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There is not the least doubt that Pietro Catte in the abstract has no reality, any more than any other man on the face of the earth. But the fact remains that he was born and that he died, as those irrefutable certificates prove. And this endows him with reality in actual fact, because birth and death are the two moments at which the infinite becomes finite; and the infinite can have no being except through the finite. Pietro Catte attempted to escape from reality by hanging himself on that tree at Biscollai, but his was a vain hope, because one cannot erase one's own birth. This is why I say that Pietro Catte, like all the hapless characters in this story, is important, and ought to be interesting to everyone: if he does not exist, then none of us exist.
a quote by Salvatore Satta
[...] Its implicit picture of the globe as irremediably divided between American capitalism and Soviet Marxism is an oversimplification. There is, according to Orwell, a third way--that of "democratic Socialism." And it is the historical duty of Europe, after two homicidal and, basically, internal wars, to show that "democratic Socialism" can be made to work. A "Socialist United States of Europe" may be very difficult to bring about, argues Orwell, but it certainly not inconceivable. It may, in fact, hold the fragile, elusive key to human survival. [...]
Essay on George Orwell
I was soon confirmed in my suspicion that our relations with Jesus Christ were in reality no different from those we had had with Adolf Hitler six months or a year earlier. When we consider the songs and choruses that are sung to the honour and glory of any so-called extraordinary personality, no matter whom--songs and choruses like those we used to sing at the boarding house during the Nazi period and later--we are bound to admit that, with slight differences in the wording, the texts are always the same and are always sung to the same music. All in all these songs and choruses are simply an expression of stupidity, baseness, and lack of character on the part of those who sing them, The voice one hears in these songs and choruses is the voice of inanity--universal, worldwide inanity. All the educational crimes perpetrated against the young in educational establishments the world over are perpetuated in the name of some extraordinary personality, whether his name is Hitler or Jesus or whatever.
quoting Thomas Bernhard (Gathering Evidence)
But there are losses. Marxism, being itself the product of an intelligentsia, notably in East Germany, felt committed to certain archaic, paternalistic ideals of high literacy, of literary-academic culture. Classical theatre and music, the publication of the classics flourished. Because it carried within its raucous facility and mass seductiveness the germ of anarchic protest, much of what is shoddiest in modernity, in the media, in down-market entertainment was kept (partly) at bay. Now the conductors and the performers are leaving the more than seventy symphony orchestras financed by the East German government. The professors are draining away. The poets, the thinkers wonder whether they can compete on the futures market of commercial choices. Oppression happens to be the mother of metaphor. In the supermarket, Goethe is a lossmaker. These losses, however, are, at an immediate level, luxury losses, and are perhaps recoverable. The minus signs on the balance sheet cut deeper but are much more difficult to define.
in an essay about Berthold Brecht, about the losses after the fall of the Berlin Wall
When Marx, in the famous 1844 manuscripts, imagined a society in which love and solidarity, rather than money and competitive hatreds, would be exchanged among human beings, he was simply rephrasing the summons to transcendence of Jeremiah, of Amos, and of the Gospels. When he urged a kingdom of social justice, of classless fraternity on earth, he was translating into secular terms the sunburst of the messianic. We know—I suppose we always knew—that such summonings were Utopian: that human beings are more or less gifted carnivores; and that man is wolf to man. What is even grimmer, we know now—and should have known since the Utopian fantasies of Plato—that ideals of equality, of communal rationality, of self-sacrificial austerity can be enforced only at totally unacceptable costs. Human egotism, the competitive pulse, the lust for waste and display can be suffocated only by tyrannical violence. And, in turn, those who practice such violence themselves wither into corruption. Ineluctably, collectivist-socialist ideals seem to lead to one or another form of the Gulag.
[...] It is better to have been hallucinated by justice than to have been awakened to junk food. [...]
Guy Davenport is faithful to Ezra Pound's injunction that prose ought to be at least as well crafted as verse. He is a master of subtle pace. Seemingly short sentences and fragmentary phrases open, via unexpected commas, into sequences as opulent as Japanese paper blossoms dropped in clear water. [...]
just a really pretty passage
So it is with the great Russian writers. Their cries for liberation, their appeals to the drowsy conscience of the West are strident and genuine. But they are not always meant to be heard or anwered in any straightforward guise. Solutions can come only from within, from an inwardness with singular ethnic and visionary dimensions. The Russian poet will hate his censor, he will despise the informers and police hooligans who hound his existence. But he stands toward them in a relationship of anguised necessity, be it that of rage or of compassion. The dangerous conceit that there is a magnetic bond between tormentor and victim is too gross to characterize the Russian spiritual-literary ambience. But it gets nearer than liberal innocence. And it helps explain why the worst fate that can befall a Russian writer is not detention or even eath but exile in the Western limbo of mere survival.
[...] It is, physically and mentally, well-nigh impossible to read those many hundreds of pages. And yet. As one forces oneself to leaf through this or that passage, the flashes of stylistic genius, of verbal incandescence strike one as might a brusque shiver of light across the sheen of a cesspool. [...]
[...] At numerous points in the political awfulness of the nineteen-thirties, Communism, even Stalinism, seemed to offer the only effective resistance to the triumphant tide of Fascism and Nazism. Scholem had no access to Benjamin's posthumously published Moscow diary. In it he would have found clear evidence of Benjamin's skepticism, of his aversion to the actual climate of Soviet society. Yet that aversion did not negate the suggestive strength of Marx's analyses of nineteenth-century capitalis or the instigations to an economic-materialist understanding of the creation and dissemination of intellectual and artistic works which we find in Marxist aesthetics. [...]
Gershom Scholem on Walter Benjamin