O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. —William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” III. Reading the Bible recently, the thick New English Oxford study edition I’ve toted around for …
An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence —William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” II. The late Christopher Hitchens was like that dread baptismal tank. I cowered before him. Sure, I admired his courage and his skillful prolificacy—I saw him as a great if often …
That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect. —William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” for Tom, with Kierkegaard among the dark Danes I. Three years ago, as my mother lay dying, her youngest sister, Carolyn, died …
The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but it is then that I am living most fully in the present. —“A Sketch of the Past,” an essay in Moments of Being Virginia Woolf begins her “Sketch” by describing …
From it all I gathered one obstinate and enduring conception. That nothing is to be so much dreaded as egotism. Nothing so cruelly hurts the person himself; nothing so wounds those who are forced into contact with it.—Virginia Woolf, writing about her relationship with her father in “A Sketch of the Past” Having posted so much lately on scenic narrative, I do penance by featuring Virginia Woolf, a most reflective writer. Toward her I feel a kinship, which for some …
While searching for something else entirely, I came across this remarkable interview on Vimeo with Flannery O’Connor’s good friend Louise Abbot, who discusses O’Connor’s disdain for fame, among other things. The unusual, very occasional blog where I found the interview link is The Role of Imagination in Literary Nonfiction, worth a visit. This quiet blog is about, according to its author, Colin Foote Burch: • About the value of the nonfiction narrator’s subjective internal experience: real events that happen in …
My southern fiction orgy last summer started with Flannery O’Connor. Since I often dip into her stories, I bought and read the latest bio of her, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. I hoped to learn how she got so wise, and so dark. Apparently, her mother and their ouchy relationship. And Flannery’s imaginings: she seemingly nudged her own prickly ways a bit to depict sullen grown children like the nasty daughter-with-PhD in “Good Country People”; she …