“Emmanuèle lay down on the floor of the truck, face down and wailing, and Oliveira put his feet on her behind and settled himself comfortably on the bench. Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a […]
This book’s title might connote a tense battlefield, with ruler-brandishing teachers firmly entrenched against the remonstrations of an angry citizenry. But, like any serious student of history, author Dana Goldstein knows such simplistic images belie the messy truth about wars, which is that they are rife with broken borders, double crossings, unexpected victories, and crushing […]
“All pain attacks me with a double-edged sword: it makes me aware as never before of the divorce between my ego and my body (and its falseness, its consoling invention) and at the same time it brings my body close to me, dresses me in it as pain. I feel it to be more mine […]
“‘Why fool ourselves? It’s impossible to live with a puppeteer who works with shadows, a moth-tamer. Someone who spends his time making pictures out of the iridescent rings the oil makes on the Seine is unacceptable. Me, with my padlocks and keys that I make out of the air, me, writing with smoke. I’ll save […]
“The real dream was located in an imprecise zone, next to waking but without his really being awake; he would have had to make use of other references to speak about it, eliminate rotund terms like dreaming and awake that didn’t mean a thing, locate himself rather in that zone where once more his childhood house would […]
“Now he realized that in his highest moments of desire he had not known how to stick his head into the crest of the wave and pass through the fabulous crash of his blood. Loving La Maga had been a sort of rite from which one no longer expected illumination; words and acts had succeeded […]
“For those with a delicate sense of smell, a world sumptuously orchestrated was being resolved into nothingness; but right there the mystery began, because at the same time one was presented with the total nihilism of the work, a more careful intuition might suspect that this was not Morelli’s intent, that the virtual self-destruction found […]
“‘To plunge one’s self into a reality or into a possible mode of a reality, and to feel how that which at first sight seemed to be the wildest absurdity comes to have some value, to articulate itself with others forms, absurd or otherwise, until the divergent weave (in relation to the stereotyped sketch of […]
“One can laugh, and think that it is not serious, but it is serious, laughter has dug more useful tunnels all by itself than all the tears on earth, even though it may barely be known to stiff-necked people, stubborn in their belief that Melpomene is more fruitful than Queen Mab. Once and for all […]
I almost quit reading this book after the first few chapters. Bernard Williams’ opaque arguments about metaphysics and epistemology––hardly my favorite philosophy subjects––are enervating to the point of somnolence. I’ve never enjoyed or been particularly enlightened by analytical philosophy, which typically deploys the tropes of formal logic to imbue philosophical arguments with an air of […]