Archives for December 2018

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”

Henry James, Hawthorne

“History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.”

John Betjeman, First and Last Loves

“Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation.”

Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter” (trans. Jack D. Flam)

“There is no such thing as was— only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

William Faulkner, Paris Review interview (Spring 1956)

“Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“A Recording Session With a Composer: Igor Stravinsky,” a Columbia Records promotional film in which Stravinsky is seen conducting a 1955 studio performance of his L’histoire du soldat:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky