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Approachin

Fellini, Kurosawa and Buñuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.

Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote.

Thus are we men, and we know not how; there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange that it hath no history, what it was before us, nor can tell how it entred in us.

Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.

Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader's own notions of life. Great literature skirts the irrational. Hamlet is the wild dream of a neurotic scholar. Gogol's The Overcoat is a grotesque and grim nightmare making black holes in the dim pattern of life.

The fragments of [Tolstoy's] imaginative work posthumously published show that his art was still developing after Anna Karenina's death. But Gogol was a man of few books and the plans he had made to write the book of his life happened to coincide with the beginning of his decline as a writer — after he had reached the summits of The Government Inspector, The Overcoat and the first volume of Dead Souls.

A famous playwright has said (probably in a testy reply to a bore wishing to know the secrets of the craft) that if in the first act a shot gun hangs on the wall, it must go off in the last act. But Gogol's guns hang in midair and do not go off — in fact the charm of his allusions is exactly that nothing whatever comes of them.

"Lust and learning," Katherine once said. "That's really all there is, isn't it?"