Category: Reading

Aha!

And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art was  the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. …

Today’s One-Liner (#192)

The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realize that after all, we [moderns] might have been mistaken. –C.F.J. Martin, quoted in Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the…

Minute Particulars

His father and mother had walked where he would walk as a young man, drifter and dreamer, who would in his fiction delineate each footstep, each bird call, each oval of sand wet or dry,…

Portrait of the Artist as a Kid

 In his new school James excelled at lessons and won prizes for the best English compositions. The money helped to buy clothes and food for the needy family and even allowed for little trips to…

Then Things Changed

“I was prepared actually never to be translated, never to be known, to remain a Yiddish writer.” –Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted in Janet Hadda, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, 88

A Yiddish Counterculture

If you read enough of Peretz and the countless Yiddish writers who followed, a deeper vision begins to emerge: of a Jewishness infinitely more interesting, more challenging, and more relevant, rooted in tradition, shaped by…

Reading the Psalms

 How I cried out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David,  those hymns of faith, those songs of a pious heart in which the spirit  of pride can find no place!…

Today’s One-Liner (#176)

Friends boasted that Proust could declaim whole pages of Balzac by heart. –Josef Czapski, Lost Time:  Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, trans. Eric Karpeles, p. 33.

Open a Book

There was nothing to do but wait it out.  My kind has to become accustomed to loneliness.  And when one is alone there is nothing to do but study.  –Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s…