"never stopped reading since they were children"

Now let’s think of Wendy and Alex in a different way, as the sort of people I know to exist. You probably know them too. You might be a lot like them.

Wendy and Alex have never stopped reading since they were children. Reading books, watching films, looking at art—these are simply things they would never not do, whatever stage they are in their lives, however much money they do or don’t have. They know how to find out about what they might like and what they might not like, whether this information arrives in their mailbox or their inbox or through one of their feeds (which feature as many strangers discussing Marcel Proust or Clarice Lispector or the Norton Anthology of Poetry as they do media outlets). Neither Wendy nor Alex thinks much about the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, but they can tell good writing from dull writing. Good writing casts a spell, but spells can be hard to find. They know the names of critics and love the clang and clack and click of minds you hear in a well-wrought piece of criticism. They’re attracted to disputation and to esoteric books. They too never have enough time, but they’re not too concerned about wasting it. They like to figure things out for themselves.

From “Like This or Die”, The fate of the book review in the age of the algorithm by Christian Lorentzen

...a river of allusion which runs hard upon a love story beneath.

Near the end of The Bughouse, his brilliant book on Ezra Pound, Daniel Swift reflects on the reading of Pound’s Cantos and on his own fascination with the “impossible poem”.

I recognize what he says about the Cantos in my own love affair with Joyce's Ulysses and other Modernist masterpieces.

"When we read late Pound we wade through a river of allusion which runs hard upon a love story beneath. This is the grand tension of this impossible poem. Capaciousness - the welcoming in of all sorts of voices, sources, modes and interference - is the Cantos great gift of poetry, but it is equally its damage. It is so tempting to read only for those fine lyrical refrains, and to overlook the bitty, argumentative interference to read, that is as magpies, picking at the pieces; but we may not. For the Cantos do not permit a simple opposition between poetry and history, or beauty and politics, or between reading as a poet or reading as an academic. Instead we must ferret out the footnotes, must consult the guides and speak with the scholars, before we can make any sense of them. The Cantos ask of us this care; that we expend our time in their unpacking.

This is however a trap. For the Cantos are an artwork which demands forty years of attention – many have devoted their working lives to precisely this – and once a reader has expended such care, he or she is bound to assume that its object has been worthwhile. It is the care which ennobles the subject, and this is how Pound converts literary critics into disciples.

It is not possible to be a casual reader of the Cantos".

On reading the Cantos

"When we read late Pound we wade through a river of allusion which runs hard on a love story beneath.

This is the grand tension of this impossible poem. Capaciousness – the welcoming in of all sorts of voices, sources, modes and interference – is the Cantos’ great gift to poetry, but it is equally its damage. It is so tempting to read only for those fine lyrical refrains, and to overlook the bitty, argumentative interference: to read, that is, as magpies, picking at the pieces; but we may not. For the Cantos do not permit a simple opposition between poetry and history, or beauty and politics, or between reading as a poet and reading as an academic.  Instead, we must ferret out the footnotes, must consult the guides and speak with the scholars, before we can make any sense of them. The Cantos ask of us this care: that we expend our time in their unpacking.

This is, however, a trap. For the Cantos are an artwork which demands forty years of attention – many have devoted their working life to precisely this – and once a reader has expended such care , he or she is bound to assume that its object has been worthwile. It is the care which ennobles the subject, and this is how Pound converts literary critics into disciples. It is not possible to be a casual reader of the Cantos. 

It is perhaps, not possible to read them as a poem".

Daniel Swift, The Bughouse p. 240

"Just to see my books..."

"Just to see my books, to note their presence, their proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity.”

Sven Birkerts “Notes from a Confession”

La più consistente scoperta che ho fatto pochi giorni dopo aver compiuto sessantacinque anni è che non posso più perdere tempo a fare cose che non mi va di fare. 

Quote from La Grand Belleza

Nous autres, civilisations...

« Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles »

Paul Valery

Silent, upon a peak in Darien...

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies                                                                                                     

When a new planet swims into his ken;                                                                 

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in October 1816. It tells of the author's astonishment while reading the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer as freely translated by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman.

The poem has become an often-quoted classic, cited to demonstrate the emotional power of a great work of art, and the ability of great art to create an epiphany in its beholder.

Das war ein Vorspiel nur...

essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life...

Christianity is, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an 'other' life, or a 'better' life. Hatred of the world, the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the 'sabbath of sabbaths' - all of this, along with Christianity's unconditional resolve to acknowledge only moral values, struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible manifestations of a 'will to decline', at the very least, a sign of the most profound affliction, fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life.

Frederic Nietzsche

On advice about reading

"The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter the independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess." 

Virginia Woolf

On failing to decode the musical subtext in the Magic Mountain

Far too many readings of the Magic Mountain fail to pay sufficient attention to the crucial role played by music in Mann’s larger thesis about the decline and fall of Europe before World War 1.

The inability fully to come to grips with the novel’s musical code can hardly be attributed to the failings of any particular commentator. The reasons for such failure are rather to be sought in factors of a historical and cultural sort. Mann’s novel inhabits a cultural sphere that is much farther removed from the world we inhabit than is suggested by the time lapse since it’s publication of four score years ago. Classical music, to take an obvious example , no longer occupies the elevated  place it enjoyed in the world of Thomas Mann, who came to think of himself as the literary heir  not only of Nietzsche but also of Richard Wagner, and who could count on contemporary readers to decode without difficulty  the musical subtext of his work. Today , in Europe and to an even greater degree in America, cultural literacy no longer requires a familiarity with the canon of Western music. Today, in America, talk of the decline of classical music is everywhere.

“Politically suspect”

Music on the Magic Mountain

Hans Rudolf Vaget

Thomas Mann : Life and Death

An interest in death and illness, in the pathological, in decay, is merely a kind of expression of an interest in life, in humanity,[...] ; anyone who is interested in the organic, in life, that person is also interested in death; and it could well be the theme of a Bildungsroman to show that the experience of death is, in the final analysis, an experience of life and that it leads one to humanity

Thomas Mann quoted in Rodney Symington ib. 

Why reread the Magic Mountain ?

Like a piece of music that contains so many strands that we cannot grasp them all at one listening, the polyphonic complexity of the Magic Mountain also cannot be apprehended in one reading. In order to encompass the full extent of the novel’s rich interweaving of leitmotifs, we would ideally have to have the entire text in our brain and be able to recall every relevant line at will. The best reader would be the one who would recall all the references and leitmotifs and be able to see the relationship of everything to everything else. That is of course impossible for the average reader, just as the average listener cannot do it for a symphony either. But as we listen to a favourite piece of music over and over again, and hear new aspects each time, so it is with The Magic Mountain: it is a novel that demands to be read and re-read many times, because the full complexity of its allusiveness can never be fully grasped. Every reading, and every discovery of new allusions and connections, increases our aesthetic pleasure[1].

“I believe that the peculiar construction of the book, it’s composition, results in heightened and deepened pleasure for the reader if he goes through it a second time – just as one must be acquainted with a piece of music to enjoy it properly. Musical composition – I have already mentioned in connection with earlier works that the novel has always been for me a symphony, a work of counterpoint – a thematic fabric in which ideas play the part of musical motifs. This technique is applied to The Magic Mountain in the most complex and all-pervasive way. On that account you have my presumptuous suggestion to read it twice. Only then can one penetrate the associational musical complex of ideas. When the reader knows his thematic material, then he is in a position to interpret the symbolic and allusive formulae both forwards and backwards”[2]

“Judge what I have done, my works of art, as you will and must, but they were always good scores, one like the other; musicians have also loved them; Gustav Mahler, for example, loved them, and I have always wanted musicians as public judges.”[3]

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[1] Rodney Symington : Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: A Reader’s Guide

[2] Thomas Mann quoted in Rodney Symington : Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: A Reader’s Guide p10

[3] Thomas Mann quoted in Rodney Symington : Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: A Reader’s Guide p9