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…
Category: Reading
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…
Today’s One-Liner (#172)
The basic function of literature, as far as I can say, is to entertain the spirit in a very big way. —Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell, p. 75.
Today’s One-Liner (#160)
I read something from Boswells’ Life of Johnson almost every day. –James V. Schall, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing
Today’s One-Liner (#141)
Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, “The Uncommon Reader” Susan Sontag, with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Freeing up the Imagination
Not too long ago, I heard a tape of the memorial service held at Stanford University Chapel at the death of Eric Voegelin. On the tape, Professor William Havard, I think, remarked that Voegelin read…