I have read almost all of Croce, and though I am not always in agreement with him, I am enchanted by him. Enchantment, as Stevenson said, is one of the special qualities a writer must have. Without enchantment, the rest is useless. ~from “The Divine Comedy,” the first lecture in Seven Nights I love what Borges says here, by way of Stevenson. As authors we try so hard to enchant, but it is impossible to do so without being, by turns, enchanted–not only with language and narrative, but also with the complexities of human nature and the intricate mysteries...
Litbits: excerpts from good books
Borges on The Thousand and One Nights
Picking up where I left off yesterday, here’s Borges in the essay, “The Thousand and One Nights:” The Thousand and One Nights is not something which has died. It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of memory–and also, now, a part of tonight. Earlier in the essay, Borges recounts De Quincey’s retelling of the Aladdin story in De Quincey’s memoir. Borges credits De Quincey’s “wonderfully inventive memory” with the fact that his retelling of the Aladdin story contains a crucial detail that does not appear in...
The Seven Nights of Jorge Luis Borges
I’m currently reading Jorge Luis Borges’s Seven Nights, a series of lectures Borges delivered at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires in 1977. The subjects range from The Divine Comedy to Buddhism to blindness. Borges himself was afflicted by blindness, and in his introduction to this slim volume, Alstair Reid explains that it was his blindness, in part, that made Borges’s lectures so compelling and unforgettable. Because he could not read in front of an audience, he memorized his lectures, which meander from the personal to the political, from great books to memorable moments of his childhood, peppered always...
how to live
“There was a tacit understanding between us that we learn–or try to learn–how to live partly from books. The learning begins with looking at our first illustrated alphabet, and goes on until we die.” ~John Berger, Here Is Where We Meet
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
on the reason for throwing parties: Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
