Category Archives: Literature

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life

08 Sunday Apr 2018

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“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea.

Once in the mid-1920s I was driving along the High Corniche Road through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling on the sea below. As far ahead as I could see was Monte Carlo, and though it was out of season and there were no Grand Dukes left to gamble and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a fat industrious man in my hotel, who lived in a bath-robe — the very name was so incorrigibly enchanting that I could only stop the car and like the Chinese whisper: ‘Ah me! Ah me!’ It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again — for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment — when life was literally a dream.”

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From the ending of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1937 essay “Early Success”, which you’ll find a lot of places but was first collected in My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940.

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Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

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“In his childhood and youth he was not very effusive, not even very talkative, not from mistrust, not from shyness or sullen unsociability, but even quite the contrary, from something different, from some inner preoccupation, as it were, strictly personal, of no concern to others, but so important for him that because of it he would, as it were, forget others. But he did love people; he lived all his life, it seemed, with complete faith in people, and yet no one ever considered him either naive or a simpleton…

Thus he possessed in himself, in his very nature, so to speak, artlessly and directly, the gift of awakening [in others] a special love for himself. It was the same with him at school, too, and yet it would seem that he was exactly the kind of child who awakens mistrust, sometimes mockery, and perhaps also hatred, in his schoolmates. He used, for instance, to lapse into revery and, as it were, set himself apart. Even as a child, he liked to go into a corner and read books, and yet his schoolmates, too, loved him so much that he could decidedly be called everyone’s favorite all the while he was at school. He was seldom playful, seldom even merry, but anyone could see at once, at a glance, that this was not from any kind of sullenness, that, on the contrary, he was serene and even-tempered. He never wanted to show off in front of his peers. Maybe for that very reason he was never afraid of anyone, and yet the boys realized at once that he was not at all proud of his fearlessness, but looked as if he did not realize that he was brave and fearless. He never remembered an offense. Sometimes an hour after the offense he would speak to the offender or answer some question with as trustful and serene an expression as though nothing had happened between them at all. And he did not look as if he had accidentally forgotten or intentionally forgiven the offense; he simply did not consider it an offense, and this decidedly captivated the boys and conquered them… Incidentally, he was always among the best of his class in his studies, but was never the first.”

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From the description of Alyosha in chapter four of Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov. Had FD lived, his plan was to write a sequel to the book to tell the rest of Alyosha’s story.

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The Calling of an Artist

07 Wednesday Feb 2018

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“On Sunday 28 June, mid-afternoon, Jed accompanied Olga to Roissy airport. It was sad: something inside him understood that they were living a moment of mortal sadness. The fine, calm weather did not favor the expression of the appropriate feelings. He could have interrupted the process of breaking up, thrown himself at her feet, begged her not to take the plane; she probably would have listened to him. […]

Many years later, when he had become famous — extremely famous, truth be told — Jed would be asked numerous times what it meant, in his eyes, to be an artist. He would find nothing very interesting or original to say, except one thing, which he would consequently repeat in each interview: to be an artist, in his view, was above all to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages… messages which nonetheless commanded you in an imperious and categorical manner, without leaving the slightest possibility of escape — except by losing any notion of integrity and self-respect. These messages could involve destroying a work, or even an entire body of work, to set off in a radically new direction, or even occasionally no direction at all, without having any project at all, or the slightest hope of continuing. It was thus, and only thus, that the artist’s condition could, sometimes, by described as difficult. It was also thus, and only thus, that it distinguished itself from other professions or trades…”

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Taken from about a quarter into Michel Houellebecq’s 2010 novel The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq’s next novel, the

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Ilium

15 Monday Jan 2018

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“Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilium but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact…”

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Pulled from midway into Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, about the book Alexander slept with under his pillow. Mark Van Doren: “Homer is a world; Virgil is a style.”

Meet Oskar Schindler

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

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“In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and — in the lapel of the dinner jacket — a large ornamental gold-on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine. ‘Watch the pavement, Herr Schindler,’ said the chauffeur. ‘It’s as icy as a widow’s heart.’ In observing this small winter scene, we are on safe ground. The tall young man would to the end of his days wear doublebreasted suits, would — being something of an engineer — always be gratified by large dazzling vehicles, would — though a German and at this point in history a German of some influence — always be the sort of man with whom a Polish chauffeur could safely crack a lame, comradely joke.

But it will not be possible to see the whole story under such easy character headings. For this is the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms… Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.

‘Virtue’ in fact is such a dangerous word that we have to rush to explain; Herr Oskar Schindler, risking his glimmering shoes on the icy pavement in this old and elegant quarter of Cracow, was not a virtuous young man in the customary sense. In this city he kept house with his German mistress and maintained a long affair with his Polish secretary. His wife, Emilie, chose to live most of the time at home in Moravia, though she sometimes came to Poland to visit him. There’s this to be said for him: that to all his women he was a well-mannered and generous lover. But under the normal interpretation of ‘virtue,’ that’s no excuse.

Likewise, he was a drinker. Some of the time he drank for the pure glow of it, at other times with associates, bureaucrats, SS men for more palpable results. Like few others, he was capable of staying canny while drinking, of keeping his head. That again, though — under the narrow interpretation of morality — has never been an excuse for carousing. And although Herr Schindler’s merit is well documented, it is a feature of his ambiguity that he worked within or, at least, on the strength of a corrupt and savage scheme, one that filled Europe with camps of varying but consistent inhumanity and created a submerged, unspoken-of nation of prisoners.”

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Excerpted from the intro to Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark (later retitled to Schindler’s List). When asked, years later, why he’d acted the way he did during the holocaust, Schindler apparently replied, “I could never abuse something with a human face.”

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Odysseus’s Mind

03 Sunday Dec 2017

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“The Odyssey is a homecoming. It’s what the Greeks called a nostos, which means a return home, and that word is very close to the Greek word for mind, nous. Both come from an Indo-European root, nos, which means a return from darkness to light. And that’s what Odysseus does, in both senses.

He is hidden, for seven years, on the island of Calypso, who is really enchanted with him. She doesn’t want to let him go. It’s a marvelous scene when she finally tells him, ‘Alright you can go, but do you really want to? You can stay here with me and be immortal and ageless all your days.’ What would you say to Calypso at that point?

Odysseus, always thinking — this is one of his epithets, polymetis, many, many thoughts — he’s always ready for any occasion, and this might be a difficult situation for him. If you’ve ever left someone who didn’t want you to leave… well, you know what I’m talking about. So he says this to her:

‘Goddess and mistress, don’t be angry with me.
I know very well that Penelope,
For all her virtues, would pale beside you.
She’s only human, and you are a goddess,
Eternally young. Still, I want to go back.
My heart aches for the day I return to my home.
If fate hits me hard as I sail the deep purple,
I’ll weather it like the sea-bitten veteran I am.
God knows I’ve suffered and had my share of sorrows
In war and at sea. I can take more if I have to.’

They make love that night for the last time, then he’s off on a raft on his struggle to return home.

He faces many adversities. He meets them all with a mind that is flexible, ready for any twist of fate. He can get out of seemingly any situation, no matter how difficult. It is by virtue of his truly incredible mind that he finally arrives back at Ithaca.”

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Stanley Lombardo, introducing a reading from his translation of Homer’s Odyssey, for my money the best version of my favorite story. Watch S.L.’s superb reading below:

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The Powerful Have the Gift of Knowing Who Their True Enemies Are

09 Friday Jun 2017

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“Gathered together and finally free, with a dim hope of promised lands, they were as if drunk. They stormed through villages and cities, taking everything… and they killed all the Jews they came upon here and there and stripped them of their possessions.

‘Why the Jews?’ I asked Salvatore. He answered, ‘And why not?’ He explained to me that all his life preachers had told him the Jews were the enemies of Christianity and accumulated possessions that had been denied the Christian poor. I asked him, however, whether it was not also true that lords and bishops accumulated possessions through tithes, so that the Shepherds were not fighting their true enemies. He replied that when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are. The lords did not want the Shepherds to jeopardize their possessions, and it was a great good fortune for them that the Shepherds’ leaders spread the notion that the greatest wealth belonged to the Jews.

I asked him who had put into the crowd’s head the idea of attacking the Jews. Salvatore could not remember. I believe that when such crowds collect, lured by a promise and immediately demanding something, there his never any knowing who among them speaks.”

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Pulled from chapter eight of Umberto Eco’s 1995 novel The Name of the Rose. One should note that the “Shepherds” here are the Pastoreaux, Salvatore’s gang of crusaders, not guys who look out for livestock for a living.

Image: Wikicommons

Dreams from Adolescence

15 Sunday Nov 2015

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Claire Messud

“But fourteen is not an age at which you ask outright for answers: not yet. Those in-between years are a haze of second-guessing and dialogues entirely of the mind. The possibility of human proximity seems greater than ever it will again, trailing still the unreflective clouds of childhood, the intimate, unsentenced dialogue of laughter or of games. Children do not have the words to ask and so do not imagine asking; not asking and not imagining, they eradicate distance: they take for granted that everything, someday, will be understood.

Adolescence, then, is a curious station on the route from ignorant communion to our ultimate isolation, the place where words and silences reveal themselves to be meaningful and yet where, too young to acknowledge that we cannot gauge their meaning, we imagine it for ourselves and behave as if we understood. Only with the passage of years, wearied, do we resort to asking. With the inadequacy of asking and the inadequacy of replies comes the realization that what we thought we understood bears no relation to what exists, the way, seeing the film of a book we have read, we are aghast to find the heroine of a strapping blonde when we had pictured her all these years a small brunette; and her house, which we envisaged so clearly and quaintly on the edge of a purple moor, is a vast, unfamiliar pile of rubble with all its rooms out of order.”

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Excerpted from the novel The Last Life by Claire Messud.

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When Biographies Become Parables

01 Sunday Nov 2015

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POLARFORSKEREN OG FORFATTEREN PETER FREUCHEN MED SIN 2 KONE SKUESPILLER MAGDALENE VANG LAURIDSEN.

“I once knew a bum who spoke like a Shakespearean actor, a battered, middle-aged alcoholic with scabs on his face and rags for clothes, who slept on the street and begged money from me constantly. Yet he had once been the owner of an art gallery on Madison Avenue.

Think of what happens. Think of how lives burst apart. Goffe and Whalley, for example, two of the judges who condemned Charles I to death, came to Connecticut after the Restoration, and spent the rest of their lives in a cave. Or Mrs. Winchester, the widow of the rifle manufacturer, who feared that the ghosts of the people killed by her husband’s rifles were coming to take her soul – and therefore continually added rooms onto her house, creating a monstrous labyrinth of corridors and hideouts, so that she could sleep in a different room every night and thereby elude the ghosts, the irony being that during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 she was trapped in one of those rooms and nearly starved to death because she couldn’t be found by her servants. There is also M.M. Bakhtin, the Russian critic and literary philosopher. During the German invasion of Russia in World War II, he smoked the only copy of one of his manuscripts, a book-length study of German fiction that had taken him years to write. One by one, he took the pages of his manuscript and used the paper to roll his cigarettes, each day smoking a little more of the book until it was gone. These are true stories. They are also parables, perhaps, but they mean what they mean only because they are true.

In a book I once read by Peter Freuchen, the famous Arctic explorer describes being trapped by a blizzard in northern Greenland. Alone, his supplies dwindling, he decided to build an igloo and wait out the storm. Many days passed. Afraid, above all, that he would be attacked by wolves – for he heard them prowling hungrily on the roof of his igloo – he would periodically step outside and sing at the top of his lungs in order to frighten them away. But the wind was blowing fiercely, and no matter how hard he sang, the only thing he could hear was the wind. If this was a serious problem, however, the problem of the igloo itself was much greater. For Freuchen began to notice that the walls of his little shelter were gradually closing in on him. Because of the particular weather conditions outside, his breath was literally freezing to the walls, and with each breath the walls became that much thicker, the igloo became that much smaller, until eventually there was almost no room left for his body. It is surely a frightening thing, to imagine breathing yourself into a coffin of ice, and to my mind considerably more compelling than, say, The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe. For in this case it is the man himself who is the agent of his own destruction, and further, the instrument of that destruction is the very thing he needs to keep himself alive. For surely a man cannot live if he does not breathe. But at the same time, he will not live if he does breathe.”

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Excerpted from “The Locked Room” by Paul Auster, which you’ll find in his New York Trilogy. You can also read it in his Collected Prose, a volume that offers most of his best work, including his endlessly thought-provoking series “True Stories”.

Incredibly, each of these anecdotes is true. Goffe and Whalley really did flee from Parliament, eventually settling in a cave in Connecticut (fittingly christened “Judges Cave”). Sarah Winchester, the widow of rifleman William, really did build a seven-story “Mystery House” in San Jose, California, fitted with trap doors, fake staircases, and mirrored interior windows. Bakhtin actually smoked one of his manuscripts after his publishing house was bombed in the German invasion of Russia (the remnants of that, an analysis of Goethe, are called “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism”). And Freuchen, pictured above with his wife, really did nearly freeze himself into his own igloo while returning from an expedition to study the inuits.

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W. H. Auden: When Pity Replaces Justice

23 Wednesday Sep 2015

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W.H. Auden

“Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions… Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces. Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are 20 years old… Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish… The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.”

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A highly prophetic section pulled from W.H. Auden’s “For the Time Being”. You’ll find it in his Collected Poems.

If you’re reading this and not seeing some parallels to today — some Consumptive Whores and generous bandits elevated in our society; some daubs supplanting masterpieces and an ethos of pity and therapy thickening around us — I think you’re reading it wrong. It doesn’t matter that it’s actually King Herod who delivers this judgement in the poem.

“For The Time Being” is a poem about the incarnation (“A Christmas Oratorio”, as the subtitle says), but this bit concerns what happened after Jesus’s birth, when Herod massacred the Innocents. Herod’s fear, it turns out, is not just that a new king will replace him, but that this successor will bring on an age of unreason.

Herod is conflicted about the action he is taking, because he’s a liberal at heart. Yet he can justify the means with the ends, and can contemplate doing evil so long as the word “lesser” is in front of it.

I think this section of the poem is wonderful because it piles on details like the excesses of the described scenario. The excerpt’s diction is absolutely superb and its loose, run-on punctuation adds to its frantic energy. (I’m reminded of C.K. Williams, who passed away last week, and his ability to string together one-sentence poems that pulse with kinetic, frenetic force.)

Returning to the present, I’m also reminded of an apropos line. It comes from the film adaptation of Ethan Canin’s imperishable short story “The Palace Thief”. In it, the protagonist, a classics teacher at an elite New England prep school, lives to witness one of his star students grow into a hungry and corrupt politician. Towards the end of the story, he reflects on the student: “I was wrong about him. But as a student of history, I could be shocked neither by his audacity nor by his success.” Without growing complacent, I often think of this nowadays when I look out the window or into the TV at what seems like cultural or moral entropy.

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Remembering a Departed Friend in a Single Image

31 Monday Aug 2015

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Saul Bellow

“I wonder if anyone believes that the grave is all there is. No one can give up on the pictures. The pictures must and will continue. If Ravelstein the atheist-materialist had implicitly told me that he would see me sooner or later, he meant that he did not accept the grave to be the end. Nobody can and nobody does accept this. We just talk tough.

This is the involuntary and normal, the secret, esoteric confidence of the man of flesh and blood. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop…

But I would rather see Ravelstein again than to explain matters it doesn’t help to explain.

Ravelstein, dressing to go out, is talking to me, and I go back and forth with him while trying to hear what he is saying. The music is pouring from his hi-fi — the many planes of his bare, bald head go before me in the corridor between his living room and his monumental master bedroom. He stops before his pier-glass — no wall mirrors here — and puts in the heavy gold cufflinks, buttons up the Jermyn Street striped shirt — American Trustworthy laundry-and-cleaners deliver his shirts puffed out with tissue paper. He winds up his tie lifting the collar that crackles with starch. He makes a luxurious knot. The unsteady fingers, long, ill-coordinated, nervous to the point of decadence, make a double lap. Ravelstein likes a big tie-knot — after all, he is a large man. Then he sits down on the beautifully cured fleeces of his bed and puts on the Poulsen and Skone tan Wellington boots. He smokes, of course, he is always smoking, and tilts the head away from the smoke while he knots and pulls the knot into place. The cast and orchestra are pouring out the Italian Maiden in Algiers. This is dressing music, accessory or mood music, but Ravelstein takes a Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands. Better Bizet and Carmen than Wagner and the Ring. He likes the volume of his powerful set turned up to the maximum. The ringing phone is left to the answering machine…

‘What do you think of this recording, Chick?’ he says. ‘They’re playing the original ancient seventeenth-century instruments.’

He loses himself in sublime music, a music in which ideas are dissolved, reflecting these ideas in the form of feeling. He carries them down into the street with him. There’s an early snow on the tall shrubs, the same shrubs filled with a huge flock of parrots — the ones that escaped from cages and now build their long nest sacks in the back alleys. They are feeding on the red berries. Ravelstein looks at me, laughing with pleasure and astonishment, gesturing because he can’t be heard in all this bird-noise.

You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.”

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The ending to Saul Bellow’s final novel Ravelstein.

This conclusion is remarkable, in my opinion — a richly sonorous, musical piece of writing that packs a deceitfully earnest and dignified solemnity. It was the last bit of prose Bellow published, released when he was in his mid-eighties (at the time of his death, he apparently had a memoir in the works with the unimprovable working title of “All Marbles Still Accounted For”).

Ravelstein is a Roman à clef; Ravelstein, the novel’s eponymous center of gravity, is a thinly veiled version of Bellow’s real-life bud Allan Bloom, a true bon vivant and intellectual extraordinaire whom Bellow had befriended while at the University of Chicago. In an interview with James Wood shortly before his death, Bellow elaborated: “The truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When people proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about.”

But Bloom certainly was one. He was quite a creature. It’s that word perhaps more than any other which inflects the ending with its somber spark. Too idiosyncratic to be a “character,” too real to be a “personality”: a creature — utterly unique and thus hard to give up. After spending 200 pages in Ravelstein’s company, after enjoying decadent stories and drink after drink in his company, it’s not easy for us to let him go, either. It’s a microcosm of giving up similar creatures in life.

Ron Rosenbaum, writing in Slate, had the following praise to heap on the book:

Ravelstein is not only my favorite Bellow novel, it’s the only one I really love. It’s a rapturous celebration of the life of the mind, as well as a meditation on the glory of sensual life and on the tenebrous permeable boundary we all eventually pass over, the one between life and death.

Martin Amis, similarly enraptured, gave it space in his own memoir Experience:

Ravelstein is a full-length novel. It is also, in my view, a masterpiece with no analogues. The world has never heard this prose before: prose of such tremulous and crystallized beauty. … [Ravelstein is] numinous. It constitutes an act of resuscitation, and in its pages Bloom lives.

Below, watch Bloom on Firing Line in 1987.

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Allan Bloom