Recently I found a few short quotes that resonate at this time of year and thought I would share them. After all, it is the season to be looking at words penned in this light.
1. “At Christmas play and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year.” Thomas Tusser
2. ” ‘Bah’, said Scrooge. ‘Humbug’.” Dickens
I have just discovered the American author James Salter, no matter how much one reads there are always wonderful surprises. Thank you Bruce for sharing this book. So I would like to share just two of his paragraphs from his autobiography:
“Kant had four questions that he believed philosophy should answer: What can I know? What may I hope? What ought I do? What is man? All of these Europe helped to clarify. It was the home of a veteran civilization. Its strengths are vertical, which is to say they are deep. The thing it finally gave was education, not the lessons of school but something more elevated, a view of existence: how to have leisure, love food, and conversation, how to look at nakedness, architecture, streets, all new and seeking to be thought of in a different way. In Europe the shadow of history falls upon you, and knowing none of it, you realize suddenly how small you are. To know nothing is to have done nothing. To remember only yourself is like worshipping a dust mote.”
” He was fond of books; steak tartare; gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause; cats; beautiful sentences; Stravinsky; and France. I also liked France, that is to say I was in its thrall, but I did not know Colette or Cocteau except for their faces. I did not know Jouhandeau or Paul Leautaud who, when he was old, forgotten man wrote ‘Ecrire! Quelle chose merveilleuse! The France that Phelps revealed to me was a cultured world in which literature endured.”
Gorgeous stuff, now it’s back to reading. Oh, glorious reading.
See you soon!
