Essay: "How I Started to Write." Carlos Fuentes (2)

Review: “But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.” The essence of this essay is in the quotes.

Quote: “I learned in Chile that Spanish could be the language of free men.”

Quote: “An anonymous language, a language that belongs to us all, as Neruda’s poem belonged to those miners on the beach, yet a language that can be kidnapped, impoverished, sometimes jailed, sometimes murdered.”

Quote: “Rhetoric, said William Butler Yeats, is the language of our fight with others; poetry is the name of our fight with ourselves.”

Quote: “The English language, after all, did not need another writer.”

Quote: “The history of Latin America was a history waiting to be lived.”

Quote: “There is no creation without tradition; the ‘new’ is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.”

Quote: “I would agree with Luis Bunel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.”

Quote: “So I entered the School of Law at the National University, where, as I feared, learning tended to be by rote.”

Quote: “But there were great exceptions of true teachers who understood that the law is inseparable from culture, from morality, and from justice.”

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

To be concluded.

Essay: "How I Started to Write." Carlos Fuentes (1)

Review: “But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.” The essence of this essay is in the quotes.

Quote: “When I arrived here [the U.S.], Dick Tracy had just met Tess Truehart. As I left, Clark Kent was meeting Lois Lane. You are what you eat. You are also the comics you peruse as a child.”

Quote: “…the history of Mexico was a history of crushing defeats, whereas I lived in a world, that of my D.C. public school, which celebrated victories, one victory after another, from Yorktown to New Orleans to Chapultepec to Appomattox to San Juan Hill to Belleau Wood: had this nation never known defeat?”

Quote: “To the south, sad songs, sweet nostalgia, impossible desires. To the north, self-confidence, faith in progress, boundless optimism.”

Quote: “The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For a Mexican, intelligence is inseparable form a malicious—in this, as in many other things we are quite Italian.”

Quote: “For me, as a child, the United States seemed a world where intelligence was equated with energy, zest, enthusiasm.”

Quote: “As a young Mexican growing up in the U.S., I had a primary impression of a nation of boundless energy, imagination and the will to confront and solve the great social issues of the times without blinking or looking for scapegoats.”

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

To be continued.

Essay: "He and I." Natalia Ginzburg.

Essay: “He and I.” Natalia Ginzburg.

Review: Portrait of a marriage. Two people with different tastes and interests who yet prosper together while complaining about the other’s habits. The essayist, however, remembers when, twenty years before, she and he walked along the Via Nazionale, carefree, conversing about everything and nothing, unattached to each other, who could and almost did, never see each other again.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995. 

Essay: "Leaving the Movie Theater." Roland Barthes.

Review: Analyzes the experience of seeing a movie in a movie theater. We have all experienced that feeling of coming back to reality when leaving the theater. Watching a movie is hypnotic, but the essayist is aware the he is two people—one who is absorbed like peering through a keyhole concentrating on the movie and a second person who observes everything around him in the theater.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995. 

Essay: "Some Blind Alleys: A Letter." EM Cioran.

Review: Letter from a misanthrope. The essayist is the very epitome of a misanthrope.

Quote: “…you were resolved upon the practice, there, of detachment, scorn, silence. Imagine, then, my surprise on hearing you say you were preparing a book about it!”

Quote: “To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?”

Quote: “Voltaire was the first literary man to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method.”

Quote: “Examine the minds which manage to intrigue us: far from taking the way of the world into consideration, they defend indefensible positions.”

Quote: “One does not destroy, save as one destroys oneself. I have hated myself in all the objects of my hatreds….”

Quote: “I am far from trying to pervert your hopes: life will take care of that.”

Quote: “Hence it is in good faith and regretfully, that I have inflicted upon you this lesson in perplexity.”

The art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Essay: "Aunt Harriet." Hubert Butler.

Review: Aunt Harriet was a Christian Scientist true believer. The narrator’s reminiscences are about the Irish neighborhood on the Nore River where he grew up. The reminiscences are almost stream of consciousness, flitting from one to another with no real cause and effect. None is at all interesting except to the narrator’s family. The references are local, Irish and personal, of little interest to the reader.

Quote: “Aunt Harriet was the strictest sort of Christian scientist. She never admitted to any illness. She never went to a dentist but let her teeth fall out so that her cheeks contracted round three or four solitary tusks. This did nothing for her appearance.

Quote: Of the Nor Valley: “It is still a place where it is easier to believe in happiness than in pain.”

Rating of the essay: * out of *****.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Essay: "Blindness." Jorge Luis Borges (2).

Review: Blind in one eye, mostly blind in the other, Gorges believes that his blindness is a gift—something to be used. He learns the Anglo-Saxon language, for example, as others read it to him. Being blind, as with so many other talented people, is a blessing. Homer. James Joyce. “It is one more instrument among so many—all of them so strange—that fate or chance provide.”

Quote: “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. These things are given us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.”

Quote: Goethe: “…everything near becomes distant.”

Quote: “Old age is probably the supreme solitude—except that the supreme solitude is death.”

Quote: “…blindness, of which I hoped to show…that it is not a complete misfortune.”

Rating the essay: ***** out of *****.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.