“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end,” Lord Acton wrote. “It is itself the highest political end.”
As a classical liberal, like Acton, I naturally agree with this, and I think most other Americans would also, especially if presented with a clear and present threat to their liberty. I am not sure if most Europeans would, however. [Read more →]
“I have sinned.”
These were, apparently, the last words English playwright John Osborne wrote. His wife found them scrawled on a cigarette pack beside his bed when he died in 1994. [Read more →]
I have been reading George Santayana’s The Life of Reason. I downloaded all five volumes into my Kindle a few months ago and started reading it while ensconced in a cabin in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains region. I’m not sure if I quite grasp Santayana’s line of argument, not because it is unclear, but because his prose is so intoxicating. It is all so perfectly phrased, one hardly bothers wondering if any of it is true, especially since, from time to time, he punctuates his discourse with aphorisms that seem so right that one simply presumes that everything leading up to them must have been eminently sound. [Read more →]
The poet Frank O’Hara’s friend Joe LeSueur tells the story somewhere — I’m pretty sure it’s in Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara — that after O’Hara’s memorial service in Greenwich Village, the composer Ned Rorem invited everyone in attendance back to his apartment. Impressed by how smoothly Rorem handled matters, LeSueur took a moment to compliment and thank him. According to LeSueur, Rorem leaned over and murmured, “You must understand, I don’t feel things deeply.” [Read more →]
“Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared in “Definitions of Poetry,” adding that “poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.” [Read more →]
I wanted to riff this week on a more light-hearted quote than those I have lately considered, so I googled P.G. Wodehouse quotes, thinking that if anyone had uttered something memorably light-hearted, it would have to be the creator of Jeeves.
Oddly, the one that caught my fancy was this: “Flowers are happy things.” [Read more →]
Recently, I quoted on my blog something by the 17th-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracián: “Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.” Later on, my friend Susan Balée posted a comment: “Odd how many of us want to “kill” this sole possession.”
All of which, not surprisingly, got me thinking about time, which is as mysterious as life itself. [Read more →]
Earlier this year, I received an email from fellow WFTC contributor Olga Gardner Galvin suggesting that I consider doing a column about “Only connect,” the epigram attached to E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End. I wrote back that I thought it was a good idea, but I would first have to reacquaint myself with Forster’s novel. Shortly thereafter I downloaded Howards End onto my Kindle, where it remained unread until a few days ago.
Unfortunately, now that this reacquaintance has taken place, I am not at all certain I understand the epigram any better than I did before. [Read more →]
Among the many pleasures reading fiction can afford, perhaps the greatest and most lasting has to do with the people one encounters there. Ever since I first met them during my teens, I have thought of D’Artagnan and his fellow musketeers — Athos, Porthos and Aramis — as friends. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Anna Karenina and Prince Hamlet can seem more real than the people one meets in the street, perhaps because, through the exercise of our imagination, we have helped bring them to life.
But how like the people we meet in real life are they really? [Read more →]
I first heard of Peter Altenberg while watching The Tonight Show, back in the days when it was hosted by Jack Paar. Alexander King, one of Paar’s regulars, used to talk about Altenberg all the time. [Read more →]
Jiddu Krishnamurti was a strange dude.
For more than half a century he told anyone who wanted to listen that the only way to find the truth is to look for it yourself. Subscribing to doctrines, performing rituals, practicing disciplines, obeying authorities were all a waste of time, because truth, he said, is “a pathless realm.” [Read more →]
“Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.”
So began the note actor George Sanders left behind when he committed suicide in 1972.
It is, one might say, perfectly phrased. Notice that Sanders didn’t complain about anything being boring, only that he was bored. So he was being serious. Boredom inheres in the person who is bored, not in others or things or circumstances. It is not boring You are bored. [Read more →]
I have been reading Justine, the first volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which I had not looked at since college. It has been a happy reunion, conjuring much of the same magic as before, its cadences echoing in the mind like favorite tunes, causing one to feel as one had not for so very long.
Durrell, I gather, has fallen into neglect since his death in 1990. [Read more →]
The mind often works better on its own, without any prodding or guidance from us. Think of all those ideas that just occurred to you out of the blue, or that problem you solved upon waking up one morning after giving up on it the night before and going to bed.
I was reminded of this recently when my wife and I went to see the exhibition of late still lifes and interiors by Pierre Bonnard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [Read more →]
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit a class at St. Joseph’s University, which happens to be my alma mater. Sam Starnes, who invited me, used to review for me when I was the book editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He wanted me to talk to his students about reviewing.
What I had to say was the less interesting part of the visit. [Read more →]
“In memory of Nicholas Serafine. Pray for him.” These words are inscribed on a brass plate attached to a small rack of votive candles in the rear of St. Paul’s Church in South Philadelphia. [Read more →]
I brought my column last week to a close by quoting Oscar Wilde’s quip that “to fall in love with oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” I cited it in connection with how I felt about myself, and this may have struck some as a wondrous exercise in narcissism.
But there is a difference between self-love and narcissism. [Read more →]
“Any life is made up of a single moment,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.” I came upon this the other day, and it has stayed with me ever since, as much in my heart as on my mind, stirring up my memory and exciting my imagination. [Read more →]
Think on These Things is the title of a book by Jiddu Krishnamurti. I don’t how many people nowadays remember Krishnamurti, but he was a most extraordinary fellow.
Born near Madras, India, in 1895, he was spotted on a beach when he 13 years old by C.W. Leadbeater, an Anglican priest turned theosophist. Leadbeater said the boy had the most perfect aura he had ever seen, and he and Annie Besant, the president of the World Theosophical Society, arranged with Krishnamurti’s father to take the boy and his younger brother back to England with them. [Read more →]
It is perhaps the most famous first line of all — the one that begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” [Read more →]
