Though my friendship be good for nothing else, it may give you the profit of a temptation or of an affliction. It may exercise your patience, and thought it cannot allure, it shall importune you. Though I knew you have many worthy friends of all ranks, yet I add something, since I, which am of none, would fain to be your friend too. There is some of the honor and some of the degrees of a creation to make a friendship of nothing.
A: What if I believe in this, just because it is beautiful?
B: One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow.
I’ve just been to Tenebrae at the Cathedral—a choir of Franciscans in their order’s brown, starched white ropes looped downwards, awkward gangling young men, looking like minor employees at the Library. And the psalms and lamentations were good, and I thought: “Why should anyone, who wants to believe, have much trouble?”
If we were a sober, New England, around-the-lamp, co-praying family I insist, we should be less. Amos would be more docile; I less modern, Charlotte less promising, Isabel less vivid, Janet more sophisticated, Mother less concentrated…
I don’t think Random House can fail to see what an extraordinarily beautiful thing this book can be…Maybe it seems strange that anyone should put such stress on the “physical” appearance of a book—but there you are, I can’t help it.
In recent days every passing hour carried you farther away to the city and, across the distance, brought what is most yours still closer. For you will not avert your gaze; you will awaken intimacy from afar.
Franz Kafka and Max Brod met at Prague’s Charles University in 1902, where they were both students of the law. When Kafka shared his first short story with his classmate, Brod proclaimed his life’s mission to be the sharing of … Continued
A: Didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate.
B: People didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate? Well, they need some basic plumbing lessons. And they have clearly lost all human morality. They’re setting fire to the future… There is no greater freedom than the right to survive.
A: Listen, I hear you: Muenster is Muenster, no matter how you slice it.
“Post-Christian man” is not the same as “pre-Christian man”. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse lost.
My imagination, virile as it is, having never been prostituted or jaded, is an enemy for me; it is always in keeping with a young and pure heart, violent with repressed desires, so that the slightest sentiment cast into my solitude makes ravages.
