Essay: "Blindness." Jorge Luis Borges (1).

Review: Blind in one eye, mostly blind in the other, Gorges believes that his blindness is a gift—something to be used. He learns Anglo-Saxon, 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: “I had replaced the visible world with the aural world of the Anglo-Saxon language.”

Quote: “I did not allow blindness to intimidate me.”

Quote: “Being blind has its advantages. I owe to the darkness some gifts: …so many lines of poetry, so many poems….”

Quote: “In general, writers try to make what they say seem profound; Wilde was a profound man who tried to seem frivolous.”

Quote: On being appointed director of the library: “Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”

Quote: On James Joyce: “We have those two vast and—why not say it?—unreadable novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.”

Quote: “We may believe that Homer never existed, but that the Greeks imagined him as blind in order to insist on the fact that poetry is above all, music; that poetry is, above all, the lyre; that the visual can or cannot exist in a poet.”

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

To be continued.

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: "Hashish in Marseilles." Walter Benjamin.

Review: Memories of the intoxication after taking Hashish as he walks around Marseilles. The description is often disjointed.

Quote: “Versailles, for one who has taken hashish, is not too large, or eternity too long. Against the background of these immense dimensions of inner experience, of absolute duration and immeasurable space….”

Quote: “I strolled along the quay and read one after another the names of the boats tied up there. As I did so, an incomprehensible gaiety came over me, and I smiled in turn at all the Christian names of France.”

Quote: “To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne’s thread.”

Quote: “In the night the trance cuts itself off from everyday reality with fine prismatic edges; it forms a kind of figure and is more easily memorable. I should like to say: it shrinks and takes on the form of a flower.”

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: "Unpacking My Library." Walter Benjamin.

Review: Thoughts while unpacking his books by a book collector, with memories of where he acquired the books, where he lived with them and where he read them.

Quote: “Not that they [the books] came alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”

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: "In Praise of Shadows." Junichiro Tanizaki (2)

Review: Trying to construct a traditional Japanese home while hiding the modern appliances fueled by electricity and plumbing. The world of shadows is a natural world. We are losing the world of shadows. A tribute to the old ways of doing things in Japan. A tribute to traditional Japanese culture.

Quote: “It has been said of Japanese food that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten. I would go further and say that it is to be meditated upon, a kind of silent muse evoked by the combination of lacquer ware and the light of a candle flickering in the dark.”

Quote: “And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else.”

Quote: “But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases,, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”

Quote: “So benumbed are we nowadays to electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination…. Tea houses, restaurants, inns, and hotels are sure to be lit far too extravagantly.”

Quote: “Light is used not for reading or writing or for sewing but for dispelling the shadows in the farthest corners, and this runs against the basic idea of the Japanese room.”

Quote: “Of this I am convinced, that the conveniences of modern culture cater exclusively to youth, and that the times grow increasingly inconsiderate of old people.”

Quote: “…to snatch away from us even the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest is the most heartless of crimes.”

Quote: “I am aware of and most grateful for the benefits of the age. No matter what complaints we may have, Japan has chosen to follow the West, and there is nothing for her to do but bravely move ahead and leave us old ones behind.”

Quote: “This world of shadows we are losing.”

Rating of this Essay: ***** 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: "In Praise of Shadows." Junichiro Tanizaki (1).

Review: Trying to construct a traditional Japanese home while hiding the modern appliances fueled by electricity and plumbing. The world of shadows is a natural world. We are losing the world of shadows. A tribute to the old ways of doing things in Japan. A tribute to traditional Japanese culture.

Quote: “What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms.”

Quote: “No stove worthy of the name will ever look right in a Japanese room.”

Quote: “The recent vogue for electric lamps in the style of the old standing lanterns comes, I think, from a new awareness of the softness and warmth of paper, qualities which for a time we had forgotten; it stands as evidence of our recognition that this material is far better suited than glass to the Japanese house.”

Quote: “Paper, I understand, was invented by the Chinese; but Western paper is to us no more than something to be used, while the texture of Chinese paper and Japanese paper gives us a certain feeling of warmth, of calm and repose.”

Quote: “Of course, this ‘sheen of antiquity’ of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime.” 

Rating of Essay:  ***** 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.

To be continued.

Essay: "Death." Lu Hsun

Review: Thoughts on death, the belief in ghosts (‘souls’ r ‘spirits’) and the transmigration of souls. The wealthy prefer to be ghosts, the poor to be born again as babies because they have no fine clothes to cut a good figure after death. The wealthy? “Just as in life they expect to be a privileged class. Round about the age of fifty, they look for a burial place, buy a coffin, and burn paper money to open a bank account in the nether regions, expecting their sons and grandsons to sacrifice to them every year.” The author has some

Practical thoughts on dying, death, and living:

.Don’t accept a cent from anyone for the funeral.

.Get the whole thing over quickly, have me buried and be done with it.

.Do nothing in the way of commemoration.

.Forget me and live your own lives.

.Don’t take other people’s promises seriously.

.Have nothing to do with people who injure others but who oppose revenge and advocate tolerance.

.If this is dying, it isn’t really painful. It may not be quite like this at the end, of course; but still, since this happens only once in a lifetime, I can take it….”

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: "This Too Is Life." Lu Hsun.

Review: Random thoughts while ill.

Quotes: The narrator is very sick. “Give me some water and put the light on so that I can have a look around.”

“ ‘What for?’ She sounded rather alarmed, doubtless thinking I was raving.”

“Because I want to live. Understand that? This, too, is life. I want to take a look round.”

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.