“To be like everyone else—to conform in dress, speech, customs; to have no thoughts or feelings that are different—saves one from the isolation of selfhood.”
—Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
Category Archives: Life
Life
“In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fiercest emotions of life defy all analytical insight. We see the cloud, and feel its bolt; but meteorology only idly essays a critical scrutiny as to how that cloud became charged, and how this bolt so stuns.”
—Melville, Pierre
Life: Existential humor edition
“The hero of my first novel beings by believing that ‘nothing makes any ultimate difference,’ and decides to end his life; he ends by realizing that if nothing makes any difference, that truth makes no ultimate difference either, and so rather than committing suicide he predicts that he’ll go on living in much the same manner as before.”
—John Barth, The Friday Book
Life: artists' edition
“What makes [Borges an artist] of the first rank, like Kafka, is the combination of that intellectually serious vision with great human insight, poetic power, and consummate mastery of his means—a definition which would have gone without saying, I suppose, in any century but ours.”
—John Barth, The Friday Book
Life: artists’ edition
“What makes [Borges an artist] of the first rank, like Kafka, is the combination of that intellectually serious vision with great human insight, poetic power, and consummate mastery of his means—a definition which would have gone without saying, I suppose, in any century but ours.”
—John Barth, The Friday Book
Life: dreaming edition
“[…] just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie.”
—Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends
Life: and taking leave of it momentarily
“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
(This appends to The joys of fantasy and Romance. Note too that Paul Graham uses the prison metaphor in his essay about schools, Why Nerds are Unpopular.)
Life: The Sot-Weed Factor
“Fall not into the vulgar error of the critics, that judge a work ere they know the whole of it.”
—John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
Life: Barney’s Version
“Count your blessings. Readers don’t have to wait until the end volume three before I’m even born. Something else. It doesn’t take me six pages to cross a field, as it would if this had been written by Thomas Hardy. I rein in my metaphors, unlike John Updike. I am admirably succinct when it comes to descriptive passages, unlike P. D. James, a writer I happen to admire. A P. D. James character can enter a room with dynamite news, but it is not to be revealed until we have learned the color and material of the drapes, the pedigree of the carpet, the shade of the wallpaper, the quality and content of the pictures, the number and design of the chairs, whether the side tables are bona fide antiques, acquired in Pimlico, or copycat from Heal’s. P. D. James is not only gifted, but obviously a real baleboosteh, or châtelaine. She is also endearing, which is not my problem, and brings me to yet another digression. Or character flaw acknowledged.”
Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version
Life: Barney's Version
“Count your blessings. Readers don’t have to wait until the end volume three before I’m even born. Something else. It doesn’t take me six pages to cross a field, as it would if this had been written by Thomas Hardy. I rein in my metaphors, unlike John Updike. I am admirably succinct when it comes to descriptive passages, unlike P. D. James, a writer I happen to admire. A P. D. James character can enter a room with dynamite news, but it is not to be revealed until we have learned the color and material of the drapes, the pedigree of the carpet, the shade of the wallpaper, the quality and content of the pictures, the number and design of the chairs, whether the side tables are bona fide antiques, acquired in Pimlico, or copycat from Heal’s. P. D. James is not only gifted, but obviously a real baleboosteh, or châtelaine. She is also endearing, which is not my problem, and brings me to yet another digression. Or character flaw acknowledged.”
Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version
The Story's Story 