5 August (1928): Cesare Pavese to Carlo Pinelli
Life being as it is now, a man can no more write in rhyme than he can go about wearing a wig and carrying a sword or even a dagger.
Staff Picks: Max Fish, "After the Beginning"
One fine morning, I awoke to discover that, during the night, I had learned to understand the language of birds. I have listened to them ever since. They say: ‘Look at me!’ or: ‘Get out of here!’ or: ‘Let’s Fuck!’ or: ‘Help!’ or: ‘Hurrah!’ or: ‘I found a worm!’ and that’s all they say…
Anna Craycroft: A Weekly Correspondence (8/5/13)
The primary word is not a straightforward symbol for a concept but rather an image, a picture, a mental sketch of a concept, a short tale about it—indeed, a small work of art…
2 August (1947): Jane Bowles to Paul Bowles
I think there is no point in using the word talent any longer. Certainly Carson McCullers is as talented as Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir but she is not really a serious writer. I am serious but I am isolated and my experience is probably of no interest at this point to anyone.
1 August (1871): George Sand to Gustave Flaubert
I awaken from a dream to find a generation divided between idiocy and delirium tremens! Everything is possible at present.
The Language of Displacement
Rick’s sadness belongs to Hollywood, where war is an occasion for great love and the heroism of self-sacrifice. The narrator of Seghers’ novel, by contrast, is overcome with a kind of misery that the French call a ‘cafard,’ a Godless emptiness…
31 July (1953): Malcolm Lowry to Albert Erskine
Such a return trip through the forest to out house is physically impossible but it being equally impossible to explain to anyone how we lived we had to make it anyhow. I would still be making it but for Margie herself of course & a shining Christian deed rare in my experience which etemphasises how all ex-Consuls in the Lowry psyche should behave in future toward their fellow man & I hope will.
30 July (1962): Evelyn Waugh to Daphne Fielding
It has always seemed to me as unnatural for two people to write a book together as for three people to have a baby.
29 July (1952): Randall Jarrell to Mary Von Schrader
I think you and I had better burn our letters some Midsummer’s Eve when we’re about 102 and think we might die. People will be able to see the flames for miles.
Anna Craycroft: A Weekly Correspondence (7/29/2013)
In accordance with a simple, necessary, and self-conditioned law of life, the development of the child proceeds from a definite, invisible, unchangeable, implicit unity, which is in harmony with a corresponding unity in the cosmos…