photograph by RODNAE Productions via Pexels
I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it…
— The Great Gatsby
photograph by Khanh Tu Nguyen Huy via Unsplash
De consolatione philosophiae
I did the best that I could
— J.S.
photograph by Ilnur Kalimullin via Unsplash
in Middlemarch
light is dark
a fire burns
skylark
— J.S.
photograph by Tim Foster via Unsplash
Carthago adhuc vivit
perfume nightsky
firelight
bells in the distant temple
tower
winds on the water
the ghosts of Hannibal
you read to me of Hanno the Navigator
on the sands of hours
and held me spellbound
— J.S.
We’ll Never Have to Say Goodbye Again
photograph by Oswald Elsaboath via Unsplash
instructions
no user serviceable parts
broken hearts
the fault, dear Brutus
is ever Descartes’
— J.S.
photograph by Nicate Lee via Unsplash
Schrödinger’s Reverie
she
is not here
and here
at the same
time
— J.S.
photograph by Casper Nichols via Unsplash
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
— Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four
Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay
And next day she actually did know the name, and uttered it the moment the glass door slammed. Frau Chauchat’s name was Clavdia.
Hans Castorp did not grasp it at first. He had to have her repeat the name, even to spell it, before he understood. Then he pronounced it twice or thrice, turning his bloodshot eyes in Frau Chauchat’s direction, in order, as it were, to try if it suited.
“Clavdia,” he said. “ Yes, that is probably it; it fits her quite well.” He could not hide his pleasure in the degree of intimacy thus achieved, and from now on referred always to Frau Chauchat as Clavdia…
— The Magic Mountain
Nationaal Archief, “Dutch family having a picnic” (ca. 1960s)
On Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”
and what of Daedalus? —
secretly deeply sorrowed
while somebody mowed the lawn
— J.S.
photograph by cottonbro via Pexels
“You are hurt? You must not be. Let us put those feelings away, send them to Jericho. Do you agree? I have been wounded too sometimes — I will confess it, since we are sitting together like this. I have been angry with your phlegm, and your being such friends with him, on account of your egoistic craving for experience. Yet I was glad too, and grateful for the respect you paid him. You were loyal; if you were a bit impertinent too, after all I could make allowance for that.”
“Very kind of you.”
She looked at him. “You are incorrigible, it seems. And certainly I can’t quite tell how much esprit you have — but deep you are, a deep young man. Well, very good, one can do with it, and be friends. Shall we be friends, shall we make a league — not against but for him? Will you give me your hand on it? I am often frightened. — Sometimes I am afraid of the solitude with him — the inward solitude, tu sais — he is — frightening; sometimes I am afraid something may happen to him — it makes me shudder. — I should be glad to feel I had someone beside me. Enfin — if you care to know — that was why I came back here with him — chez toi…”
— The Magic Mountain (Tr. Lowe-Porter)
on causation
Claudius can’t see
in that autumn orchard
proximately
hebenon poured
his reflections —
Hamlet’s sword
— J.S.
photograph by Mert Kahveci via Unsplash
At this moment, the tavern door opened. Several persons entered bringing with them an odor of wet dog to which was blent the smell of coal wafted by the wind through the opened door. Des Esseintes was incapable of moving a limb. A soft warm languor prevented him from even stretching out his hand to light a cigar. He told himself: “Come now, let us get up, we must take ourselves off.” Immediate objections thwarted his orders. What is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair so magnificently? Was he not even now in London, whose aromas and atmosphere and inhabitants, whose food and utensils surrounded him? For what could he hope, if not new disillusionments, as had happened to him in Holland?
He had but sufficient time to race to the station. An overwhelming aversion for the trip, an imperious need of remaining tranquil, seized him with a more and more obvious and stubborn strength. Pensively, he let the minutes pass, thus cutting off all retreat, and he said to himself, “Now it would be necessary to rush to the gate and crowd into the baggage room! What ennui! What a bore that would be!” Then he repeated to himself once more, “In fine, I have experienced and seen all I wished to experience and see. I have been filled with English life since my departure. I would be mad indeed to go and, by an awkward trip, lose those imperishable sensations. How stupid of me to have sought to disown my old ideas, to have doubted the efficacy of the docile phantasmagories of my brain, like a very fool to have thought of the necessity, of the curiosity, of the interest of an excursion!”
“Well!” he exclaimed, consulting his watch, “it is now time to return home.”
This time, he arose and left, ordered the driver to bring him back to the Sceaux station, and returned with his trunks, packages, valises, rugs, umbrellas and canes, to Fontenay, feeling the physical stimulation and the moral fatigue of a man coming back to his home after a long and dangerous voyage.
— Huysmans, Against The Grain
photograph by Isi Parente via Unsplash
“…but now I have a particular reason for wishing to hear all about the fire. Was it suspected that this lunatic, Mrs. Rochester, had any hand in it?”
“You’ve hit it, ma’am: it’s quite certain that it was her, and nobody but her, that set it going…”
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
photograph by REVOLT via Unsplash
“It’s greater happiness than you deserve, then! You have never chosen, I say; you have been afraid to choose. You have never really faced the fact that you are false, that you have broken your faith. You have never looked at it and seen that it was hideous, and yet said, ‘No matter, I’ll brave the penalty, I’ll bear the shame!’ You have closed your eyes; you have tried to stifle remembrance, to persuade yourself that you were not behaving as badly as you seemed to be, and there would be some way, after all, of compassing bliss and yet escaping trouble. You have faltered and drifted, you have gone on from accident to accident, and I am sure that at this present moment you can’t tell what it is you really desire!”
— Henry James, Roderick Hudson
cf. Tom McCarthy, “Renaissance of the Upper West Side” (New York Magazine, 1969)
“What is time?” A mystery, a figment — and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say a thing is “brought about” by time. What sort of thing? — Change! Now is not then, here not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is circular, is in a closed circle; and might almost equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement — for the there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present…
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (Tr. Lowe-Porter)
photograph by Hari Nandakumar via Unsplash
Whiskey Tango Charlie
at the airport lounge
nothing gold can stay
— J.S.
Nationaal Archief, “Men’s fashion fair at the RAI in Amsterdam” (1973)
Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.
“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher–shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before.”
— Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
cf. Spy Magazine (1986)
“I’ve got something to tell YOU, old sport,—” began Gatsby. But Daisy guessed at his intention…
— Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
cf. Maclean’s Magazine (1987)
was the past in color?
1987 was in color
ablazedboldbrightbrilliant
bigger than life
but then again
it could have been
only black and white —
I can’t see in this light
late at night
— J.S.
Image by Vicki Nunn via Pixabay
That time of year
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold…
autumn
leaves
me
again
every year
— J.S.
the oxford companion to modern poetry
…the major part of his verse is published on his very sparsely visited WordPress blog.
He is still part of the Romantic school even though this mode has long been repudiated.
His work lumbers through the same recurring themes over and over again —
the failed (or failing) romance, the ever popular carpe diem trope and a kind of bitter melancholic nostalgia that this reviewer, for one, finds distasteful.
An early instructive example is “Astrophysics (Halley’s Poem)”.
Here the lover is unflatteringly compared to Halley’s Comet.
She left the poet in 1986 traveling at high rate of speed and the grandiose Galileo quotation would only gild the lily if there was a lily to gild.
His more recent work such as “And the operator said, ‘May I help you please?’” again finds the poet au fait with loving and losing.
Poems such as these have this reviewer wondering whether Tennyson’s famous aphorism is generally applicable.
Providentially his verse is interlarded with songs from the 1970s (the poet’s salad days) and occasionally (and regrettably) some hair metal classics.
We do not expect a volume of his collected works at this time but anticipate further elaboration of these leitmotifs on his blog.
— J.S.
cf. Screen Magazine (2003)
BENEDICK:
Come, come, we are friends. Let’s have a
dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our
own hearts and our wives’ heels.LEONATO:
We’ll have dancing afterward.BENEDICK:
First, of my word! Therefore play, music.—
Prince, thou art sad. Get thee a wife, get thee a wife…
— Much Ado About Nothing
cf. Toni Frissell, “Fashion model underwater…” (1939) and video by Relaxing_Guru via Pixabay (edited, modified, and combined recomposition)
The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“PHILOSOPHICAL” DIALOGUES BETWEEN SOCRATES (S) AND AN IMAGINARY INTERLOCUTOR (ii):
S: Wittgenstein at a restaurant or we can dine at home.
ii: Bertrand, can you Russell up some dinner for me?
S: Francis, Bacon sure smells great when it’s cooking doesn’t it?
ii: That hits Lamarck.
S: I Goethe go.
ii: Rousseau long!
S: Let’s play Heidegger seek!
ii: I Kant find you!
S: Hegel, what’s going on?
ii: We were supposed to go Schopenhauers ago!
S: Don’t put Descartes before the horse! We’ve Spinoza this many times before.
ii: John, Locke the front door and we’ll get going.
S: Foucault? I didn’t hear the phone ring.
ii: Hume are you referring to?
S: Camus come over to visit today?
ii: I’m Newton town so I’m not sure where to go.
S: I’ll Nietzsche in front of my house. Drive Pascal and then take the next left. Husserl can you get here?
ii: Is your house Nietzsche and clean?
S: Rousseau it is. I really Fichte this place up. It looks great. Kierkegaard-en I told you about with lots of flowers.
ii: If that’s Sartre than I’m a Hottentot.
S: Santayana wants me, Lord, I can’t go back there!
ii: Don’t Thoreau your life away!
Cincinnati Magazine, 1982
They spoke in low tones, covered by the music. “Let us sit here, and look on, as though in a dream. For it is like a dream to me, that we are sitting like this…”
— The Magic Mountain
Roberta Flack – Feel Like Makin’ Love [The Reflex Revision] by The Reflex
National Geographic Magazine, 1954
All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
— Anna Karenina (Tr. Bartlett)
Popular Mechanics, 1974
“Saturn, look up!—though wherefore, poor old King?
I have no comfort for thee, no not one:
I cannot say, “O wherefore sleepest thou?”
For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy sceptre pass’d; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
Rumbles reluctant o’er our fallen house;
And thy sharp lightning in unpractis’d hands
Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time! O moments big as years!
— Keats, Hyperion
cf. TV Commercial
PART II, Chapter X. Wherein is related the crafty device Sancho adopted to enchant The Lady Dulcinea, and other incidents as ludicrous as they are true.
— Cervantes, Don Quixote (Tr. Ormsby)
Train Kept On Rollin by The Yardbirds
cf. photograph by guvo59 via Pixabay (edit) and video by McZerrill via Pixabay (edited collage)
The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the smoother road past Watery lane. Mr Bloom at gaze saw a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat.
—There’s a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus, he said.
—Who is that?
—Your son and heir.
—Where is he? Mr Dedalus said, stretching over across.
The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup roadway before the tenement houses, lurched round the corner and, swerving back to the tramtrack, rolled on noisily with chattering wheels. Mr Dedalus fell back, saying:
—Was that Mulligan cad with him? His fidus Achates!
—No, Mr Bloom said. He was alone…
Joyce, Ulysses
cf. Nationaal Archief, “Underneath a parasol” (1933) (edit)
Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory…
— Joyce, from Dubliners
cf. photograph by evalynn via Pixabay (edited)
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Betimes I found myself alive again and in downtown London.
And so to the office but I greatly found large crowds about and lost my way and strange moving carriages betimes almost hit me and large houses and great noises all about me so that I could not even collect my thoughts and so lost my wits and many strangers who were moving greatly fast and past me in the streets.
And so to bed. I miss my wife.
— J.S.
(cf. Diary of Samuel Pepys)
The Saint and the Singer (1914)
“What are you going to do?” Hans Castorp asked, flabbergasted.
“I am leaving,” she repeated, smiling in apparent amazement at the frozen look on his face.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “You’re joking.”
“Most certainly not. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving…”
A whole world was collapsing inside him.
— The Magic Mountain
If Ever You’re In My Arms Again
cf. TV commercial, ca. 1970’s (edited)
I went in — after making every possible noise in the kitchen, short of pushing over the stove — but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.
— The Great Gatsby
cf. Home Movie
He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace. It was very cold. Her face, fragrant in the cold air, was quite close to his; and suddenly he called out to the man at the furnace:
“Is the fire hot, sir?”
But the man could not hear with the noise of the furnace. It was just as well. He might have answered rudely.
— Joyce, The Dead
“I Want To Know What Love Is” by Foreigner
Northeastern University Bulletin, 1980-81
STEPHEN: (Brings the match near his eye.) Lynx eye. Must get glasses. Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat. (He draws the match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable modality of the visible. (He frowns mysteriously.) Hm… Married.
— Joyce, Ulysses
Ernst Halberstadt, “City Hall Plaza–A Pleasant Setting for Rest and Conversation” (1973)
—He’s pretty well on, professor MacHugh said in a low voice.
—Seems to be, J. J. O’Molloy said, taking out a cigarettecase in murmuring meditation, but it is not always as it seems. Who has the most matches?
— Joyce, Ulysses
“Love Of The Common Man” — Todd Rundgren
photograph by Jonathan Dubon via Unsplash (edit)
tanglewood in blue
a moment
I held
once forever
in the summer grass
steadfast bright stars
still turning
—J.S.
—Yes. So you think…
The door closed behind the outgoer.
Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and brooding air.
A vestal’s lamp.
Here he ponders things that were not… what might have been: possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known…
— Joyce, Ulysses
“Ah! I’ve scribbled all over the table!” she said, and, laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.
“What! shall I be left alone—without her?” he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting down to the table. “I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.”
He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.
“Please, ask it.”
“Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w. y. t. m. i. c. n. b. d. t. m. n. o. t.?
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Part IV, Chapter 13) (Tr. Constance Garnett)
Vanessa Williams – “Save The Best For Last”
Charles (Henry) Studios, Home Movie (1976)
“All of a sudden everything was over,” Nick said. “I don’t know why it was. I couldn’t help it. Just like when the three-day blows come now and rip all the leaves off the trees.”
…The big thing was that Marjorie was gone and that probably he would never see her again. He had talked to her about how they would go to Italy together and the fun they would have. Places they would be together. It was all gone now.
— Ernest Hemingway, “The Three-Day Blow”
“Kiss Me, Baby” by The Beach Boys
Ernst Halberstadt, “Ice Skating in the Public Garden” (detail) (1973)
“Are you going to stay in town long?” asked Kitty.
“I don’t know,” he answered, not thinking of what he was saying.
The thought that if he were held in check by her tone of quiet friendliness he would end by going back again without deciding anything came into his mind, and he resolved to rebel against it.
“How is it you don’t know?”
“I don’t know why. It depends on you,” he said, and instantly he was horrified at his own words.
She either did not understand his words, or did not want to understand them, for, seeming to stumble once or twice, catching her foot, she hurriedly skated away from him. She skated up to Mlle. Linon, said something to her, and went towards the pavilion where the ladies took off their skates.
— Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Utopia – “Say Yeah”
photograph by Mark Jefferson Paraan via Unsplash
Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.
— Melville, Moby Dick
Electric Light Orchestra – “Last Train To London”
Tom Hubbard, “…Sale of Donated Books…” (1973)
For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child — then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost him. . . .
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Billy Rose Theatre Division, “Harvest” (1913)
Newman uttered one of the least attenuated imprecations that had ever passed his lips…
—Henry James, The American
All stood amazed, until an old woman, tottering out from among the crowd, put her hand to her brow, and peering under it in his face for a moment, exclaimed, “Sure enough! it is Rip Van Winkle—it is himself! Welcome home again, old neighbor—Why, where have you been these twenty long years?”
—Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle
Jack E. Boucher, “Visitors Enjoy The View From Clingman Dome Parking Area…” (1959)
…although it had been his grandfather’s and then his father’s and uncle’s and was now his cousin’s and someday would be his own land which he and Sam hunted over, their hold upon it actually was as trivial and without reality as the now faded and archaic script in the chancery book in Jefferson which allocated it to them…
— William Faulkner, The Old People
“Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell
Michael Philip Manheim, “Constitution Beach, on Boston Harbor…” (1973)
What is time? A secret — insubstantial and omnipotent…
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
U.S. National Archives, “St. Valentine’s Day Hop…” (detail) (1975)
“You’re wearing a new dress,” he said, as an excuse for gazing at her. And now he heard her answer.
“New? You are conversant with my wardrobe?”
“I am right, am I not?”
“Yes. I recently had it made here, by Lukaek, the tailor in the village. He does work for many of the ladies up here. Do you like it?”
“Very much,” he said, letting his gaze pass over her again before casting his eyes down. “Do you want to dance?” he added.
“Would you like to?” she asked, her brows raised in surprise, but still with a smile…
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
“Do You Want To Dance” by Bette Midler
cf. photograph by Andy Beales via Unsplash (edited)
It was very early in the morning, the streets were clean and deserted, I was on my way to the train station. When I compared the time on a clock tower with that on my pocket watch and realized that it was already much later than I thought, I really had to rush, the shock at this discovery made me suddenly uncertain as to the right direction, I didn’t yet know my way all that well in this city…
— Franz Kafka, “Give It Up!”
Cincinnati Magazine, 1977
“…In your twenty-fourth year, you say? Hmm … please permit me one more question, or if you will, a modest suggestion. Since your stay here appears not to be good for you — neither physically nor, if I am not mistaken, mentally — how would it be, if you were to forgo the pleasure of growing older here, in short, if you were to pack your things tonight and be on your way with one of the scheduled express trains tomorrow morning?”
“You mean I should leave?” Hans Castorp asked. “When I’ve only just arrived? But no, how can I possibly decide about that after only one day?”
And as he said it, quite by chance he caught a glimpse of Frau Chauchat in the next room…
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
David Falconer, “Reading and Studying by Kerosene Lamps…” (1973)
The gaslight shone yellow through the frosted transom above the door of Number 31. Gordon took out his key and fished about in the keyhole — in that kind of house the key never quite fits the lock. The darkish little hallway — in reality it was only a passage — smelt of dishwater, cabbage, rag mats, and bedroom slops. Gordon glanced at the japanned tray on the hall-stand. No letters, of course. He had told himself not to hope for a letter, and nevertheless had continued to hope. A stale feeling, not quite a pain, settled upon his breast. Rosemary might have written! It was four days now since she had written…
—George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
cf. Corson Hirschfeld, “Sporting Life” (Cincinnati Magazine, 1977)
Morris looked vaguely round him, and gave a deep sigh. “Well, I was in hopes that we might still have been friends.”
“I meant to tell you, by my aunt, in answer to your message — if you had waited for an answer — that it was unnecessary for you to come in that hope.”
—Henry James, Washington Square
cf. Art Hanson, “Student at Work at Senior High School…” (ca. 1975)
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock…
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
cf. photograph by Josh Felise via Unsplash
When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn’t see me until I was five feet away…
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
cf. photograph by Peter Mason via Unsplash
What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“Because The Night” – Patti Smith
cf. photograph by Skye Studios via Unsplash
Daisy and Gatsby danced…
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby (1974)
“We’ve met before,” muttered Gatsby…
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“You weren’t so nice to me last night.”
“How could it have mattered then?”
Silence for a moment. Then:
“However — I want to see you.”
“I want to see you, too.”
“Suppose I don’t go to Southampton, and come into town this afternoon?”
“No — I don’t think this afternoon.”
“Very well.”
“It’s impossible this afternoon. Various ——”
We talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we weren’t talking any longer. I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click, but I know I didn’t care. I couldn’t have talked to her across a tea-table that day if I never talked to her again in this world.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Lyntha Scott Eiler, “Motorist Gets in Line for the Safety Lane at an Auto Emission Inspection Station…” (1975)
And so this storyteller will not be finished telling our Han’s story in only a moment or two. The seven days in one week will not suffice, nor will seven months. It will be best for him if he is not all too clear about the number of earthly days that will pass as the tale weaves its web about him. For God’s sake, surely it cannot be as long as seven years!
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Photograph by Tom Eversley via Unsplash
After all, I did not really wait in vain, because you are here again, we are sitting next to one another just as then, I can hear the wonderful edge to your voice, so familiar to my ear for a very long time; and under that billowing silk are arms that I know well…
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
John Sapiro 