Baby Tragos & I pacing ourselves at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice.
And she doesn’t even notice.
Villa Cimbrone, Italy, March 31, 2013
Villa Cimbrone, Italy, March 31, 2013
Villa Cimbrone, Italy, March 31, 2013
A sneak peek of the sneak peek of books coming fall 2013!
Patrick Leigh Fermor is actually staring at a goat (not shown) in this photo, but feel free to pretend he’s gazing at you.
I met her in Athens last year and talked about this project. She knew Fermor personally so this should be a great read for that reason alone.
I could not be more excited about this book, and not merely because Patrick Leigh Fermor is staring at a goat with the classical smile of subtle happiness.
“Ankara, Turkey” (1962)
Copyright Jean Mohr
(via goatsonthings):
Goat on a man. Be calm and be under a goat.
!!!
Tragos-endorsed.
“It was said by Epicurus, and he was probably right, that all philosophy takes its origin from θαυμάζειν, philosophical wonder. The man who has never at any time felt consciously struck by the extreme strangeness and oddity of the situation in which we are involved, we know not how, is a man with no affinity for philosophy—and has, by the way, little cause to worry. The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment; indeed, one might almost say that it is the fact that anything is experienced and encountered at all. It seems to me that this second type of astonishment—and there is no doubt that it does occur—is itself something very astonishing. Surely astonishment and wonder are what we feel on encountering something that differs from what is normal, or at least from what is for some reason or other expected. But this whole world is something we encounter only once. We have nothing with which to compare it, and it is impossible to see how we can approach it with any particular expectation. And yet we are astonished; we are puzzled by what we find, yet are unable to say what we should have to have found in order not to be surprised, or how the world would have to have been constructed in order not to constitute a riddle!”
Modern Tragedy
… Emma [Bovary] is in complete despair, but her despair is not occasioned by any definite catastrophe; there is nothing purely concrete which she has lost or for which she has wished. Certainly she has many wishes, but they are entirely vague—elegance, love, a varied life; there must always have been such unconcrete despair, but no one ever thought of taking it seriously in literary works before; such formless tragedy, if it may be called tragedy, which is set in motion by the general situation itself, was first made conceivable as literature by romanticism; probably Flaubert was the first to have represented it in people of slight intellectual culture and fairly low social station; certainly he is the first who directly captures the chronic character of this psychological situation. Nothing happens, but that nothing has become a heavy, oppressive, threatening something. …
… The more one studies Flaubert, the clearer it becomes how much insight into the problematic nature and the hollowness of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture is contained in his realistic works; and many important passages from his letters confirm this. The demonification of everyday social intercourse which is to be found in Balzac is certainly entirely lacking in Flaubert; life no longer surges and foams, it flows viscously and sluggishly. The essence of the happenings of ordinary contemporary life seemed to Flaubert to consist not in tempestuous actions and passions, not in demonic men and forces, but in the prolonged chronic state whose surface movement is mere empty bustle, while underneath it there is another movement, almost imperceptible but universal and unceasing, so that the political, economic, and social subsoil appears comparatively stable and at the same time intolerably charged with tension. Events seem to him hardly to change; but in the concretion of duration … there appears something like a concealed threat: the period is charged with its stupid issuelessness as with an explosive.
—Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), ch. 18 “In the Hôtel de la Mole”, tr. Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 488 & 490-491.
CRITIC: What is new is that our values are hollow. A play like Death of a Salesman shows what is wrong. It is a modern tragedy, and what is tragic today is not what was tragic in former times.
AUTHOR: It is hardly a tragedy. Classical tragedy deals with the uncommon individual whom we look up to in the beginning and who is somehow superior even in his destruction. Death of a Salesman is meant to be about a common case, and the hero is pathetic.
CRITIC: Let us not quibble about words.
AUTHOR: Equally pathetic individuals must have abounded in all ages, and the majority of mankind has been, and still is, far worse off; but the poets of former ages did not write about such men—at least not tragedies.
—Walter Kaufmann, ”Dialogue with a Critic”, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959), Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 29.
