Thursday, December 11, 2014

Haystacks of Literature & Language

INK BOTTLE”There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence; to consider the matter from the purely utilitarian point of view, an artist might do humanity more good than any other has ever done by work so complex that only the six cleverest men in his country could understand it, provided it was powerful enough to affect them.”
~ Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity


Patrick Modiano
“Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies. Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, Like Cold River, or like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.”



Mysterious Author Reveals – A Little Bit


elena ferrante
The novelist known as Elena Ferrante: “I didn’t choose anonymity. The books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago, I felt the burden of exposing myself in public, I wanted to detach myself from the finished story; I wanted the books to assert themselves without my patronage.”




07gray-master495
“Certainly, a culture can thrive without its own language: No one would tell today’s American Indians that if they no longer spoke their ancestral language it would render them non-Indian. Likewise, being Jewish does not require speaking Hebrew or Yiddish. Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.”