Haruki Murakami, "The Birth of My Kitchen Table Fiction" (tr. Ted Goosen)

"The Birth of My Kitchen Table Fiction"

Most people—by which I mean most of us who are a part of Japanese society—graduate from school, then find work, then, after some time has passed, get married. Even I originally intended to follow that pattern. Or at least that was how I imagined things would turn out. Yet in reality I married, then started working, then (somehow) finally managed to graduate. In other words, the order I followed was the exact opposite of what was considered normal.

Since I hated the idea of working for a company, I decided to open my own establishment, a place where people could go to listen to jazz records, have a coffee, eat snacks, and drink. It was a simple, rather happy-go-lucky kind of idea: running a business like that, I figured, would let me relax listening to my favorite music from morning till night. The problem was, since we had married while still in university we had no money. Therefore, for the first three years, my wife and I worked like slaves, often taking on several jobs at once to save as much as we could. After that, I made the rounds borrowing whatever friends and family could spare. Then we took all the money we had managed to scrape together and opened a small coffee shop / bar in Kokubunji, a student hangout, in the western suburbs of Tokyo. It was 1974.

It cost a lot less to open your own place back then than it does now. Young people like us who were determined to avoid “company life” at all costs were launching small shops left and right. Cafés and restaurants, variety stores, bookstores—you name it. Several places near us were owned and run by people of our generation. Kokubunji retained a strong counterculture vibe, and many of those who hung around the area were dropouts from the shrinking student movement. It was an era when, all over the world, one could still find gaps in the system.

I brought my old upright piano from my parents’ house and began offering live music on weekends. There were many young jazz musicians living in the Kokubunji area who happily (I think) played for the small amount we could pay them. Many went on to become well-known musicians; I sometimes run across them in jazz clubs around Tokyo even now.

Although we were doing what we liked, paying our debts was a constant struggle. We owed the bank, and we owed the people who had supported us. On one occasion, stuck for our monthly payment to the bank, my wife and I were trudging along with our heads down late at night when we stumbled across some money lying in the street. Whether it was synchronicity or some sort of divine intercession I don’t know, but the amount was exactly what we needed. Since the payment was due the next day, it was truly a last-minute reprieve. (Strange events like this have happened at various junctures in my life.) Most Japanese would have probably done the proper thing, and turned the money in to the police, but stretched to the limit as we were, we couldn’t live by such fine sentiments.

Still it was fun. No question about that. I was young and in my prime, could listen to my favorite music all day long, and was the lord of my own little domain. I didn’t have to squeeze onto packed commuter trains, or attend mind-numbing meetings, or suck up to a boss who I disliked. Instead, I had the chance to meet all kinds of interesting people.

My twenties were thus spent paying off loans and doing hard physical labor (making sandwiches and cocktails, hustling foul-mouthed patrons out the door) from morning till night. After a few years, our landlord decided to renovate the Kokubunji building, so we moved to more up-to-date and spacious digs near the center of Tokyo, in Sendagaya. Our new location provided enough room for a grand piano, but our debt increased as a result. So things weren’t any easier.

Looking back, all I can remember is how hard we worked. I imagine most people are relatively laid back in their twenties, but we had virtually no time to enjoy the “carefree days of youth.” We barely got by. What free time I did have, though, I spent reading. Along with music, books were my great joy. No matter how busy, or how broke, or how exhausted I was, no one could take those pleasures away from me.

As the end of my twenties approached, our Sendagaya jazz bar was, at last, beginning to show signs of stability. True, we couldn’t sit back and relax—we still owed money, and our sales had their ups and downs—but at least things seemed headed in a good direction.

* * * *

One bright April afternoon in 1978, I attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium, not far from where I lived and worked. It was the Central League season opener, first pitch at one o’clock, the Yakult Swallows against the Hiroshima Carp. I was already a Swallows fan in those days, so I sometimes popped in to catch a game—a substitute, as it were, for taking a walk.

Back then, the Swallows were a perennially weak team (you might guess as much from their name) with little money and no flashy big-name players. Naturally, they weren’t very popular. Season opener it may have been, but only a few fans were sitting beyond the outfield fence. I stretched out with a beer to watch the game. At the time there were no bleacher seats out there, just a grassy slope. The sky was a sparkling blue, the draft beer as cold as could be, and the ball strikingly white against the green field, the first green I had seen in a long while. The Swallows first batter was Dave Hilton, a skinny newcomer from the States and a complete unknown. He batted in the leadoff position. The cleanup hitter was Charlie Manuel, who later became famous as the manager of the Cleveland Indians and the Philadelphia Phillies. Then, though, he was a real stud, a slugger the Japanese fans had dubbed “the Red Demon.”

I think Hiroshima’s starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokoba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands. I had no idea why it had chanced to fall into my grasp. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. Whatever the reason, it had taken place. It was like a revelation. Or maybe epiphany is the closest word. All I can say is that my life was drastically and permanently altered in that instant—when Dave Hilton belted that beautiful, ringing double at Jingu Stadium.

After the game (Yakult won as I recall), I took the train to Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of writing paper and a fountain pen. Word processors and computers weren’t around back then, which meant we had to write everything by hand, one character at a time. The sensation of writing felt very fresh. I remember how thrilled I was. It had been such a long time since I had put fountain pen to paper.

Each night after that, when I got home late from work, I sat at my kitchen table and wrote. Those few hours before dawn were practically the only time I had free. Over the six or so months that followed I wrote Hear the Wind Sing. I wrapped up the first draft right around the time the baseball season ended. Incidentally, that year the Yakult Swallows bucked the odds and almost everyone’s predictions to win the Central League pennant, then went on to defeat the Pacific League champions, the pitching-rich Hankyu Braves in the Japan Series. It was truly a miraculous season that sent the hearts of all Yakult fans soaring.

* * * *

Hear the Wind Sing is a short work, closer to a novella than a novel. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. Part of the reason, of course, was the limited amount of time I had to work on it, but the greater problem was that I hadn’t a clue about how to write a novel. To tell the truth, although I was reading all kinds of stuff, my favorites being 19th-century Russian novels and American hard-boiled detective stories, I had never taken a serious look at contemporary Japanese fiction. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese novels were being read at the time, or how I should write fiction in the Japanese language.

For several months, I operated on pure guesswork, adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it. When I read through the result, though, I was far from impressed. It seemed to fulfill the formal requirements of a novel, but it was somewhat boring, and the book as a whole left me cold. If that’s the way the author feels, I thought, a reader’s reaction will probably be even more negative. Looks like I just don’t have what it takes, I thought dejectedly. Under normal circumstances, it would have ended there—I would have walked away. But the epiphany I had received on Jingu Stadium’s grassy slope was still clearly etched in my mind.

In retrospect, it was only natural that I was unable to produce a good novel. It was a big mistake to assume that a guy like me who had never written anything in his life could spin off something brilliant right off the bat. I was trying to accomplish the impossible. Give up trying to write something sophisticated, I told myself. Forget all those prescriptive ideas about “the novel” and “literature” and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like.

While it was easy to talk about setting down one’s impressions freely, doing it wasn’t all that simple. For a sheer beginner like myself it was especially hard. To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was get rid of my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature.” In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. Since I was willing to try anything, I figured, why not give that a shot?

Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. That meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head might be, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, and everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.

Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed. Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that entailed, removed this obstacle. It also led me to discover that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner. To sum up, I learned that there was no need for a lot of difficult words—I didn’t have to try to impress people with beautiful turns of phrase.

Much later, I found out that the writer Agota Kristof had written a number of wonderful novels in a style that had a very similar effect. Kristof was a Hungarian who escaped to Neuchâtel, Switzerland in 1956 during the upheaval in her native country. She had learned—been forced to learn, really—French. Yet it was through writing in that foreign language that she succeeded in developing a style that was new and uniquely hers. It featured a strong rhythm based on short sentences, diction that was never roundabout but always straightforward, and description that was apt and free of emotional baggage. Her novels were cloaked in an air of mystery that suggested important matters hidden beneath the surface. I remember feeling somehow or other nostalgic when I first encountered her work. Quite incidentally, her first novel, The Notebook, came out in 1986, just seven years after Hear the Wind Sing.

Having discovered the curious effect of composing in a foreign language, thereby acquiring a creative rhythm distinctly my own, I returned my Olivetti to the closet and once more pulled out my sheaf of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. Then I sat down and “translated” the chapter or so that I had written in English into Japanese. Well, “transplanted” might be more accurate, since it wasn’t a direct verbatim translation. In the process, inevitably, a new style of Japanese emerged. The style that would be mine. A style I myself had discovered. Now I get it, I thought. This is how I should be doing it. It was a moment of true clarity, when the scales fell from my eyes.

Some people have said, “Your work has the feel of translation.” The precise meaning of that statement escapes me, but I think it hits the mark in one way, and entirely misses it in another. Since the opening passages of my first novella were, quite literally, “translated,” the comment is not entirely wrong; yet it applies merely to the process of writing. What I was seeking by writing first in English and then “translating” into Japanese was no less than the creation of an unadorned “neutral” style that would allow me freer movement. My interest was not in creating a watered-down form of Japanese. I wanted to deploy a type of Japanese as far removed as possible from so-called literary language in order to write in my own natural voice. That required desperate measures. I would go so far as to say that, at that time, I may have regarded Japanese as no more than a functional tool.

Some of my critics saw this as a threatening affront to our national language. Language is very tough, though, a tenacity that is backed up by a long history. Its autonomy cannot be lost or seriously damaged however it is treated, even if that treatment is rather rough. It is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in every way they can imagine—without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born. My style in Japanese differs from Tanizaki’s, as it does from Kawabata’s. That is only natural. After all, I’m another guy, an independent writer named Haruki Murakami.

* * * *

It was a sunny Sunday morning in spring when I got the call from an editor at the literary journal Gunzo telling me that Hear the Wind Sing had been shortlisted for their new writers’ prize. Almost a year had passed since the season opener at Jingu Stadium, and I had turned 30. It was around 11 AM, but I was still fast asleep, having worked very late the night before. I groggily picked up the receiver, but I had no idea at first who was on the other end or what he was trying to tell me. To tell the truth, by that time I had quite forgotten that I had sent off Hear the Wind Sing to Gunzo. Once I had finished the manuscript and put it in someone else’s hands, my desire to write had altogether subsided. Composing it had been, so to speak, an act of defiance—I had written it very easily, just as it came to me—so the idea that it might make the short list had never occurred to me. In fact, I had sent them my only copy. If they hadn’t selected it, it probably would have vanished forever. (Gunzo didn’t return rejected manuscripts.) Most likely too, I would have never written another novel. Life is strange.

The editor told me that there were five finalists including me. I was surprised, but I was also very sleepy, so the reality of what had happened didn’t really sink in. I got out of bed, washed up, got dressed, and went for a walk with my wife. Just when we were passing the local elementary school, I noticed a passenger pigeon hiding in the shrubbery. When I picked it up I saw that it seemed to have a broken wing. A metal tag was affixed to its leg. I gathered it gently in my hands and carried it to the closest police station, at Aoyama-Omotesando. As I walked there along the side streets of Harajuku, the warmth of the wounded pigeon sank into my hands. I felt it quivering. That Sunday was bright and clear, and the trees, the buildings, and the shop windows sparkled beautifully in the spring sunlight.

That’s when it hit me. I was going to win the prize. And I was going to go on to become a novelist who would enjoy some degree of success. It was an audacious presumption, but I was sure at that moment that it would happen. Completely sure. Not in a theoretical way but directly and intuitively.

* * * *

I wrote Pinball, 1973 the following year as a sequel to Hear the Wind Sing. I was still running the jazz bar, which meant that Pinball was also written late at night at my kitchen table. It is with love mingled with a bit of embarrassment that I call these two works my kitchen-table novels. It was shortly after completing Pinball, 1973 that I made up my mind to become a full-time writer and we sold the business. I immediately set to work on my first full-length novel, A Wild Sheep’s Chase, which I consider to be the true beginning of my career as a novelist.

Nevertheless, these two short works played an important role in what I have accomplished. They are totally irreplaceable, much like friends from long ago. It seems unlikely that we will ever get together again, but I will never forget their friendship. They were a crucial, precious presence in my life back then. They warmed my heart, and encouraged me on my way.

I can still remember with complete clarity the way I felt when whatever it was came fluttering down into my hands that day 30 years ago on the grass behind the outfield fence at Jingu Stadium; and I recall just as clearly the warmth of the wounded pigeon I picked up in those same hands that spring afternoon a year later, near Sendagaya Elementary School. I always call up those sensations whenever I think about what it means to write a novel. Such tactile memories teach me to believe in that something I carry within me, and to dream of the possibilities it offers. How wonderful it is that those sensations still reside within me today.

--Haruki Murakami (tr. Ted Goossen)

Copyright 2015 © by Haruki Murakami

http://lithub.com/haruki-murakami-the-moment-i-became-a-novelist/

Mills, "If Librarians Were Honest"

a book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

If librarians were honest,
they wouldn’t smile, or act
welcoming. They would say,
You need to be careful. Here
be monsters. They would say,
These rooms house heathens
and heretics, murderers and
maniacs, the deluded, desperate,
and dissolute. They would say,
These books contain knowledge
of death, desire, and decay,
betrayal, blood, and more blood;
each is a Pandora’s box, so why
would you want to open one.
They would post danger
signs warning that contact
might result in mood swings,
severe changes in vision,
and mind-altering effects.
If librarians were honest
they would admit the stacks
can be more seductive and
shocking than porn. After all,
once you’ve seen a few
breasts, vaginas, and penises,
more is simply more,
a comforting banality,
but the shelves of a library
contain sensational novelties,
a scandalous, permissive mingling
of Malcolm X, Marx, Melville,
Merwin, Millay, Milton, Morrison,
and anyone can check them out,
taking them home or to some corner
where they can be debauched
and impregnated with ideas.
If librarians were honest,
they would say, No one
spends time here without being
changed. Maybe you should
go home. While you still can.

--J. Mills, "If Librarians Were Honest"

Miscellaneous quotation

In speaking and in writing something mad occurs: the true conversation is a pure play of words. What’s amazing, in fact, is that people should make such a ridiculous mistake as to imagine they are speaking of things. Precisely what is most characteristic of language—that it attends only to itself—everybody ignores. As a result it is a wondrous and fruitful mystery—to the point that, if one speaks purely for the sake of speaking, one expresses the most splendid, the most original truths. But if a person wishes to speak of some particular thing, that capricious creature language has him say the most ridiculous and muddle-headed of stuff. Which explains the hatred some serious people have for language. They see its mischievousness, but they don’t see that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If only one could have people understand that what applies to mathematical formulas applies to language too. They form a world apart, they play with each other, expressing only their own prodigious nature, which is precisely why they are so expressive—precisely why the strange play of relationships between things finds its reflection in them. Only by means of their freedom are they members of nature, and only in their free movements does the spirit of the world manifest itself and make itself the delicate measure and pattern of things. The same is true of language: he who has a subtle sense of its fingering, its timing, its musical spirit, he who intuits the delicate operation of its intimate nature, moving tongue or hand to it as he follows, he will be a prophet; conversely, he who knows this, but does not have the ear or the ability to write truths like these, will be mocked by language itself and derided by men, as was Cassandra by the Trojans. If in saying this I believe I have shown, in the clearest way possible, the essence and say it, so that no poetry has come out of it at all. But what if I felt compelled to speak? what if this linguistic impulse to speak were the hallmark of the inspiration of language, of the operation of language, in me? what if my will wanted only what I am compelled to do? might not this, in the end, without my realizing or imagining it, be poetry and make a mystery of language comprehensible? and would I then be a writer by vocation, since a writer can only be someone who is possessed by language?

--Novalis, "Monologue" qtd. in Calasso's Literature and the Gods, p. 191

Miscellaneous quotation

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist.

--Albert Camus (tr. and ed. Philip Thody), "Selected Essays and Notebooks"

Miscellaneous quotation

What an exciting experience it would be to follow the adventures of an idea through the ages. With no wordplay intended, I daresay that this would be the ideal novel: we would really see the abstract image, perfectly limpid and totally unencumbered by humanity’s dust, enjoying an intense existence that develops, swells, displays its thousand folds, with the diaphanous liquidity of an aurora borealis. One could select, for instance, the idea of beauty, follow its historical tribulations, and turn it into something vastly more vivid . . .

--Vladimir Nabokov, "Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible" qtd. in Thirlwell's The Delighted States, p. 29

Miscellaneous quotation

"Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes."
--Donald Goodwin, Alcohol and the Writer

Miscellaneous quotation

"Notes, scraps of paper, reverie, which all might go on for years. Then, one day, I have the idea or conception that makes all these isolated fragments coagulate together. There then begins a long and painful putting them into order."
--Albert Camus, interview in Claude Brisvilles' study in LaBibliotheque ideale

Samuel Johnson, "Gnothi Seauton"

When Scaliger, whole years of labour past,
Beheld his Lexicon complete at last,
And weary of his task, with wond'ring eyes,
Saw from words pil'd on words a fabric rise,
He curs'd the industry, inertly strong,
In creeping toil that could persist so long,
And if, enrag'd he cried, heav'n meant to shed
Its keenest vengeance on the guilty head,
The drudgery of words the damn'd would know,
Doom'd to write lexicons in endless woe.
Yes, you had cause, great genius! to repent;
"You lost good days, that might be better spent";
You well might grudge the hours of ling'ring pain,
And view your learned labours with disdain.
To you were giv'n the large expanded mind,
The flame of genius, and the taste refin'd.
'Twas yours on eagle wings aloft to soar,
And amidst rolling worlds the Great First Cause explore;
To fix the aeras of recorded time,
And live in ev'ry age and ev'ry clime;
Record the chiefs, who propt their country's cause;
Who founded empires, and establish'd laws;
To learn whate'er the sage with virtue fraught,
Whate'er the Muse of moral wisdom taught.
These were your quarry; these to you were known,
And the world's ample volume was your own.
Yet warn'd by me, ye pigmy wits, beware,
Nor with immortal Scaliger compare.
For me, though his example strike my view,
Oh! not for me his footsteps to pursue.
Whether first Nature, unpropitious, cold,
This clay compounded in a ruder mould;
Or the slow current, loit'ring at my heart,
No gleam of wit or fancy can impart;
Whate'er the cause, from me no numbers flow,
No visions warm me, and no raptures glow.
A mind like Scaliger's, superior still,
No grief could conquer, no misfortune chill.
Though for the maze of words his native skies
He seem'd to quit, 'twas but again to rise;
To mount once more to the bright source of day,
And view the wonders of th' aetherial way.
The love of fame his gen'rous bosom fir'd;
Each science hail'd him, and each Muse inspir'd,
For him the sons of learning trimm'd the bays,
And nations grew harmonious in his praise.
My task perform'd, and all my labours o'er,
For me what lot has Fortune now in store?
The listless will succeeds, that worst disease,
The rack of indolence, the sluggish ease.
Care grows on care, and o'er my aching brain
Black melancholy pours her morbid train.
No kind relief, no lenitive at hand,
I seek at midnight clubs, the social band;
But midnight clubs, where wit with noise conspires,
Where Comus revels, and where wine inspires,
Delight no more; I seek my lonely bed,
And call on sleep to sooth my languid head.
But sleep from these sad lids flies far away;
I mourn all night, and dread the coming day,
Exhausted, tir'd, I throw my eyes around,
To find some vacant spot on classic ground;
And soon, vain hope! I form a grand design;
Languor succeeds, and all my pow'rs decline.
If science open not her richest vein,
Without materials all our toil is vain.
A form to rugged stone when Phidias gives,
Beneath his touch a new creation lives.
Remove his marble, and his genius dies;
With Nature then no breathing statue vies.
Whate'er I plan, I feel my pow'rs confin'd
By Fortune's frown and penury of mind.
I boast no knowledge glean'd with toil and strife,
That bright reward of a well-acted life.
I view myself, while reason's feeble light
Shoots a pale glimmer through the gloom of night,
While passions, error, phantoms of the brain,
And vain opinions, fill the dark domain;
A dreary void, where fears with grief combin'd
Waste all within, and desolate the mind.
What then remains? Must I in slow decline
To mute inglorious ease old age resign?
Or, bold ambition kindling in my breast,
Attempt some arduous task? Or, were it best
Brooding o'er lexicons to pass the day,
And in that labour drudge my life away?

--Samuel Johnson, "Gnothi Seauton"

Marcel Theroux, Excerpt from 'Strange Bodies'

"Johnson has the best phrase for it. In one of his letters, he writes that ‘in the deaths of those close to us, the continuity of being is lacerated’. The continuity of being. The human personality is not an object, it’s a process, a constant state of becoming, that depends on a web of interdependencies, binding us to one another with invisible filaments, to our time, to memories and possessions, and back to our changing selves. And even that image probably overstates the solidity and integrity of the human personality. Strip a person away from the relationships that constitute their identity, the friends, the loved ones, the familiar sounds, and the outcome is bound to be breakdown and madness."
--Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

Miscellaneous quotation

 "Until you’re about the age of twenty, you read everything, and you like it simply because you are reading it. Then between twenty and thirty you pick what you want, and you read the best, you read all the great works. After that you sit and wait for them to be written. But you know, the least known, the least famous writers, they are the better ones."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/01/the-yellow-trolley-car-in-barcelona-and-other-visions/

Rudyard Kipling, "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows"

"If I can attain Heaven for a pice, why should you be envious?"
--Opium Smoker's Proverb

This is no work of mine. My friend, Gabral Misquitta, the half-caste, spoke it all, between moonset and morning, six weeks before he died; and I took it down from his mouth as he answered my questions. So:—

It lies between the Coppersmith’s Gully and the pipe-stem sellers’ quarter, within a hundred yards, too, as the crow flies, of the Mosque of Wazir Khan. I don’t mind telling any one this much, but I defy him to find the Gate, however well he may think he knows the City. You might even go through the very gully it stands in a hundred times, and be none the wiser. We used to call the gully, ‘The Gully of the Black Smoke,’ but its native name is altogether different of course. A loaded donkey couldn’t pass between the walls; and, at one point, just before you reach the Gate, a bulged house-front makes people go along all sideways.

It isn’t really a gate though. It’s a house. Old Fung-Tching had it first five years ago. He was a boot-maker in Calcutta. They say that he murdered his wife there when he was drunk. That was why he dropped bazar-rum and took to the Black Smoke instead. Later on, he came up north and opened the Gate as a house where you could get your smoke in peace and quiet. Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City. No; the old man knew his business thoroughly, and he was most clean for a Chinaman. He was a one-eyed little chap, not much more than five feet high, and both his middle fingers were gone. All the same, he was the handiest man at rolling black pills I have ever seen. Never seemed to be touched by the Smoke, either; and what he took day and night, night and day, was a caution. I’ve been at it five years, and I can do my fair share of the Smoke with any one; but I was a child to Fung-Tching that way. All the same, the old man was keen on his money: very keen; and that’s what I can’t understand. I heard he saved a good deal before he died, but his nephew has got all that now; and the old man’s gone back to China to be buried.

He kept the big upper room, where his best customers gathered, as neat as a new pin. In one corner used to stand Fung-Tching’s Joss—almost as ugly as Fung-Tching—and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never smelt ’em when the pipes were going thick. Opposite the Joss was Fung-Tching’s coffin. He had spent a good deal of his savings on that, and whenever a new man came to the Gate he was always introduced to it. It was lacquered black, with red and gold writings on it, and I’ve heard that Fung-Tching brought it out all the way from China. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I know that, if I came first in the evening, I used to spread my mat just at the foot of it. It was a quiet corner, you see, and a sort of breeze from the gully came in at the window now and then. Besides the mats, there was no other furniture in the room—only the coffin, and the old Joss all green and blue and purple with age and polish.

Fung-Tching never told us why he called the place ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.’ (He was the only Chinaman I know who used bad-sounding fancy names. Most of them are flowery. As you’ll see in Calcutta.) We used to find that out for ourselves. Nothing grows on you so much, if you’re white, as the Black Smoke. A yellow man is made different. Opium doesn’t tell on him scarcely at all; but white and black suffer a good deal. Of course, there are some people that the Smoke doesn’t touch any more than tobacco would at first. They just doze a bit, as one would fall asleep naturally, and next morning they are almost fit for work. Now, I was one of that sort when I began, but I’ve been at it for five years pretty steadily, and it’s different now. There was an old aunt of mine, down Agra way, and she left me a little at her death. About sixty rupees a month secured. Sixty isn’t much. I can recollect a time, ’seems hundreds and hundreds of years ago, that I was getting my three hundred a month, and pickings, when I was working on a big timber-contract in Calcutta.

I didn’t stick to that work for long. The Black Smoke does not allow of much other business; and even though I am very little affected by it, as men go I couldn’t do a day’s work now to save my life. After all, sixty rupees is what I want. When old Fung-Tching was alive he used to draw the money for me, give me about half of it to live on (I eat very little), and the rest he kept himself. I was free of the Gate at any time of the day and night, and could smoke and sleep there when I liked, so I didn’t care. I know the old man made a good thing out of it; but that’s no matter. Nothing matters much to me; and besides, the money always came fresh and fresh each month.

There was ten of us met at the Gate when the place was first opened. Me, and two Babus from a Government Office somewhere in Anarkulli, but they got the sack and couldn’t pay (no man who has to work in the daylight can do the Black Smoke for any length of time straight on); a Chinaman that was Fung-Tching’s nephew; a bazar-woman that had got a lot of money somehow; an English loafer—MacSomebody, I think, but I have forgotten,—that smoked heaps, but never seemed to pay anything (they said he had saved Fung-Tching’s life at some trial in Calcutta when he was a barrister); another Eurasian, like myself, from Madras; a half-caste woman, and a couple of men who said they had come from the North. I think they must have been Persians or Afghans or something. There are not more than five of us living now, but we come regular. I don’t know what happened to the Babus; but the bazar-woman she died after six months of the Gate, and I think Fung-Tching took her bangles and nose-ring for himself. But I’m not certain. The Englishman, he drank as well as smoked, and he dropped off. One of the Persians got killed in a row at night by the big well near the mosque a long time ago, and the Police shut up the well, because they said it was full of foul air. They found him dead at the bottom of it. So, you see, there is only me, the Chinaman, the half-caste woman that we call the Memsahib (she used to live with Fung-Tching), the other Eurasian, and one of the Persians. TheMemsahib looks very old now. I think she was a young woman when the Gate was opened; but we are all old for the matter of that. Hundreds and hundreds of years old. It is very hard to keep count of time in the Gate, and, besides, time doesn’t matter to me. I draw my sixty rupees fresh and fresh every month. A very, very long while ago, when I used to be getting three hundred and fifty rupees a month, and pickings, on a big timber-contract at Calcutta, I had a wife of sorts. But she’s dead now. People said that I killed her by taking to the Black Smoke. Perhaps I did, but it’s so long since that it doesn’t matter. Sometimes when I first came to the Gate, I used to feel sorry for it; but that’s all over and done with long ago, and I draw my sixty rupees fresh and fresh every month, and am quite happy. Not drunk happy, you know, but always quiet and soothed and contented.

How did I take to it? It began at Calcutta. I used to try it in my own house, just to see what it was like. I never went very far, but I think my wife must have died then. Anyhow, I found myself here, and got to know Fung-Tching. I don’t remember rightly how that came about; but he told me of the Gate and I used to go there, and, somehow, I have never got away from it since. Mind you, though, the Gate was a respectable place in Fung-Tching’s time, where you could be comfortable and not at all like the chandoo-khanas where the niggers go. No; it was clean, and quiet, and not crowded. Of course, there were others beside us ten and the man; but we always had a mat apiece, with a wadded woollen headpiece, all covered with black and red dragons and things, just like the coffin in the corner.

At the end of one’s third pipe the dragons used to move about and fight. I’ve watched ’em many and many a night through. I used to regulate my Smoke that way, and now it takes a dozen pipes to make ’em stir. Besides, they are all torn and dirty, like the mats, and old Fung-Tching is dead. He died a couple of years ago, and gave me the pipe I always use now—a silver one, with queer beasts crawling up and down the receiver-bottle below the cup. Before that, I think, I used a big bamboo stem with a copper cup, a very small one, and a green jade mouthpiece. It was a little thicker than a walking-stick stem, and smoked sweet, very sweet. The bamboo seemed to suck up the smoke. Silver doesn’t, and I’ve got to clean it out now and then, that’s a great deal of trouble, but I smoke it for the old man’s sake. He must have made a good thing out of me, but he always gave me clean mats and pillows, and the best stuff you could get anywhere.

When he died, his nephew Tsin-ling took up the Gate, and he called it the ‘Temple of the Three Possessions;’ but we old ones speak of it as the ‘Hundred Sorrows,’ all the same. The nephew does things very shabbily, and I think the Memsahib must help him. She lives with him; same as she used to do with the old man. The two let in all sorts of low people, niggers and all, and the Black Smoke isn’t as good as it used to be. I’ve found burnt bran in my pipe over and over again. The old man would have died if that had happened in his time. Besides, the room is never cleaned, and all the mats are torn and cut at the edges. The coffin is gone—gone to China again—with the old man and two ounces of Smoke inside it, in case he should want ’em on the way.

The Joss doesn’t get so many sticks burnt under his nose as he used to; that’s a sign of ill-luck, as sure as Death. He’s all brown, too, and no one ever attends to him. That’s the Memsahib’s work, I know; because, when Tsin-ling tried to burn gilt paper before him, she said it was a waste of money, and, if he kept a stick burning very slowly, the Joss wouldn’t know the difference. So now we’ve got the sticks mixed with a lot of glue, and they take half an hour longer to burn, and smell stinky; let alone the smell of the room by itself. No business can get on if they try that sort of thing. The Joss doesn’t like it. I can see that. Late at night, sometimes, he turns all sorts of queer colours—blue and green and red—just as he used to do when old Fung-Tching was alive; and he rolls his eyes and stamps his feet like a devil.

I don’t know why I don’t leave the place and smoke quietly in a little room of my own in the bazar. Most like, Tsin-ling would kill me if I went away—he draws my sixty rupees now—and besides, it’s so much trouble, and I’ve grown to be very fond of the Gate. It’s not much to look at. Not what it was in the old man’s time, but I couldn’t leave it. I’ve seen so many come in and out. And I’ve seen so many die here on the mats that I should be afraid of dying in the open now. I’ve seen some things that people would call strange enough; but nothing is strange when you’re on the Black Smoke, except the Black Smoke. And if it was, it wouldn’t matter. Fung-Tching used to be very particular about his people, and never got in any one who’d give trouble by dying messy and such. But the nephew isn’t half so careful. He tells everywhere that he keeps a ‘first-chop’ house. Never tries to get men in quietly, and make them comfortable like Fung-Tching did. That’s why the Gate is getting a little bit more known than it used to be. Among the niggers of course. The nephew daren’t get a white, or, for matter of that, a mixed skin into the place. He has to keep us three, of course—me and the Memsahib and the other Eurasian. We’re fixtures. But he wouldn’t give us credit for a pipeful—not for anything.

One of these days, I hope, I shall die in the Gate. The Persian and the Madras man are terribly shaky now. They’ve got a boy to light their pipes for them. I always do that myself. Most like, I shall see them carried out before me. I don’t think I shall ever outlive the Memsahib or Tsin-ling. Women last longer than men at the Black Smoke, and Tsin-ling has a deal of the old man’s blood in him, though he does smoke cheap stuff. The bazar-woman knew when she was going two days before her time; and she died on a clean mat with a nicely wadded pillow, and the old man hung up her pipe just above the Joss. He was always fond of her, I fancy. But he took her bangles just the same.

I should like to die like the bazar-woman—on a clean, cool mat with a pipe of good stuff between my lips. When I feel I’m going, I shall ask Tsin-ling for them, and he can draw my sixty rupees a month, fresh and fresh, as long as he pleases. Then I shall lie back, quiet and comfortable, and watch the black and red dragons have their last big fight together; and then . . .

Well, it doesn't matter much to me. Nothing matters much to me—only I wish Tsin-ling wouldn’t put bran into the Black Smoke.

--Rudyard Kipling, "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows"

Proust, Excerpt from "In Search of Lost Time"

"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is."
--Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V, Ch. II

Guy Davenport, Excerpts from "The Guy Davenport Reader"

"The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination."

"The imagination is like a drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk to find it. It is an intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re-educate our eyes."

--Guy Davenport, The Guy Davenport Reader

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Excerpt from "The Black Swan"

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Albert Camus, "La Vie d’Artiste" (tr. Ryan Bloom)

"THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST: A MIMODRAMA IN TWO PARTS"

PART ONE

A.

A small painter’s studio. Three walls, one of which is, perhaps, made of glass. These panels must be mobile. The studio is shabby but contains some attractive objects: an antique, a beautiful pitcher, some drawings, an old copper vase, two or three pieces of old furniture with dirty, but handsomely made, wood. Above all, the light.

As the curtain rises, the painter and his wife. He paints, she poses. They are shabbily, but tastefully, dressed. She shivers. He looks at her. He stops painting, goes to load up the stove. While he’s doing this, she gets up and goes over to hug him. He keeps her against him a moment, then takes her back to the pedestal on which she poses. She makes angry faces. They laugh. She returns to posing. He works.

Behind the painter, a friend enters. He waves to the wife, showing her the bottle of wine and the pâté he brings. She stands and hurries over to him. The painter gets angry, but notices his friend and laughs. The friend lays the food out on the table and the three of them surround it. Clearly, they are hungry and they laugh. But as they are about to sit the painter stops them, runs to grab a piece of heavy paper, and begins to sketch still-lifes of the food. The others protest and grab the pâté. They clink glasses and begin to eat. The painter, glass in hand, goes off to gaze at the picture in progress and to mull it over. The others look at him, smiling. He puts down his glass and returns to the painting, no longer concerned with them. Quietly, the painter’s wife settles back onto the pedestal without him even noticing. When he raises his eyes and sees her, he stares at her in silence, then, suddenly, goes to hug her.

Blackout.

B.

There are a lot more canvases in the studio, another piece of furniture, and a small rug. The wife folds laundry in a corner of the studio. A crib can be seen. The painter works. The friend enters with a dealer, who has an air of contemptuous self-importance about him. He looks at a canvas, turns it in all directions, ruminates, blows his nose, and offers two coins. The painter is about to accept when the friend signals to him. He refuses and then receives three coins. The dealer is led out. The door closed, the painter does a few jubilant somersaults and turns on the rug, while the friend juggles the coins, and the wife sings without being heard.

Blackout.

C.

Sequence of blackouts punctuated by a spotlight on the painter working, each time on a new canvas. Light. He is surrounded by canvases. Two or three dealers are discussing. Some gaze at the canvases on the other side of the easel. On the table, a variety of food has been brought: fine fruit, elegant flasks. Slowly, the wall panels begin to move. The studio gets larger. Furniture is brought in. Dealers empty their pockets into some sort of purse near the easel and begin to gather up the canvases. One discusses the price of a picture with the painter, pays him, immediately sells it to a second dealer, who resells it, for a nice profit, to a third. The painter stretches, sits down, and laughs. His wife hurries over with a little boy, who is already getting big, and places a clearly opulent bathrobe over her husband’s shoulders.

Blackout.

D.

Blackouts and lights on the painter at work. Light. The studio has gotten even bigger. Furniture, rugs, crystals, and other refined provisions continue to be brought. He works but his canvas already has a frame. His wife is in a corner with a young man and a little girl. Some benefactors enter, one an aesthete with two Afghan hounds. They look at the paintings with a lorgnette. Some colleagues come to talk to the painter, interrupting him. They bring him art books, prints, etc., which he leafs through with one hand while he paints with the other. An elegant woman enters and asks to have her portrait done. He interrupts his work, poses her, and begins to paint her. Another woman, exactly the same as the first, enters. Same game. He paints her. Then a third, and he is working on three pictures at the same time.

Some students and disciples arrive, set up their easels as in a workshop, and, from time to time, come over to place their sketches between the painter and his painting. He advises them, having to hold one of his students’ hands while he erases part of his own picture. His wife brings him a third child, who sits between his legs.

Enter suppliers, some men and women, academics, military personnel, boxers, actors. Tea is served. The painter is constantly bothered. A fashionable designer also enters. She adorns the wife and daughter with yards of fabric, which the painter tangles his feet in while the dogs get mixed up in everything. A jeweller brings jewelry boxes. As the painter is about to make a brushstroke, someone hands him a cup of tea. A woman slips her hand between the painting and him so that he may kiss it. He kisses, drinks his tea, paints, speaks to the models, to the students, praises his wife, waves, from afar, to his friend, who is kept away by the masses, and who remains alone, in a corner, pushed more and more toward the door through which he eventually disappears. Two characters come by, calmly prattling in the painter’s ears.¹

He smiles, smiles again; the studio, which has been enlarged as much as possible, is nonetheless more and more crowded. He paints only here and there, around the people. He wobbles.

Blackout.

E.

Light quickly illuminates the same scene with the same characters. Music. Two officials enter in a display of pageantry. Ceremonial greetings. One presents him with a small medal to wear around his neck. Music. The other presents him a bigger medal, so on and so forth, until he is covered in decorations. At that moment, someone adorns his head with a laurel wreath. Then someone gives him some paintbrushes. Encumbered, he cannot move and is stuck in this pose. Then an official painter, who paints his portrait, arrives, then a second painter, who paints a portrait of the first painter painting the hero, then a third, and so on. Everyone chatters in the light, the ribbons, the dogs, the easels. With great pageantry, somebody brings the painter a mirror so that he may gaze at himself.

Sudden and total silence.

He looks at himself and sees what he’s become.

Silence.

Suddenly, he overturns the mirror, tears off his medals, chases out the dogs, the women, the painters, and, with his paintbrushes, makes a furious fencing motion toward the students, half strangles an official with the cord of his medal and drags him out. Returning to the empty stage, his wife and children cowering in a corner, he takes all of the paintings and tears them up, gashes them, tramples them, overturns furniture, runs toward his wife to strip her of her fashionable glory, and then, returning to center stage like a crazy man, alone in the middle of disaster, he weeps bitterly.

PART TWO

Blackout.

A.

The center of the stage is naked. The furniture is pushed to the walls. As the curtain rises, the painter is trying, aided by his wife and kids, to drag in a gigantic canvas, which takes up the entire height of the room and a large part of the width. Once the painting is in place, very little free space is left. In that area, the painter’s family is wedged, anxiously watching the painter, who places ladders and stools in front of the canvas. In his shirtsleeves, he climbs all the way up one of the ladders so that he may work while his wife distributes to the children the remains of the food.

Blackout.

B.

The painter is still working from his ladder. The dealer enters and calls out to him. He doesn’t answer. The wife arrives. She shakes her head and shows the canvas. The dealer takes a ruler from his pocket and attempts to measure the canvas. He shakes his head and leaves. Two other dealers enter. They resell a painting for a clear loss, the reverse of what happened in Part One. They call out to the painter. He doesn’t respond. They shake the ladder. The painter throws at their heads whatever he has on hand. The dealers flee. The wife gets on her knees to beg, but the painter remains deaf.

Blackout.

C.

Series of blackouts and lights on the painter, still, always, working on the same picture. Lights. A creditor with a bill. He doesn’t respond. The wife shakes her head. A succession of creditors. The same game. The bailiff arrives, reads his official statement. One by one, the pieces of furniture are removed. The wall panels come back together, the studio becomes much smaller, the canvas more and more inconvenient. He paints. The fashionable designer arrives, stripping the wife of whatever remains. The jeweller returns to take back the wife and daughter’s jewelry. The girl looks up at her mother and father. She looks at the painting, at her father’s back. She flees behind the jeweller. The wife calls out to the father. He paints.

Blackout.

D.

Series of blackouts and lights on the painter, who is always working. Only the ladder has moved. Light. The room is now emptied of furniture, impoverished. Some colleagues come, look at the canvas, shake their heads, and walk off. The eldest son, given his portion of bread by his mother, refuses it, gives it to his brother, places a bag on his back, hugs his mother, and heads off. The mother calls out to the painter. He paints.

Blackout.

E.

Same effects. Lights. The child is sick. The doctor leaves, returns with some nurses, who take the child. The painter watches him go, looks at his wife without descending the ladder, and shakes his head. He returns to painting. His wife staggers and falls.

Blackout.

F.

The wife is in bed, sick and exhausted. She is delirious. He is always painting. Just then, the friend enters. He hesitates, looks at his comrade, and then goes over to the bed and sits in silence. The painter turns, looks at him without expression, and returns to painting.

Blackout.

G.

He is still, always painting. The friend is standing beside the bed with the doctor. The wife is dying. Just as the painter puts the finishing touch, she dies. The doctor leaves. The painter turns, sees her dead, descends, walks slowly toward her, and with a great, silent cry, suddenly throws himself by the bedside.

At this moment, the neighbors begin to enter and, little by little, fill the studio, moving toward the bed. But suddenly the spotlights flash on over the completed work, the lights dripping in a stream of music. Abruptly, all turn to the work and stand visibly stupefied, while he, oblivious to his work and their shock, cries.

Then he raises his head, notices the others, goes over to them, and gently pushes them toward the exit. He goes to a corner looking for a piece of heavy paper and an easel, and installs himself in front of the bed. The friend looks at him, hesitates, then leaves. The painter kisses his wife, returns to the easel, looks at her again, and, while the curtain slowly falls, begins to paint the dead face.

--Albert Camus (tr. Ryan Bloom, ill. Roman Muradov)

_____

1. Here, the sound effects should imitate the sounds of a barnyard. For example, a tape can be run in reverse. Similarly, the sounds of high society chattering can be symbolized by the clatter of castanets.

© Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1965.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/the-life-of-the-artist-a-mimodrama-in-two-parts.html

William Styron, Excerpt from "Darkness Visible"

Since antiquity--in the tortured lament of Job, in the choruses of Sophocles and Aeschylus--chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia. Through the course of literature and art the theme of depression has run like a durable thread of woe--from Hamlet's soliloquy to the verses of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from John Donne to Hawthorne and Dostoevsky and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf. In many of Albrecht Dürer's engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist's plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, how ever, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:

Nel mezzo del cam ming di nostra vita Mi ritrovat per una sel va
oscura, Che la diritta via era smamta.

In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul's annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease--and they are countless--bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.

For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as "the shining world." There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.

--William Styron, Darkness Visible

Miscellaneous quotation

"...a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. "
--John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science"

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

--Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science", Collected Fictions (tr. Andrew Hurley)

T. S. Eliot, Excerpt from "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

[A]nd the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.
--T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Louis MacNeice, "The Gloomy Academic"

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it 
Page by page 
To train the mind or even to point a moral 
For the present age: 
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity, 
The golden mean between opposing ills... 
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple; 
These dead are dead 
And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas 
I think instead 
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists, 
The careless athletes and the fancy boys, 
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics 
And the Agora and the noise 
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring 
Libations over graves 
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly 
I think of the slaves. 
And how one can imagine oneself among them 
I do not know; 
It was all so unimaginably different 
And all so long ago.

--Louis MacNeice, "The Gloomy Academic"