From Film to Novel My taste in fiction is quite naive: If it can’t be adapted into a great motion picture, I don’t read it. For this reason, I have not read any of Dickens’s novels, as none of the movie adaptions impressed me enough to read the original. The only exception is the movie “Scrooge” (1951) starring Alastair Sim. I watched it for many years around Christmas, almost as […]
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“Four Quartets: IV. Every Life a Poem” by T. S. Eliot
Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, […]
Read more“Four Quartets: III. Freedom” by T. S. Eliot
The Dry Salvages Eliot weaves together almost seamlessly the teachings of Eastern and Western religions and philosophies in “The Dry Salvages”. First, there is a lesson from the Hindu scripture The Bhagavad Gita, “Do not think of the fruit of action. Fare forward”, which seems very similar to the deontological ethics of Kant and the ancient Stoics. We’re not to think of the fruit of action, for it is not […]
Read more“The Cossacks” by Leo Tolstoy
Young Tolstoy in Love One must taste life once in all its natural beauty, must see and understand what I see every day before me–those eternally unapproachable snowy peaks, and a majestic woman in that primitive beauty in which the first woman must have come from her creator’s hands–and then it becomes clear who is living truly or falsely. Three months have passed since I first saw the Cossack girl. […]
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“La Vita Nuova” by Dante Alighieri
The Death of Beatrice I was a-thinking how life fails with us Suddenly after such a little while; When Love sobb’d in my heart, which is his home. Whereby my spirit wax’d so dolorous That in myself I said, with sick recoil: ‘Yea, to my lady too this Death must come.’ And therewithal such a bewilderment Possess’d me, that I shut mine eyes for peace; And in my brain did […]
Read more“Four Quartets: II. Fear and Humility” by T. S. Eliot
East Coker A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter. It was not (to start again) what one had expected. What was to be the value of the long looked forward to, Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders, […]
Read more“Four Quartets” by T. S. Eliot
I chose to read Four Quartets because of this fascinating blurb at Wikipedia,”Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man’s relationship with time, the universe, and the divine… Eliot blends his Anglo-Catholicism with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics as well as St. John of the Cross and Julian of […]
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