John Cheever (1912-1982)
“The Country Husband”
John Cheever, “The Country Husband”
John Cheever, “The Country Husband”
John Cheever, “The Country Husband”
John Cheever, “The Country Husband”
Francis Weed
The plane crash
The suburbs—Shady Hill
Julia Weed
The House
Ann Murchison—the babysitter
The kiss—a “relationship with the world that was mysterious
and thrilling”
Mrs. Wrighton’s windows—and angering Shady Hill society
Gertrude, the wandering child; the untrainable Jupiter
Lost—the last paragraph:
Then it is dark; it is a knight where kings in golden suits
ride elephants over the mountains.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
“The Garden of Forking Paths”
Jorge Luis Borges: Greatest Hits
Title
Description
“The Library of
Babel”
Exploration of a universal library which contains every possible book,
including another book just like it but one word longer.
“Funes the
Memorious”
After falling off a horse, a man develops a perfect memory. To
remember, say, last Tuesday, requires an entire day.
“The Aleph”
The narrator discovers a point in which all space and time can be seen
at once.
“Pierre Menard,
Author of the
Quixote”
A pedantic Cervantes scholar sets out to rewrite Don Quixote and
produces an identical—but “infinitely better” version of the novel.
“Tlon Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius”
A country is discovered which exists only in an aberrant edition of an
encyclopedia.
“The Secret
Miracle”
A Jewish writer facing a Nazi firing squad is granted time to finish his
magnum opus and writes the novel in the split second before he dies.
Jorge Luis Borges: The Book of Imaginary Beings
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
Once the idealist argument is accepted, I understand that it is possible—even
inevitable —to go even further. . . . The Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" is thus
invalidated: to say I think is to postulate the I, and is a petito principii. In the eighteenth
century, Lichtenberg proposed that in place of I think, we should say, impersonally it
thinks, just as one could say it thunders or it flashes (lightning).
Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time”
The greatest sorcerer [writes Novalis memorably] would be the one who bewitched
himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions.
Would not this be true of us?
I believe that it is. We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the
world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure
in time, but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so
we may know it is false.
Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
The first texts of Buddhism relate that the Buddha, under the fig tree, perceived by
intuition the infinite concatenations of all the causes and effects of the universe, the
past and future incarnations of each being. The last texts, written centuries later,
reason that nothing is real and that all knowledge is fictitious and that if there were as
many Ganges Rivers as there are grains of sand in the Ganges and again as many
Ganges Rivers as grains of sand in those new Ganges Rivers, the number of grains
would be smaller than the number of things not known by the Buddha.
Jorge Luis Borges, "From Someone to Nobody”
Why does it make us uneasy to know that the map is within the map and the thousand
and one nights are within the book of A Thousand and One Nights? Why does it
disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a
spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions suggest that
if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or
spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833 Carlyle observed that universal history is an
infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which
they too are written.
Jorge Luis Borges, "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
The odd thing is that the Secret has not been lost long ago; despite the
vicissitudes of the world, despite wars and exoduses, it extends, in its
tremendous fashion, to all the faithful. One commentator has not hesitated to
assert that it is already instinctive.
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Sect of the Phoenix"
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
The Cabalists] thought that a work dictated by the Holy Spirit was an
absolute text: in other words, a text in which the collaboration of chance was
calculable as zero. This portentous premise of a book impenetrable to
contingency, of a book which is a mechanism of infinite purposes, moved
them to dispute the scriptural words, add up the numerical value of the
letters, consider their form, observe the small letters and the capitals, seek
acrostics and anagrams, and perform other exegetical rigors which it is not
difficult to ridicule. Their excuse is that nothing can be contingent in the work
of an infinite mind. Leon Bloy postulates this hieroglyphical character, this
character of a divine writing this character of a divine mystery, of an angelic
cryptography at all moments and in all beings on earth.
Jorge Luis Borges
Once the idealist argument is accepted, I understand that it is possible—
even inevitable —to go even further. . . . The Cartesian "I think, therefore I
am" is thus invalidated: to say I think is to postulate the I, and is a petito
principii. In the eighteenth century, Lichtenberg proposed that in place of I
think, we should say, impersonally it thinks, just as one could say it thunders
or it flashes (lightning).
Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time"
The greatest sorcerer [writes Novalis memorably] would be the one who
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
Written in 1941
First translated into English
The first imagining of hypertext
Dr. Tsun
Captain Richard Madden
Viktor Runeber
Dr. Stephen Albert—a sinophile
Ts’ui Pen—creating a novel and a labyrinth
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
“"The Rocking Horse Winner"
D. H. Lawrence , “"The
Rocking Horse Winner"
D. H. Lawrence , “"The
Rocking Horse Winner"
Kafka by David Levine
Lawrence by David Levine
D. H. Lawrence , “"The Rocking Horse Winner"
Books
Short Stories/Novellas
Sons and Lovers
“The Virgin and the Gypsy”
Women in Love
“St. Mawr”
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”
Kangaroo
“The Odour of Chrysanthemums”
The Plumed Serpent
“The Fox”
“The Rocking-Horse Winner”
Studies in Classic American Literature
Apocalypse
D. H. Lawrence, “Snake”
Snake
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before
me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the
edge of
the stone trough
D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a
moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the
earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are
venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my
water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I
longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still
more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered
farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that
horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself
after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in
undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Taormina, 1923
D. H. Lawrence , “"The Rocking Horse Winner"
The mother
Paul
Uncle Oscar Cresswell
“There must be more money.”
Getting there.
£80,000