The Conscience of Words

By SUSAN SONTAG


Los Angeles Times Sunday June 10, 2001

(L.A.Times Editor's Note: Since 1963, the Jerusalem Prize has been awarded at the biennial Jerusalem International Book Fair to a writer whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society. Past recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Simone de Beauvoir, Zbigniew Herbert, Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, and Don DeLillo. This year the award was given to Susan Sontag, who delivered the following remarks on May 9 in Jerusalem. )


We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. There can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

What do we mean, for example, by the word "peace"? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean a forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor?

It seems to me that what most people mean by "peace" is victory. The victory of their side. That's what "peace" means to them, while to the others peace means defeat.

If the idea takes hold that peace, while in principle to be desired, entails an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate claims, then the most plausible course will be the practice of war by less than total means. Calls for peace will be felt to be, if not fraudulent, then certainly premature. Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. Peace has to be re-settled. Re-colonized ....

And what do we mean by "honor"?

Honor as an exacting standard of private conduct seems to belong to some faraway time. But the custom of conferring honors--to flatter ourselves and one another--continues unabated.

To confer an honor is to affirm a standard believed to be held in common. To accept an honor is to believe, for a moment, that one has deserved it. (The most one should say, in all decency, is that one is not unworthy of it.) To refuse an honor offered seems boorish, unconvivial, pretentious.

A prize accumulates honor--and the ability to confer honor--by the choice it has made in previous years of whom to honor.

By this standard, consider the polemically named Jerusalem Prize, which, in its relatively short history, has been awarded to some of the best writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Though by any obvious criteria a literary prize, it is not called The Jerusalem Prize for Literature but The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

Have all the writers who have won the prize really championed the Freedom of the Individual in Society? Is that what they--now I must say "we"--have in common?

I think not.

Not only do they represent a large spectrum of political opinion. Some of them have barely touched the Big Words: freedom, individual, society ....

But it isn't what a writer says that matters, it's what a writer is.

Writers--by which I mean members of the community of literature--are emblems of the persistence (and the necessity) of individual vision.

I prefer to use "individual" as an adjective, rather than as a noun.

The unceasing propaganda in our time for "the individual" seems to me deeply suspect, as "individuality" itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising "individuality" and "freedom"--which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.

I don't believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.

As a writer, a maker of literature, I am both a narrator and a ruminator. Ideas move me. But novels are made not of ideas but of forms. Forms of language. Forms of expressiveness. I don't have a story in my head until I have the form. (As Vladimir Nabokov said: "The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.") And--implicitly or tacitly--novels are made out of the writer's sense of what literature is or can be.

Every writer's work, every literary performance is, or amounts to, an account of literature itself. The defense of literature has become one of the writer's main subjects. But, as Oscar Wilde observed, "A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true." Paraphrasing Wilde, I would say: A truth about literature is that whose opposite is also true.

Thus literature--and I speak prescriptively, not just descriptively--is self-consciousness, doubt, scruple, fastidiousness. It is also--again, prescriptively as well as descriptively--song, spontaneity, celebration, bliss.

Ideas about literature--unlike ideas about, say, love--almost never arise except in response to other people's ideas. They are reactive ideas.

I say this because it's my impression that you--or most people--are saying that.

Thereby I want to make room for a larger passion or different practice. Ideas give permission--and I want to give permission to a different feeling or practice.

I say this when you're saying that, not just because writers are, sometimes, professional adversaries. Not just to redress the inevitable imbalance or one-sidedness of any practice which has the character of an institution--and literature is an institution--but because literature is a practice which is rooted in inherently contradictory aspirations.

My view is that any one account of literature is untrue--that is, reductive; merely polemical. While to speak truthfully about literature is necessarily to speak in paradoxes.

Thus: Each work of literature that matters, that deserves the name of literature, incarnates an ideal of singularity, of the singular voice. But literature, which is an accumulation, incarnates an ideal of plurality, of multiplicity, of promiscuity.

Every notion of literature we can think of--literature as social engagement, literature as the pursuit of private spiritual intensities; national literature, world literature--is, or can become, a form of spiritual complacency, or vanity, or self-congratulation.

Literature is a system--a plural system--of standards, ambitions, loyalties. Part of the ethical function of literature is the lesson of the value of diversity.

Of course, literature must operate within boundaries. (Like all human activities. The only boundless activity is being dead.) The problem is that the boundaries most people want to draw would choke off the freedom of literature to be what it can be, in all its inventiveness and capacity to be agitated.

We live in a culture committed to unifying greeds, and one of the world's vast and glorious multiplicity of languages--the one in which I speak and write--is now the dominant language. English has come to play, on a world scale and for vastly larger populations within the world's countries, a role similar to that played in mediaeval Europe by Latin.

But as we live in an increasingly global, transnational culture, we are also mired in increasingly fractionalized claims by real or newly self-constituted tribes.

The old humanistic ideas--of the republic of letters, of world literature--are under attack everywhere. They seem, to some, naive, as well as tainted by their origin in the great European ideal--some would say Eurocentric ideal--of universal values.

The notions of "liberty" and of "rights" have undergone a striking degradation in recent years. In many communities, group rights are given greater weight than individual rights.

In this respect, what makers of literature do can, implicitly, bolster the credibility of free expression, and of individual rights. Even when makers of literature have consecrated their work to the service of the tribes or communities to which they belong, their accomplishment as writers depends on transcending this aim.

The qualities that make a given writer valuable or admirable can all be located within the singularity of the writer's voice.

But this singularity, which is cultivated in private and is the result of a long apprenticeship in reflection and in solitude, is constantly being tested by the social role writers feel called on to play.

I do not question the right of the writer to engage in debate on public matters, to make common cause and practice solidarity with like-minded others.

Nor is my point that such activity takes the writer far from the reclusive, eccentric inner place where literature is made. So do almost all the other activities that make up having a life.

But it's one thing to volunteer, stirred by the imperatives of conscience or of interest, to engage in public debate and public action. It's another to produce opinions--moralistic sound-bites--on demand.

Not: Been there, done that. But: For this, against that.

But a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine. As a black poet in my country put it, when reproached by some fellow African-Americans for not writing poems about the indignities of racism, "A writer is not a jukebox."

The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.

It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.

I am haunted by that "something else."

I am haunted by the conflict of rights and of values I cherish. For instance that--sometimes--telling the truth does not further justice. That--sometimes--the furthering of justice may entail suppressing a good part of the truth.

Many of the twentieth century's most notable writers, in their activity as public voices, were accomplices in the suppression of truth to further what they understood to be (what were, in many cases) just causes.

My own view is, if I have to choose between truth and justice--of course, I don't want to choose--I choose truth.

Of course, I believe in righteous action. But is it the writer who acts?

These are three different things: speaking, what I am doing now; writing, what gives me whatever claim I have to this incomparable prize, and being, being a person who believes in active solidarity with others.

As Roland Barthes once observed: " ... who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is."

And of course I have opinions, political opinions, some of them formed on the basis of reading and discussing, and reflecting, but not from first-hand experience. Let me share with you two opinions of mine--quite predictable opinions, in the light of public positions I've taken on matters about which I have some direct knowledge.

I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. I mean the use of disproportionate firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes and destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and their right to employment, schooling, medical services, untrammeled access to neighboring towns and communities ... all as a punishment for hostile military activity which may or may not even be in the vicinity of these civilians.

I also believe that there can be no peace here until the planting of Israeli communities in the Territories is halted, and is followed--sooner rather than later--by the dismantling of these settlements and the withdrawal of the military units amassed there to guard them.

I wager that these two opinions of mine are shared by many people here in this hall. I suspect that--to use an old American expression--I'm preaching to the choir.

But do I hold these opinions as a writer? Or do I not hold them as a person of conscience and then use my position as a writer to add my voice to others saying the same thing? The influence a writer can exert is purely adventitious. It is, now, an aspect of the culture of celebrity.

There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive first-hand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion-mongering.

I say this, to return to the beginning, as a matter of honor. The honor of literature. The project of having an individual voice. Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn't just express themselves differently than does the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.

The problem with opinions is that one is stuck with them. And whenever writers are functioning as writers they always see ... more.

Whatever there is, there is always more. Whatever is happening, something else is also going on.

If literature itself, this great enterprise that has been conducted (within our purview) for nearly three millennia, embodies a wisdom--and I think it does, and is the root of the importance we give to literature--it is by demonstrating the multiple nature of our private and our communal destinies. It will remind us that there can be contradictions, sometimes irreducible conflicts, among the values we most cherish. (This is what is meant by "tragedy.") It will remind us of the "also" and "the something else."

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. "Nothing is my last word about anything," said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions--whenever asked--cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to perceive complexity.

Information will never replace illumination. But something that sounds like, except that it's better than, information--I mean the condition of being informed; I mean concrete, specific, detailed, historically dense, first-hand knowledge--is the indispensable prerequisite for a writer to express opinions in public.

Let the others, the celebrities and the politicians, talk down to us; lie. If being both a writer and a public voice could stand for anything better, it would be that writers would consider the formulation of opinions and judgments to be a difficult responsibility.

Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change.

As Cardinal Newman said, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."

And what do I mean by the word "perfection"? That I shall not try to explain but only say, Perfection makes me laugh. Not cynically, I hasten to add. With joy.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I accept it as an honor to all those committed to the enterprise of literature. I accept it in homage to all the writers and readers in Israel and in Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truths. I accept the prize in the name of peace and the reconciliation of injured and fearful communities. Necessary peace. Necessary concessions and new arrangements. Necessary abatement of stereotypes. Necessary persistence of dialogue. I accept the prize--this international prize, sponsored by an international book fair--as an event that honors, above all, the international republic of letters.

蘇珊·桑塔格：文字的良心

 ( 黃燦然譯 )

The Conscience of Words

By SUSAN SONTAG


Los Angeles Times Sunday June 10, 2001

(L.A.Times Editor's Note: Since 1963, the Jerusalem Prize has been awarded at the biennial Jerusalem International Book Fair to a writer whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society. Past recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Simone de Beauvoir, Zbigniew Herbert, Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, and Don DeLillo. This year the award was given to Susan Sontag, who delivered the following remarks on May 9 in Jerusalem. )


We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. There can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

What do we mean, for example, by the word "peace"? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean a forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor?

It seems to me that what most people mean by "peace" is victory. The victory of their side. That's what "peace" means to them, while to the others peace means defeat.

If the idea takes hold that peace, while in principle to be desired, entails an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate claims, then the most plausible course will be the practice of war by less than total means. Calls for peace will be felt to be, if not fraudulent, then certainly premature. Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. Peace has to be re-settled. Re-colonized ....

And what do we mean by "honor"?

Honor as an exacting standard of private conduct seems to belong to some faraway time. But the custom of conferring honors--to flatter ourselves and one another--continues unabated.

To confer an honor is to affirm a standard believed to be held in common. To accept an honor is to believe, for a moment, that one has deserved it. (The most one should say, in all decency, is that one is not unworthy of it.) To refuse an honor offered seems boorish, unconvivial, pretentious.

A prize accumulates honor--and the ability to confer honor--by the choice it has made in previous years of whom to honor.

By this standard, consider the polemically named Jerusalem Prize, which, in its relatively short history, has been awarded to some of the best writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Though by any obvious criteria a literary prize, it is not called The Jerusalem Prize for Literature but The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

Have all the writers who have won the prize really championed the Freedom of the Individual in Society? Is that what they--now I must say "we"--have in common?

I think not.

Not only do they represent a large spectrum of political opinion. Some of them have barely touched the Big Words: freedom, individual, society ....

But it isn't what a writer says that matters, it's what a writer is.

Writers--by which I mean members of the community of literature--are emblems of the persistence (and the necessity) of individual vision.

I prefer to use "individual" as an adjective, rather than as a noun.

The unceasing propaganda in our time for "the individual" seems to me deeply suspect, as "individuality" itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising "individuality" and "freedom"--which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.

I don't believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.

As a writer, a maker of literature, I am both a narrator and a ruminator. Ideas move me. But novels are made not of ideas but of forms. Forms of language. Forms of expressiveness. I don't have a story in my head until I have the form. (As Vladimir Nabokov said: "The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.") And--implicitly or tacitly--novels are made out of the writer's sense of what literature is or can be.

Every writer's work, every literary performance is, or amounts to, an account of literature itself. The defense of literature has become one of the writer's main subjects. But, as Oscar Wilde observed, "A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true." Paraphrasing Wilde, I would say: A truth about literature is that whose opposite is also true.

Thus literature--and I speak prescriptively, not just descriptively--is self-consciousness, doubt, scruple, fastidiousness. It is also--again, prescriptively as well as descriptively--song, spontaneity, celebration, bliss.

Ideas about literature--unlike ideas about, say, love--almost never arise except in response to other people's ideas. They are reactive ideas.

I say this because it's my impression that you--or most people--are saying that.

Thereby I want to make room for a larger passion or different practice. Ideas give permission--and I want to give permission to a different feeling or practice.

I say this when you're saying that, not just because writers are, sometimes, professional adversaries. Not just to redress the inevitable imbalance or one-sidedness of any practice which has the character of an institution--and literature is an institution--but because literature is a practice which is rooted in inherently contradictory aspirations.

My view is that any one account of literature is untrue--that is, reductive; merely polemical. While to speak truthfully about literature is necessarily to speak in paradoxes.

Thus: Each work of literature that matters, that deserves the name of literature, incarnates an ideal of singularity, of the singular voice. But literature, which is an accumulation, incarnates an ideal of plurality, of multiplicity, of promiscuity.

Every notion of literature we can think of--literature as social engagement, literature as the pursuit of private spiritual intensities; national literature, world literature--is, or can become, a form of spiritual complacency, or vanity, or self-congratulation.

Literature is a system--a plural system--of standards, ambitions, loyalties. Part of the ethical function of literature is the lesson of the value of diversity.

Of course, literature must operate within boundaries. (Like all human activities. The only boundless activity is being dead.) The problem is that the boundaries most people want to draw would choke off the freedom of literature to be what it can be, in all its inventiveness and capacity to be agitated.

We live in a culture committed to unifying greeds, and one of the world's vast and glorious multiplicity of languages--the one in which I speak and write--is now the dominant language. English has come to play, on a world scale and for vastly larger populations within the world's countries, a role similar to that played in mediaeval Europe by Latin.

But as we live in an increasingly global, transnational culture, we are also mired in increasingly fractionalized claims by real or newly self-constituted tribes.

The old humanistic ideas--of the republic of letters, of world literature--are under attack everywhere. They seem, to some, naive, as well as tainted by their origin in the great European ideal--some would say Eurocentric ideal--of universal values.

The notions of "liberty" and of "rights" have undergone a striking degradation in recent years. In many communities, group rights are given greater weight than individual rights.

In this respect, what makers of literature do can, implicitly, bolster the credibility of free expression, and of individual rights. Even when makers of literature have consecrated their work to the service of the tribes or communities to which they belong, their accomplishment as writers depends on transcending this aim.

The qualities that make a given writer valuable or admirable can all be located within the singularity of the writer's voice.

But this singularity, which is cultivated in private and is the result of a long apprenticeship in reflection and in solitude, is constantly being tested by the social role writers feel called on to play.

I do not question the right of the writer to engage in debate on public matters, to make common cause and practice solidarity with like-minded others.

Nor is my point that such activity takes the writer far from the reclusive, eccentric inner place where literature is made. So do almost all the other activities that make up having a life.

But it's one thing to volunteer, stirred by the imperatives of conscience or of interest, to engage in public debate and public action. It's another to produce opinions--moralistic sound-bites--on demand.

Not: Been there, done that. But: For this, against that.

But a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine. As a black poet in my country put it, when reproached by some fellow African-Americans for not writing poems about the indignities of racism, "A writer is not a jukebox."

The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.

It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.

I am haunted by that "something else."

I am haunted by the conflict of rights and of values I cherish. For instance that--sometimes--telling the truth does not further justice. That--sometimes--the furthering of justice may entail suppressing a good part of the truth.

Many of the twentieth century's most notable writers, in their activity as public voices, were accomplices in the suppression of truth to further what they understood to be (what were, in many cases) just causes.

My own view is, if I have to choose between truth and justice--of course, I don't want to choose--I choose truth.

Of course, I believe in righteous action. But is it the writer who acts?

These are three different things: speaking, what I am doing now; writing, what gives me whatever claim I have to this incomparable prize, and being, being a person who believes in active solidarity with others.

As Roland Barthes once observed: " ... who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is."

And of course I have opinions, political opinions, some of them formed on the basis of reading and discussing, and reflecting, but not from first-hand experience. Let me share with you two opinions of mine--quite predictable opinions, in the light of public positions I've taken on matters about which I have some direct knowledge.

I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. I mean the use of disproportionate firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes and destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and their right to employment, schooling, medical services, untrammeled access to neighboring towns and communities ... all as a punishment for hostile military activity which may or may not even be in the vicinity of these civilians.

I also believe that there can be no peace here until the planting of Israeli communities in the Territories is halted, and is followed--sooner rather than later--by the dismantling of these settlements and the withdrawal of the military units amassed there to guard them.

I wager that these two opinions of mine are shared by many people here in this hall. I suspect that--to use an old American expression--I'm preaching to the choir.

But do I hold these opinions as a writer? Or do I not hold them as a person of conscience and then use my position as a writer to add my voice to others saying the same thing? The influence a writer can exert is purely adventitious. It is, now, an aspect of the culture of celebrity.

There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive first-hand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion-mongering.

I say this, to return to the beginning, as a matter of honor. The honor of literature. The project of having an individual voice. Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn't just express themselves differently than does the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.

The problem with opinions is that one is stuck with them. And whenever writers are functioning as writers they always see ... more.

Whatever there is, there is always more. Whatever is happening, something else is also going on.

If literature itself, this great enterprise that has been conducted (within our purview) for nearly three millennia, embodies a wisdom--and I think it does, and is the root of the importance we give to literature--it is by demonstrating the multiple nature of our private and our communal destinies. It will remind us that there can be contradictions, sometimes irreducible conflicts, among the values we most cherish. (This is what is meant by "tragedy.") It will remind us of the "also" and "the something else."

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. "Nothing is my last word about anything," said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions--whenever asked--cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to perceive complexity.

Information will never replace illumination. But something that sounds like, except that it's better than, information--I mean the condition of being informed; I mean concrete, specific, detailed, historically dense, first-hand knowledge--is the indispensable prerequisite for a writer to express opinions in public.

Let the others, the celebrities and the politicians, talk down to us; lie. If being both a writer and a public voice could stand for anything better, it would be that writers would consider the formulation of opinions and judgments to be a difficult responsibility.

Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change.

As Cardinal Newman said, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."

And what do I mean by the word "perfection"? That I shall not try to explain but only say, Perfection makes me laugh. Not cynically, I hasten to add. With joy.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I accept it as an honor to all those committed to the enterprise of literature. I accept it in homage to all the writers and readers in Israel and in Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truths. I accept the prize in the name of peace and the reconciliation of injured and fearful communities. Necessary peace. Necessary concessions and new arrangements. Necessary abatement of stereotypes. Necessary persistence of dialogue. I accept the prize--this international prize, sponsored by an international book fair--as an event that honors, above all, the international republic of letters.

蘇珊·桑塔格：文字的良心

 ( 黃燦然譯 )

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.

William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)

William Hazlitt—born on April 10th 1778—was a man of prolific mental power. Over-intellectual modern-day critics should take a lesson from his capacity to write intelligently about emotion

William Hazlitt: the greatest essayist in English letters?

Essayist William Hazlitt was born on this day in 1778

ECON.ST

威廉·哈兹里特 "莎士比亚戏剧中的人物"

Characters of Shakespear's plays - Google 圖書結果

Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830

• Wikipedia
• Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (English) (as Author)
• Lectures on the English Poets
  Delivered at the Surrey Institution (English) (as Author)
• Liber Amoris, or, the New Pygmalion (English) (as Author)
• The Spirit of the Age
  Contemporary Portraits (English) (as Author)
• Table Talk
  Essays on Men and Manners (English) (as Author)

TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL

This is justly considered as one of the most delightful of
Shakespeare's comedies. It is full of sweetness and pleasantry. It
is perhaps too good-natured for comedy. It has little satire, and no
spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous. It
makes us laugh at the follies of mankind, not despise them, and
still less bear any ill-will towards them. Shakespeare's comic
genius resembles the bee rather in its power of extracting sweets
from weeds or poisons, than in leaving a sting behind it. He gives
die most amusing exaggeration of the prevailing foibles of his
characters, but in a way that they themselves, instead of being
offended at, would almost join in to humour; he rather contrives
opportunities for them to show themselves off in the happiest
lights, than renders them contemptible in the perverse construction
of the wit or malice of others.--There is a certain stage of society
in which people become conscious of their peculiarities and
absurdities, affect to disguise what they are, and set up
pretensions to what they are not. This gives rise to a corresponding
style of comedy, the object of which is to detect the disguises of
self-love, and to make reprisals on these preposterous assumptions
of vanity, by marking the contrast between the real and the affected
character as severely as possible, and denying to those who would
impose on us for what they are not, even the merit which they have.
This is the comedy of artificial life, of wit and satire, such as we
see it in Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, &c. To this succeeds a
state of society from which the same sort of affectation and
pretence are banished by a greater knowledge of the world or by
their successful exposure on the stage; and which by neutralizing
the materials of comic character, both natural and artificial,
leaves no comedy at all--but the sentimental. Such is our modern
comedy. There is a period in the progress of manners anterior to
both these, in which the foibles and follies of individuals are of
nature's planting, not the growth of art or study; in which they are
therefore unconscious of them themselves, or care not who knows
them, if they can but have their whim out; and in which, as there is
no attempt at imposition, the spectators rather receive pleasure
from humouring the inclinations of the persons they laugh at, than
wish to give them pain by exposing their absurdity. This may be
called the comedy of nature, and it is the comedy which we generally
find in Shakespeare.--Whether the analysis here given be just or
not, the spirit of his comedies is evidently quite distinct from
that of the authors above mentioned, as it is in its essence the
same with that of Cervantes, and also very frequently of Moliere,
though he was more systematic in his extravagance than Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's comedy is of a pastoral and poetical cast. Folly is
indigenous to the soil, and shoots out with native, happy, unchecked
luxuriance. Absurdity has every encouragement afforded it; and
nonsense has room to flourish in. Nothing is stunted by the
churlish, icy hand of indifference or severity. The poet runs riot
in a conceit, and idolizes a quibble. His whole object is to turn
the meanest or rudest objects to a pleasurable account. The relish
which he has of a pun, or of the quaint humour of a low character,
does not interfere with the delight with which he describes a
beautiful image, or the most refined love. The clown's forced jests
do not spoil the sweetness of the character of Viola; the same house
is big enough to hold Malvolio, the Countess, Maria, Sir Toby, and
Sir Andrew Aguecheek. For instance, nothing can fall much lower than
this last character in intellect or morals: yet how are his
weaknesses nursed and dandled by Sir Toby into something 'high
fantastical', when on Sir Andrew's commendation of himself for
dancing and fencing, Sir Toby answers: 'Wherefore are these things
hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before them? Are they like
to take dust like Mistress Moll's picture? Why dost thou not go to
church in a galliard, and come home in a coranto? My very walk
should be a jig! I would not so much as make water but in a cinque-
pace. What dost thou mean? Is this a world to hide virtues in? I did
think by the excellent constitution of thy leg, it was framed under
the star of a galliard!'--How Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and the Clown
afterwards chirp over their cups, how they 'rouse the night-owl in a
catch, able to draw three souls out of one weaver'!--What can be
better than Sir Toby's unanswerable answer to Malvolio, 'Dost thou
think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and
ale?' In a word, the best turn is given to everything, instead of
the worst. There is a constant infusion of the romantic and
enthusiastic, in proportion as the characters are natural and
sincere: whereas, in the more artificial style of comedy, everything
gives way to ridicule and indifference, there being nothing left but
affectation on one side, and incredulity on the other.--Much as we
like Shakespeare's comedies, we cannot agree with Dr. Johnson that
they are better than his tragedies; nor do we like them half so
well. If his inclination to comedy sometimes led him to trifle with
the seriousness of tragedy, the poetical and impassioned passages
are the best parts of his comedies. The great and secret charm of
TWELFTH NIGHT is the character of Viola. Much as we like catches and
cakes and ale, there is something that we like better. We have a
friendship for Sir Toby; we patronize Sir Andrew; we have an
understanding with the Clown, a sneaking kindness for Maria and her
rogueries; we feel a regard for Malvolio, and sympathize with his
gravity, his smiles, his cross-garters, his yellow stockings, and
imprisonment in the stocks. But there is something that excites in
us a stronger feeling than all this--it is Viola's confession of her
love.

 Duke. What's her history?

 Viola. A blank, my lord, she never told her love:
   She let concealment, like a worm i' th' bud,
   Feed on her damask cheek, she pin'd in thought,
   And with a green and yellow melancholy,
   She sat like Patience on a monument,
   Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
   We men may say more, swear more, but indeed,
   Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
   Much in our vows, but little in our love.

 Duke. But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

 Viola. I am all the daughters of my father's house,
   And all the brothers too; and yet I know not.

Shakespeare alone could describe the effect of his own poetry.

   Oh, it came o'er the ear like the sweet south
   That breathes upon a bank of violets,
   Stealing and giving odour.

What we so much admire here is not the image of Patience on a
monument, which has been generally quoted, but the lines before and
after it. 'They give a very echo to the seat where love is throned.'
How long ago it is since we first learnt to repeat them; and still,
still they vibrate on the heart, like the sounds which the passing
wind draws from the trembling strings of a harp left on some desert
shore! There are other passages of not less impassioned sweetness.
Such is Olivia's address to Sebastian whom she supposes to have
already deceived her in a promise of marriage.

   Blame not this haste of mine: if you mean well,
   Now go with me and with this holy man
   Into the chantry by: there before him,
   And underneath that consecrated roof,
   Plight me the full assurance of your faith,
   THAT MY MOST JEALOUS AND TOO DOUBTFUL SOUL
   MAY LIVE AT PEACE.

We have already said something of Shakespeare's songs. One of the
most beautiful of them occurs in this play, with a preface of his
own to it.

 Duke. O fellow, come, the song we had last night.
   Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
   The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
   And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,
   Do use to chaunt it; it is silly sooth,
   And dallies with the innocence of love,
   Like the old age.

              Song

Come away, come away, death,
  And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
  I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
  O prepare it;
My part of death no one so true
  Did share it.

Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
  On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
  My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown;
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
  Lay me, O! where
Sad true-love never find my grave,
  To weep there.

Who after this will say that Shakespeare's genius was only fitted
for comedy? Yet after reading other parts of this play, and
particularly the garden-scene where Malvolio picks up the letter, if
we were to say that his genius for comedy was less than his genius
for tragedy, it would perhaps only prove that our own taste in such
matters is more saturnine than mercurial.

 Enter Maria

 Sir Toby. Here comes the little villain:--How now, my
   Nettle of India?

 Maria. Get ye all three into the box-tree: Malvolio's
   coming down this walk: he has been yonder i' the sun,
   practising behaviour to his own shadow this half hour;
   observe him, for the love of mockery; for I know this letter
   will make a contemplative idiot of him. Close, in the name
   of jesting! Lie thou there; for here comes the trout that
   must be caught with tickling.

 [They hide themselves. Maria throws down a letter, and exit.]

 Enter Malvolio

 Malvolio. 'Tis but fortune; all is fortune. Maria once told
   me, she did affect me; and I have heard herself come thus
   near, that, should she fancy, it should be one of my complexion.
   Besides, she uses me with a more exalted respect
   than any one else that follows her. What should I think on't?

 Sir Toby. Here's an over-weening rogue!

 Fabian. O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-
   cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes!

 Sir Andrew. 'Slight, I could so beat the rogue:--

 Sir Toby. Peace, I say.

 Malvolio. To be Count Malvolio;--

 Sir Toby. Ah, rogue!

 Sir Andrew. Pistol him, pistol him.

 Sir Toby. Peace, peace!

 Malvolio. There is example for't; the lady of the Strachy
   married the yeoman of the wardrobe.

 Sir Andrew. Fire on him, Jezebel!

 Fabian. O, peace! now he's deeply in; look, how
   imagination blows him.

 Malvolio. Having been three months married to her,
   sitting in my chair of state,--

 Sir Toby. O for a stone bow, to hit him in the eye!

 Malvolio. Calling my officers about me, in my branch'd
   velvet gown; having come from a day-bed, where I have
   left Olivia sleeping.

 Sir Toby. Fire and brimstone!

 Fabian. O peace, peace!

 Malvolio. And then to have the humour of state: and
   after a demure travel of regard,--telling them, I know my
   place, as I would they should do theirs,--to ask for my
   kinsman Toby.--

 Sir Toby. Bolts and shackles!

 Fabian. O, peace, peace, peace! now, now.

 Malvolio. Seven of my people, with an obedient start,
   make out for him; I frown the while; and, perchance, wind
   up my watch, or play with some rich jewel. Toby approaches;
   curtsies there to me.

 Sir Toby. Shall this fellow live?

 Fabian. Though our silence be drawn from us with
   cares, yet peace.

 Malvolio. I extend my hand to him thus, quenching my
   familiar smile with an austere regard to control.

 Sir Toby. And does not Toby take you a blow o' the lips
   then?

 Malvolio. Saying--Cousin Toby, my fortunes having
   cast me on your niece, give me this prerogative of speech;--

 Sir Toby. What, what?

 Malvolio. You must amend your drunkenness.

 Fabian. Nay, patience, or we break the sinews of our
   plot.

 Malvolio. Besides, you waste the treasure of your time
   with a foolish knight--

 Sir Andrew. That's me, I warrant you.

 Malvolio. One Sir Andrew--

 Sir Andrew. I knew,'twas I; for many do call me fool.

 Malvolio. What employment have we here?     [Taking up the letter.]

The letter and his comments on it are equally good. If poor
Malvolio's treatment afterwards is a little hard, poetical justice
is done in the uneasiness which Olivia suffers on account of her
mistaken attachment to Cesario, as her insensibility to the violence
of the Duke's passion is atoned for by the discovery of Viola's
concealed love of him.

李中志 - 美好樂園裡的集體遺忘 - 想想Thinking Taiwan - 想想台灣，想想未來

融合表現主義與超寫實畫派的瑞士裔德籍畫家克利〈Paul Klee,…

THINKINGTAIWAN.COM

A Life in Letters, 1914-1982

Gershom Scholem

Edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner

About This Book

• About the Authors
• Reviews
• Table of Contents
• Google Search Inside:

“A biography of Gershom Scholem lies in these well selected and edited letters. Reading biographically between the letters’ lines, in the manner of Gershom Scholem, Master Scholar, you can learn how he found his own story between the lines of the Kabbalah’s texts he almost signlehandedly restored to life; and how he wrote his autobiography out so intensely, with such vast erudition and brilliance, in all his commentaries on the Kaballah that it became, over his lifetime, a biography of the whole endlessly resilient, culturally prolific Jewish people, a 20th century national epic.”—Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World

“Scholem was a giant in the scholarly study of Jewish mysticism, responsible for bringing Kabbalah in particular to the attention of academia. However, the letters Skinner presents here reveal more of Scholem as a person than as a scholar. Scholem saw the two as intimately connected and would likely argue that these documents do aid in understanding his work. The decision to focus on the personal has the benefit of unearthing several firsthand accounts of critical events in 20th-century Jewish and European history.”—Stephen Joseph, Library Journal

“[Anthony David Skinner] has ably translated and edited a wide-ranging selection of letters from the life of this master scholar of Jewish mysticism. Most of the letters...appear here in English for the first time. [Skinner’s] selection illuminates a question that has always haunted readers of Scholem: How did the personality of this overly dignified and self-confident academic relate to the unbridled otherworldliness in the texts he analyzed with such seeming detachment?”—Publishers Weekly

“Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters offers a fascinating sample of the 16,000 letters he exchanged with members of his family...His correspondences with brilliant intellectuals of his time make for fascinating reading and provide a close look at the thoughts, beliefs and passions of a man discovering Judaism in a time and place when it seemed to be disappearing...Anthony David Skinner had chosen the letters wisely and offers excellent overviews of the periods in which they were written.”—Sylvia Rothchild, Jewish Advocate
“A lively...collection, which follows Scholem from his fevered adolescence to the sovereign authority of his final years. The editor’s illuminating biographical summaries set out useful links from decade to decade, but it is Scholem’s uncompromising voice that gives this volume its unified force and striking crescendos. In their unstinting energy, the letters show a man exactly where he wanted to be, and conscious of exactly why.”—Cynthia Ozick, New Yorker

“Over seven decades, Scholem sent and received 16,000 letters. The Hebrew University’s Anthony David Skinner has lovingly translated and edited a selection of these...The replies--from such luminaries as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt--create an engrossing dialogue. Skinner’s artful annotations render Scholem’s most esoteric notions accessible to the lay reader. And he shows how the adolescent maverick evolved from a "Jewish Zarathustra to Master Magician Emeritus of the post-war years"...It will whet readers’ appetites to read Scholem’s own books. In an age of emails and faxes, Scholem is truly a man of letters--in both senses of the term.”—Lawrence Joffe, Jewish Chronicle

“Anthony David Skinner has done a useful and meticulous job. This is the most readable history of German destruction and Israeli construction I know. And it describes Jewish habits of thought leading to this day and trailing back into the darkness over thousands of hidden years.”—Atar Hadari, Jewish Quarterly

“What can this lucky bookworm say to readers who are not especially curious about the kabbalah or about the history of universities in Israel? A great deal, as this selection of letters to and from Scholem makes clear. Some of its pleasures are simple ones: the spell-binding story of the Scholem clan...But this narrative also asks difficult questions: one is whether cleaving to a particular people and its tradition constitutes a self-imposed exile from a realm of more-universal concerns...[Skinner’s] translations, thankfully, let the correspondents speak in voices that sound like their own.”—The Economist

Part of a series on
Kabbalah
Concepts[show]
History[show]
Practices[show]
People[show]
Role[show]
v t e

Life

Selected works in English

• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1941
• Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition, 1960
• Arendt and Scholem, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt", in Encounter, 22/1, 1964
• The Messianic Idea in Judaism and other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, trans. 1971
• Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1973
• From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn, 1980.

• 從柏林到耶路撒冷

• Kabbalah, Meridian 1974, Plume Books 1987 reissue: ISBN 0-452-01007-1
• Walter Benjamin: the Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.
• Origins of the Kabbalah, JPS, 1987 reissue: ISBN 0-691-02047-7
• On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, 1997
• The Fullness of Time: Poems, trans. Richard Sieburth
• On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays
• On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism
• Tselem: The Representation of the Astral Body, trans. Scott J. Thompson 1987
• Zohar — The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, ed.

邦訳著書[編集]

• 『ユダヤ主義の本質』 河出書房新社, 1972年

• 『ユダヤ主義と西欧』 河出書房新社, 1973年

• 『ユダヤ教神秘主義』　河出書房新社, 1975年

• 『わが友ベンヤミン』 晶文社, 1978年

• 『ユダヤ神秘主義』 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版局, 1985年　別訳

• 『カバラとその象徴的表現』 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版局, 1985年

• 『ベンヤミンーショーレム往復書簡』 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版局, 1990年

• 『ベルリンからエルサレムへ　青春の思い出』 叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版局, 1991年

• 『錬金術とカバラ』 作品社, 2001年

• 『サバタイ・ツヴィ伝　神秘のメシア』　2冊組　叢書ウニベルシタス・法政大学出版,　2009年

• 『エラノス叢書』 平凡社全9巻別冊1、1994－95年、数編の論文が所収。

Today, we think of nostalgia as a pleasurable state of being. But in the 19th century, it was considered a terminal condition. During the American civil war, doctors scribbled the word on dozens of death certificates

We don’t always feel emotions like our ancestors did

Feelings like nostalgia can change meaning with time

ECON.ST

• 作者：Boym, Svetlana
• 出版社：Perseus Books Group
• 出版日期：2002年

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Synopsis:

About the Author

怀旧的未来

内容简介 · · · · · ·

作者简介 · · · · · ·

目录 · · · · · ·

Origin:

late 18th century (in the sense 'acute homesickness'): modern Latin (translating German Heimweh'homesickness'), from Greek nostos'return home' + algos'pain'

「懷舊的故事通常有很不好的開頭，一般都帶着一些問題，但它們總能有個好的結局，因為有親近的人給予你幫助，」斯蒂基特博士說，「所以你能以一種強烈的歸屬感結束懷舊體驗，而會對他人更寬容慷慨。」

「如果回憶可以至少讓你自我感覺身體舒適，這都會是一種神奇並複雜的環境適應，」他說，「它讓你可以堅持更長時間以尋覓食物與庇護，這有助於生存。」

「懷舊對於存在感至為關鍵，」斯蒂基特博士說，「它喚起了珍貴的記憶，讓我們相信個人的價值，覺得我們擁有有意義的生活。我們的一些研究表明，那些經常沉入懷舊情緒的人更能面對死亡這一概念。」

「我不願意錯過任何機會，以製造值得懷舊的記憶。」他說，「我們管這個叫可預期的懷舊，我們甚至已經開始這個相關研究了。」

斯蒂基特博士從研究中還得到了另一個啟發。

What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows

ByJOHN TIERNEYAugust 06, 2013

• Pandora's Box: the Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (1956) (with Dora Panofsky)
• 『パンドラの箱 — 神話の一象徴の変貌』 ドラ・パノフスキーと共著、阿天坊耀ほか訳、美術出版社、1975年
  • 『パンドラの函 － 変貌する一神話的象徴をめぐって』 尾崎彰宏ほか訳、法政大学出版局・叢書ウニベルシタス、2002年

三采文化

• Barthes, Roland, Mythologies. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1957. 沒有
• Barthes, Roland, translated by Annette Lavers. Mythologies. London, Paladin, 1972. ISBN 0-374-52150-6. Expanded edition (now containing the previously untranslated 'Astrology'), with a new introduction by Neil Badmington, published by Vintage (UK), 2009. 我有初版，簡稱英文版

作品[編輯]

• 25 Images of a Man's Passion (1918)
• Passionate Journey (1919)
• The Sun (1919)
• Story Without Words (1920)
• The Idea (1920)
• The City (1925)
• The Work (1928)
• The Siren (1932)
• From Black to White (1939)
• Route des hommes (1964)

Guardian culture

Lost ducks, beatniks, and sex in the storeroom: we kick off a new series exploring iconic bookstores around the world with one of America’s most famous, City Lights Bookstore

(in partnership with Literary Hub)

Interview with a Bookstore: San Francisco's historic City Lights

Lost ducks, beatniks, and sex in the storeroom: we kick off a new series…

THEGUARDIAN.COM

1. Seamus Justin Heaney, MRIA was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Wikipedia
3. Born: April 13, 1939, Castledawson, United Kingdom
4. Died: August 30, 2013, Blackrock Clinic

Seamus Heaney—who was born on April 13th 1939—saw poetry as general nourishment and necessity. He was as happy gently floating his words in a village hall as in some elitist auditorium

Seamus Heaney, "a soul ramifying and forever"

Seamus Heaney was born on this day in 1939

ECON.ST

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, poet, died on August 30th, aged 74

THE eyes first. Kind, brown, narrowing as they smiled. Eyes that had squinted into wind and through smoke: that had seen a river rat “tracing its wet/Arcs on the stones”, wind “quicksilvering” a poplar in one sweep, a cut finger “swaying its red spoors through a basin”. Then the hands: big, red, with squared-off nails. Not a poet’s hands. These had paid out rope in long loops, taking the strain; had dressed a hay-ruck and combed it down; had felt the tug and strum of a fishing line in a river. When they switched to poem-work, his pen (the faithful Conway-Stewart, guttering and snorkelling its full draught of ink) became another tool in a long succession of them: the heavy spade, slicing and nicking the turf with its clean plate-edge; the “rightness and lightness” of pitchfork and rake; the sledgehammer’s gathered force, “so unanswerably landed/The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle”. “Do not waver/Into language,” he wrote. “Do not waver in it.”

He was bookish from boyhood, with a compendium of literature in his head; won a scholarship to Queen’s Belfast, did a lectureship at Berkeley, held professorships at Harvard and Oxford. There were four volumes of critical essays, translations from Greek, Italian, Irish and Anglo Saxon, Latin puns, etymological conversations, a lifelong struggle to resist the seduction of iambic pentameters. He rubbed shoulders with a constellation of great poets: Ted Hughes, Czeslaw Milosz, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell. In 1995 he joined the select circle of winners of the Nobel prize. Yet he was always outside the academy. The farm boy from Mossbawn, County Derry saw poetry as general nourishment and necessity, saving proof that “whatever is given/ Can always be reimagined”, and was as happy gently floating his words in a village hall as in some elitist auditorium.

It had begun early, with his mother’s songs; with Hopkins, whose flashingly sprung poems gave him “verbal gooseflesh” at school; with Yeats, the towering and inescapable presence. He wrote first under the name “Incertus”, feeling his way among giants. The past became the shy youth’s touchstone, with its walled solidities of byre, kitchen, thorn tree, cot; of familial love “like a tinsmith’s scoop/sunk past its gleam/in the meal-bin.” He rhymed, he said, “To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”. Then he grew to learn that poetry flowed from self-forgetfulness. From 1972 he made it his day-job, understanding that he had succeeded when the crop of words “felt like its own yield”. Starting with “Death of a Naturalist” in 1966, moving through the bone-vaults of “North” (1975) and the glittering winds of “Seeing Things” (1991) to the mortal quietude of “Human Chain” (2010), there were 12 collections, and no failures.

He should have written more, some said, about the Troubles he lived through, as a Catholic teaching and poetising in Belfast in the 1960s. Indeed he did write about them: the “maimed music” of British helicopters, the “cold raw silence” after Bloody Sunday, the armoured cars in the lane covered with broken alder boughs. He made tender verses of rebel Croppy boys and of his cousin Colum, murdered at random for some sectarian reason, whose body he imagined washing on the grass by Lough Beg, “with blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes”. What he refused to do was propagandise. He would write for himself, not for a cause; would weigh up, rather than weigh in.

Out of the peat

His “fardel” of Catholicism was ever there, the clicking beads and the gold inner gleam of the ciborium, the “tremor and draw” of words he no longer believed but could not disavow. Inevitably, living in the North, he sensed “a battened-down spirit that wanted to walk taller”. Yet he strove to preserve a balance, insisted on his Protestant friendships. “Protestant poets, Catholic poets—and don’t those terms fairly put the wind up you?” His move south, to Glanmore in County Wicklow, in 1972 (“a wood-kerne/Escaped from the massacre,/Taking protective colouring/From bole and bark”) was driven not by funk but by the demands of family and poetry.

It was impossible in any case to avoid the deep history of Ireland, laid down in layers like the black peat he had dug down through on Toner’s Moss; to ignore the ancient kings, monks and wanderers who could be turned up again like bog people, with their patient, ebonised, twisted faces, into the spring light. He too had grown out of this bottomless “sump and seedbed”, “the vowel of earth/dreaming its root/in flowers and snow.” He involved himself wholeheartedly in Ireland’s literary rediscovery of itself in the 1980s, trusting in the power of poetry to drive out the rancid utterances of terrorist and sectarian with “the clear light…leaning in from sea.”

He was taken so comfortably for granted in the pantheon of poets that his going had the shock of a great tree falling. He had written of such a tree, the chestnut planted by his aunt when he was born and then, in later years, chopped down with “the hatchet’s differentiated/Accurate cut”:

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.

Yet his last texted words to his wife were Noli timere, don’t fear.

• Neutral Tones By Thomas Hardy 1867
• The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

隨筆・評論／姜濤週瓚穆青傅浩王娟黃燦然馬永波塗衛群胡續冬譯 摩斯巴恩 貝爾法斯特 尼祿、契訶夫的白蘭地與來訪者 舌頭的管轄 進入文字的感情 翻譯的影響 詩歌的糾正 樹上的神 先世之山：論近期愛爾蘭詩歌中的幻景與反諷 信念、希望和詩歌――論奧希普・曼德爾斯塔姆 歡樂或黑夜：WB葉芝和菲利浦・拉全詩歌的最終之物 測聽奧登 數到一百：論伊莉莎白・畢肖普 洛威爾的命令 不倦的蹄音：西爾維妞・普拉斯 歸功於詩――諾貝爾文學獎受獎演說 附錄：希尼作品及研究目錄 · · · · ·
*****

The Paris Review

“That's something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.”

—Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry No. 75, interviewed by Henri Cole in “The Paris Review” no. 144 (Fall 1997)

Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 75, Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry No. 75, interviewed by Henri Cole in “The...

THEPARISREVIEW.ORG

展覽評論

假如托馬斯·曼寫「推特」

NICHOLAS KULISH報道2013年03月07日

德國呂貝克——文學名人托馬斯·曼(Thomas Mann)一個多世紀前的作品近日再造轟動：其長度足有整整500個字母，不是頁數。
近日發現了一組托馬斯·曼的明信片，共有81張。在其中一張上，他向哥哥亨利希·曼(Heinrich Mann)狂贊酸奶，稱其“美味且略具緩瀉效果”，還表達了對低因咖啡健康問題的焦慮。這位文學泰斗素以《魔山》(The Magic Mountain)、《布登勃洛克一家》(Buddenbrooks)等傑作的長度與難度聞名；而這些明信片通信的文字，則柔化了他的形象，展現了其活 潑、饒舌、清新有趣、平易近人的一面。

按圖放大

Gordon Welters for The New York Times

呂貝克文學史卓爾不凡，其公共圖書館已有近400年歷史。

這批明信片書於1901年至1928年間，系由亨利希孫輩在其女兒的財產中發現，如今在“布登勃洛克宅邸”(Buddenbrookhaus)文學博物館展出，以手機短訊常見的聊天氣泡形式，在巨大的平板屏幕上滾動顯示。如今和將來的幾代人從小就習慣於推特簡訊和動態更新，如何讓他們對這位諾貝爾獲獎作家的鴻篇巨製感興趣呢？官方準備明年擴建博物館，所以，他們正想盡辦法解決這個問題。
同在這座漢薩同盟城市裡，穿過哥特式磚砌建築的美景，一箭之遙處便是值得參考的典範——聚焦另一位諾貝爾獎得主的君特·格拉斯博物館(Günter Grass-Haus)。 在那裡，參觀者通過在觸摸屏上投票，決定關於格拉斯先生的近期展覽安排。君特·格拉斯是《鐵皮鼓》(The Tin Drum)的作者，85歲高齡，仍然話題不斷。近日一個午後，在投票單上，“性”與“士兵格拉斯”兩個展覽並列暫居榜首；“詩人格拉斯”則排在最後一位。
“在德國，人們對博物館的體驗是被動的。”格拉斯博物館負責人約爾格-菲利普·托姆薩(Jörg-Philipp Thomsa)一邊說，一邊演示如何操作一台餐桌大小的巨大平板電腦。
格拉斯先生的圖片，隨着托姆薩先生的手指放大、縮小、旋轉。托姆薩先生在搜索藍精靈的圖片，就是那個動畫片《藍精靈》(The Smurfs)里的角色。他解釋道，博物館電腦里之所以有這些藍色的小傢伙，是因為在格拉斯小說《母鼠》(The Rat)中，它們象徵著波蘭工人運動中的“團結工會”——此外，小朋友們也很喜歡它們。
“我們的目標是喚醒人們對格拉斯作品的興趣，其作品往往被視作艱深難懂，”托姆薩先生說。
但這些最新式的小玩意兒，無非只是解決難題的拼圖一角。對許多讀者而言，終極的吸引，是與作者和作品之間建立起心靈關聯的感覺，比如在都柏林暢遊喬伊斯在《尤利西斯》中提到的地點。
“這地方必須要有點兒什麼非同尋常的東西才行，要有點兒那種你在互聯網上找不到的東西。”布登勃洛克宅邸的館長霍爾格·皮爾斯(Holger Pils)說，“人們對場所體驗的需求與日俱增，因為其他的一切都是二維平面的。”
就某些方面而言，於如今這個八卦、自白的時代，曼氏兄弟的主題十分完美。這兩兄弟就好比德國版的勃朗特(Brontë)姐妹，又帶着幾許該隱和亞伯 (Cain and Abel)的特質——非暴力，但充滿競爭。曼氏家族史既有繁榮鼎盛，又有家道中落，還有兄弟姊妹的衝突、自殺與醜聞。而根據亨利希·曼的小說《垃圾教授》 (Small Town Tyrant)改編的經典電影《藍天使》(The Blue Angel)，則捧紅了女星瑪琳·黛德麗(Marlene Dietrich)。
如今德國人依然特別鍾情於《布登勃洛克一家》，這是德國文學的一個巨人，就好比英國的《米德爾馬契》(Middlemarch)，或俄國的《戰爭與 和平》(War and Peace)。小說以編年史的形式，以曼氏家族史實為藍本，記敘了一個商賈家族的衰落。書中大部分情節，都發生在一個虛構的大宅里，原型其實就是位於孟街 (Mengstraße)的作者祖父母的宅第——這棟房產亦即如今博物館的所在地。
這棟大宅具有舊貴族氣息，其巴洛克風格的門面，仍然正對着聖瑪麗教堂(St. Mary's Church)——據書中開篇處的描寫，“風在教堂里眾多哥特式的犄角旮旯里呼嘯”。近日一個冬夜，賓客們齊聚博物館的拱形地窖，小口嚼着小說中描寫的紅 白蛋白霜餅(meringues)，聽一位演員以深沉、舒緩的語調朗讀書中著名的一幕聖誕情景。
一頓晚餐，外加曼氏兄弟生活及作品相關名勝游，花了他們65歐元，約合86美金。
“小說中的人物，必定與真實人物存在密切關聯，與這部偉大文學作品的現實性密不可分。”今年52歲的托馬斯·凱希維茨(Thomas Katschewitz)參加了這個文學之旅，他講這話的時候，他們正駐足於曼氏兄弟母校門口，一邊欣賞街頭手風琴師的表演，一邊喝着加香料的熱葡萄酒。
對於一個僅擁有21.2萬人口的城市而言，呂貝克的文學傳統異常卓越。市裡最主要的公共圖書館幾乎有400年歷史。圖書館主任貝恩德·哈徹爾(Bernd Hatscher)拿出一份拉丁文的《初學者手冊》(Rudimentum Novitiorum)，大秀一番。這本世界歷史書中有生動的彩色地圖，出版於1475年，印刷地正是呂貝克。
呂貝克是19世紀詩人伊曼紐爾·蓋貝爾(Emanuel Geibel)的故鄉。他的詩作，僅在其有生之年就再版上百次。葬於此地的小說家依達·博伊-艾德(Ida Boy-Ed)，曾是托馬斯·曼年輕時的早期資助人。激進猶太作家埃里希·米薩姆(Erich Mühsam)，在奧拉寧堡集中營(Oranienburg)遭納粹黨衛軍殺害，生前亦久居該市。“二戰”空襲輪番轟炸中，呂貝克，包括布登勃洛克宅邸在內，遭受了嚴重破壞；但這座城市的文學聲譽絲毫不見衰退。
近日一個午後，托馬斯·曼研究專家、呂貝克所有博物館的主管——漢斯·維斯基興(Hans Wisskirchen)，手戴白手套，拿起一張明信片。明信片上貼着一張1904年德意志帝國的5分郵票。“請代我向馮·哈通根醫生(Dr. von Hartungen)問好，”托馬斯·曼寫到。明信片寄往時在利瓦(Riva)療養院的哥哥亨利希，當時利瓦還屬於奧匈帝國。對“曼迷”們而言，這明信片 與《魔山》(The Magic Mountain)中的一幕幕產生關聯——這部小說有一部分內容，就是受這位哈通根醫生，及其療愈避難所的啟發而創作出來。
受過教育的德國人對曼氏兄弟耳熟能詳，不僅是對於他們的作品而言，還包括二人對於“一戰”的意見分歧（亨利希反對），以及二人向來冷淡的兄弟關係。 此次發現這組明信片的消息，登上了晚間新聞和報紙，部分原因，是其展現了托馬斯·曼的另一面，令人出乎意料：一般總認為他為人沉悶，哪曾想，他也可以就拖 鞋和牙醫之類的話題喋喋不休。同時，托馬斯與亨利希之間的嫌隙——據《斯圖加特日報》(Stuttgarter Zeitung)稱，所謂“永恆的兄弟鬥爭神話”——可能也需要一些修訂了。
這組明信片，是博物館改造計劃的重頭戲之一，有助於博物館吸引更多訪客。目前該館每年接待訪客數量5.5萬至6萬人次。在聯邦政府提供的約合40萬 美元的幫助下，呂貝克市政府買下了博物館隔壁的房子，用以擴建。今年2月，該館計劃舉辦一場大型討論會，屆時將有文化界、建築界，以及新媒體界的人士參 加。
“現在的問題是，我如何才能把這個場所，與數字閱讀的世界相結合呢？”維斯基興問到，“文學與現實不同，但偉大的藝術、偉大的作者，以及一個偉大的地點，在此處交融。你在這裡，應該能以一種全然不同的方式，體驗到這種交融。”
與君特·格拉斯博物館的互動計算機相比，布登勃洛克宅邸一樓展示的傳記式文本似乎略顯靜態。樓上，銀箔絲帶與白色百合妝點了聖誕樹，桌上的布偶戲展演着貝多芬歌劇《費德里奧》(Fidelio)的最後一幕——與托馬斯·曼小說中描繪的場景一模一樣、毫無二致。
貝蒂娜·芬納(Bettina Fenner)，一位45歲的呂貝克教師，也參加了剛才介紹的那個晚餐暨名勝游。她說，曼氏兄弟在呂貝克長大，儘管自那以後這裡發生了各種變化，但她的那 些十多歲的學生們，仍能從這本書中讀出一些共鳴。“畢竟，”她說，“每個人都有自己的家族史。”

The American Scholar: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain

The vitality of big ideas

THEAMERICANSCHOLAR.ORG

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
• The Magic Mountain, a new translation into English by John E. Woods,1996, ISBN 0-679-77287-1. This won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 1996.

日本語訳[編集]

• 「魔の山」　新潮文庫　（上下、高橋義孝訳、初版1969年、改版2005年）
• 「魔の山」　岩波文庫　（上下、関泰祐・望月市恵訳、改版1988年）、これらが手に取り易い。

Vintage Books & Anchor Books

6小時 · 編輯紀錄 · 

“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.

魔山書店裡的祕密地下室，曾是一個禁書圖書館。

以經營「魔山」展開第二人生的Loch先生。

魔山的藍色門口。

我喜歡的綠沙發角落。

魔山書店全景拍攝。

魔山書店的外觀一瞥。

◎陳思宏 攝影◎Achim Plum
【編輯室報告】
對作家而言，書店該是城市裡最有感觸的空間之一。緣此，本刊特闢【作家與書店】單元，邀請作家分享在所居城市中，最喜愛、或者最常造訪的書店。今、明兩天分別刊出陳思宏在柏林與周丹穎在巴黎的書店豔遇。未來亦將不定期刊出其他作家和書店的戀史。
★★★
迷路時，我走進魔山。
那 簡直是設定好的巧遇場景：炎熱的柏林夏天，我在寧靜的社區裡尋找舞者朋友S的公寓。社區裡商店稀疏，人車皆靜，手上的電子羅盤似乎被曬壞了，地圖定位失 敗，我一路迷途，眼見皆陌生。蟲在行道樹上慵懶鳴叫，肥胖的胡蜂狂吻花圃裡的牡丹，一位老婦人拖著買菜籃慢慢走過。我揮汗抬頭，看到了寫著「魔山」 （Der Zauberberg）的藍色小招牌。我站在街邊觀看「魔山」的櫥窗，全都是文學書籍，還有精美的童話繪本。反正迷路，就進去逛逛吧。我走進這間街角書 店，老闆微笑問好，我偷偷深呼吸，視線快速移動，幾秒鐘，我就確定，我找到了我在柏林最愛的書店了。
在柏林的純文學角落
「魔山」，真的是我心目中，理想的書店。
這 裡，不賣咖啡糕餅，單純賣書。我愛咖啡，但咖啡是蜜糖，招惹人聲嗡嗡，有咖啡就一定有咖啡桌，桌上有指尖與鍵盤擊掌、口語生是非、咖啡拍打口腔海岸，對我 這種極易分心的人，書店、咖啡館的複合式經營，只會讓我忘了書籍的存在。「魔山」純粹賣書，打開藍色的店門，嗅覺會立即在腦內召喚閱讀，這裡有紙張的、油 墨的厚重味道，沒有任何咖啡干擾。
這裡，有最簡單的裝潢，藍色窗框，白灰牆壁，黑色書架，讓讀者登高取書的木梯子，幾盞溫暖的燈。書架上 方，貼滿了作家群像：吳爾芙、卡夫卡、貝克特、Thomas Bernhard、Judith Hermann，與讀者對望。靠街邊的角落，有綠色沙發、小圓桌、幾張椅子。我總是在店裡選本書，把自己埋入綠色沙發裡，安靜地閱讀，考慮著是否要把手上 的書帶回家。這是我在柏林，最愛的文學角落。
店裡不放音樂，顧客稀少的暑假，聽覺只能抓取到老闆整理書的聲音。在家裡寫作，電腦隨時尖叫送 來遠方的耳語，音響彈完蕭邦立即大唱Fiona Apple，我跟大部分現代人一樣，享受社群網站的干擾，甘願讓樂音暫時癱瘓思考。但在「魔山」，我可以靜靜地，專心選書，讀書，買書。
「魔山」只賣文學書以及精美繪本童書，沒有靈修成長勵志減肥致富養生成名找伴時尚健身瑜伽。彷彿那扇藍色店門就是個文學篩網，卡夫卡開門就溜進入駐，網路輕盈小說找不到門把。
店 裡的角落有兩張古老的書桌，老先生Harald Loch與Natalia Liublina女士各自坐在書桌前，處理書單、接電話、幫讀者結帳。我每次在書店裡流連，總感覺這個文學書店有強烈的故事磁場。某天，我終於忍不住開口 討故事。Loch先生當時正在忙，他說，改天再來，我們好好聊。
聽故事那天，剛好在台灣從事出版的W與女友來訪，我們三個台灣人變成等待童話的小孩，Loch先生坐進綠色沙發，故事啟程。
「魔 山」的前身，是俄國人Andreas Wolf於1931年創立的書店，今年七十一歲的Loch先生還清楚記得，六十年前，他就在這裡買了一本古希臘文法的書。多年來，他一直保持在這裡買書的 習慣。2009年，他接下經營的責任，以「魔山」為名，開啟書店的另一篇章。為何稱之「魔山」？除了與湯馬斯．曼著名的小說同名之外，最主要是因為他覺得 文學書宛如魔術，令人著迷。這個轉角的書店，是他成長過程的重要文學回憶，褪下律師的身分後，他決定在書店裡展開全新的退休生涯，成為書店主人，並且寫書 評，他說這是他的「第二人生」。綠色沙發前的小圓桌上，就擺著出版社寄來的未出版的小說稿，他評讀完之後，再決定是否要選購這本書在店裡販賣。
W 深知台灣書店經營的現況，書店擺上的書，要是沒被讀者買走，就會遭到退書的命運。W問Loch先生，這樣一間獨立書店，是否也會退書呢？Loch先生驕傲 地說：「不，這些書，都是我們的書。我們讀過之後喜歡，跟出版社訂購，才在架上陳列，我們不會退給出版社。」那句「我們的書」，撞進了我的身體。這些都是 書店主人精選過的文學書籍，跟暢銷排行榜毫無瓜葛，是寶藏，是珠玉，店長親自篩選淘洗過，開店與讀者分享。
讓思想翻牆的地下密室
幾天後，我又打開那道藍色的門，Loch先生正在忙著盤點，他知道我又來討故事的糖，只說：「等一下，我帶你去地下室，拜訪祕密。」
我 在書店裡的童書區選了繪本，坐下來細讀。我也發現之前居住在台灣的德國作者施益堅（Stephan Thome）的《邊境行走》（Grenzgang），看到我翻閱《邊境行走》的平裝本，Loch先生說起：「你知道作者住過台灣嗎？他之前有來我這邊朗讀 這本書，我很期待他的第二本小說。」我說起幾年前在台北與施益堅短暫結識的過程，當時，我完全不知道他在寫作。文學的話題開啟，Loch先生發現我也是個 文學人，放下手邊的盤點說：「走，我們去地下室。」
突然，他把古老的書桌用力往旁邊挪，把地上的一塊綠色墊子拿開，一道通往地下室的門，出現了。他掀開門，身手靈活走下木梯：「來！」
我 走下木梯，眼前出現一個祕密的地下圖書館，我震驚無言。地下室有一盞昏黃燈光，蜘蛛網放肆，老舊書籍放置在書架上，散發著歲月的氣息。Loch先生開始說 故事，納粹掌權期間，許多書籍都成為禁書，Wolf先生就在這個祕密的地下室裡，開始經營禁書圖書館。知道這個圖書館的人們，都必須獲得Wolf先生的信 任，才能進入這個地下祕密圖書館，把被納粹禁止的書籍偷偷帶回家閱讀，廿四小時內必須歸還。那是一個柏林的祕密閱讀組織，以閱讀，翻越納粹高築的思想控制 牆。希特勒曾下令燒掉禁書，一把火熊熊，企圖燒掉不受控的知識。但在這個角落書店裡，有個祕密地下室，來借書的讀者冒著危險，在閱讀裡，享受走私來的自 由。
這狹窄的地下室，因為閱讀，而有了無限的自由空間。我在這空間裡，絲毫不感覺到幽閉，當年的每一次祕密借閱，就是一次自由的伸展。閱讀，果真讓人自由。
只 可惜，納粹當年做過的那些蠢事，至今仍在許多國家被徹底執行。書籍被審查控制，網路被監看，社群網站上的幾句書寫，可能會惹來囹圄之災。但「魔山」裡的這 間地下室，繼續以各種不同的形式在不同的疆界與時空存在。這地下室是個完美的文學隱喻，翻開書，靜下來，閱讀就是自己最私密的時刻，閱讀是無人可管的疆 界，閱讀是魔術，閱讀是自由。
Loch先生說，有時候會有整班的學生來訪，一個接一個跟著他進入這個祕密閱讀基地。他會細說納粹的禁書政策，鼓勵學生們閱讀。他致力保存地下室原貌，這是這間街角書店，最寶貴的人類資產。
關上地下室的門，放回綠色墊子，把書桌推回，不知情的人，永遠不知道那裡藏著一個精采的故事。短短的地下室拜訪，我有看了一部電影的豐富感受。
我買下繪本，告別。Loch先生說，記得下次來參加店裡的朗讀活動，店裡的許多書架都是裝有輪子的，朗讀時刻，把書架推開，讀者們排排坐聽作者聲音，是書店裡持續累積的文學聲響回憶，歡迎一起來建築這共同的回憶。
我 在當兵時，讀完《魔山》這本厚重小說。小說主角Hans Castorp在山上的療養院裡，遇見各式各樣的人物，與我高山雷達站服役的際遇類似，一進魔山身難退，怪奇人物紛沓來。我覺得Loch先生也像《魔山》 裡的Hans Castorp，書店裡，隨時都有各種人物走進來。
離開「魔山」，我發現Loch先生是猶太人。一定，還有更多故事。
下次，再來推開藍色的門，聽故事。 ●

Gordon Welters for The New York Times

Lübeck Journal

Updating Mann’s Status for Age of Texting

By NICHOLAS KULISH

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.


亨利希曼．他最著名的晚年長篇小說『亨利四世』有百萬字.....

• 1984年：Mazurca para dos muertos（《為亡靈彈奏瑪祖卡》，被評論者認為是1989年諾貝爾文學獎得獎代表作）

ADJECTIVE

literary

(Especially of vegetation) dry or withered:small green vineyards encircled by vast sear fields

作品在台灣的出版[編輯]

• 劉梅緣/譯，《巴斯瓜‧杜阿狄的家庭》，台北市：驚聲，1973年。
• 黃志良、劉靜言/譯，《蜂巢》，台北市：允晨，1988年。
• 李德明等人/譯，林盛彬/導讀，《為亡靈彈奏》，台北市：桂冠，1994年。《為亡靈彈奏瑪祖卡》桂林：灕江，2015
• 張淑英/譯，《杜瓦特家族》，台北市：時報文化，1995年。
• 張淑英/譯，《亞卡利亞之旅》，台北市：皇冠文學，1995年。

趙建中紀念部落格 | in memory of Chao Chien-Chung

去年秋好友漢清(17屆校友)與玉燕(19屆系友)拜訪漢先生後，提及趙建中先生也一起見漢先生，但趙先生必須帶著氧氣筒行動，聽到這消息時就被嚇…

CCCHAO.CCLOOKUP.COM

趙建中先生紀念集

---

前往趙建中先生紀念集電子書 館長的話 林祝興館長 趙建中先生，1971年6月本校建築系畢業，1974年8月至1977年7月間擔任建築系專任教師，1978年9月開始轉任建築系兼任教師，一直到 1991年6月。1993年10月與建築系阮偉明老師一起完成本校「教學研究大樓」的設計案，並於1995年10月完成該大樓的興建工程。 2013年3月18日，趙建中先生不幸去世，噩耗傳來，本校創意設計暨藝術學院院長羅時瑋教授與建築系同仁希望能為趙先生舉辦追思會。本館基於校史文獻典 藏的單位，義不容辭地為這位校友與前同仁蒐集相關資料，擬承續「東海名人錄系列」的編纂旨趣，彙纂成書，命名為《東海山林的沈思》，以呼應其大作《大度山 林--七十年代大學校園回憶錄》。 趙先生在<自序>回憶說：「曾經，這裡就如同一所修院，與外界有著相當的隔閡。早先樹木低矮而稀疏，山風較大，到了秋冬的夜間路上少有人 行。」然而在這樣的環境中渡過的經驗是：「許多老同學懷念舊日情景，據說事業有成的學長嘉緒兄曾對人說『在大度山度過一生最快樂的日子』。」是的，大學生 涯是每一位過來人心目中最為黃金的時段，然而歲月的流逝，景物也隨之變動，誠如趙先生所說的：「剛留學返台，回到這山丘上的大學服務，放眼所見景物依舊， 而人物則略有更替。而近四十多年後的今日，不僅人物全非，連景物也依稀難以辨識！」因此他「個人的懷舊方法，主要靠的是舊照片和沉思往事，由記得的部分推 向已忘卻之處。」所以在他的《大度山林》處處搭配著照片來呈現。這種文字與圖片的組合，相信同樣也可以「牽動著」校友們的「共同回憶」。因此我們安排他的 「主題展」，藉以「牽動你我共同的回憶」。 書成之際，我們將安排在圖書館入口處的「主題展示區」展出，分別陳列趙校友在雜誌上發表的「建築專業著作」，在《聯合報》與《中國時報》發表的「懷舊」作 品，以及「建築論著」所附的建築物圖片(部份是從網路取得)，冀能呈現趙建中先生在建築領域的成就以及他對東海的懷念與關注，並配合建築系擬將舉辦的「追 思會」。 目  次 目次-----------------------------------------------------------------------壹 館長序(林祝興)----------------------------------------------------------一 第一單元：大事記 趙建中先生大事記-----------------------------------------------------001 第二單元：作品集 壹、懷舊 (一)憶童年 追憶江氏姐妹-----------------------------------------------------------013 消失了的北一女舊校園------------------------------------------------019 《人生進行事》：吃在北一女公園路---------------------------------024 (二)東海憶舊 十年東海風(1967~1977)-----------------------------------------------026 側寫老漢----------------------------------------------------------------031 側寫老漢--漢先生的似水年華----------------------------------------048 懷念陳其寬先生--------------------------------------------------------054 《人生進行事》--評圖風雲--------------------------------------------057 《人生進行事》--評圖風雲(附照片)---------------------------------060 貳、建築物參觀感想 走訪柯比意作品--------------------------------------------------------073 記金石文化廣場--------------------------------------------------------088 參、建築作品 台北市中央研究院地球科學研究所---------------------------------093 中央研究院地球科學研究所-----------------------------------------096 南台工商專科學校商學館--------------------------------------------098 中原大學教學大樓(夜間部與校外教學推廣中心)設計案---------101 理想大地渡假旅館-----------------------------------------------------108 教育歲月之延續：中原大學夜間部與推廣部教學大樓------------112 第三單元：附錄 理性的思考：訪趙建中建築師談地球科學研究所設計                  (對談：王增榮、吳光庭，整理：仲倍瑩)-----------116 我們的師長--張肅肅先生與趙建中先生(主請人：李安國、                 羅榮源，主持人：羅時瑋)-------------------------------119 舊藝術中心保留案-----------------------------------------------------136 《大度山林--七十年代大學校園回憶錄．自序》-------------------147 大度山林(郭肇立)------------------------------------------------------151 懷念趙建中先生(羅時瑋)----------------------------------------------152 第四單元：照片 一、個人照----------------------------------------------------------155 二、合照------------------------------------------------------------157 三、建築作品照----------------------------------------------------164 編後記--------------------------------------------------------------172

相關檔案：趙建中先生紀念集(浮水印).pdf

******

《趙建中建築師紀念集》郭肇立編，私立東海大學建築系+趙建中紀念會出版  2013
 目錄6-8
第一篇 追思10-129
 第二篇 趙建中建築作品 131-68
 第三篇 趙建中著述 169-266
附錄二篇 趙建中生平事略/謝誌各一頁

睡前幾乎將此書翻讀一遍。 許多篇都很感人.....此書有isbn書號， 或許加上"《大度山林 》新書發表"及"紀念會"的摘要， 再精編一番，應可"上市"，讓更多人分享。他過世之後，留下來的，是很有個性的小孩子性情之趙先生。 除了某(些)家人的長期日常生活負擔， 可能無法承受之外， 所有的關係人，可能都是友情的受惠者。
在建築專業上，以一篇沒交待"出處"/目的之《大學校園建築外部空間之品質》 (頁212-14)論文最好:11注解中，有3處提到Chris Alexander 等人的作品 ，有點出乎我意外。 只怕此論文太精簡，外行人不容易懂。
(許多人都不知道要"出書"，所以沒機會多寫一番。編者也可能將某些人的"關係"分類錯誤.....)

****

趙建中老師的這本新書，《大度山林：七十年代大學校園回憶錄》 ( 攝影多為阮偉明) ， 總經銷：田園城市出版社， 2012年。
是關心東海大學校園發展史，以及相關人物點滴的佳作。它是為東海之友所寫的，也是關心東海的朋友必讀的。當然，我認為可能改進的地方也不少，但是那是無關宏旨的。
有一件事，我認為或許趙先生或羅院長等人可以幫忙的：
「後記」有許多建言，包括設「校園建築師」，以控制校園品質日益低下；「遷教授宿舍區」；「新教舍的空間分配原則」…..都自成一家之言，所以值得將它們放到這兒，以及其它開會討論之用。

他對建築有執著，對東海校園有感情。可惜真的無力可回天。他對東海校園的一些發展觀念，寫在書的後記中，或許多是"為時已晚"了。不過，我欣賞他認真地寫出來。從他為本書出版的認真運作，盛大的好友俱在的新書發表會，七零年代加入東海的現代舞蹈社等等，可見他是位好漢…….

張正：《四方報》快轉，十年一刻 - 獨立評論@天下 - 天下雜誌

我對《四方報》停刊有什麼意見？《四方報》成立的動機是高尚的，我很榮…

OPINION.CW.COM.TW|作者：獨立評論在天下

《破周報》428聲明，呼籲世新董事會盡快簽署讓渡協議

破報編輯部於網站及臉書宣佈，該報將於3月底停刊重整。（圖擷取自破報臉書）

 aNobii

誰說法國只有浪漫- anobii (拉丁:書虫)

References

1. ^Good News, The aNobii Blog, March 2, 2011.

See also

• Goodreads
• LibraryThing
• Shelfari

Further reading

• Ming Pao (2007-07-09). "Web 2.0 'Made in Hong Kong'". Archived from the original on 2007-11-21. http://web.archive.org/web/20071121194634/http://www.mingpaovan.com/htm/News/20070709/wa1h.htm. Retrieved 2007-10-31.
• Hong Kong Economic Times (2007-06-27). "Virtual Bookshelf in Hong Kong Impresses Bookworms of the Whole World". p. A35.
• South China Morning Post (2007-08-02). "Shelf absorbed". pp. CITY5.

External links

• aNobii official site
• aNobii iPhone App
• aNobii Android App

四方報- 維基百科，自由的百科全書

外部連結

• 越南四方網
• 越文四方報部落格
• 越文四方報Facebook
• 泰文四方報
• 四方藝廊

• 台灣立報
• 破報
• 大學報
• 新莊報導
• 文化一周