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It is, moreover, to be observed that the regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity. Remarkable things we do as a rule only by fits and starts.

Hi GR friends, I don't think I can post a photo on the general update. Today I passed by Marcel Proust's home where he wrote most of his La Recherche and uploaded a pic to my GR photos in case you want to see it (I'm there too :-)).
https://www.goodreads.com/photo/user/...

Have to abandon this book. While refreshing in thematically (vs. chronologically) organizing the poems, themes are borrowed from another (painstakingly researched!) study not properly credited (a mention in passing would not do it). The translations sometimes drown Cavafy in current colloquialisms and, in some poems, the text is even changed/adjusted to reflect the translator's interpretation, not Cavafy's original.

“He was unable to resist the lure of his new rooms. Whereas the night before he had had to leave Delphine at one in the morning, this time it was Delphine who, at around two, left him to go home.”

Well, well, Monsieur Balzac ... nicely veiled from the censors. :-)

... by a kind of inevitability, the slightest events in his life were conspiring to drive him in a direction, which ... would lead him, as on a battlefield, to kill or be killed, to deceive or be deceived; to leave his heart, his conscience at the gate, to wear a mask, to dupe other men mercilessly, and ... to win his laurels by stealthily seizing his chance.
Eerie echo of what I just watched in The Apprentice film.

"Ourself behind ourself, concealed —
Should startle most —"
(from One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —)

Way ahead of Freud.

[that] Black Forest philosopher Heidegger has kitschified philosophy... after whom the generations have been chasing, showering him with revolting and stupid doctoral theses even in his lifetime—I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him...

LOL, the one and only Bernhard

Oh, mon cher Monsieur Proust, these endless sentences with innumerable subclauses (and is if the subclauses are not enough, there have to be the inserted parenthetical digressions)… and yet they work on me like magic.

OMG. Just as I am listening to Rachmaninoff’s Second concerto in the background and exactly as the slow movement is going on, I read this! They are working on the slow movement of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto.

I value most the one virtue which they share with gods and animals, and which need not therefore be referred to as a virtue. I refer to courage. You, Mrs Green, possess that quality in abundance.

She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating. Will-power is useless without a sense of direction. Hers was at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instructions for survival.

I sat for a long time at my desk, unable to put pen to paper, idly turning the pages of a notebook in which I kept accounts and made shopping lists. How fascinating they would have been, had they been mediaeval shopping lists! I thought.