An animation from a Harvard neuroscience course explores representations of perception
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We grow accustomed to the Dark - When light is put away - As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp To witness her Goodbye - A Moment - We uncertain step For newness of the night - Then - fit our Vision to the Dark - And meet the Road - erect - And so of larger - Darknesses - Those Evenings of the Brain - When not a Moon disclose a sign - Or Star - come out - within - The Bravest - grope a little - And sometimes hit a Tree Directly in the Forehead - But as they learn to see - Either the Darkness alters - Or something in the sight Adjusts itself to Midnight - And Life steps almost straight.
I stepped from Plank to Plank A Slow and cautious way The Stars about my Head I felt About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next Would be my final inch - This gave me that precarious Gait Some call Experience. 男女走路的方式有別,但除非是經過軍事操練,每個人的步態都不大一樣。狄金遜(EmilyDickinson)擅寫危顫不穩的壯麗,但是我們若對反諷無所感,便無法窺得其堂奧。她走在唯一能走的路上,走過「一段又一段的甲板」,說來諷刺,她的戒慎恐懼卻與豪放反叛並列,她覺得「星斗當空」,而雙足卻已浸在海水中。她不知道再走一步是否就「與死亡一寸之遙」,因而「腳步蹣跚」,她只說「有人」稱之為經驗。狄金遜讀過愛默生的散文〈經驗〉(Experience),這是一篇與蒙田(Montaigne)的〈論經驗〉(Of Experience)異曲同工的登峰之作,而她的反諷可說是回應了愛默生文章的開頭:「我們在哪裡找到了自己?在一連串我們並不知道極限何在、也不相信有極限的事物裡。」對狄金遜而言,極限就是不知道下一步是不是就到了底。「如果我們之中能有人知道自己在做什麼,或是在往何處去,甚至何時是在自以為是!」愛默生接下來的思緒在氣味上,或用狄金遜的話,在步態上,與她有所不同。在愛默生的經驗範疇裡,「萬物流動閃耀」,他那愉快的反諷不同狄金遜戒慎恐懼的反諷。但兩者都不是意識型態,而他們也仍然在其反諷的敵對力量中繼續存活著。」(郭強生譯) --- 小讀者 留言: Plank: 甲板? 走在甲板上怎會在海水裡? === 橋板 I felt About my Feet the Sea: 我感覺"海水中"我的雙足? ===> 頂上掛星, 足下臨海, 但頭未沾星, 足亦未浸海. 除非是海上"浮木", 河中跨板, 或足可沾水. precarious: 蹣跚? ===顫顫危危, 如臨深淵, 危哉殆哉... 感覺上很像走危危吊橋... ---- 小讀者 留言: Women and men can walk differently, but unless we are regimented we all tend to walk somewhat individually. Dickinson, master of the precarious Sublime, can hardly be apprehended if we are dead to her ironies. She is walking the only path available, "from Plank to Plank," but her slow caution ironically juxtaposes with a titanism in which she feels "The Stars about my Head," though her feet very nearly are in the sea. Not knowing whether the next step will be her "final inch" gives her "that precarious Gait" she will not name, except to tell us that "some call it Experience . She had read Emerson''''s essay "Experience," a culmination much in the way "Of Experience" was for his master Montaigne, and her irony is an amiable response to Emerson''''s opening: "Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none." The extreme, for Dickinson, is the not knowing whether the next step is the final inch...
----
but her slow caution ironically juxtaposes with a titanism in which she feels "The Stars about my Head," though her feet very nearly are in the sea.
Dickinson''s ironic juxtaposition of precarious and sublime:
- slow caution, the seas about my feet, uncertain/unknown last inch== precarious 極低極險 (one extreme of the series)
vs
- titanism, the stars about my head==> sublime 極高極崇 (the other extreme of the series)
就是在這向天抗爭的不確定經驗中, 狄金遜 (人類) 達到雖險卻崇的境地...
Titanism: The spirit of revolt against an established order; rebelliousness.
Spiritual Titanism: an extreme form of humanism in which human beings take on divine attributes and prerogatives. ---- Emerson's "Experience":
WHERE do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight... -- Montaigne's "OF EXPERIENCE"
There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all ways that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ experience, which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it. Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience has no fewer...
**** I stepped from Plank to Plank A Slow and cautious way The Stars about my Head I felt About my Feet the Sea. 赴黃泉 步履艱 海水濺 星斗懸
rl 留言(閒著也是閒著的rl): : I knew not but the next Would be my final inch - This gave me that precarious Gait Some call Experience. 悟失足 成千古 步踟躕 飽世故
*****
Emily Dickinson died on May 15th 1886. Only 10 of her poems were published during her lifetime; hundreds more were discovered in a wooden chest after her death, and a legend grew up, sweet with pathos, of a woman too delicate for this world, disappointed in love.http://econ.st/1d2Nifd
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds. By Lyndall Gordon. Viking Press; 512 pages; $32.95. Virago; £20. Buy from Amazon.com,...
ECON.ST
艾蜜莉.狄金生(Emily Dickinson,1830-1886)
山間行草/文】
這個世界,處處可以是作者的行蹤:屈原有他行吟的澤畔,蘇東坡有他一再謫放的天涯,傑克‧倫敦(Jack London, 1876-1916)有他的荒漠北極,費滋傑羅(F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896-1940)有他的燈紅酒綠,而海明威,有他的狩獵場和戰地……。其他人,即或沒這麼戲劇性,至少都有一定廣度的生活經驗,作為寫作素材的來源。像那樣,一輩子住在她出生的屋子裡,二十幾歲還是青春年華就開始足不出戶的,大概少有別的例子了。她在五十六歲時因腦膜炎過世,一生當中至少有三十年,過的是自我幽囚的日子。
她也不給自己的詩訂題目。後人替她出的詩集,只好都用第一行作題目酖酖倒彷彿我們古代的《詩經》。但是越到二十世紀,英詩的格律式微,連康明思(ee comings, 1894-1962)那樣在詩裡把一個個字拆得七零八落的都有,狄金生的劣勢反而變成優勢了。不管是愛情詩中的難解的隱喻,還是宗教想像中的神祕色調,或者歌頌自然時的細緻觀察,她的特立獨行和女性特質,都使二十世紀以來的讀者不僅接受,而且擁抱她。而狄金生自己,儘管孤僻自閉,刻意與外界隔絕,並沒有失去對自己作品的信心,她曾說,"If fame belonged to me, I can not escape her."「如果名聲該屬於我,我絕逃不掉。」歷史也證明她果然沒有「逃掉」!
Yukio Mishima’s "The Temple of Dawn" is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility 豐饒之海. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend.
瑪格麗特·尤瑟納爾(Marguerite Yourcenar,1903—1987),法國現代著名作家、學者。本名瑪恪麗特·德·克拉楊古爾(Marguerite de Crayencour),尤瑟納爾是作家與父親—起以姓氏字母重新組合后為自己起的筆名。16歲即以長詩《幻想園》嶄露頭角。在半個多世紀的時問里,她游歷了歐美多國。著有小說《哈德良回憶錄》、《苦煉》、《東方故事集》、《—彈解千愁》等;回憶錄《虔誠的回憶》、《北方檔案》;詩歌《火》等。1980年入選法蘭西學院,成為法蘭西學院成立三百五十年來第—位女院士。
Chagall (1887-1985) did not begin making etchings until 1921. After his return from Russia, he first tried his hand at etching in the prints he executed for his autobiography, My Life (Berlin, 1922-23). Moving to Paris, Chagall was approached by Ambroise Vollard, who wished to commission him to produce a set of etchings for a deluxe "livre de peintre" like the ones Vollard had already commissioned from Bonnard and Rouault. Chagall rejected Vollard’s choice of texts and instead suggested Gogol’s Dead Souls. The result is one of the masterpieces of modern art. Jean Adehmar’s brief summary in his Twentieth Century Graphics gives us some keys for entry into the work: "the numerous figures in profile show astonishing types; the Expressionist influence is very noticeable and the Russian atmosphere is admirably rendered." The characterizations of the people whom Chagall presents us are so striking that we instantly recognize them not simply as portaits of individuals but as representatives of the human comedy that so much of Chagall’s art illustrates for us. Nor is this effect diminished upon further viewing; rather it is strenghtened the more familiarity we gain with the images. As Franz Meyer has observed in Marc Chagall: His Graphic Work, the etchings paint a much larger mental canvas than mere individual types, showing Chagall’s "native Russia with its wind-swept vastness and, for all its bitter misery born of unreason and inertia . . . its inexhaustible, wholesome, joyous vitality as well." While there is satire and mockery in these plates, there is also acceptance and even love of the whole of human experience. As Meyer notes, "This entire world of stupidity, malice, and selfishness is rendered transparent through humor. . . . The basic incongruence of reality and appearance is so pointedly brought into relief that magnificently comical figures result. But this comedy is not a hostile satire or a pitiless record of these characters, with their weaknesses and their baseness. It is a liberating force which discloses the deep stream of exuberant life behind all the figures in the novel. Everywhere, running through all the comical elements, and borne along by a sort of inner joyfulness, there appears the fantastic, rich, inexhaustible reality of Russian life."
Although the surface details of the etchings may be drawn from the Russia to which Chagall is so affectionately saying farewell, one realizes that Chagall’s affirmation of the whole of life—folly as well as brilliance, selfishness as well as altruism, fear as well as love, the surface illusions as well as the inner truths—has a relevance as universal as Shakespeare’s comedies or Joyce’s Ulysses. Robert Marteau ("Chagall as Engraver") has wisely insisted on this dimension of Chagall’s art, so strongly transcending its Russian origins, when he notes of the Dead Souls etchings, "Observation is what feeds this verse always. Nothing is set, nothing fixed: people and objects take life under the graver without our expecting it to happen, and their geste follows its course under our gaze amid the tribulations, joys, and jokes that each new day brings. We always feel how greatly life delights him, but Chagall adds a dimension to the fleeting manifestations of life that he seizes, and this extra dimension puts the work far above any mere realism limited to particular situations." Thus in looking at such etchings as "The new chief at the Treasury,""On route to Sobakevitch’s house," or "Tchitchikov and Manilov meeting in their overcoats," one notices first such details as the Russianness of the dress and of the landscape (including the quintessentially Russian troika which carries Tchitchikov to Sobakevitch’s), but then the universality of the depicted scenes takes over, and we find ourselves focusing more on the scurrying clerks whose new boss has just tried to terrify them into submission to his regime or the fantastic conversation between the coachman and the center horse whom he is accusing of loafing while his two fellows do all the work (and in so doing offers the horse the opportunity to laugh at him for thinking it within his power to make it work any harder and for providing the horse with an excuse not to work until the conversation has ended), or even the jostling and sparring for position between the two heavily clothed bargainers, each keeping his true position as hidden as his overcoat keeps his body bundled up and hidden from the winter’s cold. Once we have entered into this world of universal truths, we are freed to respond to the visions of the human comedy that inform the contrast between the painters’ joyous abandon and their employer’s terror in "The house painters," Madame Korobotchka’s extravagantly mixed emotions as she provides pillows for her unexpected guests, or the surrealistic vision of the clerks merging with their desks in "The registry of deeds." The Dead Souls etchings allow us to witness clearly to this first explosion in graphics of Chagall’s tremendous affirmation of life and in so doing define themselves as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century printmaking.
The etchings for the Dead Souls were executed between 1923 and 1927 and printed in 1927; the sheets were stored in Ambroise Vollard's warehouse until he could publish them, but unfortunately his own death in an automobile accident and Chagall's flight from German-occupied France kept them hidden until Teriade and Chagall published them in 1950. Les Ames Mortes was issued in an edition of 285 on velin d’arches, the first 50 containing a suite on japon, and 33 artist’s proofs hors commerce. All of the portfolios were signed by the artist. Many of the plates are signed in the plate. There are no pencil-signed impressions of the pieces in the edition (though we have recently acquired a signed trial proof–"assai"–of a state prior to the final version. All etchings with full margin in very good+ or better condition
Select Bibiliography of Chagall's Prints: Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall: His Graphic Work (NY: Abrams, 1957; Meyer was Chagall's sson-in-law and author of the massive Life and Works which is still the standard catalogue raisonné of Chagall's paintings); Sylvie Forestiere, ed. Marc Chagall: L'oeuvre gravé (Nice: Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall, 1987; abbrev. Nice 1987); Jean Adhemar, Chagall: L'oeuvre gravé (Paris: Bibliothèque National, 1970; abbrev. BN 1970); Irina Antonova, et al, Chagall Discovered From Russian and Private Collections (NY: Levin Associates, 1988; abbrev. Moscow, 1988); Ernst-Gerhard Güse, Marc Chagall Druckgraphik(Westfalen: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster, 1985); Udo Liebelt, ed. Marc Chagall Druckgraphische Folgen 1922-1966 (Hannover: Kunstmuseum Hannover, 1981; abbrev. Hannover); Roger Passeron, Mâitres de la gravure: Chagall (Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1984); Charles Sorlier, Marc Chagall et Ambroise Vollard: Catalogue Complet des gravures exécutées par Marc Chagall á la demande de Ambroise Vollard (Paris: Editions Galerie Matignon, 1981).
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La soirée chez le gouveneur / Evening fête at the Governor's house (Sorlier 5, Hannover 43). Original etching with drypoint, 1923-27. 335 unsigned impressions + 33 HC. No pencil-signed impressions exist. Inclulded in the 1970 BN show. Image size: 223x287mm. Price: $5000.
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Selifan (Sorlier 7, Hannover 45). Original etching, 1923-27. 335 impressions signed in the plate + 33 HC. No pencil-signed impressions exist. Chagall's etchings for Gogol's Dead Souls are among his earliest etchings. They are also some of his finest. Illustrated in Meyer'sChagall's Graphic Works, Wesfalen 1985, Nice 1987, and the 1987 Moscow Chagall exhibition. Selifan is a rather rascally figure who believes in self-indulgence and would rather party than work. Image size: 221x286mm. Price: $5000.
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On the way to Sobakevich's (Sorlier 8, Hannover 46, ). Original etching, 1923-27. 335 impressions signed in the plate + 33 HC. No pencil-signed impressions exist. Illustrated in Meyer's Chagall's Graphic Works, BN 1970, the 1987 Moscow Chagall Exhibition and Nice 1987. Image size: 219x287mm. Price: $6000.
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Repas chez Manilov / Dinner at Manilov's house (Sorlier 9, Hannover 49). Original etching with drypoint, 1923-27. 335 unsigned impressions + 33 HC. No pencil-signed impressions exist. Inclulded in the 1970 BN show. Image size: 223x287mm. Price: $5000.
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Tchitchikov's farewell to Manilov (Sorlier 12, Hannover 51). Original etching, 1923-27. 335 impressions signed in the plate + 33 HC. No hand-signed impressions exist. Illustrated in Meyer,Chagall: His Graphic Works, Wesfalen 1985, and in the 1987 Moscow Chagall Exhibition. Image size: 218x284mm. Price: $5500.
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Madame Korobotchka (Sorlier 18, Hannover 54). Original etching, 1923-27. 335 impressions signed in the plate + 33 HC. No pencil-signed impressions exist. Illustrated in the Bibliotheque National show of Chagall's graphics; illustrated in Meyer, Chagall's Graphics, and Passeron,Maitres de la Gravure: Chagall. Image size: 285x212mm. Price: $5000.
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The house painters (Sorlier 22, Hannover 62). Original etching, 1923-27. 335 impressions signed in the plate + 33 HC. Signed in the plate right-center bottom. No pencil-signed impressions exist. Illustrated in Passeron, the Philadelphia Museum/Royal Academy catalogue, BN 1970, and the 1987 Moscow Chagall exhibition. Image size: 277x218mm. Price: $6000.
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Nozdriov (Sorlier 23, Hannover 61). Original etching, 1923-27. 335 impressions signed in the plate + 33 HC. No pencil-signed impressions exist. Included but not illustrated in the B.N. 1970 exhibition of Chagall's graphics, illustrated Nice 1987, and Moscow 1987. Image size:280x215mm. Price: $5500.
A model image of the proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.Photo: AP
It’s been 15 years since a federal commission began planning a memorial in the nation’s capital to Dwight Eisenhower. That’s nearly twice as long as his presidency.
Yet, as a new congressional report discloses, after $41 million in taxpayer funds, instead of a memorial we have mismanagement, skyrocketing cost overruns and a design process flawed from the outset.
New Yorkers know the feeling. The same architect at the heart of the Ike memorial, Frank Gehry, is the guy who first designed Ground Zero’s now-stalled Performing Arts Center. Meanwhile, his fellow star architect, Santiago Calatrava, gave us the nearby PATH station boondoggle that came in years behind schedule and, at $4 billion, double the original price tag.
Ike’s memorial has its own problems. Gehry’s design, for example, ignores Ike’s achievements as both general and president, focusing instead on his description of himself as “a barefoot boy from Kansas.”
After Eisenhower’s family objected, Gehry — who’s already been paid $16.4 million — modified his design. Yet there is still no construction-ready approved plan. In fact, construction is actually barred until all necessary funding is in hand.
Which raises an unresolved question: Will taxpayers end up with the bill?
Certainly, Ike deserves enshrinement along with such immortals as Washington and Lincoln. But Eisenhower doesn’t need a memorial for a legacy. His legacy is all around us, in those lives lived in freedom because he defeated Hitler and brought a truce to Korea.
Pity that a memorial in his name would obscure rather than enhance these historic achievements.
Unesco's Palestine fiasco is only the latest of the agency's offenses.
good riddance
Also, good riddance to bad rubbish. A welcome loss or departure. This expression is often used as an exclamation. For example, The principal has finally retired, and most of the teachers are saying, "Good riddance!" or When Jean decided to give up her violin her relieved family quietly said, "Good riddance to bad rubbish.". [Late 1700s] 新聞報導 | 2011.11.07教科文組織前景堪憂 聯合國教科文組織未來的經費還沒有著落。在美國停止向該機構繳納會員費後,教科文組織缺少資金來維持重要的文化項目。德國執政黨聯盟黨對此的立場很明確:教科文組織是作繭自縛。美國很快就作出了反應。在聯合國教科文組織於10月31日決定接納巴勒斯坦為成員後,美國立即宣布,將兌現此前的威脅,停止向該機構提供資金。華盛頓是教科文組織重要的出資國,每年提供6000萬美元的資金,佔教科文組織經費預算的22%。教科文組織沒有想到的是,美國會這麼快就付諸行動。至少教科文組織總幹事博科娃(Irina Bokova)給人的印像是這樣的。她11月2日對媒體表示:"我呼籲美國政府、國會和美國人民,尋找一條新的道路,在目前這個艱難時刻,繼續支持聯合國教科文組織的工作。"她指出,該機構的資金也用來資助與美國的利益息息相關的項目,例如伊拉克獨立媒體的發展和阿富汗警察的掃盲。教科文組織總幹事博科娃教科文組織總幹事博科娃德國不會停止出資與美國一樣對接納巴勒斯坦投了反對票的德國則表示,將繼續為教科文組織提供資金。德國每年為該機構出資2300萬歐元。聯邦政府負責文化事務的國務秘書皮佩爾(Cornelia Pieper)表示,德國不會停止繳費。這位與德國外長韋斯特韋勒同屬自民黨的女政治家說:"我們認為,現在用這樣的措施來懲罰教科文組織是沒有道理的。"與自民黨聯合執政的聯盟黨則對教科文組織提出了批評。聯盟黨議會黨團的外交政策發言人米斯菲爾德(Philipp Missfelder)在接受德國之聲採訪時說:"美國的做法只是對教科文組織錯誤決定的一個反應而已。"他認為,教科文組織作出的許多決定"都是對以色列的詆毀,讓這個國家成為眾矢之的,但事實上,以色列是整個中東地區唯一運作有效的民主國家。"米斯菲爾德還指出,聯合國教科文組織有越俎代庖之嫌,"其實該組織更應該起到調解的作用,聯合國組織應該保持中立。"在聯邦層面代表德國民間文化團體的德國文化理事會則批評美國的做法不恰當。該理事會執行長齊默曼(Olaf Zimmermann)對德國之聲表示:"這是一個民主的程序。教科文組織的多數成員作出了這一決定。而現在少數反過來要懲罰這個組織,這是不可以的。"他擔心,美國在做法會對其他國家產生示範效應。以色列和加拿大已經宣布,也將停止向教科文組織繳納會費。德國文化理事會得出的結論是:"聯合國教科文組織的根本基礎受到了動搖"。 作者:Friederike Schulz 編譯:葉宣責編:樂然
(德國之聲中文網)1945年11月,整個世界還未能從剛剛結束的戰爭中得到恢復。當時英國教育大臣維德金森( Ellen Witkinson)召集了37個國家的代表在倫敦聚會,商討怎樣以文化作為長久維護和平的有效手段。在她看來,一切戰爭都是在人類的頭腦中首先醞釀誕生的,那麼,和平也應該深深地植根於人類的大腦中。當年11月16日,出席倫敦會議的人們簽署了聯合國教科文組織憲章。
Michel Conil Lacoste (著) The Story of a Grand Design: UNESCO 1946-1993-People, Events and Achievements (UNESCO Reference Books) Unesco (1995/05) 《宏圖大業:聯合國教科文組織編年史(1946-1993)》中國對外翻譯出版公司 1996
p.204 英文有錯 應該是VENICE RESTORED: UNESCO Twenty-five years have passed since 4 November 1966, the day when Venice was flooded ... Publication Date, 11-03-1991 10:00 am. Publication Location, Paris ...www.unesco.org
"The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place." --from "Arrow of God" (1988) by Chinua Achebe, who was born in the Igbo village of Ogidi, Nigeria Protectorate on this day in 1930
Here, collected for the first time in Everyman’s Library, are the three internationally acclaimed classic novels that comprise what has come to be known as Chinua Achebe’s “African Trilogy.” Beginning with the best-selling Things Fall Apart—on the heels of its fiftieth anniversary—The African Trilogy captures a society caught between its traditional roots and the demands of a rapidly changing world. Achebe’s most famous novel introduces us to Okonkwo, an important member of the Igbo people, who fails to adjust as his village is colonized by the British. In No Longer at Ease we meet his grandson, Obi Okonkwo, a young man who was sent to a university in England and has returned, only to clash with the ruling elite to which he now believes he belongs. Arrow of God tells the story of Ezuelu, the chief priest of several Nigerian villages, and his battle with Christian missionaries. READ an excerpt of the introduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/200294/the-african-trilogy/
Here, collected for the first time in Everyman’s Library, are the three internationally acclaimed classic novels that comprise what has come to be known as Chinua Achebe’s “African Trilogy.”...
“The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.' But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.” ― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
Beginning with the best-selling Things Fall Apart—on the heels of its fiftieth anniversary—The African Trilogy captures a society caught between its traditional roots and the demands of a rapidly changing world. Achebe’s most famous novel introduces us to Okonkwo, an important member of the Igbo people, who fails to adjust as his village is colonized by the British. In No Longer at Ease we meet his grandson, Obi Okonkwo, a young man who was sent to a university in England and has returned, only to clash with the ruling elite to which he now believes he belongs. Arrow of God tells the story of Ezuelu, the chief priest of several Nigerian villages, and his battle with Christian missionaries. In these masterful novels, Achebe brilliantly sets universal tales of personal and moral struggle in the context of the tragic drama of colonization. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/200294/the-african-trilogy/
Things Fall Apart is a 1958 English language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African novels written in English to receive global critical acclaim. The title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming".[1] In 2009, Newsweek ranked Things Fall Apart #14 on its list of Top 100 Books: The Meta-List.[2] The novel depicts the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in Umuofia—one of a fictional group of nine villages in Nigeria, inhabited by the Igbo ethnic group. In addition it focuses on his three wives, his children, and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Igbo (archaically "Ibo") community during the late nineteenth century. Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work together with Things Fall Apart, and Arrow of God (1964), on a similar subject. Achebe states that his two later novels, A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants and set in fictional African countries, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history.
Although Okonkwo's father was a lazy drunk and a deadbeat man who received no titles in his village and died with huge debts, Okonkwo was a great man in his home of Umuofia, a group of nine villages in Nigeria. Okonkwo despises his father and does everything he can to be nothing like him. As a young man, Okonkwo began building his social status by defeating a great wrestler, propelling him into society's eye. He is hard-working and shows no weakness — emotional or otherwise — to anyone. Although brusque with his family and neighbors, he is wealthy, courageous, and powerful among the people of his village. He is a leader of his village, and his place in that society is what he has striven for his entire life. Because of his great esteem in the village, Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken prisoner by the village as a peace settlement between two villages after his father killed a Umuofian woman. Ikemefuna is to stay with Okonkwo until the Oracle instructs the elders on what to do with the boy. For three years the boy lives with Okonkwo's family and he grows fond of him, he even considers Okonkwo his father. Then the elders decide that the boy must be killed, and the oldest man in the village warns Okonkwo to have nothing to do with the murder because it would be like killing his own child. Rather than seem weak and feminine to the other men of the village, Okonkwo helps to kill the boy despite the warning from the old man. In fact, Okonkwo himself strikes the killing blow as Ikemefuna begs him for protection. Shortly after Ikemefuna's death, things begin to go wrong for Okonkwo. When he accidentally kills someone at a ritual funeral ceremony when his gun explodes, he and his family are sent into exile for seven years to appease the gods he has offended with the murder. While Okonkwo is away in exile, white men begin coming to Umuofia and they peacefully introduce their religion. As the number of converts increases, the foothold of the white people grows beyond their religion and a new government is introduced. Okonkwo returns to his village after his exile to find it a changed place because of the presence of the white man. He and other tribal leaders try to reclaim their hold on their native land by destroying a local Christian church that has insulted their gods and religion. In return, the leader of the white government takes them prisoner and holds them for ransom for a short while, further humiliating and insulting the native leaders. As a result, the people of Umuofia finally gather for what could be a great uprising. Okonkwo, adamant over following Umuofian custom and tradition, despises any form of cowardice and advocates for war against the white men. When messengers of the white government try to stop the meeting, Okonkwo kills one of them. He realizes with despair that the people of Umuofia are not going to fight to protect themselves because they let the other messengers escape and so all is lost for the village. When the local leader of the white government comes to Okonkwo's house to take him to court, he finds that Okonkwo has hanged himself, ruining his great reputation as it is strictly against the custom of the Ibo to kill oneself.
Achebe depicts the Ibo as a people with great social institutions in accordance with their particular society, ie, wrestling, human sacrifice and suicide. Their culture is heavy in traditions and laws that focus on justice and fairness. The people are ruled not by a king or chief but by a kind of democracy, where the males meet and make decisions by consensus and in accordance to an "Oracle" that should be written down. It is the Europeans, who often talk of bringing democratic institutions to the rest of the world, who upset this system. Achebe emphasizes that high rank is attainable for all freeborn Igbo men – he attained his through fighting as opposed to reading or ploughing the land and growing herbal remedies, vegetation, rearing cattle, fowl etc. He also depicts the injustices of Ibo society. No more or less than Victorian England of the same era, the Ibo are a patriarchal society. They also fear twins, who are to be abandoned immediately after birth and left to die of exposure. The novel attempts to repair some of the damage done by earlier European depictions of Africans.
Okonkwo: An influential clan leader in Umuofia. Since early childhood, Okonkwo’s embarrassment about his lazy, squandering, and effeminate father, Unoka, has driven him to succeed. Okonkwo’s hard work and prowess in war have earned him a position of high status in his clan, and he attains wealth sufficient to support three wives and their nine children. Okonkwo’s tragic flaw is that he is terrified of being weak or "womanly" like his father. As a result, he behaves rashly, bringing a great deal of trouble and sorrow upon himself and his family. He is a tragic character who not only brings suffering to himself but also to those around him. Towards the end of the novel one can view Okonkwo as a tragic hero because like other tragic heroes he has one major flaw. His main flaw stems from the fear of being like his father who is a lazy, social, drunkard debtor. He as well cannot display his emotions because he doesn't want to look weak or effeminate, and when he does show any emotion, it is an uncontrollable rage. As a result of his flaws he has suffered countless tragedies, which ultimately leads to his tragic death. Nwoye (later known as Isaac): Okonkwo’s oldest son, who Okonkwo believes is weak and lazy. Okonkwo continually beats Nwoye, hoping to correct what he sees as flaws in his personality. Influenced by Ikemefuna, Nwoye begins to exhibit more masculine behavior, which pleases Okonkwo. However, he maintains doubts about some of the laws and rules of his village and eventually converts to Christianity, an act that Okonkwo criticizes as “effeminate,” and beats him for, after which he leaves. Okonkwo believes that Nwoye is afflicted with the same weaknesses that his father, Unoka, possessed in abundance. Ezinma: The only child of Okonkwo’s second wife, Ekwefi. As the only one of Ekwefi’s ten children to survive past infancy, Ezinma is the center of her mother’s world. Their relationship is atypical—Ezinma calls Ekwefi by her name and is treated by her as an equal. Ezinma is also Okonkwo’s favorite child, for she understands him better than any of his other children. She reminds him of Ekwefi, who was the village beauty. Okonkwo rarely demonstrates his affection, however, because he fears that doing so would make him look weak. Furthermore, he wishes that Ezinma were a boy because she would have been the perfect son. Ikemefuna: A boy given to Okonkwo by a neighboring village. Ikemefuna lives in the hut of Okonkwo’s first wife and quickly becomes popular with Okonkwo’s children. He develops an especially close relationship with Nwoye, Okonkwo’s oldest son, who looks up to him. Okonkwo too becomes very fond of Ikemefuna, who calls him “father” and is a perfect clansman, but Okonkwo does not demonstrate his affection because he fears that doing so would make him look weak. Mr. Brown: The first white missionary to travel to Umuofia. Mr. Brown institutes a policy of compromise, understanding, and non-aggression between his flock and the clan. He even becomes friends with prominent clansmen and builds a school and a hospital in Umuofia. Unlike Reverend Smith, he attempts to appeal respectfully to the Igbo value system rather than harshly impose his religion on it. Reverend James Smith: The missionary who replaces Mr. Brown. Unlike Mr. Brown, Reverend Smith is uncompromising and strict. He demands that his converts reject all of their indigenous beliefs, and he shows no respect for indigenous customs or culture. He is the stereotypical white colonialist, and his behavior epitomizes the problems of colonialism. He intentionally provokes his congregation, inciting it to anger and even indirectly, through Enoch, encouraging some fairly serious transgressions. Uchendu: The younger brother of Okonkwo’s mother. Uchendu receives Okonkwo and his family warmly when they travel to Mbanta, and he advises Okonkwo to be grateful for the comfort that his motherland offers him lest he anger the dead—especially his mother, who is buried there. Uchendu himself has suffered—all but one of his six wives are dead and he has buried twenty-two children. He is a peaceful, compromising man and functions as a foil (a character whose emotions or actions highlight, by means of contrast, the emotions or actions of another character) to Okonkwo, who acts impetuously and without thinking. The District Commissioner An authority figure in the white colonial government in Nigeria. The prototypical racist colonialist, the District Commissioner thinks that he understands everything about native African customs and cultures and he has no respect for them. He plans to work his experiences into an ethnographic study on local African tribes, the idea of which embodies his dehumanizing and reductive attitude toward race relations. Unoka: Okonkwo’s father, of whom Okonkwo has been ashamed since childhood. By the standards of the clan, Unoka was a coward and a spendthrift. He never took a title in his life, he borrowed money from his clansmen, and he rarely repaid his debts. He never became a warrior because he feared the sight of blood. Moreover, he died of an abominable illness. On the positive side, Unoka appears to have been a talented musician and gentle, if idle. He may well have been a dreamer, ill-suited to the entrenchant culture into which he was born. The novel opens ten years after his death. Obierika: Okonkwo’s close friend, whose daughter’s wedding provides cause for festivity early in the novel. Obierika looks out for his friend, selling Okonkwo’s yams to ensure that Okonkwo won’t suffer financial ruin while in exile and comforting Okonkwo when he is depressed. Like Nwoye, Obierika questions some of the Igbo traditional structures. Ekwefi: Okonkwo’s second wife, once the village beauty. Ekwefi ran away from her first husband to live with Okonkwo. Ezinma is her only surviving child, her other nine having died in infancy, and Ekwefi constantly fears that she will lose Ezinma as well. Ekwefi is good friends with Chielo, the priestess of the goddess Agbala. Enoch: A fanatical convert to the Christian church in Umuofia. Enoch’s disrespectful act of ripping the mask off an egwugwu during an annual ceremony to honor the earth deity leads to the climactic clash between the indigenous and colonial justice systems. While Mr. Brown, early on, keeps Enoch in check in the interest of community harmony, Reverend Smith approves of his zealotry. Ogbuefi Ezeudu: The oldest man in the village and one of the most important clan elders and leaders. Ogbuefi Ezeudu was a great warrior in his youth and now delivers messages from the Oracle. Chielo: A priestess in Umuofia who is dedicated to the Oracle of the goddess Agbala. Chielo is a widow with two children. She is good friends with Ekwefi and is fond of Ezinma, whom she calls “my daughter.” At one point, she carries Ezinma on her back for miles in order to help purify her and appease the gods. Akunna: A clan leader of Umuofia. Akunna and Mr. Brown discuss their religious beliefs peacefully, and Akunna’s influence on the missionary advances Mr. Brown’s strategy for converting the largest number of clansmen by working with, rather than against, their belief system. In so doing, however, Akunna formulates an articulate and rational defense of his religious system and draws some striking parallels between his style of worship and that of the Christian missionaries. Nwakibie: A wealthy clansmen who takes a chance on Okonkwo by lending him 800 seed yams—twice the number for which Okonkwo asks. Nwakibie thereby helps Okonkwo build up the beginnings of his personal wealth, status, and independence. Mr. Kiaga: The native-turned-Christian missionary who arrives in Mbanta and converts Nwoye and many others. Okagbue Uyanwa: A famous medicine man whom Okonkwo summons for help in dealing with Ezinma’s health problems. Maduka: Obierika’s son. Maduka wins a wrestling contest in his mid-teens. Okonkwo wishes he had promising, manly sons like Maduka. Obiageli: The daughter of Okonkwo’s first wife. Although Obiageli is close to Ezinma in age, Ezinma has a great deal of influence over her. Ojiugo: Okonkwo’s third and youngest wife, and the mother of Nkechi. Okonkwo beats Ojiugo during the week of peace after she is late bringing in his dinner, and is fined.
Themes throughout the novel include change, loneliness, abandonment, and fear:
Individuals derive strength from their society, and societies derive strength from the individuals who belong to them. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo builds his fortune and strength with the help of his society's customs. Likewise, Okonkwo's society benefits from his hard work and determination.
In contacts between other cultures, beliefs about superiority or inferiority, due to limited and partial world view, are invariably wrong-headed and destructive . When new cultures and religions meet, there is likely to be a struggle for dominance. For example, the Christians and Okonkwo's people have a limited view of each other, and have a very difficult time understanding and accepting one another's customs and beliefs, resulting in violence as with the destruction of a local church and Okonkwo's killing of the messenger.
In spite of innumerable opportunities for understanding, people must strive to communicate. For example, Okonkwo and his son, Nwoye have a difficult time understanding one another because they hold different values. On the other hand, Okonkwo spends more time with Ikemefuna and develops a deeper relationship that seems to go beyond cultural restraints.
A social value—such as individual ambition—which is constructive when balanced by other values, can become destructive when overemphasized at the expense of other values. For example, Okonkwo values tradition so highly that he cannot accept change. (It may be more accurate to say he values tradition because of the high cost he has paid to uphold it, i.e. killing Ikemefuna and moving to Mbanta). The Christian teachings render these large sacrifices on his part meaningless. The distress over the loss of tradition, whether driven by his love of the tradition or the meaning of his sacrifices to it, can be seen as the main reasons for his suicide.
There is no such thing as a static culture; change is continual, and flexibility is necessary for successful adaptation. Because Okonkwo cannot accept the change the Christians bring, he cannot adapt.[3]
The struggle between change and tradition is constant; however, this statement only appears to apply to Okonkwo. Change can very well be accepted, as evidenced by how the people of Umuofia refused to join Okonkwo as he struck down the white man at the end. Perhaps Okonkwo is not so much bothered by change, but the idea of losing everything he had built up - his fortune, fame, title, etc. that will be replaced by new customs. It is evidenced throughout the book that he cares for these things, especially his mentions of a lack of a "respectable" father figure from whom he could have inherited them from.[3] A second interpretation is apparent with Okonkwo's static behavior to cultural change. His suicide can be seen as a final attempt to show to the people of Umuofia the results of a clash between cultures and as a means for the Igbo culture to be upheld. In the same way that his father's failure motivated Okonkwo to reach a high standing within Igbo culture and society, Okonkwo's suicide leads Obierika and fellow Umuofia men to recognize the long held custom of not burying a man who commits suicide and perform the associated rituals with his death. This interpretation is further emphasized with Obierika's comment on Okonkwo as a great man driven to kill himself, likely as a result of the loss of tradition. His killing of the messenger and subsequent suicide continues the internal struggle between change and tradition.
The role of culture in society. With the death of Ikemefuna, Okonkwo's expulsion due to causes beyond his control, and the journey of Ezinma with Chielo, Achebe questions, particularly through Obierika, whether adherence to culture is for the better of society, when it has caused many hardships and sacrifices on the part of Okonkwo and his family.
Definitions of masculinity vary throughout different societies. In this case, Okonkwo views aggression and action as masculinity.
Notion of success and failure. Okonkwo's personal ambition to avoid a life of complacency like his father, Unoka, leads to his high ranking and affluence in the community. He ardently tries to avoid failure. The notion of failure correlates with the idea of change in Umuofia and a shift in cultural values. Failure, for Okonkwo, is societal reform. Hence Okonkwo's drastic and at times erratic action against anything foreign or not masculine.
Through the Achebe’s use of language, he is successful in demonstrating (and attesting to) Africa’s rich and unique culture. By integrating traditional Igbo words (e.g. egwugwu, or the spirits of the ancestor’s of Nigerian tribes), folktales, and songs into English sentences, the author is successful in proving that African languages aren’t incomprehensible, although they are often too complex for direct translation into English. Additionally, the author is successful in verifying that each of the continent’s languages are unique, as Mr. Brown’s African translator is ridiculed after his misinterpretation of an Igbo word.
Things Fall Apart is a milestone in African literature. It has achieved the status of the archetypal modern African novel in English,[4] and is read in Nigeria and throughout Africa. It is studied widely in Europe and North America, where it has spawned numerous secondary and tertiary analytical works. It has achieved similar status and repute in India and Australia.[4] Considered Achebe's magnum opus, it has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide.[5]Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[6] Achebe’s writing about African society, by telling from an African point of view the story of the colonization of the Igbo, tends to extinguish the misconception that African culture had been savage and primitive. In Things Fall Apart, western culture is portrayed as being “arrogant and ethnocentric," insisting that the African culture needed a leader. As it had no kings or chiefs, Umofian culture was vulnerable to invasion by western civilization. It is felt that the repression of the Igbo language at the end of the novel contributes greatly to the destruction of the culture. Although Achebe favors the African culture of the pre-western society, the author attributes its destruction to the “weaknesses within the native structure.” Achebe portrays the culture as having a religion, a government, a system of money, and an artistic tradition, as well as a judicial system.[7] Achebe named Things Fall Apart from a line in William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming," thus tying in the meaning of the poem itself. The missionaries' arrival begins the downfall of traditional Igbo society. This downfall destroys the Igbo way of life, leading to the death of Okonkwo, who was once a hero of the village. Things Fall Apart has been called a modern Greek tragedy. It has the same plot elements as a Greek tragedy, including the use of a tragic hero, the following of the string model, etc. Okonkwo is a classic tragic hero, even though the story is set in more modern times. He shows multiple hamartia, including hubris (pride) and ate (rashness), and these character traits do lead to his peripeteia, or reversal of fortune, and his downfall at the end of the novel. He is distressed by social changes brought by white men, because he has worked so hard to move up in the traditional society. This position is at risk due to the arrival of a new values system. Those who commit suicide lose their place in the ancestor-worshipping traditional society, to the extent that they may not even be touched to give a proper burial. The irony is that Okonkwo completely loses his standing in both value systems. Okonkwo truly has good intentions, but his need to feel in control and his fear that other men will sense weakness in him drive him to make decisions, whether consciously or subconsciously, that he regrets as he progresses through his life.[8]
Achebe writes his novels in English because written Standard Ibo was created by mixing the various languages, creating a stilted written form. In an interview for The Paris Review by James Brooks in 1994, Achebe says, "the novel form seems to go with the English language. There is a problem with the Igbo language. It suffers from a very serious inheritance, which it received at the beginning of this century from the Anglican mission. They sent out a missionary by the name of Dennis. Archdeacon Dennis. He was a scholar. He had this notion that the Igbo language—which had very many different dialects—should somehow manufacture a uniform dialect that would be used in writing to avoid all these different dialects. Because the missionaries were powerful, what they wanted to do they did. This became the law. But the standard version cannot sing. There’s nothing you can do with it to make it sing. It’s heavy. It’s wooden. It doesn’t go anywhere."
Gender differentiation is seen in Igbo classification of crimes. The narrator of Things Fall Apart states that "The crime [of killing Ezeudu's son] was of two kinds, male and female. Okonkwo had committed the female because it was an accident. He would be allowed to return to the clan after seven years."[9] Okonkwo fled to the land of his mother, Mbanta, because a man finds refuge with his mother. Uchendu explains this to Okonkwo:
"It is true that a child belongs to his father. But when the father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother's hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness, he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say that mother is supreme."[10]
Women are understated throughout Things Fall Apart. A crucial element of the story is that the elements within represent the cultural aspects of the igbo society, its culture and traditions. As such, it can be argued that the infrequent mentions of wives in the story of Things Fall Apart, can be taken as a statement of the limited value of women The mentioning of wives purely as the bearers of children can then be taken as a statement that women are actually nothing more than tools of reproduction. The fact that the number of wives you have affects social status further depicts women as possessions of the men. The fact that the men are free to beat their wives also adds to this idea. Okonkwo wishing that his favorite child, Enzima, was a boy further reveals in the inequality between the genders in Nigeria at the time.
The events of the novel unfold around the 1890s.[4] The majority of the story takes place in the village of Umuofia, located west of the actual Onitsha, on the east bank of the Niger River in Nigeria.[4] The culture depicted is similar to that of Achebe's birthplace of Ogidi, where Igbo-speaking people lived together in groups of independent villages ruled by titled elders. The customs described in the novel mirror those of the actual Onitsha people, who lived near Ogidi, and with whom Achebe was familiar. Within forty years of the British arrival, by the time Achebe was born in 1930, the missionaries were well-established. Achebe's father was among the first to be converted in Ogidi, around the turn of the century. Achebe himself was an orphan, so it can safely be said the character of Nwoye, who joins the church because of a conflict with his father, is not meant to represent the author.[4] Achebe was raised by his grandfather. His grandfather, far from opposing Achebe's conversion to Christianity, allowed Achebe's Christian marriage to be celebrated in his compound.[4]
Prior to British colonization, the Igbo people as featured in Things Fall Apart, lived in a patriarchal collective political system. Decisions were not made by a chief or by any individual but were rather decided by a council of male elders. Religious leaders were also called upon to settle debates reflecting the cultural focus of the Igbo people. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore Nigeria. Though the Portuguese are not mentioned by Achebe, the remaining influence of the Portuguese can be seen in many Nigerian surnames. The British entered Nigeria first through trade and then established The Royal Niger Colony in 1886. The success of the colony led to Nigeria becoming a British protectorate in 1901. The arrival of the British slowly began to deteriorate the traditional society. The British government would intervene in tribal disputes rather than allowing the Igbo to settle issues in a traditional manner. The frustration caused by these shifts in power is illustrated by the struggle of the protagonist Okonkwo in the second half of the novel Things Fall Apart.
[edit]Film, television, and theatrical adaptations
A dramatic radio program called Okonkwo was made of the novel in April 1961 by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. It featured Wole Soyinka in a supporting role.[11] In 1987, the book was made into a very successful mini series directed by David Orere and broadcast on Nigerian television by the NTA (Nigerian Television Authority). It starred movie veterans like Pete Edochie, Nkem Owoh and Sam Loco.
^ www.cliffnotes.com. Set in 1880s, in the Nigerian village of Umuofia, before missionaries and other outsiders had arrived, Things Fall Apart tells the story of the struggles, trials, and the eventual destruction of its main character, Okonkwo. His rise to prominence and his eventual fall acts as a metaphor reflecting the plight of the Umuofia native people. Play the story forward until the mid 1950’s, when it was written, and expand it to represent an African culture entirely subordinate to Western influence, and the scope and reach of the book is revealed.
^ Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. EMC Corporation. 2004. Noodle
^ Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: First Anchor Books, 1994.
^ Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. EMC Corporation. 2003.
^ Ezenwa-Ohaeto (1997). Chinua Achebe: A Biography Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-33342-3. P. 81.
“It often happens that in situations of unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies a bulk of truth, with the evil consequence, if perceived, that the substance is estimated by the superficies, and the whole rejected.” ― from "The Woodlanders" by Thomas Hardy
Grace Melbury is promised to her longtime companion, Giles Winterborne, a local woodlander and a gentle, steadfast man. When her socially motivated father pressures her to wed the ambitious doctor Edred Fitzpiers, Grace’s loyalties shift—and her decision leads to tumultuous consequences. Set in the secluded forest community of Little Hintock, Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders inextricably links the dramatic English landscape with the story of a woman caught between two rivals of radically different social statures.
“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope,tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss.What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"We must think of men who are cruel today as stages of earlier cultures, which have been left over... They show us what we all were, and frighten us. But they themselves are as little responsible as a piece of granite for being granite." --from "On the History of Moral Feelings" in "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits" (1878)
Friedrich Nietzsche died in Weimar, Saxony, German Empire on this day in 1900 (aged 55).
"God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too." --from The Gay Science (1882)
in Music, Philosophy| June 11th, 2015 人很容易遺忘,必須常溫故。昨天談胡適之先生引魯迅譯的尼采。 今天查一下我1977年在英國買的企鵝版,發現我在引文處有畫線,寫記號: In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted river and not be defiled. Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under.
O noon of life! A time to celebrate! Oh garden of summer! Restless happiness in standing, gazing, waiting:— I wait for friends, ready day and night. You friends, where are you? Come! It's time! It's time!
Was it not for you that the glacier's grayness today decked itself with roses? The stream is seeking you, and wind and clouds with yearning push themselves higher into the blue today to look for you from the furthest bird's eye view.
For you my table has been set at the highest point. Who lives so near the stars? Who's so near the furthest reaches of the bleak abyss? My realm—what realm has stretched so far? And my honey—who has tasted that? ...
There you are, my friends! —Alas, so I'm not the man, not the one you're looking for? You hesitate, surprised! —Ah, your anger would be better! Am I no more the one? A changed hand, pace, and face? And what am I—for you friends am I not the one?
Have I become another? A stranger to myself? Have I sprung from myself? A wrestler who overcame himself so often? Too often pulling against his very own power, wounded and checked by his own victory?
I looked where the wind blows most keenly? I learned to live where no one lives, in deserted icy lands, forgot men and god, curse and prayer? Became a ghost that moves over the glaciers?
—You old friends! Look! Now your gaze is pale, full of love and horror! No, be off! Do not rage! You can't live here: here between the furthest realms of ice and rock— here one must be a hunter, like a chamois.
I've become a wicket hunter! See, how deep my bow extends! It was the strongest man who made such a pull— Woe betide you! The arrow is dangerous— like no arrow—away from here! For your own good! ...
You're turning around? —O heart, you deceive enough, your hopes stayed strong: hold your door open for new friends! Let the old ones go! Let go the memory! Once you were young, now—you are even younger!
What bound us then, a band of one hope— who reads the signs, love once etched there—still pale? I compare it to parchment which the hand fears to touch—like that discoloured, burned.
No more friends—they are... But how can I name that? — Just friendly ghosts! That knocks for me at night on my window and my heart, that looks at me and says, 'But we were friends? '— —O shrivelled word, once fragrant as a rose!
O youthful longing which misunderstands itself! Those yearned for, whom I imagined changed to my own kin, they have grown old, have exiled themselves. Only the one who changes stays in touch with me.
O noon of life! A second youthful time! O summer garden! Restless happiness in standing, gazing, waiting! I wait for friends, ready day and night. You friends, where are you? Come! It's time! It's time
The song is done—the sweet cry of yearning died in my mouth: A magician did it, a friend at the right hour, a noontime friend—no! Do not ask who it might be— it was at noon when one turned into two....
Now we celebrate, certain of victory, united, the feast of feasts: friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests! Now the world laughs, the horror curtain splits, the wedding came for light and darkness....
“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Wikipedia 只英文版將此書的副標題也翻譯出 Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen) (also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra) is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of the Übermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science.[1]
[[Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (1961, trans. Hollingdale). Please note that Kaufmann is the translator of the slightly different titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None]] Reginald John Hollingdale (October 20, 1930 – September 28, 2001) was best known as a biographer and a translator of German philosophy and literature, especially the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, G. C. Lichtenberg, and Schopenhauer.
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“Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
"All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it." --from "The Way of All Flesh" (1903) by Samuel Butler (novelist)
Samuel Butler was among the most wide-ranging of the accomplished crew of late Victorian writers to which be belonged -- a forceful controversialist in the debates that surrounded Darwin's theory of evolution, a painter who sometimes exhibited at the Royal Academy, an idiosyncratic critic and a gifted travel writer, and even, in his early years, a highly successful sheep farmer in New Zealand. He was also, as The Way of All Flesh, his deterministic tale of the havoc wrought by genetic inheritance, suggests, one of the great British masters of the novel of ideas.
英文文學有2位 Samuel Butler。這本小說 "The Way of All Flesh"有譯本;原文為公共財。 「相信我,誠實的懷疑者的信仰」丁尼生懇切說道:「可比半調子的信教者深切。」SamuelButler對於Bardolph, Falstaff和上述老板娘等等「理性時代」的產兒,倍感興趣。對於這些人,「基督徒得救之道」是不言自明的,而且心中確信「最後審判」和「地獄之火」都是無可置疑的、真的。
“That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.” ― from "Waterland' by Graham Swift
In the flat, watery Fen Country of East Anglia, a passionate history teacher named Tom Crick is being forced into early retirement from the school where he has taught for thirty years. When a student rebelliously questions the value of the subject to which Tom has devoted his life, Tom responds with his own personal retrospective. His story—intertwined with the stories of the local wetlands, the French Revolution, and World War II, among other things—throws light onto the dark circumstances of the current day, revealing how his wife’s tragic youth led to the events surrounding his forced retirement. A monumental tribute to the past, a gripping multigenerational family saga, and a powerful affirmation of the history of self, this exceptional novel illuminates the cycles of time in which we live. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/b…/175770/waterland/9780375712371/
“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.” ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando ‘The longest and most charming love letter in literature’, playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf’s close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth’s England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.
Orlando: A Biography is an influential novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. A semi-biographical novel based in part on the life of Woolf's intimate friend Vita Sackville-West, it is generally considered one of Woolf's most accessible novels. The novel has been influential stylistically, and is considered important in literature generally, and particularly in the history of women's writing and gender studies. A film adaptation was released in 1992, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando and Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I.
Orlando tells the story of a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He is briefly a lover to the decrepit queen, but after her death has a brief, intense love affair with Sasha, a princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy. This episode, of love and excitement against the background of the Great Frost, is one of the best known, and is said to represent Vita Sackville-West's affair with Violet Trefusis. Following Sasha's return to Russia, the desolate, lonely Orlando returns to writing The Oak Tree, a poem started and abandoned in his youth. This period of contemplating love and life leads him to appreciate the value of his ancestral stately home, which he proceeds to furnish lavishly and then plays host to the populace. Ennui sets in and a persistent suitor's harassment leads to Orlando's appointment by King Charles II as British ambassador to Constantinople. Orlando performs his duties well, until a night of civil unrest and murderous riots. He falls asleep for a lengthy period, resisting all efforts to rouse him. Upon awakening he finds that he has metamorphosed into a woman—the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman's body. For this reason, the now Lady Orlando covertly escapes Constantinople in the company of a Gypsy clan, adopting their way of life until its essential conflict with her upbringing leads her to head home. Only on the ship back to England, with her constraining female clothes and an incident in which a flash of her ankle nearly results in a sailor's falling to his death, does she realise the magnitude of becoming a woman; yet she concludes the overall advantages, declaring 'Praise God I'm a woman!' Orlando becomes caught up in the life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, holding court with the great poets (notably Alexander Pope), winning a lawsuit and marrying a sea captain. In 1928, she publishes The Oak Tree centuries after starting it, winning a prize.
Apart from being, at the beginning of the book, a knightly young man, ready for adventure, Woolf's character takes little from the legendary hero Orlando of the Italian Renaissance, spoken by Ludovico Ariosto in the Orlando Furioso. Orlando can be read as a roman à clef: the characters Orlando and Princess Sasha in the novel refer to Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis respectively. The photographs printed in the illustrated editions of the text are all of the real Vita Sackville-West. Her husband, Harold Nicolson, appears in the novel as Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. "The Oak Tree", the poem written by Orlando in the novel, refers to the poem "The Land", for which Vita had won the Hawthornden Prize in 1926. Moreover, the minor character Nick Greene, who later reappears as Sir Nicholas Greene, spouts opinions which had been uttered in real life by Logan Pearsall Smith.[1] For historical details Woolf draws extensively from Knole and the Sackvilles, a book written (and reworked in several versions) by Sackville-West, describing the historic backgrounds of her ancestral home, Knole House in Kent. Other historical details derive from John Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie. (Orlando, personified as one of Vita's ancestors — the 6th Earl of Dorset— discusses artistic topics with his contemporaries as described in that book.) Orlando is also an attractive version of a history book on the Sackvilles' noble descendants, their estates, their culture, etc; Woolf was middle-class and fascinated by the aristocracy, as embodied in Vita. (Vita also wrote about these subjects, but Woolf thought Vita had a "pen of brass"). The conventions of fiction and fantasy (e.g., fictional names and a main character who lives through many centuries) allowed Woolf to write a well-documented biography of a person living in her own age, without opening herself to criticism about controversial topics such as lesbian love. While Orlando was published in the same year as The Well of Loneliness, a novel banned in the UK for its lesbian theme, it escaped censorship because the main character appears as a man when he loves Princess Sasha. Vita's mother, Lady Sackville, was not pleased at the writing of the novel, because she believed the story was too plain in its meaning, and she would call Woolf the "virgin wolf" henceforth. Violet Trefusis's reply would be a more conventional roman à clef (Broderie Anglaise), which loses much of its interest if the reader does not know the background, whereas Orlando remains a captivating novel, even if the reader does not know the identity of the person in the photographs in the book. Orlando: A Biography was described as an elaborate love letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West (by the latter's son Nigel Nicolson); nonetheless, Woolf intended her novel as the first in a new trend, breaking the boundaries between what are traditionally seen as the fiction and non-fiction genres in literature (so the novel is not only about trans-gender, but also trans-genre, so to speak). This was not to be, however, as the book is invariably called a "novel" (while Woolf called it a "biography"), and is shelved in the "fiction" section of libraries and bookshops. Only in the last decades of the 20th century would authors again try this "tricky" cross-over genre (which differs from "romanticised" or "popularised"non-fiction, and does not necessarily have to take a roman à clef form) , e.g., Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (ISBN 0-330-28976-4).
The work has been the subject of numerous scholarly writings, including detailed treatment in multiple works on Virginia Woolf.[2] An "annotated" edition has been published to facilitate critical reading of the text. The novel's title has also come to stand for women's writing generally in some senses, as one of the most famous works by a woman author very directly treating gender.[3] For example, a project on the history of women's writing in the British Isles was named after the book.[4]
Near the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography is one of the most fanciful passages in all literature. Due to an exceptionally frigid winter, the inhabitants of London turn the frozen Thames into a 24/7 carnival:
“Great statesmen, in their beards and ruffs, despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda. Soldiers planned the conquest of the Moor and the downfall of the Turk in striped arbours surmounted by plumes of ostrich feathers. Admirals strode up and down the narrow pathways, glass in hand, sweeping the horizon and telling stories of the north-west passage and the Spanish Armada. Lovers dallied upon divans spread with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hovered motionless in the air. Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak wood, lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire.”
Because their ships had frozen in the water, the foreign delegates who visited London earlier in the fall were unable to leave, lending an international flair to the frost fair and allowing the young Orlando to meet his first love interest, the beautiful and enigmatic Russian princess Sasha.
This section of the book was turned into a charming animation in 1977, which is well worth a watch, especially if you haven’t read Orlando recently.
Though Woolf plays fast and loose with the timeline of British history in Orlando, frost fairs on the Thames were actually pretty common during the “Little Ice Age,” a period of lower average temperatures that lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The first frost fair took place in 1608.
“…from Sunday the tenth of January untill the fifteenth of the same, the frost grew so extreme, as the ice became firme, and removed not, and then all sorts of men, women, and children, went boldly upon the ice in most parts; some shot at prickes, others bowled and danced, with other variable pastimes; by reason of which concourse of people were many that set up boothes and standings upon the ice, as fruit sellers, victuallers, that sold beere and wine, shoemakers, and a barber’s tent, etc.”
“Frost congealed the river Thames to that degree, that another city, as it were, was erected thereon; where, by the great number of streets and shops, with their rich furniture, it represented a great fair, with a variety of carriages, and diversions of all sorts.”
According to another witness,
“Coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other staires, to and fro, as in the streetes, sleds, sliding with skeetes, a bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet-plays, and interludes, cookes, tipling, and other lewd places, so that it seem’d to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water.”
"The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, is not a historical novel but a novel about history—about a time just past whose ramifications have yet to fully unfold. Mann chillingly foresaw the disintegrating faith in reason and the corresponding surrender to the irrational that only a few years later produced Adolf Hitler and caused Mann’s own books to be burned in Germany." --Fergus M. Bordewich, The American Scholar
《魔山》-《魔山》这本书可以说是20世纪的全面预言,浓缩了西欧精神生活的作品,同时,它也是一本当代青年不可不读的经典名著。-《moshan》---- 彭淮棟翻譯作品約有(*為主要作品): T. Mann《魔山*》台北:遠景,1988。這本是他的處男譯作,從英譯本轉譯,便宜賣給遠景出版社。當時阿擘的書中有大量的改稿本,近25年過去了,彭淮棟的德文進步很多,應該有機會再翻譯一次。
中國數個版本:如钱鸿嘉译,上海译文出版社出版
Translations into English
The Magic Mountain, translated into English by H T Lowe-Porter with an afterword by the author, 1927, Secker and Warburg, SBN 436-27237-2
“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” ― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the SwissAlps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
At Buddenbrookhaus, a museum devoted to Thomas Mann, the challenge is how to keep the long-winded writer relevant in an age of shorter attention spans.
Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). It is frequently observed that characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.
Peter Drucker 認為Howards End 一書是 E. M. Forster (1879-1970)的小說中最偉大的,也是20世紀最細緻的英國散文作品。它可以作為英國階級系統的寓言;書中可見維繫社會的禮儀已開始瓦解了。小說中提到的德國表兄妹雖從未露面,但他們的醜陋、驕慢和目中無人的優越感卻是籠罩全書的陰影。 ({旁觀者的時代},頁253)
The monument to Forster in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, near Rooks Nest where Forster grew up and on which he based the setting for his novel Howards End. The area is now known as Forster Country.
電影情節已忘 One of the best Ismail Merchant/James Ivory films, this adaptation of E. M. Forster's classic 1910 novel shows in careful detail the injuriously rigid British class consciousness of the early 20th century. The film's catalyst is "poor relation" Margaret Schlegel (Emma Thompson), who inherits part of the estate of Ruth Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave), an upper-class woman whom she had befriended. The film's principal characters are divided by caste: aristocratic industrial Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins); middle-echelon Margaret and her sister Helen (Helena Bonham Carter); and working-class clerk Leonard Bast (Sam West) and his wife (Nicola Duffett). The personal and social conflicts among these characters ultimately result in tragedy for Bast and disgrace for Wilcox, but the film's wider theme remains the need, in the words of the novel's famous epigram, to "only connect" with other people, despite boundaries of gender, class, or petty grievance. Filmed on a proudly modest budget, Howards End offers sets, spectacles, and costumes as lavish as in any historical epic. Nominated for 9 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, the film took home awards for Thompson as Best Actress, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's adapted screenplay, and Luciana Arrighi's art direction. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
"If [justice] is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and support seems in this world if I may say so has the peculiar and darling care of Nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms." --from "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith
Published in 1776, in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations has had an equally great impact on the course of modern history. Adam Smith’s celebrated defense of free market economies was written with such expressive power and clarity that the first edition sold out in six months. While its most remarkable and enduring innovation was to see the whole of economic life as a unified system, it is notable also as one of the Enlightenment’s most eloquent testaments to the sanctity of the individual in his relation to the state. READ an excerpt from the introduction by Robert Reichhere: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/168734/the-wealth-of-nations/
The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith's influential 231-year-old economic treatise, has been voted the best business book of all time. In a poll by the Financial Times, the book published in 1776 was voted the winner by a "wide margin" ahead of Barbarians at the Gate, the 1990 account by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar of the leveraged buy-out of RJR Nabisco, the US conglomerate formed in 1985 through the merger of Nabisco Brands and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Andrew Hill, associate editor of the FT, said: "One of the measures of greatness in the broad genre of books on business, economics and finance is that it should stand the test of time. The Wealth of Nations, published more than 200 years ago but still regularly cited, clearly passes that test and is a worthy winner." Henry Tang, the Hong Kong government's chief secretary for administration and one of the judges who selected five business books which were put to the vote of FT readers, said The Wealth of Nations had helped "lay down the foundation of free market economics". Other judges included Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of easyJet, Scott Moeller, from Cass Business School and Lakshmi Mittal, president and CEO of steel giant ArcelorMittal. The other choices in the poll were The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, Good to Great by Jim Collins and The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen.
Philia, the root of Philadelphia, roughly translates to “friendship” in Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics, an enduring source for understanding the ethics of friendship. Aristotle identifies three essential bases for friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Friendships of virtue, Aristotle believes, are ideal because only they are based on recognition.
When I was thirty, I moved back to Philadelphia. I had only been gone a few years, and though I knew better, I had half expected it to be just as I’d left it. It was not: most of my friends had left the city altogether or moved, married, to the edges of town. Occasionally, I would run into people I had once known, encounters that produced deep and surprising embarrassment in me; unexplained life choices digested in fast, always alienating, appraisal. The more unsettling thing was that my close friendships were changing, too.
Friendship has never seemed both more important and less relevant than it does now. The concept surfaces primarily when we worry over whether our networked lives impair the quality of our connections, our community. On a nontheoretical level, adult friendship is its own puzzle. The friendships we have as adults are the intentional kind, if only because time is short. During this period, I began to consider the subject. What is essential in friendship? Why do we tolerate difference and distance? What is the appropriate amount to give? And around this same time, I discovered the curious, decades-long friendship between the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and the sculptor Wharton Esherick. Their relationship seemed to me model in some ways; they were friends for over twenty years, mostly living in different cities. Each man was dedicated to pursuing his own line of work, and the insecurities and single-mindedness of ambition seemed analogous too to the ways that adulthood can separate us from our friends.
Wharton Esherick’s studio and living space is preserved as a museum, about thirty miles outside Philadelphia. It stands in a cluster of the artist’s other handmade buildings on a little wooded lot. Esherick created much of what is found inside the museum, from the smooth-grained floorboards to the furniture, chairs, and oblong tables balanced on shapely legs or held up by a geometry of them. There are carved doors and coat pegs, tiny busts of the workmen who built the house, plus that of a songbird that often visited. In what used to be the bedroom is a photograph of Sherwood Anderson. “I produce because I want to make something with my talent equal to [my friend’s] production,” Esherick once said. “Fine music makes fine pictures. Fine pictures make fine drama. Fine drama makes fine music or poetry or song. Each stimulates the other… ”
Esherick met Anderson in the propitious-sounding refuge of Fairhope, Alabama. It was spring, 1920. Friendship, some say, is the province of youth, but Esherick was thirty-two when he met Anderson, who was forty-three at the time. Each man was near the start of his artistic career. (Anderson had recently published Winesburg, Ohio). Fairhope was a respite for Anderson from a struggling marriage; for Esherick, it was an escape from financial stress. The colony was (and remains today) a single-tax community, born from socialist utopian ideals. “A resort &hellip full of middle class eccentrics… ” Anderson sniffed at first arrival. Later, even he was seduced by the idylls of the place. (He declared he’d gone “color mad”). It was a productive, happy time; the men spent mornings at work and afternoons in shared recreation, in the woods or on the water.
Legend has it that it was Anderson who spied Esherick’s talent for woodwork first. At the time, Esherick considered himself a painter, and he was planning an exhibition for the community. As an experiment, he carved a frame for his painting Moonlight. The frame is engraved with sprays of pine needles gilded in bronze paint. It surrounds a dark impressionist-looking painting of a stand of Alabama pines. Anderson is said to have advised Esherick to quit painting for woodwork on sight. The influence that Anderson had on Esherick’s move from painting is unknown, but it’s not hard to imagine that Anderson’s recognition and encouragement of Esherick’s talent came at an opportune time. Esherick had been frustrated by his inability to find his own painting style. “If I can’t paint like Esherick, I can at least sculpt like Esherick,“ the artist said.
Do all friendships have a Fairhope-like heart, wherein the potential of friendship is a place, real or imagined, that we continue to inhabit even when reality challenges sentiment? Sentiment, the thing that Lionel Trilling said cost Anderson the ability to convey meaning in writing, may have no better host than friendship. Consider Anderson’s story “Loneliness.” In it, Enoch Robinson is a man of secret ambition and yearning. He sets out to be an artist in the familiar way. He goes to New York City and discovers people who set him aflame with enthusiasm, but who also have the uneasy effect of making him stupefied and mute, sidelined. Somewhat abruptly, Enoch gets married, becomes a father, dispatches to the suburbs. For a time, he takes pride in appearances, but a gnawing dissatisfaction gets the better of him. He leaves. Alone, Enoch peoples a room with invisible men and women, in whose special company Enoch finds happiness at last. When he meets a woman who promises real companionship, he feels his imaginary friends threatened. He drives her away and she flees, “taking all his people with her.”
There is an uneasy symmetry between the lives of Sherwood Anderson and Enoch Robinson. Anderson was a prosperous businessman until he made a dramatic break from his job and family. Shortly after, he took up writing full time. Anderson even kept a room in his country house full of photos of friends and men he admired. ‘[Y]ou may think it’s a poor substitute,” he wrote to H. L. Menken, in a letter requesting that Menken send a picture to add to his wall, “but a picture framed and hung up in a room I am in and out of every day does seem to bring my friends closer… ” The letter carries a whiff of Enoch Robinson’s ruinous impulses, giving the faint impression that friendship is a self-validating enterprise, friends themselves less important. Fortunately, likeness is fleeting. Enoch, hamstrung by ego, threatened by actuality, is condemned to life as an outcast; Anderson had many friends and admirers. And though he built a career on writing about alienation as a symptom of industrial life, he was not indifferent to its pleasures. He died, in 1941, after choking on a martini toothpick while cruise-bound for South America.
One day in 1916, Anderson, a longtime admirer of Dreiser’s, dropped in on the other man, uninvited. Dreiser closed the door in Anderson’s face, then promptly went to his desk to write a letter to Anderson apologizing for the bad behavior. “My first attempt to come a little closer to Dreiser,” Anderson admitted later, “was a failure.” Esherick’s first overtures to Dreiser were similarly rebuffed. Invited by an actress named Kirah Markham, Dreiser visited a theater near where the Eshericks lived with instructions to stay with the Eshericks overnight. It was 1924. When the theater lights dimmed, Esherick tapped Dreiser on the shoulder to whisper introduction and Dreiser, surprised, awkward as ever, pointedly ignored him.
The letters between Anderson, Esherick, and Dreiser are rich in the Aristotelian pleasure. Letters sent between 1920 and 1940 note arrivals, departures, delays, and visits to and from homes in Paoli, rural Virginia, New York City, and Mount Kisco. The men sailed on the Barnegat Bay, walked together in woods, drank and socialized together. They were ribald. Esherick’s papers include letters decorated with lusty doodles, a bosomy woman showering nude, a sketch of Anderson’s enormous rear end. Utility, too, emerges in material and emotional support. Dreiser employed Esherick to work on Dreiser’s country house in Mount Kisco; Esherick collaborated with Anderson on his collection of essays No Swank. When Esherick’s wife was hospitalized, it was Dreiser who offered words of reassurance and support. Dreiser penned Anderson’s eulogy and Esherick created the gravestone, a crescent that rises out of the ground, curving round itself, that reads, “Life, not death, is the great adventure.”
I had hoped the letters might reveal something about friendship: how to be a good friend, when to let go. And they did—but in negative. Virtue, it seems, lives in action; the ways that we make recognition known in matters important and not. Dreiser to Esherick: “Your future today is absolutely all ahead of you.” Anderson to Dreiser: “Jennie, Sister Carrie, the boy in Tragedy … In any one of such stories you break so much ground… ” Esherick’s scene-by-scene report to Anderson about the performance of a staging of Anderson’s Winesburg near Esherick’s home. The men gossiped, joked, and advised each other on reading, professional opportunities, family matters.
Friendship, Aristotle suggests, is the most immediate form of public personhood; it motivates a person for moral excellence, ennobles us to become a stronger unit for a social whole. And yet, the thing is this: the very material of friendship is the exchange of it. In friendship, sentiment is the relationship. Friendship may have a public aspect, but it is essentially a private exchange. If the letters between Anderson, Esherick, and Dreiser showed me anything, it is that friendship remains the special provenance of those who live it.
My own friendships go on changing, adjusting by degrees to demands that I won’t totally understand. A becomes a parent. B wrestles over what a career should look like. C’s stubborn nostalgia threatens to uproot what we still have in common. The reassuring thing is that no single law rules over us. Friendship is a return, as variable as we are.
Naguib Mahfouz (born Dec. 11, 1911, Cairo, Egypt — died Aug. 30, 2006, Cairo) Egyptian writer. He worked in the cultural section of the Egyptian civil service from 1934 to 1971.
His major work, the Cairo Trilogy (1956 – 57) — including the novels Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street — represents a penetrating overview of 20th-century Egyptian society"開羅三部曲(The Cairo Trilogy, 1956-1957),作品由「宮廷街」(Palace Walk)、「思宮街」(Palace of Desire)和「甘露街」(Sugar Street)三個部分所組成,描寫一個阿塞伊.阿瑪德(Al-Sayyid Ahmad)封建家庭三代人的生活與遭遇。故事始於一九一九年反英國殖民主義戰爭,終於一九五二年埃及正式獨立和納塞將軍發動「七二三革命」前夕,是一部兼具社會寫實和歷史史詩的反帝國主義長篇巨著。阿塞伊.阿瑪德育有二女三男,三個男子中,法米(Fahmy)是一個理想主義悲劇者的代表,他在反英示威中獻出了身軀;亞辛(Yasin)是個放蕩的享樂主義者,沉淪於封建腐敗的泥淖中;凱默(Kamal)代表迷惘、探索和矛盾的一代。馬哈福茲通過一個「兒子反叛」的家族革命來折射埃及二十世紀上半葉反英鬥爭、反封建革命、現代化改革、婦女解放以及東西方文化碰撞下的社會劇變和價值衝突,特別是透過學生運動和群眾抗議事件,描寫了埃及從英國殖民走向民族獨立,從法老封建蛻變為君主立憲的艱辛歷程。"
Subsequent works offer critical views of the Egyptian monarchy, colonialism, and contemporary Egypt.
Other well-known novels include Midaq Alley (1947), Children of Gebelawi (1959), and Miramar (1967).
He also wrote short-story collections, some 30 screenplays, and several stage plays. In 1988 he became the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
馬哈福茲只能在病榻上以小紙片寫作 1996年,他匯集曾在《金字塔報》連載的隨感錄出版,題名《自傳的迴聲》(Echoes from an Autobiography)。這部充滿伊斯蘭哲人「蘇菲」(Sufi)智慧的格言式語錄,表達了馬哈福茲對整整一個世紀的懷念、感傷和體悟。人在垂幕之年,還以「幼年哲學家」自稱,謙遜、寬恕和愛,是這位智慧老人留給人間的不朽話語。
“A priest's life is spent between question and answer-- or between a question and the attempt to answer it. The question is the summary of the spiritual life.” ―from "Khufu's Wisdom" by Naguib Mahfouz
From Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz: the three magnificent novels—published in an omnibus edition for the first time—that form an ancient-Egyptian counterpart to his famous Cairo Trilogy. Mahfouz reaches back thousands of years to bring us tales from his homeland's majestic early history—tales of the Egyptian nobility and of war, star-crossed love, and the divine rule of the pharoahs. In Khufu's Wisdom, the legendary Fourth Dynasty monarch faces the prospect of the end of his rule and the possibility that his daughter has fallen in love with the man prophesied to be his successor. Rhadopis of Nubia is the unforgettable story of the charismatic young Pharoah Merenra II and the ravishing courtesan Rhadopis, whose love affair makes them the envy of all Egyptian society. And Thebes at War tells the epic story of Egypt's victory over the Asiatic foreigners who dominated the country for two centuries. Three Novels of Ancient Egypt gives us a dazzling tapestry of ancient Egypt and reminds us of the remarkable artistry of Naguib Mahfouz.
Aldous Leonard Huxley died in Los Angeles, United States on this day in 1963 (aged 69).
"Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly - they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced." --Helmholtz Watson from BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
A towering classic of dystopian satire, BRAVE NEW WORLD is a brilliant and terrifying vision of a soulless society—and of one man who discovers the human costs of mindless conformity. Hundreds of years in the future, the World Controllers have created an ideal civilization. Its members, shaped by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning, are productive and content in roles they have been assigned at conception. Government-sanctioned drugs and recreational sex ensure that everyone is a happy, unquestioning consumer; messy emotions have been anesthetized and private attachments are considered obscene. Only Bernard Marx is discontented, developing an unnatural desire for solitude and a distaste for compulsory promiscuity. When he brings back a young man from one of the few remaining Savage Reservations, where the old unenlightened ways still continue, he unleashes a dramatic clash of cultures that will force him to consider whether freedom, dignity, and individuality are worth suffering for. READ an excerpt from the introduction here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/84791/brave-new-world/
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. 2册 野色-瞎尊者石涛等二种 现代出版 纸本 精装 二册 提要:1979年纽约大都会博物馆出版《野色-瞎尊者石涛》,1969年伦敦伦德?休姆夫雷出版公司《十七世纪中国绘画大师》,收录十七世纪董其昌、吴历、清初四僧、王时敏、王原祁等画作。
現任美國紐約大學美術史研究所 (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)講座教授。 其研究專長領域為中 國藝術史、中國當代藝術、以及藝術史理論與方法等,特別是關於中國現代性與視覺文化議題。2002–03年曾獲古根漢研究基金(Guggenheim Fellowship)。自1989年起陸續發表關於中國晚期與當代藝術的論文和評論多篇,如 “The Kangxi Emperor’s Brush-Traces: Calligraphy, Writing, and the Art of Imperial Authority.” In Wu Hung and Katherine Tsiang Mino, eds., Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005)、“The Diachronics of Early Qing Visual and Material Culture.” In Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004)、“Review of Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Lothar Ledderose),” Art Bulletin 86.2 (June 2004)、“Sanyu’s Animals.” In Sanyu: L’criture du corps / Language of the body(Paris: Mus?e Guimet, 2004)等。近期計畫出版 Sensuous Surfaces: Decoration and Pleasure in China, 1600–1800 一書(Reaktion Books, London)。
Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right. If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.
Cover of Snowball’s Chance, 2002. Cover of Why Orwell Matters, 2002. Timeline to this Timeline September 9, 2001, I’m walking down Lafayette Street with my wife. We’re close to my apartment, with the Tribeca sky,...
It is now 65 years since George Orwell died, and he has never been bigger. His phrases are on our lips, his ideas are in our heads, his warnings have come true. How did this happen?
今日是香港學生舉行為期一周的罷課活動的第二天,學生們坐在香港政府附近的區域聆聽有關民主和公民社會的演講。 在香港嶺南大學教授歷史的David Lloyd Smith做了有關喬治•奧威爾(George Orwell)的演講并將香港的民主發展比作朝鮮,朝鮮有正式的普選,但只有經過政府審查的人才能參選。 現年21歲、就讀香港科技大學(Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)商業專業的學生Christine Tong說,有關喬治•奧威爾的演講引起了她的共鳴。她說,香港政府就好比《動物莊園》(Animal Farm)裡的豬,利用自己的權力來壓制其他動物,違背自己的原則。 另一場關於莫罕達斯•甘地(Mohandas Gandhi)和公民抗命的演講也吸引了學生以及其他一些佩戴黃絲帶、支持“佔中”運動的人。
Animal Farm was the first animated film made by the British film industry in 1954. But what nobody realised at the time, least of all the producers, was that the film was financed by the CIA as part of the Cold War effort... Listen to The Film Programme: http://bbc.in/1wOW7MU
Fashion designer Agnes B discusses her directorial debut My Name Is Hmmm...
BBC.IN
George Orwell 1945 When Animal Farm was published in 1945, its British author George Orwell (a pseudonym for Eric Arthur Blair) had already waited a year and a half to see his manuscript in print. Because the book criticized the Soviet Union, one of England's allies in World War II, publication was delayed until the war ended. It was an immediate success as the first edition sold out in a month, nine foreign editions had appeared by the next year, and the American Book-of-the-Month Club edition sold more than a half-million copies. Although Orwell was an experienced columnist and essayist as well as the author of nine published books, nothing could have prepared him for the success of this short novel, so brief he had considered self-publishing it as a pamphlet. The novel brought together important themes — politics, truth, and class conflict — that had concerned Orwell for much of his life. Using allegory — the weapon used by political satirists of the past, including Voltaire and Swift — Orwell made his political statement in a twentieth-century fable that could be read as an entertaining story about animals or, on a deeper level, a savage attack on the misuse of political power. While Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a pointed criticism of Stalinist Russia, reviews of the book on the fiftieth-anniversary of its publication declared its message to be still relevant. In a play on the famous line from the book, "Some animals are more equal than others," an Economist reviewer wrote, "Some classics are more equal than others," and as proof he noted that Animal Farm has never been out of print since it was first published and continues to sell well year after year.
“I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.In 1995, more than twenty years after hisirreverent illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, the beloved British cartoonistRalph Steadman put his singular twist on a very different kind of literary beast, one of the most controversial books ever published. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first American publication of George Orwell’s masterpiece, which by that point had sold millions of copies around the world in more than seventy languages, Steadman illustrated a special edition titled Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (public library), featuring 100 of his unmistakable full-color and halftone illustrations.
Accompanying Steadman’s illustrations is Orwell’s proposed but unpublished preface to the original edition, titled “The Freedom of the Press” — a critique of how the media’s fear of public opinion ends up drowning out the central responsibility of journalism. Though aimed at European publishers’ self-censorship regarding Animal Farm at the time, Orwell’s words ring with astounding prescience and timeliness in our present era of people-pleasing “content” that passes for journalism:
The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of … any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.
Alas, this exquisite edition is no longer in print, but I was able to track down a surviving copy and offer a taste of Steadman’s genius for our shared delight.
Also included is Orwell’s preface to the 1947 Ukrainian edition, equally timely today for obvious geopolitical reasons. In it, he writes:
I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement.
And here I must pause to describe my attitude to the Soviet régime.
I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers. Even if I had the power, I would not wish to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs: I would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.
But on the other hand it was of the utmost importance to me that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet régime for what it really was…
I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.
Orwell concludes with a note on his often misconstrued intent with the book’s ultimate message:
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure. But I should like to emphasize two points: first, that although the various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is changed; this was necessary for the symmetry of the story. The second point has been missed by most critics, possibly because I did not emphasize it sufficiently. A number of readers may finish the book with the impression that it ends in the complete reconciliation of the pigs and the humans. That was not my intention; on the contrary I meant it to end on a loud note of discord, for I wrote it immediately after the Teheran Conference which everybody thought had established the best possible relations between the USSR and the West. I personally did not believe that such good relations would last long; and, as events have shown, I wasn’t far wrong.
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