 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
page 1
page2
page3
page4
page5
page6
page7
page8
page9
page10
page11
page12
page13
page14
page15
page16
page17
page18
page19
page20
page21
page22
page23
page24
page25
page26
page27
page28
page29
page30
page31
page32
page33
page34
page35
page36
page37
page38
page39
page40
page41
page42
page43
page44
page45
page46
page 47
page48
page49
page50
page51
page52
page53
page54
page55
page56
page57
page58
page 59
page59
page 60
page61
page62
page 63
page 64
page 65
page66
page67
page 68
page 69
page 70
Page 71
page 72
pare 73
page 74
page 75
page76
page 77
page 78
page 79
page 80
page 81
page 82
page 83
page 84
page 85
page 86
page 87
page 88
page 89
page 90
page 91
page92
page93
page 94
page 95
page 96
page 97
page98
|
|
| QUOTATIONS 1547-1574 |
| ||||||
| 1547. It is in the nature of a craft that a writer must be superior in all respects to the characters he creates. He should know where they're coming from and where they're going. He should know their strengths and weaknesses, what they'll feel and how will they act in any situation. And his success as a novelist depends ultimately on his ability to manipulate them skillfully to bring the novel to the intended conclusion. But there is a danger inherent in such a lofty position. There is a tendency on a part of a writer, especially a successful one, to cross the line between the fictional world he creates and above which he reigns supreme, and the real world of which he is just one of the players, no more knowledgeable, no more insightful, and certainly no more powerful than the rest. When he presumes (as many a writer do) that he is, when he imagines that he possesses a special and unique gift to know more about people than they do about themselves, and when, consequently, he tries to manipulate them as the characters in his novels, the inevitable disaster ensues. 1548. To be exposed to the double danger of social and cultural marginality is a fate of every immigrant. But while little could be done to escape social marginality (for it takes several generations to be accepted as a full member of the "tribe") , cultural marginality could be substantially overcome, provided an immigrant is willing to put sufficient efforts into learning the language of the new country, reading the books written by its writer, studying its history and geography, reading newspapers and magazines, listening to the radio, watching television, etc., etc. In the process, the more familiar one become with the culture and spirit of his newly adopted land the less he feels as a stranger, regardless of what the "natives" think of him. It's undoubtedly a hard work, but if one is unwilling to do it he should not blame anyone but himself for staying on the margins for the rest of his life. 1549. The miraculous triumph of Christianity, its widespread acceptance by widely divergent cultural and social groups, is due to the political skills of the writers of The New Testament, who produced a document full of such glaring inconsistences that anyone can find in it what one is looking for. It is an ancient centrist version of a political and ideological program full of ambiguities, vagueness and most of all of outrageous promises with no real guarantee of fulfilment. If Christianity were a political party it couldn't have come with a better election platform than The New Testament. It's a veritable "all things to all people". For to be all things to all people is the quality every aspiring political, ideological or religious leader has to master to win hearts and minds. When the conservatives think you ‘re a conservative, when the liberals think you're a liberal, when the rich think you'll protect their wealth and the poor think you'll take it from the rich and give it to them, etc., etc., you made it. 1550. Regardless of its positive or negative outcomes, progressive or regressive implications, it is difficult to deny at least one aspect of a call for Islamic State by the substantial number of Muslims in widely divergent countries, namely, that it is, essentially, a call for consistency, the call to practice what is preached in the Holy Book of Islam -Koran and its legal extension - Sharia. By comparison, the overwhelming majority of Christians, who accepted for centuries separation of Church and State as given, seems to be totally oblivious to the glaring contradictions between their daily life, both social and political, and the teachings of their religion, Christianity as expressed in their Holy Book - The New Testament. But before anyone tries to accuse Christians of essential hypocrisy of their existence, one has to realize that an establishment of strictly Christian State governed accordingly to Scriptures would have been suicidal, for Scriptural precepts were never meant for the life in this world. And though Islam, like Judaism before, is more earthly than heavenly religion, the attempts to live strictly according to their laws were never successful so far. Contrary to the popular assumptions the practical benefits of consistency are highly overrated. 1551. Why do women, in general, know so much more about men, than men about women? Is it because while men perform (socially, culturally, politically) women mostly observe: the first are actors, the second -the audience. Or is it because a man looks just for beauty in a woman, but a woman has to discern the character, the inclination, the reliability, etc. of a man? All of which makes men more idealistic (while imagining themselves being practical and resolute), and women pragmatic and down to earth (while fantasizing being romantic and vulnerable). In reality, however, dealing with each other, it is the men who choose illusion, while the women seek knowledge. Also, to achieve their respective goals, men used to order, women - to manipulate. But to order one doesn't have to know, whom one is ordering, while to manipulate the extensive knowledge of the object of manipulation is needed to succeed. 1552. I, personally, prefer sublimation to masturbation. The surge of blood in my brain gives me more pleasure than similar sensation in my penis. 1553. The common mistake of all philosophers who tried to give the answer to the question: "What will make men happy?", is the conviction (natural to philosophical mode of thinking which deals with the Universals rather than particulars) that there must be one universal solution, for all people, for all times of this eternal problem. But if one just admit the obvious, that we are all different, living on different circumstances at different times, it becomes abundantly clear that no universal answer to the question of Human Happiness could be given. Even such apparently all encompassing statement as "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities" is still too narrow to cover all cases. Therefore the philosophical, universal approach has to be abandoned once and for all. Instead, all efforts have to be redirected to solving the concrete problems of unhappiness for each particular individual. Of course, it is vastly more difficult than giving universal recipes, but nothing else can give happiness to a single human being. 1554. Any analogy from physical to metaphysical, from material to spiritual (used invariably by metaphysicians and theologians to prove their point) remains invalid unless we assume that the second is a product of the first. Otherwise we have to reverse the direction of analogy and accept the metaphysical and spiritual as given and self-evident, which is impossible (unless one is an orthodox Platonist), because by its nature it is at best unknown, and at worst, for metaphysicians and theologians, is non-existent. 1555. "Re-invention of the wheel" is a curse of the social sciences. Whereas in the technical, "hard" sciences once discovery has been made and becomes widely known, no scientist would try "to rediscover" it again. No scientist, for example, would claim to discover the Law of Gravity after Newton, without being called, and justifiably so, a mad man. And yet, the social scientists like philosophers, economists, psychologists, historians, etc. do it all the time, having seemingly an enormous capacity to disregard or to be totally oblivious to the hypothesis and ideas of their predecessors. They continue incessantly to repeat, albeit in different forms, what others had said long (and not so long) time ago. This tendency of "rediscovery" and "reinvention" is largely responsible for the slow progress of the social sciences as compared with the technical ones. 1556. Misty and mysticism don't sound similarly for no reason. 1557. If Plato were an American (hard to imagine, but let's suspend disbelief for the argument's sake) he, despite his highly pronounced high-brow attitudes and anti-democratic tendencies, would have, in order to achieve the widespread popularity and acclaim (which he obviously craved) to pretend to be a baseball aficionado, learn some essential baseball statistics and attend enough games to be seen attending these games by enough fellow Americans to prove to them that despite being a genius he is not an arrogant snob but a down-to-earth regular guy, the true red-blooded American he-man. He would also have to reveal publicly, either in TV interviews or in newspaper's profile, that actually becoming a great philosopher was a consolation prize for not being good enough to fulfil his true ambitions in life - to be a pitcher for The Yankees. If Americans had the Athenian's ritual of ostracizing their countrymen for getting "too big for the breeches", they would use it against their prominent citizens who refuse to proclaim their devotion and allegiance to Baseball - the great leveler of American Democracy. 1558. Freud was only half-right (as with most of his insights) talking about "penis envy" - he accused the wrong gender of suffering from it. For it is the men not the women who are afflicted with this ego-shattering malady. For a proof of it just take a look at "spam' directed at the male users of Internet - 50% of it devoted to penis enlargement. 1559. Paradoxically, though the inscription on the gates to the Delphi temple enjoined the visitors to "Know Thyself", none of them apparently heeded this sage advice. For they were not looking for self-knowledge. They asked the oracle what to expect in the future, so as to be able to act accordingly. And they were existentially right. From the purely pragmatic point of view the knowledge of others is much more important than self-knowledge. Knowledge is the guide to action and our very survival depends on how we act and interact. And actions are directed not inwardly but outwardly. To act adequately one has to know the nature of thins outside himself, not the nature if oneself. Thus, like many received wisdom, the value of "Know thyself" (Gnosi in Greek, originally attributed to Thales) is highly overrated. My personal advice to anyone entering the temple of the world would be "know the other". For this would spare you many of life nasty surprises. 1560. There is a ceratin danger in following too diligently the Thales' precept "Know Thyself". For the self-definition which must be the ultimate outcome of such a quest imposes the nagging obligation to live up to it. But here lies even greater danger: what if one has made a mistake by arriving at the false self-definition and then spent his entire life laboring in vain to be what one, essentially, is not. 1561. The power of human imagination is the main cause of human misery for it vastly exceeds not only the obvious limitations of the present but also the reasonable possibilities of the future. 1562. There is a down-side to everything: being well acquainted with the understandably rare masterpieces often prevents one from appreciation of the much more common meritocracies, and thus, in a way, diminishes the sum total of enjoyment one would have derived from the arts otherwise. 1563. All my life the irresistible compulsion to say loudly what I think was one of my greatest undoing. 1564. As far as handling money is concerned every family, without exception (and no matter how rich or poor it is) has a more or less clearly defined "division of labor": some of its members are consistently trying to save money while the others, equally consistently, waste them. Moreover, these two activities are so closely connected that one cannot exist without the other. Feeding on each other they are in a kind of symbiotic relationship. Firstly, one cannot waste what doesn't exist, so the saving, by necessity, has to precede wasting. Reversely, what is saved has to be eventually wasted, for otherwise continuos saving leads to the dead end - accumulation for the sake of accumulation, which some members of the family will find highly unreasonable and do their best to correct the imbalance. 1565. "Ubi patria vita bene" - my fatherland is where I have a good life. If this is true I, a Jew in Russia, a Russian in Israel, a Russian Jew in USA and Canada, never had a fatherland, for I never had a good life in either of these places. I always felt and have been made to feel a stranger, one who doesn't belong. And for me the truly good life without sense of belonging is not possible. 1566. Why did the British, the British cultural and social elite to be precise, who were so receptive to the beauty of Italy, who for almost 300 years flocked there in mass, had never been able or even willing to recreate it on their native island, to built Florence in England's green and pleasant land? 1567. For some people having noble intentions is as good or even better than acting upon them. 1568. Reality is not something absolute and all-powerful out there which gives us an imperious and merciless ultimatum: adapt or perish. There are actually two kinds of reality - one is objective and give, another is subjective and constructed. Like with evolution where not only environment "dictates" which particular permutation of a species would survive but also where an organism in turn changes this environment by its activities so it is with Reality every individual faces: it affects him but he affects it as well. And which one of these effects predominates is ultimately decisive in whether an individual life is a success or a failure. Reality is not only what it is but also what one makes of it - circumstances do make a man, but man makes circumstances as well. 1569. As for me, what separates the good writing from the bad one is the desire on my part to read, in the first instance, the same sentence at least twice for the pure pleasure of it as opposed to the necessity of trudging through it again and again just for a sake of simple comprehension, in the second. 1570. All the unsuccessful relationships that finally break down have this thing in common: in the beginning, due to the purely physical attraction, the differences are blissfully minimized or ignored altogether and similarities are eagerly exaggerated or imagined. Than, as the reality starts to intrude, the differences are gradually discovered, scrutinized and fought over and the similarities which were taken for granted are increasingly questioned and eventually discarded as insufficient or irrelevant. In the successful relationships, characterized among the other things by longevity, the dynamic sequence is usually opposite: they start with the differences felt to be overwhelming and causing initially sharp confrontations. But because both parties find them engaging and emotionally stimulating through perseverance and hard work, fueled by challenge and instinct to overcome the obstacles, compromises emerge and than as if by some magic (you may call it love) turn into the long lasting similarities. 1571. What often infuriates me is the pettiness and undisguised malicious arrogance often displayed by novelists in the minute, and yet sketchy, descriptions of the appearance of the secondary characters. Let me illustrate it by the quotation from "The New Machiavelli" by H.G.Wells. "There were two thinly attended public meetings at different ends of the constituency, and then I had a correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation. My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty people. They had had to come upstairs to me and they were manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark his sense of the occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven. There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation, which included two other public-spirited ladies and several ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus going Strandward during the May meetings." (Book the Third, Chapter the Third, 3) Now, does the color of one's dress, the shape of one's hat, the bone structure of one's face, etc. define in any sense a person? And yet such a grotesque simplifications and high-handedness, when people even before they open their mouth are found wanted and summarily dismissed, is presented as a masterful brush strokes of an artist. What does it say about the writer as a man? What does it say about the writer as a writer? 1572. Unlike in the feudal society where everyone was born to a certain position and had more or less resigned to his place in social hierarchy, in the modern democracy which ostensibly proclaims the equality of opportunities, the understandable shortage of positions of prominence generates a lot of resentment and bitterness. To somewhat alleviate this dissatisfaction with one's social insignificance America, the first fully functioned modern democracy, came up with the seemingly endless numbers of clubs like Kiwanis, Knights of Columbus, Rotarians, etc. which serve as a safety valve for the ambitions and aspirations of those who couldn't make it into the official structure of power , by providing them with the opportunity to still achieve the coveted position of prominence and leadership in such voluntary organizations. 1573. The waters of life are murky. Swimming among poorly discernable, vague and deceptive shapes and forms we hardly know where we're going. And, the truth to be told, we actually prefer it this way. 1574. Usually one begins life as an enthusiastic optimist, and only after having one's dreams smashed one after another by the hard blows of reality turns into a sceptic lamenting the futility of it all. In short, the usual case is that of "sour grapes". With me it was just the opposite. I don't remember why, but even before I began my life I was already disillusioned with it. When I was young, very young, I condemned in advance the life of ambition, of striving for recognition and achievements as "vanity of vanities". But now, ironically, in my declining years, after being rather "successful" in maintaining my purity and aloofness from the worldly affairs, I deeply regret the missed opportunities and look back at my life as a sad and misguided failure. |
 Sign Guestbook |
 View Guestbook |
|
. |
| Visitors: 00476 |