Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists...Essentially the serious novelist should do what s/he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.

عجبت لحال وطني . إنه رغم انحرافه يتضخم ويتعظم ويتعملق ، يملك القوة والنفوذ ، يصنع الأشياء من الإبرة حتى الصاروخ ، يبشر باتجاه إنساني عظيم ، ولكن مابال الإنسان فيه قد تضاءل وتهافت حتى صار في تفاهة بعوضة ، ما باله يمضي بلا حقوق ولا كرامة ولا حماية ، ما باله ينهكه الجبن والنفاق والخواء- الكرنك

ليسوا مذنبين ؟ هل فقدت عقلك ؟!. مجرد كونهم لم يصغوا لأسيادهم، وكانوا وقحين، وقليلى الأدب مع مساعد المدعى العام، وسمحوا لأنفسهم بأن يتحذلقوا أمام المحكمة، ينبغى أن يجلدوا بالسياط. ألا تعلم بان التبرئة تفسد أخلاق المرء؟ وتتلف الناس!. تريد أن تقول إن الجرائم يمكن أن تمر دون عقاب! ابدلها، من فضلك!

إن الناس الجهلة لا يعرفون مدى هذه القوة التي يمكن أن يمدهم بها تدخين الحشيش...إنها قوة تفرض على العقل البشري التركيز على موضوع واحد فقط طالما هو تحت سيطرة الحشيش، فاذا بدأ الحشاش يدخن و هو يفكر مثلا في موضوع مشاكله مع زوجته و أولاده، يظل كل عقله و احساسه و كل خواطره معلقة بهذا الموضوع طوال الفترة التي يقضيها مسطولا كأنه أصبح أستاذا متفرغا لدراسة تخصص فيها

فإنْ كانَ قلبكِ يا سيّدتي شيئاً غيرَ القلوب فما نحنُ شيئاً غيرَ النّاس , وَ إنْ كنتِ هندسةً وحدها في بناءِ الحبِّ فما خُلقتْ أعمارنا في هندستكِ للقياس , وَ هبي قلبكِ خُلقَ " مربّعاً " أفلا يسعنا " ضلعٌ " من أضلاعه , أوْ " مدوّراً " أفلا يُمسكنا " محيطه " في " نقطة " منْ انخفاضه أو ارتفاعه , وَ هبيه " مثلّثا " فاجعلينا منهُ بقيّةً في " الزّاوية " أو " مستطيلاً " فدعينا نمتدُّ معه وَ لوْ إلى ناحية ...!

Marx was troubled by the question of why ancient Greek art retained an ‘eternal charm’, even though the social conditions which produced it had long passed; but how do we know that it will remain ‘eternally’ charming, since history has not yet ended? Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own, and began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge. One result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them in the light of our own preoccupations; once this became less possible, the drama might cease to speak at all significantly to us.The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns - indeed that in one sense of ‘our own concerns’ we are incapable of doing anything else - might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually been valuing the ‘same’ work at all, even though they may think they have. ‘Our’ Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor ‘our’ Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a ‘different’ Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.

Należymy do gatunku składającego słowa jak ryba ikrę, produkujemy więcej kultury, niż jesteśmy w stanie przetrawić. W ciągu ostatnich lat pedantycznie zwalczaliśmy graffiti na stacjach metra, a jednocześnie wydajemy miliony koron na budowę nowych bibliotek narodowych. Tymczasem zapis pamięci narodowej może przyjąć również formę graffiti. Nietzsche porównał człowieka przejedzonego kulturą do węża, który połknął zająca, a teraz drzemie w słońcu, nie będą w stanie się ruszyć. Czas epigramatów już minął. Na przystani w Bryggen w Bergen znaleziono niewielki kawałeczek drewna z takim oto napisem runicznym: Ingebjørg kochała mnie, kiedy byłem w Stavanger. Fakt ten musiał wywrzeć pewne wrażenie na autorze napisu, podobnie zresztą jak na czytelniku, żyjącym osiemset czy dziewięćset lat później. Dzisiaj oszczędny w słowach autor, chcąc uwiecznić jedną schadzkę z Ingebjørg, dorzuciłby do pamięci potomnych czerystustronicową powieść. Albo też zadręczyłby życie swoim współczesnym wpadającymi w ucho popularnymi piosenkami w stylu 'Nie ma jak z Ingebjørg, nie ma jak z Ingebjørg'. Paradoks polega na tym, że gdyby przez wszystkie osiemset lat napisano równie wiele powieści, jak w latach siedemdziesiątych, to nikt z nas nie byłby w stanie przebrnąć przez tak obfitą tradycję piśmiennictwa i nie dotarłby do prostej, lecz przyjemnej historii o Ingebjørg. (...) Namiętna historia miłośna została odarta ze wszystkiego aż do kości, lecz mimo to niesie za sobą mnóstwo konotacji. Ponadto pewnych rzeczy czytelnik może się domyślić. Dostał do ręki coś, nad czym dalej może pracować jego wyobraźnia. Po czterystustronicowej powieści trudno jest samemu coś wymyślić.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral; it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare to define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing. All literature is an attempt to make life real. All of us know, even when we act on what we don’t know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying’, which is what an adult, i.e., an idiot, would say but rather, ’ I feel like tears.’ And this phrase -so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! The small child aptly defined his spiral. To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming- like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it— he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth.I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream- familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust.

رأيتني في حي العباسية اتجول في رحاب الذكريات، وذكرت بصفة خاصة المرحومة عين فاتصلت بتليفونها ودعوتها الي مقابلتي عند السبيل، وهناك رحبت بها بقلب مشوق واقترحت عليها أن نقضي سهرتنا في الفيشاوي كالزمان الاول، وعندما بلغنا المقهي خف الينا المرحوم المعلم القديم ورحب بنا غير أنه عتب علي المرحومة عين طول غيابها، فقالت ان الذي منعها عن الحضور الموت فلم يقبل هذا الاعتذار، وقال إن الموت لا يستطيع أن يفرق بين الأحبة.

إني أحترف السياسة وأتذوّق الأدب، فأسند الواحد بالآخر. وأكتب القصة في اوقات متباعدة حين يضيق صدري عن آهة لا يقوى صدري على حبسها. ونحن، رجال السياسة، ندرك أن التنهُّد، مثله مثل الشتيمة، لا يقدم ولا يؤخر. فعلينا أن نصدر عن الواقع، مهما يكن مؤلماً، للسير به إلى أمام، لا إلى خلف، نحو التغيير السويّ الممكن، لا المغامر، غير الممكن. ولكن، وعلى الرغم من كل واقعيتنا، هل نستطيع أن نمنع الإنسان عن التنهُّد، والمظلوم عن الشتم؟

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit.But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. ‘I have often thought’, he said to himself, ‘that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.’ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works…It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was ‘off reading’. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock.

رافدان لابد من جمعهما معاً في بنائنا الثقافي الجديد،موروثنا الحضاري الثقافي من جهة ، وما أبدعه الغرب في العصر الحديث من جهة أخرى ، ولئن كان الجانب الأول سيلزمنا بالدوران في نصوصه حفظا واستدلالاً فإن الجانب الثاني لكونه يعالج الأشياء فسوف يدفعنا دفعاً إلى ارتياد الكون المحيط بنا فننعم عندئذٍ بضرب من الحرية لا أظننا قد ألفنا منه الشيء الكثير ، وهي الحرية المغامرة في الهواء الطلق ، غير منحبسة في نصوص نحفظها ونشرحها ونستدل منها نتائجها .. كلا الجانبين ضروري ومطلوب لتولد أمة عربية ناهضة على جناحين ، هما تاريخها وتراثها الحيوي من ناحية ، وحاضرها بعلومه وفنونه وبعض نظمه من ناحية أخرى

ففي سورية مثلا كان التعليم يأتينا من الغرب بشكل صدقة .وقد كنا ولم نزل نلتهم خبز الصدقة لأننا جياع متضورون . ولقد أحيانا ذلك الخبز ، ولما أحيانا أماتنا . أحيانا لأنه أيقظ جميع مداركنا ونبه عقولنا قليلا . وأماتنا لأنه فرّق كلمتنا وأضعف وحدتنا وقطع روابطنا وأبعد ما بين طوائفنا حتى أصبحت بلادنا مجموعة مستعمرات صغيرة مختلفة الأذواق متضاربة المشارب . كل مستعمرة منها تشد في حبل إحدى الأمم الغربية وترفع لواءها وتترنم بمحاسنها وأمجادها . فالشاب الذي تناول لقمة من العلم في مدرسة أميركية قد تحول بالطبع إلى معتمد أميركي . والشاب الذي تجرع رشفة من العلم من مدرسة يسوعية صار سفيرا فرنسيا . والشاب الذي لبس قميصا من نسيج مدرسة روسية أصبح ممثلا لروسيا