Category: World Literature

Today’s One-Liner (#165)

These are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the restIs prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action. –T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages

Bearing Fruit

Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture might almost be described as the lit­er­a­ture of conversion. (We noted some famous instances in Chapter 3.) Time and again, suffering leads to awareness of Truth or apprehension of God. Tolstoy’s autobiographical Confession recounts…

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oilCrushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?Generations…

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…