"Our lessons are becoming more and more difficult. May we learn them." - Ingeborg Bachmann
I would never have expected a collection of letters to be so"Our lessons are becoming more and more difficult. May we learn them." - Ingeborg Bachmann
I would never have expected a collection of letters to be so fascinating. This collection offers an astonishingly intimate and humane window into the quiet lives of two of the greatest German-language poets of the post-war period. You'll never read Malina or "Corona" the same way again, that much is certain.
The drama of their evolving relationship is captivating in its own right, and this work would almost be worth reading, even for someone who had never read their work.
It contains some illuminating discussion of their art and thoughts, and I was particularly interested by a dialog regarding whether or not Bachmann should provide a solicited contribution to a Festschrift celebrating Martin Heidegger....more
Well, that was a sad tale. Billie Holiday's autobiography ends with her using a mink coat as a blanket to keep her dog warm in a prison cell, and she Well, that was a sad tale. Billie Holiday's autobiography ends with her using a mink coat as a blanket to keep her dog warm in a prison cell, and she died years later at the age of 44, handcuffed to her hospital bed with police guards posted outside - for a simple possession charge. The decades of pure hell the cops rained down on her just for being hooked on heroin really surprised me. These guys really hated the hell out of her.
But then that's a big part of the story of jazz - Bud Powell suffering life-long neurological problems after being beaten by police. Miles Davis beaten bloody by police for not "moving along" when he was standing outside the club where he was playing, underneath the marquee with his name on it. Thelonious Monk unable to work in New York for many years because of a bullshit possession charge for drugs in a car he was in that probably weren't even his.
Speaking of Miles Davis - Holiday has something in common with him: both of them had fathers who died relatively young because the doctors wouldn't treat them. In Davis's case, an ambulance wouldn't take his father to the hospital after he was hit by the train, even though he was one of the wealthiest businessmen and landowners in the state. In Holiday's case, the hospitals wouldn't admit him when he was sick in the cracker-ass South.
So there it is - a great deal of this short memoir chronicles the all-too-common profound suffering of living as a member of a rejected and despised social group in the United States, where racism is the Original Sin that mars and threatens all of its accomplishments and ideals.
It's a harrowing read, and the early pages especially dealing with her early childhood are almost unbearable, beginning with the first awful sentences: "Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three."
That she rose from these horrible conditions to become perhaps the greatest singer in the history of jazz is a mystery of the human spirit, though I wouldn't go so far as to call it an inspiration.
This book is her own account of her life and times, pieced together from her ghostwriter based on conversations and interviews, and that's how it reads. It's not a worked-out autobiography, but a free-running series of memories and reflections.
I would have liked a lot more detail on some of the key periods in her life, especially when she first found success as a musician. On one page she walks into a restaurant at the age of 15 and is amazed to find the room enchanted by her singing at an open mic, and a few pages later she's hanging out with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, even though obviously a whole world lies between those two points. How did this woman with a fifth-grade education and no training at all work with professional musicians? How did she learn how to perform, how to get work? What was the personal journey like, meeting some of her great heroes and working alongside them? I would have loved much more on that - or anything, really.
It's more like meeting a friendly celebrity at a party and them telling you a bunch of stuff, and her ghostwriter does not seem to have prompted her to fill in any of the missing pieces. We never learn about the notoriously abusive behavior of any of the men she's with, and she gives little detail on her drug use, other than the legal hassles she experienced. And sometimes you have to read between the lines, because she's giving her own account of how things seemed to her, and she's not always the most reliable interpreter.
But if you want to learn more about Lady Day's life, here it is, in her own voice. It's clearly the key document in understanding that story....more
It’s difficult to convey how much this book says in just over a hundred pages. It is radical and important. It is one woman’s true story of going beyoIt’s difficult to convey how much this book says in just over a hundred pages. It is radical and important. It is one woman’s true story of going beyond herself through the heart of the wild and reflecting back into the depths of her body and spirit, which finally become the meeting place of what she seeks and that which is seeking.
If it were made up, the story would sound too fantastic to be believed. An anthropologist, specializing in animism, studying the nomadic Even people in Siberia, Marin has always sought out the remotest wilds beyond the edge of the map, hoping to encounter the Other, and thereby, somehow, at last, to find herself. Fully equipped with the conceptual tools of her discipline, she is fully conscious of what she is doing and why. There is something wild in her - among her Even friends, her nickname is “she-bear.”
One day, out in the snowy mountains above the forest where she has been staying, she is attacked by a bear - a bear whose tracks she had seen for days, and whom she was secretly hoping to see. The bear takes her head in its jaws and crunches her face before being driven off by an ice pick.
After an agonizing journey of many hours, medevaced by a Soviet-era helicopter, her face is painstakingly reconstructed. A kind of shamanic crisis ensues, and this woman with a life-long penchant for ecstasy in Eliade’s sense is plunged into reflection on what happened, and whether it means nothing, or everything, or both.
Her Siberian friends and confidants began to regard her as having become part bear. Who could believe such a thing? It is as incomprehensible as the fact that the famed doctor Oliver Sacks, who made rare neurological disorders famous in his popular books, should have himself suffered a leg injury on a hike that resulted in asomatognosia, an intriguing and unusual neurological condition that he had himself written about in his best-selling The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Can this be coincidence? Carl Jung wrote that what remains unconscious in a person returns in their lives as fate, and there seems to be something to this. In her deep study of animism, something has obviously been set into motion, something integrally bound up with the author’s self-defining conflicts. She is clearly a distressed person, driven and tormented by her needs to go outside of herself and inside of herself, and she says as much throughout the book.
When she and the bear become increasingly confused and mutually implicated in her dreams and memories, she reminds me of Parzival, who, together with his greatest foe on the field of battle, is "as one person fighting himself," in von Eschenbach's words, and the unknown enemy turns out to be his own brother.
There is something in this book that speaks to a quest that I myself am on, which has to do with encountering the world as it is, in its total nature, beautiful, or terrible, or both, and, finally, beyond sense and sense-making. The author’s odyssey is very different from mine, but her story is deeply illuminating. It’s a goldmine of insights, mistakes, absurdities, miracles, and journeys past the edge of the map, outwards and then back to the center from which all journeys begin....more
The extraordinary memoir of Jacques Lusseyran will probably primarily be known to most readers as a survivor memoir written by a member of the French The extraordinary memoir of Jacques Lusseyran will probably primarily be known to most readers as a survivor memoir written by a member of the French resistance who endured more than a year of captivity in the Buchenwald concentration camp, which is made all the more astonishing by the fact of its authors total blindness. But as with some other well-known representatives of the literature - here I think especially of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning - Lusseyran performs a kind of philosophical and spiritual alchemy on the base matter of his experience to extract a healing stone that his readers may use to connect to a deeper sense of possibility.
If that is not enough for one short book, it also includes a sustained meditation on the experience of blindness in a manner that will greatly appeal to fans of Oliver Sacks. Of particular interest to this reader was the work the author put into disabusing his audience of the notion that the experience of blindness is one of darkness, as a sighted person is likely to suppose, since that is the condition in which they themselves cannot see. For Lusseyran, at least, the experience of blindness is one of light, and here he clearly means light in an expansive sense, and this series of reflections will be of great interest to the phenomenologist and the philosopher.
Light for Lusseyran means the experience of illumination in all of its myriad senses, and all of them, he tells us, are available to the blind person - some of them even more readily than to the sighted person. I thought of Thomas Aquinas' conception of claritas, which does mean illumination or brightness, but also something like intelligibility, and I thought as well of the Buddhist philosopher's conception of the essence of awareness as self-luminous. These two conceptions link light to something more, and, I think, in the same way.
Lusseyran's story is astonishing, and this book is loaded with many insightful gems about how he came to endure his condition with a resilience that reminded me of the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Han - a kind of joy within the very real and very profound suffering, and a reminder that both are possible at once.
Not all of his insights landed for me, because the author's character is rather different from my own. He connects the idea of light with the feeling of direct apprehension and inspiration, and throughout his memoirs he projects a constant sense of certainty, where I tend to regard certainty with suspicion. It may have been a support in terrible times, but it does not strike me as particularly useful in less grave circumstances.
For example, when he writes of a hidden radio, the discovery of which by the Nazis would have surely led to the death of thousands (his words), he does not pause to ask whether the access to information afforded by this radio, no matter how highly-valued, is worth that risk, or if he has the right to take that risk on their behalf. There is a kind of unyielding faith that fills the book and animates his general stance to life that does not resonate for me - I prefer the attitude of Thich Nhat Han, who asks us in such moments to ask ourselves with complete humility, am I really so sure?
This is an interesting philosophical question that I think we may bring to bear when reading literature of this kind, as well as end-of-life literature. It is not clear to me that the clearest light on life as its ordinarily lived is necessarily thrown from the perimeters of human extremity, though the testimony of people at the limits is often valued as if the certainties that arise in such hours are more true and more real than our ordinary perspective. I'm not sure, by analogy, that the ravenous person is necessarily the best judge of food, though certainly they will see it in a different way.
This is a question that Lusseyran is self-conscious enough to consider, and wonders for us if it is the position of life that is inverted, or the position of extremity.
This is a fascinating and worthwhile book that will be intriguing to readers of many interests....more
This is the kind of book where you finish the last sentence and remain staring at the page, astonished and subdued, and deeply saddened that you have This is the kind of book where you finish the last sentence and remain staring at the page, astonished and subdued, and deeply saddened that you have to leave the world it created. Zweig's account of life in Vienna, Salzburg, and Europe is spellbinding. Merely as the autobiography of one of the most accomplished German-speaking writers of the early 20th century, this book would be exceedingly worthwhile, not only for the light it sheds upon his own work and creative process, but for its countless of closely-observed and brilliantly-related stories of encounters with some of the greatest European artists and thinkers of his day, including Rodin, Rilke, Theodor Herzl, James Joyce, Richard Strauss, and Sigmund Freud. But beyond that we get much more - a profoundly-involving and deeply-moving personal perspective on history on the continent as it was observed and interpreted by a perceptive and expressive genius. The story reaches from the very heights of human possibility to its deepest depths, and the harrowing story of onset of xenophobic authoritarianism has chilling echoes with current events.
This book is endlessly illuminating and entertaining. To any reader interested in European art in the early 20th century, or history, or Stefan Zweig, or all three, I would enthusiastically recommend this book. I'm shelving it with my favorites. ...more
This book contains translations of two works by the 12th-century master Al-Ghazali - his popular and justly-famous "Deliverance from Error," and his "This book contains translations of two works by the 12th-century master Al-Ghazali - his popular and justly-famous "Deliverance from Error," and his "Beginning of Guidance," included to encompass his basic perspectives on the theory and practice of the Islamic faith, respectively. I'll focus my attention on "Deliverance from Error," which is a far more significant and profound work, the "Beginning" consisting of admonitions with respect to the details of conduct in the daily worship of the faithful.
"Deliverance from Error" contains Al-Ghazali's spiritual and intellectual autobiography, describing his early days teaching and criticizing philosophy in Baghdad, his crisis of faith, and his subsequent pursuit of a form of life that was less abstract, and more directly connected to the spiritual source of his being. Thus he famously abandoned his family and responsibilities and went abroad to practice austerities and mystical contemplations with Sufi masters, until he achieved a satisfying epiphany, and then set about extolling the virtues of this form of life. In essence, his view is that while the philosopher discourses endlessly about piety and God, the mystic directly experiences and embodies it.
Now, there is an interpretation of Al-Ghazali that has been referred to by scholars as the "standard view," which runs something like this - the 'Abbasid Caliphate was a golden age of Islamic learning and culture, perhaps exemplified by its great engagement with the Greek philosophers, but also expressed by its achievements in medicine, mathematics, science, and literature. Then, Al-Ghazali came along and wrote a scathing critique of philosophy, his "Incoherence of Philosophers," and sounded a ringing tone of anti-intellectualism which disparaged study of the world in favor of piety and belief, and this became the prevailing mood of Islam ever since.
This interpretation is as widespread as it is false, pervaded by specious reduction and grotesque over-simplification. Al-Ghazali's actual view, as represented in "Deliverance from Error," is far more moderate, and more persuasive.
Al-Ghazali does not reject analysis or philosophy - on the contrary, he himself mastered the art of philosophy, and writes with scorn of pious fools who reject philosophy without understanding what it is about. Far less does he propound any kind of anti-intellectualism, but writes, for example:
"A grievous crime indeed against religion has been committed by the man who imagines that Islam is defended by the denial of the mathematical sciences, seeing that there is nothing in revealed truth opposed to these sciences by way of either negation or affirmation, and nothing in these sciences opposed to the truths of religion."
The attentive reader will notice that Al-Ghazali uses analytical reasoning and argumentation throughout his works, including his mystical texts, and at no point rejects science or understanding.
What he does firmly reject is the view that philosophy in itself is sufficient to bring about a total experience of God, or an expression of religious life. Instead, it forms a basis for understanding which is a point of departure for a real life of devotion and piety, expressed in conventional forms of worship, and of mystical experience, which delivers true communion with God.
It is perhaps easy to lose sight of the fact that it was a core belief of Neoplatonism that philosophy itself was the best tool to bring the mind to God. And when you come to the philosophical works of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the primary target of Al-Ghazali's polemic, you do indeed find an incredibly abstruse philosopher dwelling at stupefying length on intellectual minutiae as if God is to be found in discerning the various modalities of causality. It's tedious stuff, and I'm in deep sympathy with Al-Ghazali's critique.
The whole of Al-Ghazali's critique, it seems to me, could be summarized as: reason is no substitute for experience, and intellectual understanding is no substitute for piety. I find this exceedingly persuasive, and in general find Al-Ghazali far more readable and sympathetic than Ibn Sina or Ibn Rushd.
"The Deliverance from Error" is a short, engaging, and profoundly important work, and it has been ably translated by Watt in this edition - I would very highly recommend it to any student of Islam. ...more
This touching memoir of Beach's years as proprietress of the infamous Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris deserves a place of honor on the booksheThis touching memoir of Beach's years as proprietress of the infamous Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris deserves a place of honor on the bookshelf next to Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast." Any fan of early 20th Century literature and art will be delighted by her intimate reminiscences of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Valéry, Fitzgerald, and especially James Joyce. Her long years' friendship with the latter author and her indefatigable labors on his behalf makes up about a half of this short book, and it is a vital source of insight on his life and character.
It is filled with unforgettable anecdotes, such as her work with Hemingway to find and fund a compatriot to operate out of Canada and smuggle first-edition copies of Ulysses across the border into the US, literally in his pants, so they could be shipped to subscribers without being confiscated and burned.
The brief account of her harrowing years living under the Nazi occupation and the end it brought to her wonderful bookstore may well bring a tear to your eye. Beach emerges as a tireless, heroic, kind, perceptive, and altogether wonderful woman who had the great good fortune to be at the center of one of the high watermarks of European art and literature, and fully knew and savored it. ...more
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