Posted Sunday night, November 29, 2020.
The narrator of Zia Haider Rahman's novel "In the Light of What We Know", having failed as a friend, reckons with the burden of guilt he counts as the cost of friendship...
My lasting regret is that I made my excuses and did not go with [Zafar and his parents] to Headington for breakfast. At the time, and immediately afterward, I told myself that I had sensed in his heart my friend did not want me to. But the truth is that I myself, to my own shame, felt embarrassed for my friend. Sharper still was the disconcerting feeling I had in those few minutes that a distance had opened up between him and me for reasons I did not grasp in the full subtleties. After that day, Zafar did not mention his parents again. If friendship has a cost, then perhaps it is that at its heart there is always a burden of guilt. I don’t deny that I’ve failed to do certain things, failed, for instance, to provide support in the hour of need, or skype in when that’s what a friend should o, failed as a friend…
Posted Tuesday night, November 17, 2020.
Bauduin, killed, Foy wounded, fire, slaughter, carnage, a stream of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled in fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of Nassau and the regiment of Brunswick wiped out, Duplat killed, Blackmann killed, the English Guards savaged, twenty French battalions, besides the forty from Reille's corps, decimated, three thousand men in that hovel of Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their throats cut,--and all this so that a peasant can say today to the traveller: “Monsieur, give me three francs, and I will tell you the story of Waterloo!”
---from “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo.
Posted Sunday evening, October 11, 2020.
Those times when Hercule Poirot becomes a “mere member of the human race," as explained by Hercule Poirot...
“They say an army marches on its stomach,” said Poirot. “But how much are the delicate convolutions of the brain influenced by the digestive apparatus? When the mal de mer seizes me, I, Hercule Poirot, am a creature with no gray cells, no order, no method---a mere member of the human race somewhat below average [in] intelligence! It is deplorable, but there it is!”
---from “Death in the Clouds” by Agatha Christie.
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The "Poirot" television series adaptation of "Death in the Clouds" is available to watch on YouTube.
Posted Saturday night, September 19. 2020.
Along with a couple hundred dozen other books, I’ve been reading A.J. Baime's “Go Like Hell”, the book the movie “Ford v Ferrari" was based on, once removed. (Development hell. Long story. You can read about it here.) Baime’s introduction of Lee Iacocca into the story definitely places Iacocca in the American grain...
It was this world of money and cutthroat competition that Lee Iacocca stepped into in the winter of 1960. Iacocca’s promotion to the top man at the Ford division occurred the same week that John F. Kennedy was voted into the Oval Office. Inside Iacocca’s nerves slithered, but his outer shell was impenetrable. His colleagues saw a salesman through and through. After listening to Lee talk about a car, one once said, “I didn’t know whether to drive it home or make love to it.”...
Iacocca embodied the other end of the American dream. He was the son of Ellis Island immigrants, raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he was the first top man in the Ford division who had real dealership experience, selling on the floor, and he hadn’t shed the bootstrap urgency...He had rougher edges than his associates. He could work the phrase “son of a bitch” into every other sentence. He had dreamed of working at Ford since he was in high school. The day a recruiter from Dearborn showed up at Lehigh in a big Lincoln, and Iacocca smelled the leather interior , his resolve had only strengthened.
During his first six months on the new job, Iacocca took a hard look at the American car buyer, not just in the present day but what the customer was about to become. He had the benefit of a new tool feeding him information. Computers had arrived in offices...Sitting in Henry II’s office one day, Iacocca began to map out his vision of 1960s America. He clutched his Ignacio Haya cigar like a stage propped, and he armed himself with numbers. He was very good at math.
“Next year there will be a million more 16-year-olds than there are today." The key to the future, Iacocca reasoned, was the youth market. The war-baby generation was coming of age. Soon the kids would be filing into government offices to get their driver’s licenses...Trends come and go, but one thing never changes: the primary goal of every sixteen-year-old is to own a car...If Ford could get the kids when they were young, he argued, Ford could get them for life.
…
Iacocca gathered a team of admen, engineers, and designers, and began to outline a new theme for Ford. “What we need is a campaign, a philosophy that is young at heart,” he told them,. The team went to work in a large windowless room at the Ford office called “the tomb,” where Iacocca enforced security so rigid the garbage was burned under his supervision. Weekly late-night meetings were held in a nearby motel called the Fairlane Inn. Iacocca’s underlings began to understand the depth of his ambition. He was proof that you couldn’t have enough balls in this town.
Iacocca’s vision included a new model, and a marketing theme to sell it, a way to make a statement: Ford cars were about performance, style, adventure. He knew America was ripe for something different. The numbers were there in the market research, and he could feel it in his gut. Together with his chief engineer Donald Frey, he approached the styling department. Within days, a secret prototype was in the works. The original name as Tornino, after the Italian city of Turin. But it would one day soon become a car called Mustang.
---from “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans" by A. J. Baime.
Mined from the notebooks Friday, July 24, 2020. Posted Monday night, August 10.
Started “Burr” this morning. The best and best-written of Vidal’s “Narratives of Empire”. The first quote contains Vidal’s own words and is from the novel’s afterward. The next two quotes and the last one are the words of the narrator Charlie Schuyler. The line about Washington is Burr’s himself..
Obviously I have made up conversation, but whenever possible I have used actual phrases of the speaker. Certainly the opinions Jefferson expresses in the book are taken from life, and often represented in his own words. He wrote and talked a great deal about everything.
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He is a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster in short.
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I find his brilliance disturbing. We do not want the old to be sharper than we. They were there first, and got the best things.
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“How fitting that the first American President should have been a land surveyor.”
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...the euphemisms can come later.
---from “Burr” by Gore Vidal.
Posted Monday night, July 6, 2020.
Sarah Bush Lincoln recalled Abraham’s yearnings as a boy to express himself plainly and extract clear meanings from the adults around him. “Sometimes he seemed pestered to give Expression to his ideas and got mad almost at one who couldn’t Explain plainly what he wanted to convey.” When the Reverend John P. Gulliver praised him in 1860 for the clarity of his speeches, Lincoln explained: “Among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when any body talked to me in a way I could not understand.” After he clambered into bed at night in his family’s little cabin, he recalled, he listened closely to the “dark sayings” of the adults, trying to make out their meaning. “I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it; and when I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I know to comprehend.” He used that approach throughout his life. “This was a kind of passion with me,” Lincoln said.
---from “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln” by Edward Achorn.
Posted Saturday night, May 30, 2020.
The White City illuminated at night was a radiant electrical vision long remembered by all who witnessed it, acclaimed as the most fabulous spectacle in a fair brimming with fabulous spectacles. On Monday evening, May 8, as twilight gathered...the sky darkened to a deep indigo over the lake, and the air grew perceptibly chillier. Suddenly, the gold-domed Administration Building came brilliantly to pulsating electrical life, provoking a prolonged sigh of pleasure from the crowd. Next, the long classic sweep of the peristyle on the far end of the great basin burst forth from the twilight’s shadow, wondrously luminous with the tens of thousands of Westinghouse’s “stopper” lamps glowing softly up in the cornices and along the pediment, highlighting the hundreds of statues. The crowd clapped wildly at this bravura burst of electricity. Next, all the white palaces glowed to electrical life, radiant visions of an imagined past, followed swiftly by thousands of lights encircling the dark waters of the 1,500-foot Great Basin, its rippling surface now a-shimmer. Hundreds of arc lights lining the waters came on, spreading their clear, blue white coronas....Ghostly gondolas and long electric craft looked like a fairy fleet. Then, from the highest roofs swung to luminous life, four massive searchlights, each raking the night sky, even as it shone, white, then bloodred, then green, then blue. The people, who had never seen such concentrated, artistic electrical luminosity, let out a steady, breathless chorus of “Oh!” and “Ah!”
Then all went dramatically, suddenly dark, and the White City loomed only as a spectral vision. The murmur of the crowd mingled with the sound of the chilly spring winds off the lake. Out of the total blackness, with a rush and a roar “the great electric fountains lifted their gushing and gleaming waters. There were two of these fountains, one on either side of the MacMonnies Fountain, and through all their many changes each was the counterpart of the other, alike in color and form.” The gushing colored waters formed beautiful shapes and hues. Finally, at 9:30, the lights were quelled and the electrically dazed and sated crowds drifted slowly home, awed by the transformation of the dark into something so magically new.
---from “Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World” by Jill Jonnes.
Posted Wednesday night, May 27, 2020.
I think Pasternak captures Lara’s youth and her naivete perfectly in having the only way she can begin to understand what happened to her---what was done to her---is to see herself as a character in a what she regards as a grown-up’s novel and in how she can only see what happened as her fault...
The weather was trying to get better. “Drip, drip, drip,” the drops drummed on the iron gutter and cornices. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw.
She walked all the way home as if beside herself and only when she got there did she realize what had happened.
At home everyone was asleep. She again lapsed into torpor and in that distraction sank down at her mother’s dressing table in her pale lilac, almost white dress with lace trimmings and a long veil, taken from the shop for that one evening, as if for a masked ball. She sat before her reflection in the mirror and saw nothing. Then she leaned on her crossed arms on the table and dropped her head on them.
If mama finds out, she’ll kill her. Kill her and take her own life.
How did it happen? How could it happen? Now it’s too late. She should have thought earlier.
Now she’s---what is it called?---now she’s---a fallen woman. She’s a woman from a French novel, and tomorrow she will go to school and sit at the same desk with those girls, who, compared to her, are still unweaned babies. Lord, Lord, how could it happen!
Someday, many years from now, when it was possible, she would tell Olya Demina. Olya would clutch her by the head and start howling.
Outside the window the drops prattled, the thaw was talking away. Someone in the street banged on the neighbors’ gate. Lara did not raise her head. Her shoulders shook. She was weeping.
---from “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Posted Wednesday night, May 27, 2020.
This is memoir as much as fiction, and “Doctor Zhivago” is that book of biographies…
Yura thought well and wrote very well. Still in his high school days he dreamed of prose, of a book of biographies, in which he could place in the form of hidden explosive clusters, the most astounding things of all he had managed to see and ponder. But he was too young for such a book, and so he made up for it by writing verses, as a painter might draw sketches all his life for a great painting he had in mind.
Yura forgave those verses the sin of their coming to be for the sake of their energy and originality. These two qualities, energy and originality, Yura considered representative of reality in the arts, which were pointless, idle, and unnecessary in other respects.
---from “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevar and Larissa Volokhonsky.
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