Category: World Literature

The Pleasure of Aphorisms

As most of the little book’s exegetes remark, the story [of Rasselas]–to term it so–is a thread upon which an extraordinary number of powerful adagio are precariously arranged in series. Johnson once remarked that he…

Today’s One-Liner (#266)

[Samuel Johnson] used the conventions and mechanisms of Grub Street—writing rapidly, writing to order, writing in a standard genre—to generate literature, happily defined by Ezra Pound as “news that stays news.” –Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson…

Preserving Potency

Writing to Simone, Proust requested her photograph, as he had her mother’s not so long ago without success. He explained to Simone the importance photographs had for him: “I shall think of you even without…

Job’s Friends

The friends cannot be expected to recognize their own injustice. As with all those who create scapegoats, they consider their victim to be guilty. Therefore, for them, there is no scapegoat….In Job’s eyes, the three…

Reciting by Heart

When I use my memory,  I ask it to produce whatever it is that I wish to remember. Some  things it produces immediately; some are forthcoming only after a  delay, as though they were being…

The Grace of Sympathy

When I turned, I found that the young man had taken out the dog and was standing at the door looking in upon us with dry eyes, but quiet. The girl was quiet too and…

Memory Multitudes

During the night he went through his vast store of memories. He remembered the hundreds of people who had passed through his life. He remembered pupils and teachers, friends and enemies. He remembered books and…

It’s Not Easy

But the love revealed in Jesus, simple as it sounds, is terribly arduous. That is why the history of our faith so often reads like a history of our resistance to love. Give us rules….

The Blood-stained Face of History

Could this really be socialism—with the labor camps of Kolyma, with the horrors of collectivization, with the cannibalism and the millions of deaths during the famine? Yes, there were times when a very different understanding…