Hanna Krall: “All my books are about how very good human beings can be, and about how very bad they can be—something we are constantly discovering over and over again.” Chasing the King of Hearts, 190 [translated by Philip Boehm] See Dear Layla, 138 and 198.
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David Grossman’s Falling out of Time reminded me of the Sermon at the Stone in The Brothers Karamazov; Ram Dass’s letter in Fierce Grace; Kerouac’s impossible imperative, “Accept loss forever”; Soen Nakagawa’s “encourage others”; Dear Layla‘s Henry, “You, too?”; and Chris Wallach reminding me of our continuation, now and later.
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A Day in the Life of Simone Weil in the Factory: “Uneventful day. Not particularly hard. Feeling of silent fraternity with the rugged set-up man from the back (the only one). Spoke to no one. Nothing very instructive.”
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Proust transcends our notions of political correctness and punishment of the transgressors; according to Josef Czapski in his lectures: “In his work we come across an absolute absence of bias, a willingness to know and to understand as many opposing states of the human soul as possible, a capacity for discovering in the lowest sort of man such nobility as to appear sublime, and in the seemingly purest of beings, the basest instincts. His work acts on us like life, filtered and illuminated by a consciousness whose soundness is infinitely greater than our own.” Which is why Darren Crews might immerse himself in Proust after a couple of summer months in the West Bank (Dear Layla, 152-153).
