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…Continue reading Borges on enchantment
Category: 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…Continue reading Borges on The Thousand and One Nights
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…Continue reading The Seven Nights of Jorge Luis Borges
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…Continue reading Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf