There’s not too fine a distinction between humor and tragedy; even tragedy is in a way walking a tightrope between the ridiculous, between the bizarre and the terrible. Possibly the writer uses humor as a tool; he’s still trying to write about people, to write about man, about the human heart in some moving way, [...]
“I’ll kill him though,” he said. “In all his greatness and his glory.” Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures. “I told the boy I was a strange old man,” he said. “Now is when I must prove it.” The thousand [...]
Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it [...]
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Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord’s door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when [...]
Entonces comprendí que su cobardía era irreparable. Le rogué torpemente que se cuidara y me despedí. Me abochornaba ese hombre con miedo, como si yo fuera el cobarde, no Vincent Moon. Lo que hace un hombre es como si lo hicieran todos los hombres. Por eso no es injusto que una desobediencia en un jardín [...]
… the Castelreynaldian fantastic does through indirection, unsettling symbol, or calm account of the impossible the very thing literature is meant to: lend voice to solitary experience or singular witness. How many of us, back from a foreign land, then face the difficulty of describing our time there? How often, over the breakfast table or [...]
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And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. [...]
Being aware of the history of literature—or of any other art, for that matter—is really a form of unbelieving, a form of skepticism. If I say to my self, for example, that Wordsworth and Verlaine were very good nineteenth-century poets, then I may fall into the danger of thinking that time has some how destroyed [...]
The first thing to say about J.G. Ballard is not that he is among our finest writers of science fiction but that he is among our finest writers of fiction tout court period. Ballard himself might retort that, granted the first claim, the second is redundant, since the only important fiction being produced today is [...]
I’m continually impressed by Ezra Pound’s translations of Li Bai (or Li Po). This poem in particular, and especially now, as many of my friends (so many) scatter across the country. They all go to better things, and not a one is sad, but nonetheless, to echo Pound: Let us resolve also to make nothing [...]