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“Proverbs from Purgatory,” Lloyd Schwartz

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“Proverbs from Purgatory,” Lloyd Schwartz Yahoo / Inbox Lloyd Schwartz Proverbs from Purgatory It was déjà vu all over again. I know this town like the back of my head. People who live in glass houses are worth two in the bush. One hand scratches the other. A friend in need is worth two in the bush. A bird in the hand makes waste. Life isn’t all it’s crapped up to be. It’s like finding a needle in the eye of the beholder. It’s like killing one bird with two stones. My motto in life has always been: Get It Over With . Two heads are better than none. A rolling stone deserves another. All things wait for those who come. A friend in need deserves another. I’d trust him as long as I could throw him. He smokes like a fish. He’s just a chip off the old tooth. I’ll have him eating out of my lap. A friend in need opens a can of worms. Too many cooks spoil the child. An ill wind keeps the doctor away. The wolf at the door keeps the doctor away. People who live in glass houses keep the doctor awa...
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The Seasons by Pasternak

  The Paris Review Subscribe The Seasons Boris Pasternak , translated by Robert Lowell Issue 26, Summer-Fall 1961 I Now the small buds are pronged to the boughs like candle-butts. Steaming April! The adolescent park simmers. Like a lassoed buffalo, the forest is noosed in the ropes of shrill feathered throats— a wrestler, all gratuitous muscle, caught in the pipes of the grand organ. The shadows of the young leaves are gummy. A wet bench streams in the garden. Poetry is like a pump with a suction-pad that drinks and drains up the clouds. They ruffle in hoop-skirts, talk to the valleys— all night I squeeze out verses, my page is hollow and white with thirst. II The garden’s frightful all drip and listening. The rain is loneliness. A branch splashes white lace on the window. Is there a witness? The earth is swollen and smelly, the pasture is a sponge; as if it were August, the far off night ripens and rots in the elm-dissected field. No sound. No trespasser watches the night. The rai...
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Weil by Sontag

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  Simone Weil Susan Sontag Each of our truths must have a martyr. June 6, 2013 issue Susan Sontag (1933–2004) contributed over fifty reviews, articles, and letters to The New York Review between 1963 and 2002. The following is an extract from her review of Simone Weil’s Selected Essays , which appeared in the first issue in February 1963. It can be read in full here . Simone Weil in Marseilles, early 1940s The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There...
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Nathalie Sarraute, The Art of Fiction No. 115

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  Nathalie Sarraute , The Art of Fiction No. 115 Interviewed by Shusha Guppy & Jason Weiss Issue 114, Spring 1990   Nathalie Sarraute was eighty-three when she published her first best-seller, Childhood . Unlike her previous books, it was an autobiographical work. Memories from her Russian and French childhood emerge from a word or a gesture recalled, burn brightly for a moment, and fade. Quietly the mosaic takes shape, in her compassionate regard for the parents whose early divorce divided her love. She was born in 1900 in Ivanovo, near Moscow. Her first book, Tropisms , a collection of brief texts that appeared in 1939, marked a fresh direction in French literature. She describes tropisms as the “interior movements that precede and prepare our words and actions, at the limits of our consciousness.” They happen in an instant, and apprehending them in the rush of human interactions demands painstaking attention. Tropisms became the key to all her subsequent work. Highly r...
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