Sweet Theft by J.D. McClatchy

Author:J.D. McClatchy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619027602
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

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“ ‘I distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness.’

“ ‘Pray, sir,’ said Mr. Milestone, ‘by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round the grounds for the second time?’ ”

—Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall (1816)

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—his squeeze-box

—but less of that anon

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“For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.”

—Käthe Kollwitz

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“When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us.”

—Turkish proverb

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Apropos the work of other artists becoming more spare, it should be noted that this is not always obvious; Parsifal is the thinnest of Richard Wagner’s scores (in terms of printed bulk).

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“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.”

—Max Beerbohm

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“When I was four, I could draw as well as Raphael. It has taken me my whole life to learn to draw like a child.”

—Picasso

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Rossini: “La Musique Anodine.”

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From Cesare Pavese’s diary:

“Great modern art is always ironic, just as ancient art was religious. In the same way that a sense of the sacred was rooted in visions beyond the world of reality, giving them backgrounds and antecedents pregnant with significance, so irony discovers, beneath and within such visions, a vast field for intellectual sport, a vibrant atmosphere of imaginative and closely reasoned methods of treatment that make the things that are represented into symbols of a more significant reality. . . . It is enough to create imaginative visions according to a standard that transcends or governs them.” (22 February 1942)

“If it is true that a man marries, for preference, his opposite (the ‘law of life’), that is because we have an instinctive horror of being tied to someone who displays the same defects and idiosyncrasies as ourselves. The reason is obviously that defects and idiosyncrasies, discovered in someone near to us, rob us of the illusion—which we formerly fostered—that in ourselves they would be eccentricities, excusable because of their originality.” (20 May 1940)

“Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.” (17 November 1937)

“The greatest benefit that a writer brings to poetry, to literature, is that part of his life which, while living it, seemed to him the furthest removed from literature.” (12 May 1947)

“Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.” (4 May 1946)

“Why do we find any new writer tiresome? Because we do not yet know enough about him to visualize him in a social environment we would feel confident in sharing.” (5 November 1939)

“No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.” (14 April 1941)

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“The beautiful girls you will have seen at Nîmes will not, I am certain, delight your spirit less than the sight of the beautiful columns of the Maison Carrée, since the latter are only ancient copies of the former.

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