Category Archives: literature

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

On how thinking and doing are different: Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something—whatever that may be—goes into action; “it” goes to the woman I don’t want to see anymore, “it” … Continue reading

Posted in history/memory, literature | Comments Off on The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

SH, the real and imagined

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Vincent Starrett (1933) This book often has a tone of loving mockery, particularly of Watson and his inexactitude with dates and, by extension, Arthur Conan Doyle’s carelessness (or laziness), that makes it a … Continue reading

Posted in history/memory, literature | Tagged | Comments Off on SH, the real and imagined

The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley (1919)

I discovered Morley after reading about his helping found the Baker Street Irregulars, and I figured any friend of SH is a literary friend of mine. This and Parnassus on Wheels are both cute stories (often called “charming,” I think … Continue reading

Posted in literature | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley (1919)

Music at Night and Other Essays by Aldous Huxley (1931)

“The Rest is Silence” From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death—all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly … Continue reading

Posted in literature, music | Comments Off on Music at Night and Other Essays by Aldous Huxley (1931)

sisyphean

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” Guildenstern in Rosencrantz … Continue reading

Posted in history/memory, literature | Comments Off on sisyphean