Category: World Literature

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 (#159)

 They buried [Bergotte], but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more,…

Today’s One-Liner (#157)

You can get Ovid, or rather Ovid’s stories in Golding’s Metamorphoses, which is the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s). –Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading

A Mission

After the Holocaust, no further doubt was possible. Isaac said so explicitly: the work he wanted to fashion would also be a surviving testimony to a murdered people, a vanished culture, and a dying language. …

Today’s One-Liner (#148)

In Poor Folk we have the first timid and hesitant expression of the great theme of theodicy, the questioning of the wisdom of the world created by God—thus a questioning of God himself—that will ultimately…

Today’s One-Liner (#137)

If we search for God and we are good to human beings, we are doing more or less our job. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell

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…

Today’s One-Liner (#132)

We must collect all kinds of sayings and proverbs. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945 , edited  by David Stromberg