“Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.” ―from THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH by Gabriel García Márquez
“There is always something left to love.” ―from ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel García Márquez
The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as "magical realism." READ more here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/one-hundred-years-of-s…/#
“Inspiration is when you find the right theme, one which you really like; that makes the work much easier. Intuition, which is also fundamental to writing fiction, is a special quality which helps you to decipher what is real without needing scientific knowledge, or any other special kind of learning. The laws of gravity can be figured out much more easily with intuition than anything else. It’s a way of having experience without having to struggle through it. For a novelist, intuition is essential. Basically it’s contrary to intellectualism, which is probably the thing that I detest most in the world—in the sense that the real world is turned into a kind of immovable theory. Intuition has the advantage that either it is, or it isn’t. You don’t struggle to try to put a round peg into a square hole.” —Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez was interviewed in his studio/office located just behind his house in San Angel Inn, an old and lovely section, full of the…
THEPARISREVIEW.ORG
“He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.” ― from CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD by Gabriel García Márquez
一件事先張揚的兇殺案
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.
The Fragrance of the Guava: Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Maarquez Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza
Series: Faber Caribbean
Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: Faber & Faber (April 20, 1998)
Language: English
Apuleyo Mendoza, Plinio; García Márquez, Gabriel (1983), The Fragrance of Guava, London: Verso
In these conversations Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, speaks about his Colombian family background, his early travels and struggles as writer, his literary antecedents, and his personal artistic concerns. Marquez conveys, as he does in his work through the power of language, the heat and colour of the Spanish Caribbean, the mythological world of its inhabitants, and the exotic mentality of its leaders. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the journalist and novelist who shares these conversations, is a friend and contemporary of Marques, and also of Colombian extraction.
加西亞•馬爾克斯（Gabriel Garc a M rquez）1927年出生於哥倫比亞馬格達萊納海濱小鎮阿拉卡塔卡。童年與外祖父母一起生活。1936年隨父母遷居蘇克雷。1947年考入波哥大國立大學。1948年因內戰輟學，進入報界。五十年代開始出版文學作品。六十年代初移居墨西哥。1967年出版《百年孤獨》。1982年《番石榴飄香》問世。同年獲諾貝爾文學獎。2014年4月17日於墨西哥病逝。
普利尼奧‧門多薩（P. A. Mendoza）加西亞•馬爾克斯好友，作家、記者，曾任哥倫比亞駐意大利和葡萄牙大使。
Apuleyo Mendoza, Plinio; García Márquez, Gabriel (1983), The Fragrance of Guava, London: Verso, p.35 García Márquez and his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza discuss his work in a similar way,
"The way you treat reality in your books ... has been called magical realism. I have the feeling your European readers are usually aware of the magic of your stories but fail to see the reality behind it ... .""This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs."[109]
“Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.”
"What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed." --from "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" by Yukio Mishima
In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully. Mizoguchi, an ostracized stutterer, develops a childhood fascination with Kyoto’s famous Golden Temple. While an acolyte at the temple, he fixates on the structure’s aesthetic perfection and it becomes his one and only object of desire. But as Mizoguchi begins to perceive flaws in the temple, he determines that the only true path to beauty lies in an act of horrific violence. Based on a real incident that occurred in 1950, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion brilliantly portrays the passions and agonies of a young man in postwar Japan, bringing to the subject the erotic imagination and instinct for the dramatic moment that marked Mishima as one of the towering makers of modern fiction. With an introduction by Donald Keene; Translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris.
Today in the 91st anniversary of the birth of Yukio Mishima.
In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully...
Yukio Mishima died in Ichigaya, Tokyo, Japan on this day in 1970 (aged 45).
"Japanese people today think of money, just money: Where is our national spirit today? The Jieitai must be the soul of Japan. … The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is why you don’t agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your tiny world. You do nothing for Japan. … I salute the Emperor. Long live the emperor!" --Mishima's final address the SPF Garrison at Ichigaya Camp during his failed coup attempt (1970)
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。
This biography sheds light on the subtle means by which Marcel Proust transformed his own experiences and borrowed from those of his friends for his masterwork Remembrance of Things Past. B&W photos & illus. evoke the atmosphere of 19th- and early-20th-century Paris. By William Samson Proust and his World.
Ekphrasis Chardin and Rembrandt Marcel Proust Translation by Jennie Feldman ISBN 9781941701508 17.70 x 10.70 cm Paperback 64pp First published 2016
This brief cameo is so far the only known film footage of Marcel Proust in existence.
Marcel Proust, Caught on Film While trawling in a French film archive, a professor stumbled upon a clip from a 1904 wedding that contains the only known moving images of the great novelist. NEWYORKER.COM|由 RUBÉN GALLO 上傳
---2008.4.5 The World of Proust, as seen by Paul Nadar
See larger image Hardcover: 160 pages Publisher: The MIT Press (November 1, 2002) Language: English ISBN-10: 0262025329 ISBN-13: 978-0262025324
Nadar, Paul (1856-1939), French photographer, son of Félix Nadar, whose studio he inherited. Known for his inventive approach to photography, he became famous after collaborating with his father in interviewing the chemist Chevreul on his 100th birthday, 31 August 1886. Paul photographed Félix interviewing Chevreul, combining the photographs not only with transcriptions of the dialogue, but with a sound recording using Clément Ader's (1841-1925) phonophone. It was published in Le Journal illustré on 5 September 1886, with twelve photogravures corresponding to statements made by Chevreul.
In 1891 Nadar founded the journal Paris-Photographe, and in 1893 became the French representative of Eastman Kodak.
(click to enlarge) Marcel Proust, oil painting by Jacques-Émile Blanche; in a private collection. (credit: Permission S.P.A.D.E.M. 1971 by French Reproduction Rights, Inc.; photograph J.E. Bulloz)
(born July 10, 1871, Auteuil, near Paris, France — died Nov. 18, 1922, Paris) French novelist. Born to a wealthy family, he studied law and literature. His social connections allowed him to become an observant habitué of the most exclusive drawing rooms of the nobility, and he wrote social pieces for Parisian journals. He published essays and stories, including the story collection Pleasures and Days (1896). He had suffered from asthma since childhood, and c. 1897 he began to disengage from social life as his health declined. Half-Jewish himself, he became a major supporter of Alfred Dreyfus in the affair that made French anti-Semitism into a national issue. Deeply affected by his mother's death in 1905, he withdrew further from society. An incident of involuntary revival of childhood memory in 1909 led him to retire almost totally into an eccentric seclusion in his cork-lined bedroom to write À la recherche du temps perdu (1913 – 27; In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past). The vast seven-part novel is at once a kind of autobiography, a vast social panorama of France in the years just before and during World War I, and an immense meditation on love and jealousy and on art and its relation to reality. One of the supreme achievements in fiction of all time, it brought him worldwide fame and affected the entire climate of the 20th-century novel.
Proust, Marcel (1871-1922). Regarded as the greatest 20th-c. French novelist, Proust owes his fame to one 3, 000-page novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, which he began in his late thirties and on which he continued to work until his death.
He was born into an upper-middle-class Parisian family of strong scientific and artistic interests; these interests were to mark both the subject-matter of his writing and the metaphors through which he would convey his picture of the mind. His father was an eminent physician, conversant with French psychology of the day, and his mother—with whom he had the more intense relationship—was cultured and witty. The letters exchanged between mother and son show the ambivalent intimacy that may have set a pattern for his susceptible and often unhappy sexual relationships. These were homosexual; Proust was to be the first major European novelist to describe in detail the comic and tragic aspects of being a gay in a prejudiced society.
Proust's mother was Jewish; he and his younger brother were brought up as Catholics. He no doubt grew up with an awareness of the diversity of religious and cultural traditions; this awareness is part of what gives A la recherche du temps perdu its breadth. The adult Proust seems to have been an atheist or agnostic (albeit one with a keen sense of awe and mystery); certainly his mature work shows, in religious and other areas, a scepticism by turns quizzical or delighted or anguished. Such scepticism has been part of the French literary tradition for centuries, but Proust was to foreground it in a particularly modern mode.
He was educated at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, then studied law and philosophy; he was a voracious reader, but his scholastic career was some-what idiosyncratic, in part because of ill health (he was asthmatic from the age of 9). Of contemporary influences, he was perhaps most drawn to the philosophy of Bergson (to whom he was related by marriage). But to speak of this influence only would be to make far too narrow an assessment of a catholic taste that had absorbed not only the finest writings of 19th-c. France and England but also the classics of world literature, music, and painting. Direct references in all of Proust's writing (whether letters, articles, or fiction) show his detailed knowledge of, for example, Greek myth, medieval epic, George Eliot, Baudelaire; of plainsong and Bach; of the Italian Renaissance and Turner.
There has been a widely held picture of the young Proust as a dilettante—this in spite of a collection of short stories, ‘portraits’, and poems, brought out in his twenties (Les Plaisirs et les jours, 1896); the translation and annotation of some Ruskin in his thirties (La Bible d'Amiens, 1904; Sésame et les lys, 1906); the publication at various times of talented articles and pastiches [see Parody And Pastiche]; and, starting 30 years after his death, successive discoveries by scholars of many unpublished sketches or drafts. Of these drafts, the most sustained and ambitious is an unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil, written mainly in Proust's mid-to-late twenties (published 1952). Perhaps the most influential posthumous publication has been that of a short extract from drafts for A la recherche du temps perdu, known as Contre Sainte-Beuve and written c.1909. This extract, in the form in which it was published in 1954, is part essay, part autobiography, part fiction. In it Proust suggests that the kind of literary criticism which seeks close connections between works of art and the artist's own life is at best naïve, at worst wilfully stupid; for (he argues) there is an absolute division between the self which socializes with others and the ‘deeper’ self which creates in solitude. The same idea is present in A la recherche (embodied most notably in the figure of the great composer Vinteuil, despised by his neighbours). But Contre Sainte-Beuve puts the case more forcefully and single-mindedly, and it was only after its publication that mainstream French literary criticism slowly started to move away from the biographical approach. Contre Sainte-Beuve probably prompted, or at least reinforced, important new critical and literary trends in the second half of the 20th c. [see Criticism, 4].
Proust was, then, a more committed writer than his contemporaries and early commentators realized. Nevertheless, it is still true that, although clearly brilliant, he wrote nothing of real artistic importance until A la recherche. His previous writings show that he already had wit, all of his themes, many of his characters, and his gifts for metaphor, parody, and hyperbolic elaboration. But he was still groping towards a structure for these, and still often lacked complete stylistic control. It does seem that, round about 1908-9, he may have had a sudden inspiration comparable to that he gives to the narrator of A la recherche, even if it was only of how to use insights long held. Certainly, from about 1909-10 he devoted himself to a huge task of writing, revising, and expanding, using the ill health of these later years as a way of withdrawing from the fashionable social circles he had once courted. Surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs of A la recherche show how meticulously and purposefully he shaped and reshaped successive drafts.
The first volume (Du côté de chez Swann) was published in 1913, and although well received did not become immediately famous. World War I then interrupted publication. During these four years Proust greatly developed the rest of his novel, partly under the influence of the war itself, partly under that of his most passionate and tragic love-affair, but mainly because he constantly saw newly fertile ways of turning the 1, 500 pages he had already written into the still richer and more sophisticated 3, 000 we now have. With the publication of the second volume (A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1919), and the award of the Prix Goncourt, his fame was assured, and by the time he died he was attracting an international readership which has continued to grow.
Although A la recherche occasionally teases the reader with the idea that it might be Proust's own autobiography, it is not: there are very many differences, small and large, between the life of Proust the man and that of the narrator of A la recherche. The work is a great one because it is an intellectually challenging and aesthetically exquisite fiction.
[Alison Finch]
Bibliography Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. P. Kolb (1970- ) R. Hayman, Proust: A Biography (1990)
The World of Proust, as seen by Paul Nadar (Hardcover)
Based on unpublished as well as published Chinese and British archival materials, this book focuses on the negotiations for the implementation of the commercial provision of the Treaty of Tientsin. Topics studies in detail include the opening of the Yangtze River to trade, problems in the river trade, revisions of the river trade regulations, and the opening of the bean trade at the northern ports to British shipping. A concluding chapter places Sino-British commercial policies within the context of Britain's overall China policy and within China's overall foreign policy.
Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs (Book 50)
Hardcover: 223 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center (January 1, 1974)
Language: English
第七篇為劉子健所撰之〈中國史料編纂中之官僚分類〉(James T. C. Liu, “Some Classifications of Bureaucrats in Chinese Historiography.”)
As this article doesn't contain an abstract, the image below is necessary to enable the article to be indexed by certain search engines. The resolution of the full-text PDF is much higher than that shown here.
Obituaries James T. C. Liu (1919–1993) Andrew H. Plaksa1, Willard J. Petersona1, Hai-tao Tanga1 and Ying-shih Yua1
A study of the early versions of the classic Chinese novel known to readers in English as Monkey. Dr Dudbridge examines a long tradition of earlier versions in narrative and dramatic form through which the great episodic cycle slowly took shape. The two main fields of interest are popular culture and folklore and the development of Chinese vernacular literature. Dr Dudbridge provides a very thorough survey of present knowledge about the whole topic and discusses critically a good deal of theorising about it. This is a study for experts. It uses Chinese characters, both in text pages and in the bibliography, which is very extensive. The plates reproduce paintings, carvings and sections of text relevant to the tradition.
Contents
List of illustrations; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. The first reflections of a popular cycle; 3. A Hsi-yu chi fragment in the Yung-lo ta-tien; 4. Fragments of Hsi-yu chi stories in Pak t'ongsa onhae; 5. Early dramatic versions of the story; 6. Reflections in the Hsias-shih Chen-k'ung pao-chuan; 7. Putting the sources to use; 8. The white ape; 9. Monkey's in tsa-chu litertaure; 10. Wu-chih-ch'i; 11. Further theories.
Tagore has been called one of the outstanding thinkers of the 20th century and the greatest poet India has ever produced. In Our Time looks at the polymath, progressive, painter, play writer, novelist, short story writer, composer of many songs and friend of Gandhi.
Great writers often shape our impressions of a place. Steinbeck and Dust Bowl Oklahoma, for instance. Sometimes a writer might even define a place, as Hemingway did for 1920s Paris. Rarely, though, does a writer create a place. Yet that is what the Indian poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore did with a town called Shantiniketan, or “Abode of Peace.” Without Tagore’s tireless efforts, the place, home to a renowned experimental school, would not exist.
Tagore produced many of his famous poems at the school, which has always been known for its arts program.
For Indians, a trip to Shantiniketan, a three-hour train ride from Kolkata, is a cultural pilgrimage. It was for me, too, when I visited last July, in the height of the monsoon season. I had long been a Tagore fan, but this was also an opportunity to explore a side of India I had overlooked: its small towns. It was in places like Shantiniketan, with a population of some 10,000, that Tagore — along with his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi — believed India’s greatness could be found.
As I boarded the train at Kolkata’s riotous Howrah Station, there was no mistaking my destination, nor its famous resident. At the front of the antiquated car hung two photos of an elderly Tagore. With his long beard, dark eyes and black robe, the poet and polymath, who died in 1941, looked like a benevolent, aloof sage, an Indian Albus Dumbledore. At the rear of the car were two of his paintings, one a self-portrait, the other a veiled woman. Darkness infused them, as it does much of Tagore’s artwork, unlike his poems, which are filled with rapturous descriptions of nature. As the train ambled through the countryside, Tagore’s words echoed in my head. “Give us back that forest, take this city away,” he pleaded in one poem.
The son of a Brahmin landlord, Tagore was born in Calcutta, as Kolkata was called back then, in 1861. He began writing poetry at age 8. In 1913, he became the first non-Westerner to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The committee cited a collection of spiritual poems called “Gitanjali,” or song offerings. The verses soar. “The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end,” reads one.
Tagore became an instant international celebrity, discussed in the salons of London and New York. Today, Tagore is not read much in the West, but in India, and particularly in West Bengal, his home state, he remains as popular — and revered — as ever. For Bengalis, Tagore is Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Andy Warhol and Steven Sondheim — with a dash of Martin Luther King Jr. — rolled into one. Poet, artist, novelist, composer, essayist, educator, Tagore was India’s Renaissance man. He was also a humanist, driven by a desire to change the world, which is what he intended to do in Shantiniketan. Upset with what he saw as an India that mooched off other cultures — “the eternal ragpickers of other people’s dustbins,” he said — he imagined a school modeled after the ancient Indian tapovans, or forest colonies, where young men meditated and engaged in other spiritual practices. His school would eschew rote learning and foster “an atmosphere of living aspiration.”
Equipped with this vision — and unhappy with Calcutta’s transformation from a place where “the days went by in leisurely fashion,” to the churning, chaotic city that it is today — Tagore decamped in 1901 to a barren plain about 100 miles north of Calcutta. Tagore’s father owned land there, and on one visit experienced a moment of unexpected bliss. He built a hut to mark the spot, but other than that and a few trees, the young Tagore found only “a vast open country.”
Undaunted, he opened his school later that year, readily admitting that it was “the product of daring inexperience.” There was a small library, lush gardens and a marble-floored prayer hall. It began as a primary school; only a few students attended at first, and one of those was his son. Living conditions were spartan. Students went barefoot and meals, which consisted of dal (lentils) and rice, were “comparable to jail diet,” recalled Tagore, who believed that luxuries interfered with learning. “Those who own much have much to fear,” he would say.
Shantiniketan and its school represented an idea as much as a place: people do their best learning and thinking when they divorce themselves from the distractions of urban life and reconnect with their natural environment. That’s not easy to do in India. As my train trundled past rice fields and open space, I was inundated with offers of a shoeshine, pens, biscuits, flowers, jhalmuri (puffed rice), newspapers, musical performances and a magic show that featured the transformation of a Pepsi bottle into a bouquet of flowers.
Before I knew it, the train pulled into a tiny station, and the touts and hawkers were replaced by a few young men meekly asking if I needed a taxi. We drove past a moving collage of small-town India: squat buildings, women in saris riding sidesaddle on motor scooters, men in rickshaws selling banners emblazoned with verses from the Great Poet, tailors working from sidewalk shops, a sign for the “Tagore Institute of Management for Excellence.” Fifteen minutes later, I entered the lush grounds of the Mitali inn — and exhaled. India often takes your breath away; rarely does it give it back.
After settling into my simple room, lined from floor to ceiling with books (including Tagore’s), I met the inn’s owner, Krishno Dey, a former United Nations official who returned to his native Bengal some years ago. Sitting in a portico with ceiling fans whirling, we dined on chom-chom, or mango pulp (it tastes better than it sounds).
“You’re not going to see much here,” Mr. Dey warned me, “because there’s really not much to see.”
Perfect, I thought. I had just spent three weeks in Kolkata, an unrelenting city of 13 million, and “not much” was precisely what I craved. India may have invented the concept of zero, but traveling in the country has more to do with infinity. A seemingly infinite number of people, vehicles, noises, odors, wonders and hassles. Not in Shantiniketan, thankfully, where there are just enough sights to justify a few days’ stay.
The perfect activity is to read Tagore, and that’s what I did on the veranda, where I stumbled across a poem called “The Gardener”: “Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”
Tagore, who lived on campus, produced much of his poetry in Shantiniketan (and nearly all of his paintings), taught a few courses and hosted a parade of visitors that included Ramsey MacDonald, a future British prime minister, and Gandhi.
Ridiculed at first, Tagore’s new school, which he called Patha Bhavan (“a place for the wayfarer”), became a college in 1921 and attracted thousands, including a young Indira Gandhi, the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen and Satyajit Ray, the Indian filmmaker.
“If Shantiniketan did nothing else,” Mr. Ray once recalled, “it induced contemplation, and a sense of wonder in the most prosaic and earthbound of minds.”
Today, more than 6,000 students attend the university, which is now known as Visva-Bharati. Despite a drop in academic standards, its art school is still considered one of the best in the world.
As the school grew, so did the town. Its streets are lined with stately sal trees (some planted by Tagore), tea stalls and tiny bookstores. The poems and paintings of Tagore are everywhere.
Bicycles, which outnumber cars, are the best transportation. One day, Mr. Dey lent me his clunky bike equipped with a single gear and a bell, which came in handy given that there seem to be no passive-aggressive drivers on Indian roads, only aggressive-aggressive ones. Riding under a blanket of monsoon clouds, I passed schoolgirls in crisp blue uniforms, two or three to a bike. My destination was Rabindra Bhavan, the small museum that celebrates Tagore’s life.
Built on his former estate, it consists of a clutch of bungalows separated by raked gravel. Inside the dimly lighted exhibition hall are a few handwritten pages from “Gitanjali,” Tagore’s most famous poem, and black-and-white photographs of Tagore — a few of him as a dashing young man, but most of an older Tagore with crinkly eyes, looking off into the distance.
There are photos of Tagore with Helen Keller, Freud and Gandhi. Notable for its absence is the Nobel Prize itself. It was stolen from the museum in 2004, a crime that remains unsolved and that is, some believe, emblematic of a deeper problem.
“Long before the prize was stolen, Tagore was stolen,” quipped Kumar Rana, an aid worker I met. Reminiscing about Shantiniketan’s “good old days” is a popular sport here. Everyone I met told me how the air was once cleaner, the streets quieter, the people gentler.
Later that afternoon, I strolled through the sprawling university campus, with its simple concrete buildings and rows of sal trees. In the art studios, students’ work was on display: intricate bas-reliefs of Hindu goddesses, a sculpture made from a bicycle rickshaw.
A group of students gestured to me from a dormitory balcony. I climbed some stairs and found them slumped about a simple room — perhaps not as austere as Tagore had in mind, but close. On the ledge of the balcony sat one of their assignments, a bust of a well-known artist, a Shantiniketan alumna, drying slowly in the humid air.
Tagore left Shantiniketan rarely, but when he fell gravely ill in 1941, he went to Calcutta for treatment. It was there, in his ancestral home, that he dictated his last poem. “Today my sack is empty. I have given completely whatever I had to give. In return if I receive anything — some love, some forgiveness — then I will take it with me when I step on the boat that crosses to the festival of the wordless end.” Nine days later, the Sage of Shantiniketan died.
Toward the end of my stay, I encountered a baul singer alongside the road, strumming an ektara, a guitarlike instrument with a single string. He waved and I steered my bike toward him.
With their unruly hair, matted beards and saffron kurtas, the singers (baul means “crazy”) are difficult to miss. Neither Hindu nor Muslim, they are said to be insane with the love of God and wander the countryside, as they have for centuries, singing enigmatic songs about the blessings of madness and the life of a seeker. Tagore adored the bauls, and even declared himself one of them.
I sat on the ground and listened to the hypnotic music. Bauls have grown popular in recent years and, inevitably, poseurs have tried to cash in. So when another traveler, a well-off Kolkatan with an expensive camera, joined us, I asked, “Do you think he is a real baul singer?”
Clearly displeased with my question, he said after a long pause, “He’s as real as you want him to be.”
Sitting on the hard Shantiniketan earth, a breeze foreshadowing the monsoon rains, I closed my eyes, listened to the music, and asked no more questions.
IF YOU GO
Getting There
Shantiniketan is reached via Kolkata. The fastest way is by train. The Shantiniketan Express runs daily and takes about two and half hours. Round-trip fare: approximately 1,560 rupees, or about $30, at 52 rupees to the dollar, on Indian Railways: indianrail.gov.in.
Where to Stay
Mitali Homestays (91-94-3307-5853, mitalishantiniketan.com; 1,560 to 4,160 rupees, about $30 to $80, a night) is a delightful B&B run by Krishno and Sonali Dey with lush gardens, an impressive library and delicious food. They will lend you a bicycle for the day, and offer suggestions about what to do.
What to See
The Rabindra Bhavan Museum features several of Rabindranath Tagore’s original manuscripts, as well as letters and photographs. Closed Wednesdays.
What to Buy
Shantiniketan is known for its leather goods, batik prints and artwork. Visit the bustling Saturday market on the outskirts of town.
Eric Weiner, author of “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine,” is working on a book about the connection between place and genius.
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Asia and the West
Never the twain
The intellectual roots of Asian anti-Westernism
Jul 28th 2012 | from the print edition
Dreaming of doing down the overlords
From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. By Pankaj Mishra. Allen Lane; 356 pages; £20. To be published in America in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $27. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk RARELY has the prestige of the West fallen lower in Asian eyes. Seemingly endless wars and the attendant abuses, financial crisis and economic malaise have made Europe and America look less like models to aspire to than dire examples to be shunned. In response, Asian elites are searching their own cultures and intellectual histories for inspiration.
In this section
As Pankaj Mishra, a prolific Indian writer, shows in this subtle, erudite and entertaining account of Asian intellectuals’ responses to the West, much the same was true over a century ago. He defines Asia broadly, as bordering with Europe at the Aegean Sea and Africa at the River Nile. A century ago, what he calls “an irreversible process of intellectual…decolonisation” was under way across this huge region. For Mr Mishra, and many Asians, the 20th century’s central events were the “intellectual and political awakening of Asia and its emergence from the ruins of both Asian and European empires”. China and India have shaken off foreign predators and become global powers. Japan has risen, fallen and risen again. It is commonplace to describe the current century as Asia’s. Mr Mishra tells the story of this resurgence through the lives of a number of pivotal figures, as they grappled with the dilemma of how to replicate the West’s power while retaining their Asian “essence”. He pays most attention to two, both little known in the West. One, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, was like most of them “neither an unthinking Westerniser, nor a devout traditionalist”. Despite his name, and despite a tomb in Kabul restored at America’s expense, al-Afghani was born in Persia in 1838. An itinerant Islamist activist, he also spent time in Egypt, India, Turkey and Russia, railing against the feebleness and injustices of Oriental despotisms and the immorality of Western imperialism, and trying to forge a Pan-Islamic movement. He had the ear of sultans and shahs. The other main character is Liang Qichao, a leading Chinese intellectual in the twilight of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, and the chaotic early years after it fell in 1911. Steeped in the old Confucian traditions and aghast at the weak new republic, he came to the conclusion that “the Chinese people must for now accept authoritarian rule; they cannot enjoy freedom”. Writing in 1903, however, he saw this as a temporary phenomenon. He would have been surprised to find China’s rulers today arguing much the same. Two other developments would also have surprised these men. The first is how disastrously some of the syntheses of West and East worked out: from Mao’s and Pol Pot’s millenarian communism, to al-Qaeda’s brand of Islamist fundamentalism and Japan’s replication of the worst traits of Western imperialism. Japan’s later aggression helps explain the other surprise: that in many ways the links between Asian thinkers look more tenuous now than they did a century ago. Then, men such as Liang, or Rabindranath Tagore (pictured) from Bengal, would travel to Tokyo. They would dream of a pan-Asian response to the West, inspired by Japan’s example. China is now the coming Asian power, but it is not an intellectual hub of pan-Asianism, either in Communist orthodoxy or in efforts to revive Confucianism. And the Islam of al-Afghani’s ideological heirs has made little headway in non-Muslim countries. There is one contemporary Asian phenomenon that, Mr Mishra notes, would seem far less surprising to the author’s subjects than to many present-day Westerners. That is the depth of anti-Western feeling. Millions, he writes, “derive profound gratification from the prospect of humiliating their former masters and overlords.” That prospect, however, masks what Mr Mishra concedes is an “immense intellectual failure”, because “no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy”. The ways of the West may not be working. Yet the alarming truth, Mr Mishra concludes, is that the East is on course to make many of the same mistakes that the West has made in its time.
When she passed by me with quick steps, the end of her skirt touched me. From the unknown island of a heart came a sudden warm breath of spring. A flutter of a flitting touch brushed me and vanished in a moment, like a torn flower petal blown in the breeze. It fell upon my heart like a sigh of her body and whisper of her heart.
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”
"Good men are unwilling to rule, either for money's sake or for honour.... So they must be forced to consent under threat of penalty.... The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. That is the fear, I believe, that makes decent people accept power." --from Plato's THE REPUBLIC
"The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are." --from THE REPUBLIC by Plato "The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention."
--from "The Republic: The Complete and Unabridged Jowett Translation" by Plato
Toward the end of theastonishing period of Athenian creativity that furnished Western civilization with the greater part of its intellectual, artistic, and political wealth, Plato wrote The Republic, his discussion of the nature and meaning of justice and of the ideal state and its ruler. All subsequent European thinking about these subjects owes its character, directly or indirectly, to this most famous (and most accessible) of the Platonic dialogues. Although he describes a society that looks to some like the ideal human community and to others like a totalitarian nightmare, in the course of his description Plato raises relevant questions about politics, art, education, and the general conduct of life. The translation is by A. D. Lindsay.
Note this is also translated as "our need will be the real creator."
2017.8.23 孫教授等貼出懷念同事：Kang-i Sun Chang 和 Ayling Wang。 2016年8月23日 · Remembering my dear colleague Marston Anderson who had left us 24 years ago today(i.e. August 23, 1992). 讀：Portraits: Marston Anderson (essay) By Emanuel Pastreich 待讀：The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period
Some Like It Hot is a 1959 American romantic comedy film set in 1929, directed and produced by Billy Wilder, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack ...
"It was just absolute heaven..." Jack Lemmon shares his memories of making of Some Like it Hot (recently picked as the funniest film of all time in a BBC Culture poll) in 1972.
"Disclaimer: I do not own anything in this video. No copyright infringement intended. Everything belongs to ...
YouTube 有11小段 clips
1. Some Like It Hot
The last line is what everyone remembers first: “Well, nobody's perfect.” A kicker somehow delivered with both deadpan insouciance and saucy irony, aligning the most sweetly playful and most recklessly subversive instincts of Billy Wilder's matchless 1959 cross-dressing comedy. While its leading men totter awkwardly in feminine drag, the film surrounding them navigates a high tightrope in stiletto heels. As it skips from scuzzy underworld B-movie to riotous mistaken-identity farce to sweet hard-luck romance to dedicated buddy movie, Some Like It Hot passes any number of risky pitfalls where its joyous cheek could turn to sexist smut. That it avoids them all comes down to the stars' unflagging zest and the quicksilver cleverness of Wilder and IAL Diamond's writing, yes, but also to the unexpected tenderness with which the director treats his characters even at their most absurd. Witness the hilarious delusion of Jack Lemmon's maracas-shaking love hangover, revealing the heart of both a born conman and a queerly befuddled romantic. Nobody's perfect, but that's not to say a movie can't be. – Guy Lodge, Variety, UK (Credit: United Artists)
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the second novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, published in 2017, twenty years after her debut, The God of Small Things.
Murderous and self-sanctifying, radical Islam has become a global attractor for psychopaths. It has never been embarrassed to proclaim its list of hatreds: education, tolerance, plurality, pleasure and, above all, freedom of expression – the freedom that underpins all others. Even more important than the abstractions are the people that jihadists hate and have killed: children, schoolgirls, gays, women, atheists, non-Muslims, and many, many Muslims. To that list we must now add the brave and lively staff of Charlie Hebdo, who hoped to face down hatred with laughter. The slaughter in Paris is a tragedy for the open society. On a dark night for mental freedom, a few fragile points of light: the calm, determined crowds gathered in cities across France; the hope that the general revulsion at these murders might have a unifying effect; the fact that a cult rooted in hate is a frail thing and cannot last; the fact that the psychopaths are vastly outnumbered.
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