13
ADMIRATION. I have admired many people. I have always considered myself a crooked tree, so straight trees earned my respect. Indeed, we should remember what happens to us before Christmas when we set out to buy a Christmas tree. Rows of lovely trees, and all of them look terrific from a distance, but close up, none of them really meets our desire for an ideal tree. One is too thin, another crooked, the third too short, and so on. It's the same with people; no doubt some of them seemed so imposing to me because I did nto know them better, while I knew my own defects only too well.
ADMIRATION. I have admired many people. I have always considered myself a crooked tree, so straight trees earned my respect. Indeed, we should remember what happens to us before Christmas when we set out to buy a Christmas tree. Rows of lovely trees, and all of them look terrific from a distance, but close up, none of them really meets our desire for an ideal tree. One is too thin, another crooked, the third too short, and so on. It's the same with people; no doubt some of them seemed so imposing to me because I did nto know them better, while I knew my own defects only too well.
44
AUTHENTICITY. My great fear: that I am pretending to be someone who I am not I have been aware of the fact that I am pretending. But let us think about this: What else could I have done? My ego was unhappy. Had I been preoccupied only with myself, I would have created a literature of accusations and groans. Instead, I kept my distance from the substance I extruded [...] and this helped me artistically.
[...]
Authenticity in literature requires that we do the least possible writing with one or another audience in mind. We do not live in the wilderness, however, and language itself, along with its traditions, rules us and is accompanied by the pressure of expectations from other speakers of that language. I have experienced writing for my Marxist colleagues in my youth [...] during my many years in France and America I did not write for a Western audience, but against it. [...]
AUTHENTICITY. My great fear: that I am pretending to be someone who I am not I have been aware of the fact that I am pretending. But let us think about this: What else could I have done? My ego was unhappy. Had I been preoccupied only with myself, I would have created a literature of accusations and groans. Instead, I kept my distance from the substance I extruded [...] and this helped me artistically.
[...]
Authenticity in literature requires that we do the least possible writing with one or another audience in mind. We do not live in the wilderness, however, and language itself, along with its traditions, rules us and is accompanied by the pressure of expectations from other speakers of that language. I have experienced writing for my Marxist colleagues in my youth [...] during my many years in France and America I did not write for a Western audience, but against it. [...]
83
CHURCHES. People go to church because they are divided beings. They wish, for a moment at least, to find themselves in a reality other than the one that surrounds them and claims to be the only true reality. This daily reality is unyielding, brutal, cruel, and hard to bear. The human "I" is soft in the center and feels every moment that its adaptation to the world is doubtful.
CHURCHES. People go to church because they are divided beings. They wish, for a moment at least, to find themselves in a reality other than the one that surrounds them and claims to be the only true reality. This daily reality is unyielding, brutal, cruel, and hard to bear. The human "I" is soft in the center and feels every moment that its adaptation to the world is doubtful.
186
[...] I was, I think, eight years old. The old folks gossiped and entrusted me to a young girl, who was to show me the park. We walked along the paths, crossed some little bridges which had railings made of birch poles - I remember that well. Then it happened. I looked at her thin bare shoulders, the narrowness of her arms above the elbow, and an emotion I had never experienced, a tenderness, a rapture, unnamable, welled up in my throat. I had no idea that this is called love. I think she must have said something, explaining, but I said not a word, strucky dumb by what had suddenly come over me.
[...] I was, I think, eight years old. The old folks gossiped and entrusted me to a young girl, who was to show me the park. We walked along the paths, crossed some little bridges which had railings made of birch poles - I remember that well. Then it happened. I looked at her thin bare shoulders, the narrowness of her arms above the elbow, and an emotion I had never experienced, a tenderness, a rapture, unnamable, welled up in my throat. I had no idea that this is called love. I think she must have said something, explaining, but I said not a word, strucky dumb by what had suddenly come over me.