Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn't have the cast-iron grid of a priori... coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hermeneutic, protactic, proairetic, aphanisis: the structuralists are obliged by their scientific consciences to use what they reg...ard as a technical language... but they all hanker after the lost paradise of "ordinary language."...But it doesn't occur to them that "ordinary language" is another way of saying "literature"Mi.e., language that can never be translated into a technical language, theirs or anybody else's. Literature exchanges confidences with literature only, and scientific criticism is for the birds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a great ...writer, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All right, so there he is, our representative to the world, Mr. Western Civilization, in codpiece and pantyhose up there on the bo...ards, firing away at the rapt groundlings with his blank verses, not less of a word-slinger and spellbinder than the Bard himself and therefore not to be considered too curiously on such matters as relevance, coherence, consistency, propriety, sanity, common decency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boswell's Johnson is the word made flesh... an extemporaneous man talking himself into the thick of every occasion (in a world of ...occasions if nothing else) and therefore no monument at all but all that can be saved of a man alive in the pages of a book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Either over neither, both over either/or, live-and-let-live over stand-or die, high spirits over low, energy over apathy, wit over... dullness, jokes over homilies, good humor over jokes, good nature over bad, feeling over sentiment, truth over poetry, consciousness over explanations, tragedy over pathos, comedy over tragedy, entertainment over art, private over public, generosity over meanness, charity over murder, love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life direct...is what Flaubert and Joyce have convinced themselves the man may never get quite clear of but the artist has nothing... to do with. What they can't admit is that t is overrated: which artists, faking and fumbling it together out of spit and toothpicks, should know best of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »