(Mostly) Inspirational Aspirations

    

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Nice meditation on Gospel the other day:

This quotation from Isaiah comes in today’s reading, ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Its context is the personal relationship of each believer to the Lord. The Lord will sow in our hearts individually the knowledge of himself, so that each of us has a personal, secret link, to be cultivated by prayer. If we listen to the Father and learn from him, we come to Jesus, who has seen the Father.

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I also liked this concerning local artist Elijah Pierce and his work “Obey God and Live”:

Pierce often referred to “Obey God and Live", which recalled his boyhood neglect of the bible one night and how he was punished by the Almighty for his transgression. In what curator Hall calls “his most moving polemic on authority and disobedience…“

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I like the Knox version of John 6: “Nobody can come to me without being attracted towards me by the Father who sent me, so that I can raise him up on the last day.”

On the Sunday reading from Ephesians he has it: “…your business is to give thanks to God.”

Also love the Brazos commentary on the first reading from Deuteronomy:

Can love be commanded? Modern emotivism treats moral authenticity as outward expression of independent inner consciousness. Commanded love seems to violate the “inside out” direction of true love. But in fact love is fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22; →30:6–10). It is brought into the human heart. The commandment to love is then a promise to receive in faith, and with it our full identity as moral agents in God’s image. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts..“.

And elsewhere a catch-22:

    'If Israel fails to keep the Torah it will lose its capacity to love, identify with, and obey the Torah. “

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Oh my but the world and it's people are stranger than I know. I came across a couple books about Eric Gill on the Chesterton Society site. Who is Eric Gill? (Say like, "Who is John Galt?”).

I'd never heard of him before but could quickly see the attraction for Chestertonians: Catholic artist of the 1930s-era who warned of the excesses of technology and who saw the value of small handiwork and makers of things not mass produced. Flirted with socialism, sculpted beautiful works of art for churches and such, even created his own typeface (Perpetua).

Also created a lot of erotic art. Hmmm… very interesting. I'm always impressed by artists who can celebrate the beauty of the nude without lust. But then, er, something happened along the way to his canonization. Turns out he was a serial adulterer. And engaged in incestuous relationships with sisters and daughters. Even experimented with bestiality. Oh. my.

As a biographer put it, “There remains the mystery of how the avowed man of religion, Tertiary of the Third Order of St Dominic, habitual wearer of the girdle of chastity, could be by conventional standards so unchaste.” Uh, ya think? I guess the noble desire to embrace the body as not shameful but “very dear” and “redeemed by Christ” as Gill put it, ran into a snag somewhere along the way to redemption. No matter how much we might imagine Original Sin has been cured, it still exists and it trips us.

But in his autobiography he writes truly:

It is thus: we human beings are all in the same difficulty. We are all torn asunder, all of us, by this disintegration of our flesh and spirit. And so if in this book I am appearing more spiritual than credible to some of those I have loved, let them examine their own consciences. I think they will discover, as I have done, that they also are torn asunder and that they also have desired to be made whole.

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Electric to read the following gospel yesterday after reading how Jesus died in order to marry us (in Brad Pitre's book):

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ”

Emphasis mine….Which Jesus proved in his own death, after which he was no longer alone but was furnished a bride by God from his pierced side, the Church, via the sacrament of his blood and water.

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Oh how much fun to read a lyrical book set right where I'm sitting, specifically Pat Conroy's book on a “South Carolina sea island” ("The Prince of Tides"):

“…Have them open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, “There. That taste. That’s the taste of my childhood.” I would say, “Breathe deeply,” and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen, and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater. My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.”

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“…their ages and size and beauty always startled me; I could measure my own diminishment with their sunny ripening. You could believe in the birth of goddesses by watching the wind catch their hair and their small brown hands make sweet simultaneous gestures to brush the hair out of their eyes…”

Unfortunately that kind of Conroy-writing tails off into crap dialogue, characters verbally sniping at each other. It's like two different books.

Fed by Feedly

I don't go to the attractive Feedly app/website to read blogs too often despite the fact that I find the treasures contained therein more energizing and enlightening than, say, Facebook. But oh what a thick symphony of inspirations and intrigue it contains! Art appreciation. Music appreciation. The fascinating Fulton Sheen controversy. The words of classic scholars from long ago. The words of monks and near-monks (Heather King).

Before dipping my toe in Feedly I listened to a couple Metropolitan Museum of Art talks, and then heard the complete Mahler 1st symphony for free via the Berlin Philharmonic offering. The wonders of the 'net don't quit.

On Fulton Sheen, my half-baked, could-be-completely-wrong impression is that Cardinal Egan didn't care about losing Sheen's body or cause to Illinois, but then Cardinal Dolan came in and he likes having Sheen's body in the cathedral and doesn't want to give that up. There also could be some feeling that Sheen belongs in Manhattan after getting shuttled out to the boondocks in his later years. From my perspective, the highlight of St. Patrick's is that Sheen is buried there and I can't be alone.

Anyway, the whole thing surprises me if only because public dirty laundry between prelates is rarely aired. And it certainly doesn't make Dolan look good given the agreement made by Egan and the Peoria bishop in good faith. I feel sorry for the people who donated money to the cause now if the cause is indefinitely suspended.

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From yesterday's first reading it's sort of ironic, perhaps, is how Paul says basically, “this is not written in Scripture but I feel that it is best…”. But what he's saying became Scripture!:

In regard to virgins I have no commandment from the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife.

And indeed a Catholic commentary notes the tension:

Paul had not heard of any pronouncement of Christ on this subject. It does not mean that the rule which follows is only a private opinion of Paul’s. He speaks as an apostle, authorized to decide in Christ’s name.

I suppose that means that Paul's letter is binding only specifically to the audience immediately intended.

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Much enjoyed Lino Rulli interview, of all people, the infamous Toronto mayor Rob Ford. I keep thinking Ford reminded me of John Candy, but it seems like Google tells me more people think of him as Chris Farley. Candy and Farley's comedic personas aren't too distinct, I suppose, and I think Ford does look more like Farley.

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More web collations:

André Gide, Journals (January 5, 1922; tr. Justin O'Brien):

"My good days of work are those I begin by reading an ancient author, one of those that are called “classics.” A page is enough; a half-page, if only I read it in the proper state of mind…"

Cf. Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Notas, 210 (tr. Michael Hendry):

"The reading of Homer every morning, with the serenity, the tranquillity, the deep sensation of moral and physical well-being which it instills in us, is the best provision to endure the vulgarities of the day."

Via Heather King:

You want to know why the innocent have to suffer, why the poor have to suffer, why the Just Man had to die.

I used not to know the reason for these things.

When I discovered the reason it was Christ Himself who told me.

You ask Him this evening; He will tell you

And perhaps He will add the phrase which meant so much to me when He was explaining that universal salvation depends on the vocation of some to pay for all.

'You shall not escape from love.'

If in the Kingdom we ask the innocent who suffered for sinners, the poor who paid for the rich, the tortured who shed blood for the powerful, whether it is just or mistaken to pay so dear, we shall hear them tell us:

'It was necessary so that no-one might escape from Love.' “
–Carlo Carretto, The Desert in the City

George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984), Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal (1934; rpt. New York: Time Incorporated, 1965), p. 260 (brackets in original):

Our first stop was at the Tetas de Pinedo. [Preparing a lecture once in Buenos Aires a refined friend urged me to call them the "Mamelones," that being a more elegant word, but tetas they are to the local people, tetas they are on the official maps, and so tetas they shall be in my work.] These are two large rounded hills, standing near each other and rising above the coastal plain with an appearance, as the name implies, extraordinarily like two gargantuan breasts.

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From here:

I turned on the radio the other day while driving through my ramshackle post-industrial town, and I heard the adagio movement of a piece I know well, Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 in B-flat Major. I know it well because, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother had an LP of it that I would play over and over again. We had bought it while out grocery shopping; I had seen a display near the exit of LPs on sale for something like forty-nine cents, and this one had an image on the cover of one of Marc Chagall's designs for The Magic Flute -- Papageno, the birdcatcher -- though I didn't know this at the time. I begged my mother to get it. While driving the other day, I found that, though I hadn't heard the piece for years, I could sing every note of the piano solo and the melodic orchestral line. I noticed that the performance on the radio was actually played on the fortepiano, a forerunner of the modern piano, and that, delightfully, the soloist interpolated a fragment of Mozart's song "Komm, lieber Mai" into the cadenza in the coda of the last movement.

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From St. Joseph's Abbey:

Jesus is real flesh and blood, resurrected and still here with us; and his place is always with the downtrodden and needy, for he is small like them. And this morning once again he pronounces God’s blessing on human poverty, a promise of blessing for all who are oppressed.

Commentators remind us that the Greek word for “poor” in the Beatitudes means literally “beggar” not just a poor person with a few possessions, but a beggar.* The truly poor are those who have nothing at all; the poor are those who have no choice. As monks we want to take our place with them.

In some way our poverty is all we have to offer the Lord. There is too much- so many things exteriorly, more so interiorly; and we may feel like we are stuck with it all. In the monastery we become more and more keenly aware of the reality of our very real inner woundedness and poverty and our desperate need for Christ, a need, a longing to be mercied continually. It’s just the same old story.

But this poverty is everything to us; it is all we have to offer Christ, offer the Church - the reality of total dependence on the mercy of God from moment to moment.  Ours is certainly not the crushing poverty of the economically poor and destitute; we dare not compare it. Still it’s all we’ve got- all the stuff we’ve got no choice about. And we believe it’s the very place where blessing and mercy can intrude and take root- poverty as blest by God’s loving regard. We are truly blessed, when our poverty is blest as an emptiness to be filled to overflowing with Christ’s peace and most affectionate compassion. This is everything for us as monks. And what is more, we believe that our true blessedness depends upon our willingness to become ourselves mercy-doers, mercy-makers for all who are poor.

And so we hope, and each morning we go to the altar of God, the God in Christ who alone gives us joy and freedom and peace- his very self as food. So much needs yet to be accomplished and prayed through. Our lives lived together in this monastery help to notice and watch and pray.

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From "Everything That Rises" blog:

Our society’s model for the museum visit is All You Can Eat: you pay some portion of the exorbitant suggestion admission fee – now $25 at the Metropolitan Museum, I think – and then blast through the rooms, gorging on masterpieces, and wind up in the gift shop feeling stuffed, even sick.

It doesn’t have to happen that way.  With a free hour in Washington the other day, I popped into the Phillips Collection, near Dupont Circle, where admission to the current exhibit is $5 with a university ID and the permanent collection is pay-what-you-wish.

The current exhibit was of American work from the collection.  In an hour, I saw everything – well, everything except the Rothkos, which are hung (displayed is the wrong word, and so is exhibited) in a room where only three people are allowed at one time.  I saw everything – but I looked, really looked, at something like a dozen paintings, and no more. That way, I could hope to see them, really see them.

And I gave full attention to just one painting: Ben Shahn’s Still Music, from 1948.  There’s so much to see in it: the counterpoint between the soft washes of color and the firm line of the drawing; the several lines of horizontal movement (stand shelves, chair seats, chair hinges, stand bases) running over and along the intermittent vertical lines of the stands, like notation running across the bar lines of a piece of music; the tremendous energy of the painting working against the plain truth that the chairs and stands are empty. Here the music, made in this place for a certain passage of time, has gone wherever it is that live music goes.

The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim liked to spend an entire day at the National Gallery in London considering a single painting.  I could have spent a full day with Still Music.
Failing that, I now come up from the Metro at Dupont Circle relishing the knowledge that although the exhibit is over, the Shahn painting is part of the permanent collection — so is still in permanent residence nearby.   

MJ of Logos Forum Fame

Occasionally I'll wander to the Logos Bible Forum and look for posts by the inimitable MJ Smith, she who stands amid the forum contents like a colossus of catholic civility. 

Here are a few of her recent thoughts/replies:

I have a basic preference for believing we constantly overestimate the quality of our [biblical] scholarship just as our predecessors did. Of course, my measure of language competency is that you don't know a language until it becomes bathroom reading. More seriously, as long as we use dual language dictionaries, I am uncomfortable saying we know a language. And, to the best of my knowledge, Logos is short of completely Hebrew (or Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Latin, Ugaritic, Coptic ...) dictionaries. There is a big difference between reading a foreign language to translate it into your native tongue and reading a foreign language and understanding it in that language ... what we nicknamed the dream test.

I don't disagree that multiple translations serve as pointers towards the original language meaning as each translation gives us additional clues of the constraints on the original text. Another thread offered a link to a journal article that I find apropos - BaxterBiblicalWords.pdf

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My translation pet peeve is people having a pet peeve rather than recognizing translators have to make compromises in order to best meet the need of their ideal intended audience which I not me. I much prefer to have my pet translations such as Psalm 4 in the Jerusalem Bible ... I measure all other translations against it even though i know the grammatical argument against the translation.

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David A: Textual Criticism ASSUMES that all versions have the same chances of being found.

MJ Smith: Really? That is odd because it is so unlikely to be true. It could only be a simplifying assumption to make the data manageable. How many ancient manuscripts do we have from the Mar Thoma church in India? [Trick question - use of banana leaves as a writing surface has seriously limited the number of old manuscripts in a bug infested environment.]

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Dean053: ...with the moral brigade always trying to shut down legitimate questions or concerns about the product.
MJ Smith: While I have seen this accusation made frequently, I have seen the shutting down of legitimate questions only occasionally. As in a face-to-face community, there are particular people who by reasons of upbringing, culture, age or mental health need to be given a broader leeway than others.


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There are also many excellent graphics for the liturgical year. My (very simple) favorite also captures the sense of a spiral i.e. movement towards the end of time:

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I'd set two rules for myself when I offered to create the [following] list - non-Catholic Logos resources. As you can see, I ignored the Logos part when I tried to tailor the list to what L.S. seemed to need - enjoyable, non-confrontational reading that raises the important issues. Getting people to ask the question is more important than giving an answer to a question not asked.

• Prayer by Richard Foster - a good introduction to liturgical prayer
• Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster - a good introduction to spiritual disciplines
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - a good introduction to logic and what words mean
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - a study in social ethics
• The Way of the Pilgrim by Olga Savin and Father Thomas Hopko - a study in Christian growth
• The Psalms through Three Thousand Years by William Holliday - use of psalms in worship, Jewish and Christian
• To Pray As A Jew: A Guide To The Prayer Book by Hayim H. Donin - liturgy as way of life
• Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture and Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan- church history made enjoyable
• Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality by Alan W. Jones - not really introductory but presents a very catholic spirituality in a contemporary way

and cheating to add one Catholic convert book:

• The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth by Scott Hahn to explore the heavenly liturgy as described in Revelation

On Reading Multiple Books at a Time

Delightful excerpts from Joe Qeenan on his book habits:

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library,” wrote Samuel Johnson; “for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.”

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Somewhere along the line, I got into the habit of reading several books simultaneously. “Several” soon became “many,” and “many” soon became “too many.” A few of my female friends read one or two books at a time; my closest male friends insist that they are always reading at least one, though I believe this figure may embody the triumph of hope over truth. In my adult life I cannot remember a single time when I was reading fewer than fifteen books, though at certain points this figure has spiraled far higher.

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My reading habits are unusual, perhaps counterproductive. Sometimes I think that I am reluctant to finish books because I want to let the joy of reading them go on and on forever. Other times I believe that I get a particular kind of thrill out of starting books that I do not get from finishing them. Another possibility is that, at any given moment, I am distracted from the subject I am reading about—the life and times of Mata Hari—by a far more pressing concern—the neutral-zone trap employed with such great success by the New Jersey Devils. Friends say that I suffer from a short attention span, an inability to stay focused, but I think exactly the opposite is true. If anything, I have too long an attention span, one that allows me to read dozens of books simultaneously without losing interest in any of them. Moreover, I have an excellent memory that permits me to suspend reading, pick up a book six months later, and not miss a beat.

Most books written by journalists open with two reasonably good chapters, followed by loads of padding, then regather a bit of momentum for the big roundup. This is because editors encourage writers to front-load the merchandise, jamming the best material into the first two chapters, the only ones that will ever get read.

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Well, I do get back to them later. I started Lord Jim in high school and finished it when I was fifty-two. Better late than never. No matter how good the book I am currently reading—be it The Aeneid, War and Peace, or The Red and the Black—I am always ready to drop everything and crack open a forty-year-old book about the 1954 Viet Cong triumph at Dien Bien Phu.

When I look at that stack and try to imagine the order in which I might read them, I always arrive at the same conclusion: Middlemarch is the last book I will ever finish. I’m not going down without a fight. I have started it six times; I am now 312 pages into it; but it is much like the mandolin or snooker or tantric sex: something I would dearly love to master without ever believing for one second that I would actually enjoy the experience...

Middlemarch is one of those books that I long ago enshrined at the very top of my desert-island reading list, that compendium of elusive, difficult, fundamentally unreadable books I have always wanted to finish or at least start, if I only had the time to do so. But I know that if I were shipwrecked and somehow managed to stay afloat by clutching the splintered, though jagged, remnants of the mainmast and started paddling through shark-infested waters toward a distant shore and then, just as I was dragging my battered, bruised, waterlogged body out of the surf, spotted a pile of desert-island reading books that included Mrs. Dalloway, Finnegans Wake, and Middlemarch, I’d turn around, plunge right back into the surf, and start paddling toward another island.

I used to think that I kept stopping and starting books because I could never find the right one. Untrue. Virtually all the books I start are the right one. It’s the fact that all these books are so good that makes me stop reading them, as I am in no hurry to finish; the bad ones I could whip through in a few hours.

On Freedom

Collected in the RSS feed, almost back-to-back: Link here:

Cicero, De Officiis 1.20.69-70 (tr. Walter Miller):

But there have been many and still are many who, while pursuing that calm of soul of which I speak, have withdrawn from civic duty and taken refuge in retirement. Among such have been found the most famous and by far the foremost philosophers and certain other earnest, thoughtful men who could not endure the conduct of either the people or their leaders; some of them, too, lived in the country and found their pleasure in the management of their private estates. Such men have had the same aims as kings—to suffer no want, to be subject to no authority, to enjoy their liberty, that is, in its essence, to live just as they please.

Link here:

One morning, I got a letter from my wonderful aunt, a secular humanist who runs a nonprofit and dedicates her entire life to helping women leave situations of slavery. While I love and admire and appreciate her dearly, it is worth noting that she is in no way what I would consider a practicing Christian.

Her letter began: "My dear, I woke up this morning and felt I should write to you about freedom. It is an issue I have thought about for many long years. And what I have realized is this: My freedom ends where another's begins..."

Why's My Bookbag (or e-reader equivalent) so Heavy?

From the novel Middlesex:

Most were last remodeled in the seventies and have the colors of suburban kitchens from my childhood: avocado, cinnamon, sunflower yellow.
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Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
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Zizmo harbored vaguely yogic beliefs about the mental benefits of semen retention, and so was disposed to wait until his wife’s vitality returned.
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In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. “It’s like the paintings in the museum,” she said. “Just an excuse to show people with no clothes.”

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The Church and New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet by Brandon Vogt

If God is construed as one being among many, then his causal efficacy competes with ours. In regard to Scripture, this means that the Bible is his book, not ours. But the Catholic sense, of course, is that the Bible is, as Vatican II puts it in Dei Verbum (n. 13), “the words of God, expressed in human language. “ 28 Given God’s unique metaphysical makeup, it is altogether possible to speak of a divine authorship that does not compete with or preclude real human authorship. But to admit human authorship means to admit cultural conditioning, historical context, the particularity of literary genre, authorial intention, etc. In a word, it is to admit the need for interpretation.
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A difficulty I face again and again is that apparently an entire generation has been raised with very little feel for literature or poetry, for the manner in which literary texts mean. There is a marked tendency among my interlocutors to see truth as identical to fact or journalistic reportage. When I observe that certain biblical texts are metaphorical, poetic, or symbolic in nature, I am invariably accused of “cherry-picking, “ conveniently isolating those parts of the Bible that tell what “really happened” from those that don’t. I counter that nonliteral texts such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Eliot’s The Wasteland, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Melville’s Moby Dick are bearers of profound truth indeed, though they convey their truth in a distinctively nonscientific or nonhistorical way.
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A passage from the Book of Revelation is particularly illuminating here. John the visionary is within the heavenly temple, and he spies a scroll sealed with seven seals and representing the whole of Scripture or even the whole of history. He weeps because no one comes forward to unseal the text. Finally, the announcement is made that the Lion of Judah, who has triumphed, can perform the task. Then John sees, not a lion or a Davidic warrior, but rather a Lamb that seemed to have been slain (Revelation 5:1-7). The point is clear: the nonviolent and forgiving Christ, slain on the cross and risen from the dead, is the hermeneutical key to the entire Bible and to the whole of the human story. When Christians survey the Bible, therefore, they do so through the interpretive lens of Jesus the Lamb. Thus, any reading of Scripture running counter to that fundamental Logos ought to be regarded as an illegitimate interpretation. The God disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth simply cannot be coherently understood as a bloodthirsty advocate of blitzkrieg, arbitrary killing, and genocide.
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since the Bible is “the words of God, expressed in human language, “ we might be sensitive to the progressive nature of biblical revelation, a theme suggested by Irenaeus in the second century. God is slowly, gradually educating the human race in his ways, and this means that he adapts himself to varying and evolving human modes of understanding. We cannot, therefore, simply isolate one passage, one moment in the Bible and say, without further explanation, this is the final revelation of God.
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Dr. Peter Kreeft was asked what he thought was the biggest obstacle facing orthodox Christianity today, he replied simply: “Our own sins…. Only saints can save the world. And only our own sins can stop us from being saints. “35 We shape society, and the amount of God’s love we allow into our heart shapes us.

Interesting Quotes from Somerset Maugham...

Found in his memoir The Summing Up:

The humorist has a quick eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint...You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.

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Selfishness and kindliness, idealism and sensuality, vanity, shyness, disinterestedness, courage, laziness, nervousness, obstinacy, and diffidence, they can all exist in a single person and form a plausible harmony. It has taken a long time to persuade readers of the truth of this...It is evidently less trouble to make up one's mind about a man one way or the other and dismiss suspense with the phrase, he's one of the best or he's a dirty dog.

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I lived at this time in a group of young men who had by nature gifts that seemed to me much superior to mine. They could write and draw and compose with a facility that aroused my envy...I know now that all they had was the natural creativity of youth. To write prose and verse...is instinctive with a great many young persons. It is a form of play, due merely to the exuberance of their years, and is no more significant than a child's building of a castle on the sands...Youth is the inspiration. One of the tragedies of the arts is the spectacle of the vast number of persons who have been misled by this passing fertility to devote their lives to the effort of creation. Their invention deserts them as they grow older, and they are faced with the long years before them in which, unfitted by now for a more humdrum calling, they harass their wearied brain to beat out material it is incapable of giving them.

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The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness...There is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed a thousand fields. The True, the Good and the Beautiful are not the perquisites of those who have been to expensive schools.

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To me reading is a rest as to other people conversation or a game of cards. It is more than that; it is a necessity, and if I am deprived of it for a little while I find myself as irritable as the addict deprived of his drug.

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I can never forget myself. The hysteria of the world repels me and I never feel more aloof than when I am in the midst of a throng surrendered to a violent feeling of mirth or sorrow... I am incapable of complete surrender. And so, never having felt some of the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible that my work should have the intimacy, the broad human touch and the animal serenity which the greatest writers alone can give.