The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth.
A friend is dying; he who put to me the Rubaiyat of Omar Kahyyan.
And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press
End in what All begins and ends in–Yes;
Think then you are To-day what Yesterday
You were - Tomorrow You shall not be less.
We are never less than ever we were, and yet are still clay.
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I’m sorry to hear that, Banno.
A beautiful poem, indeed.
Thanks - he’s in his nineties, on a morphine pump and unconscious, so peacefully moving on. We should be so lucky…
Wife found a copy of Fitzgerald’s first version, illustrated lavishly and sometimes lasciviously by Virgil Burnet. Nice.
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I found an old paperback of a bio of Mozart by Marcia Davenport. I can’t compare it to other bios, but it’s a great little book. I don’t know his music that well, but Hesse uses him as a important symbol in Steppenwolf, basically as one of the “immortals.” This is one of my reasons for buying it. Hesse is so passionate about music in that novel and in The Glass Bead Game — and such a great novelist — that I trusted him and thought it was finally time to reduce my ignorance on Wolferl, brother of Nannerl.
I just ejected Spotify from my life, so now I’m buying cds from thrift stores, getting great classical and jazz albums for almost nothing. Of course I’m on the hunt for Mozart’s work. If anyone has suggestions, I all ears. I can say that I tend to like fewer instruments. Maybe it’s because entire orchestras don’t translate well for listening in the car ( my primary listening situation.)
The Ego as Cause
by John Dewey
The Good Life Handbook: Epictetus’ Stoic Classic Enchiridion
A house in the Country by José Donoso.
The New Leviathan
by R.G. Collingwood
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Continental Philosophy since 1750 - Robert Solomon
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The Jesuit Reading of Confucius - Thierry Maynard (Rereading)
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Nineteen Lectures on Philosophy – Mou Zongsan
PATRICK AIDAN HEELAN: THE OBSERVABLE — Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
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The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Isaiah Has Come by László Krasznahorkai.
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Haven’t read this, but love Krasznahorkai.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony
Recent and current:
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Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust, Dark Entries, Compulsory Games.
I read his other collections a few years ago, now I’m trying to read everything of his in print. Short stories with a quality of creepiness second only to Kafka. The creepiness might be partly unintentional: Aickman’s world of the English upper-middle class in the mid-twentieth-century is downright weird in itself, somewhat familiar but also very alien.
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Manuel Mujica Lainez, Bomarzo. I had not heard of this till recently. Looks like my kind of thing.
Orcus in the Gardens of Bomarzo, Italy
This caught my eye. Some of his work is available as audiobooks on YouTube, which is my current preferred method of reading fiction. I’m giving it a whirl.
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~Heraclitus: A Study of the Energetic Core of His Philosophy by Oswalt Spengler
~The Kybalion
~Leviathan and it’s Enemies by Sam Francis
I really enjoyed Krasznahorkai – the book is a short story of just 50 pages long, but it is too intense and beautifully written. Looking forward to reading more about him, a well-deserved Nobel laureate.
My next book:
A Song of Truth and Semblance by Cees Noteboom.
Reading The Russian Revolution, A New History by Sean McMeekin. Note the appropriate lenin pants. Get it? Lenin. Yep.
Read Seven brief lessons on physics (Rovello) on a flight from Brisbane yesterday. It was very slight. Apparently that was the point.