Gabriel Josipovici arrived in Oxford to be interviewed for a place to study English – the most un-English of students, Jewish, twice-displaced, already passionate about the great European writers: “They kept asking me what English novelist I most admired and I kept saying ‘Dostoevsky’, and they kept saying, ‘English novelist, Mr Josipovici’, and I kept saying ‘Dostoevsky’, vaguely aware that something was profoundly wrong but unable, in the heat of the moment, to put my finger on it.”
– Gabriel Josipovici, (via here)
Kafka spent eight months in Zürau, in the Bohemian countryside […] The tuberculosis had declared itself a month before, when he coughed up blood in the night. The sick man didn’t hide a certain sense of relief. Writing to Felix Weltsch, he compared himself to the ‘happy lover’ who exclaims: ‘All the previous times were but illusions, only now do I truly love’. Illness was the final lover, which allowed him to close the old accounts.
– Roberto Calasso, K. (tr. G. Brock)
You’re the one who’s kitschy, aren’t you, X tells me. You’re the one who’s out there faking it, but I’m the one who really feels it, so I’m not the kitschy one, am I? I bear the real brunt of your kitsch, don’t I?
Posted in Kitsch, Writing, X
Of all things one feels, nothing gives the impression of being at the very heart of truth so much as fits of unaccountable despair; compared to these, everything seems frivolous, debased, lacking in substance and interest.
– Cioran (via here)
This town’s out of reach, X and I agree, we more or less accepted that when we arrived. But it’s there, it’s definitely there, and we made it there, more or less, and that’s what matters, we agree. There are things to be glad about now and then, we agree, even proud of. Don’t get carried away, he tells me, it’s only a house move.
