17 quotes
One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Shakespeare, far from being careless about grammar, could depart from it in any direction only because he had first mastered it as a structure.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Pedants and snobs are fond of declaring that only accomplished French speakers can catch Proust's tone. That might be so, but the tone is only one of the things to be caught.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
The question isn't about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Beethoven. The question is about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Mozart.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Few artists were ever fully well, so it is no great trick to prove them ill. There are commentators who can't get interested in Caravaggio until they find out he killed someone. They are only one step from believing that every killer is Caravaggio.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Taste was his world. Rilke behaved as if art were taste elevated to the highest possible degree. The armigerous chatelaines who played hostess were happy to believe it, since the idea made them artists too.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Since the Nazi era need never have happened, to say that he prophesised it is actually a belittlement of his creative achievement, and only one step up from saying that he caused the whole thing. But nobody could now read The Trial without thinking of the Soviet show trials, or the short works Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony without thinking of the death camps.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Whoever said "Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds" was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain Ahab's contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can't get started with even after you have finished reading them.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
The flowers bloomed, the schools of thought contended, and Mao's executioners went to work. The slogan had the same function as the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
There have even been outright bad writers blessed by the visitation of a poetic title. Ayn Rand had one with The Fountainhead, and another with Atlas Shrugged: a bit of a mouthful, but nobody has ever spat it out without first being fascinated with what it felt like to chew. Yet if those were not two of the worst books ever written - the worst books ever written don't even get published - they were certainly among the worst books ever to be taken seriously.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such. The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement. He didn't like the masses: he was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)