The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.

papyrology

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark.

Now it is patently, blatantly obvious that this is insane. If you are going to shuffle all the names around so that one person is always the genius, this means that you have decided not to believe your source whenever it says someone else said something good or the genius said something bad—but the source is your only reason for thinking the genius was a genius in the first place.

Musil, or Rilke, or Zweig.

There is a character in The Count of Monte Cristo who digs through solid rock for years and finally gets somewhere: he finds himself in another cell. It was that kind of moment.

Rilke was the secretary of Rodin. The things I knew about Rilke were these: that he was a poet; that he went to Paris and got a job as secretary to Rodin; and that he saw some paintings by Cézanne in an exhibition at the Grand Palais and went back day

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, it might have been.

hiragana,

She loved America in the way that the Victorians loved Scotland, French Impressionists Japan.

mezzotint

An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years.

Black Fir White Snow,

In a less barbarous society children would not be in absolute economic subjection to the irrational beings into whose keeping fate has consigned them: they would be paid a decent hourly wage for attending school.

andante

he is goggling as only a man can goggle who has applied Occam’s razor to syllables all his life.

Pas mal.

Mizoguchi’s Five Women Around Utamaro

Essentially the film is about the importance of rational thought. We should draw our conclusions from the evidence available rather than from hearsay and try not to be influenced by our preconceptions. We should strive to see what we can see for ourselves rather than what we would like to see.

how cruel that we must wake each time to answer to the same name, revive the same memories, take up the same habits and stupidities that we shouldered the day before and lay down to sleep.

aorist

tmesis.

A la recherche du temps perdu,

Caruso up the Amazon? ST: Yes? Yamamoto: With Klaus

Messiaen

Well everyone knew there were unfinished pieces Schubert’s unfinished symphony the Mozart Requiem Mahler’s Tenth Moses and Aaron & what made them unfinished was the stupid fact that the composer had not put an end to them,

The tape was of traffic and footsteps & people talking and he played Op. 10 No. 1 nine times while it ran,

It was as if after the illusion that you could have a thing 500 ways without giving up one he said No, there is only one chance at life once gone it is gone for good you must seize the moment before it goes, tears were streaming down my face as I heard these three pieces each with just one chance of being heard if there was a mistake then the piece was played just once with a mistake if there was some other way to play the piece you heard what you heard and it was time to go home.

After we had thoroughly mastered our characters we went to the library. I have been trying all week to find out my father’s name but Sibylla will not even tell me the first letter. I decided to borrow Kon Tiki.

She said, We should not elevate the fortuitous to the desirable.

The poem was called Erlkönig by Goethe, about a boy who is riding on a horse behind his father and the Erlking keeps calling the boy and the father doesn’t hear and then the boy dies.

She said there were other things in life besides academic achievement and that often children who had been forcefed at an early age had trouble adjusting to their peers and were often socially maladjusted all their lives. ‘La formule est banale,’ I said. Miss Lewis said, ‘That will do, Stephen.’

satori.

Lord Leighton,

There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant

love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge,

Tiresias

Impractical Caravanning. Impractical Boating. Impractical Knitting. I would buy any of the above and I have not the slightest interest in knitting, boating or, God help me, caravanning.

Tyrone Power

He had never really mastered the difference between the special and general theories of relativity, but for some reason could not keep from bringing both into his articles whenever he could.

Es regnete ununterbrochen.

no shame in ignorance but in the refusal to learn.

he’d end up teaching English as a foreign language.

I said I had always heard that logical thought was discouraged in schools. I could not believe someone so stupid had been to find the lost silent tribe; no wonder they hadn’t wanted to talk to him.

The last thing I wanted was to be alone in the Transural with this lunatic.

Zoroastrian

He gave me a sort of rueful is-there-no-end-to-it smile. He said: I won’t be a moment.

I said: My mother says you look like Robert Donat. Are you related?

bathysphere,

What it felt like was being in a pocket of blue light—light that was blue the way water is wet.