Sunday, September 14, 2003

Marriage is like fine wine...let it mature
Cleaning up notes from the backs of envelopes, matchbooks, and assorted notebooks.


I am a fairly educated person, but not a scholar, and as an educated layman I do quite a lot of reading. But when reading certain authors I run into a macaronic tendency to drag in untranslated quotations. This is an annoying carryover from the days when educated people were expected to know Latin, Greek and a few modern languages like French and German.

Aside from a smattering of Spanish I have none of these languages, and I daresay that few of my contemporaries do either. Its time to start translating quotations, if only in footnotes. Leaving them untranslated has become de trop.

***

In Paris, when the War was over, Albert Camus, having seen both Nazis and Communists close up, defied democracy as that regime created and sustained by those who know that they do not know everything.



James Russell Lowell

Democracy has the unpleasant "habit of making itself generally disagreeable by asking the Powers That Be at the most inconvenient moment whether they are the Powers that Ought to Be. "

***

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is better looking than he had imagined.
/
People who give advice should be prepared to give some help.

***

It was in the old days--we tried to be mad in a sane world.
Now, how hard it is to be sane in a mad world.
/ from a note made to myself this summer in NYC:

Two very well appointed black women on the Madison Avenue bus. In the course of enthusiastic office gossip one remarks to the other: "He must respect me--I'm no house nigger."

Still, after so many years Blacks cannot escape the chains of blackness in America. (Or are they only perceived chains?) I wonder to myself why have the links have held, why have they not rusted away?

>

light and darkness
good and evil
matter and God
truth and falsehood


>
Iris Murdoch ----from The Jackson Dilemma

...An awareness of the tragedy of human life, good and evil, crime and punishment--remorse.

Surveying myself in the mirror, there was little light, the mirror old, I always wondered what I looked like. --This connects with who am I, what I am...I wonder why everyone does not feel like this, or is it a gift, free from my gods, an understanding of the only reality which is in truth that we are nothing. The mirror now shows me mostly my father, my brows thickening, perhaps...