In Napoleon’s entourage a young man from Grenoble,
Marie-Henri Beyle, known through his writing as Stendhal, earned his spurs. He made his
first acquaintance with Italy in 1800, when he crossed as a dragoon with the
army of liberation over the Grand Saint-Bernard pass to fight the Austrians,
and it was to remain his country of predilection. And he ‘fell’, as he put it, with Napoleon in
1814. After the Treaty of Fontainebleau,
he settled for a while in Milan, and later in life was to be French consul at
Trieste (then run by Austria) and Civitavecchia. Many of his greatest books are set in Italy,
including his autobiography The Life of
Henry Brulard (Brulard was one of his many aliases), which
opens with the writer looking out from the Janiculum Hill with ‘the whole of
Rome . . . from the ancient Appian Way with the ruins of its tombs and
aqueducts to the magnificent garden of the Pincio, built by the French, spread
out before [him].’ He travelled widely,
briefly visited Spain, spent 2 years as a quartermaster in northern Germany
(whence his pen-name) and of course was in Russia with the Grande Armée, on a
journey to Moscow and back that turned into a horrendous saga of frostbite and
starvation. He visited London three
times, and even contributed articles to English-language journals on the
cultural life of Paris. Stendhal liked
to pepper his French with anglicisms, and was one of the first writers to
popularise the use of the word ‘tourist’ in French. It was on one of his visits to Italy in 1817
that Stendhal described an experience that brought the literary swoon into
tourism. Visiting the Basilica of Santa
Croce, he found a monk to let him into the chapel where he could sit on a
genuflecting stool, tilt his head back and take in the prospect of Volterrano’s
fresco of the Sibyls without
interruption. The pleasure was
keen. ‘I was already in a kind of
ecstasy,’ he writes, ‘by the idea of being in Florence, and the proximity of
the great men whose tombs I had just seen.
Absorbed in contemplating sublime beauty, I saw it close-up—I touched
it, so to speak. I had reached that
point of emotion where the heavenly sensations of the fine arts meet passionate
feeling. As I emerged from Santa Croce,
I had palpitations (what they call an attack of the nerves in Berlin); the life
went out of me, and I walked in fear of falling.’ It was something he had observed about
himself: ‘when a thought takes too strong a hold of me,’ he writes in his
autobiography, ‘I fall down.’ There were
to be many cases resembling Stendhal’s experience in the 19th-century—the
hypersensitive Marcel Proust had constant attacks of the vapours (and asthma)
writing his novel In Search of Lost Time,and Dostoevsky is known to
have become terribly agitated when he saw the famous painting of the dead Christ
by Hans Holbein in Basle (and made his pregnant wife fear he was going to have
one of his epileptic fits). The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in
his first Duino Elegy: ‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of
terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it
serenely disdains to annihilate us.’
Philosophers were getting in on the act too. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, hypothesised that the
contemplation of aesthetically stimulating objects induces ‘a rapidly
alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same object. The point of excess for the imagination . . .
is like an abyss in which it fears to lose itself.’ Kant’s ideas were further developed in the
19th-century, when aesthetics abandoned the classical idea of imitation and
took on the idea that contemplating an object might be a self-activity
experienced as an attribute of the object.
This kind of involuntary emotional projection was called Einfühlung: it is the German word that was brought into
English as ‘empathy’. Iain Bamforth https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991758/
Stendhal, pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle, (born January 23, 1783,
Grenoble, France—died March 23, 1842, Paris), one of the most original and
complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century, chiefly known for
his works of fiction. His finest novels
are Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The
Red and the Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The
Charterhouse of Parma). Stendhal is only one of the many pseudonyms
Henri Beyle adopted. As a student he
grew interested in literature and
mathematics. In 1799 he left for Paris, ostensibly to prepare
for the entrance examination to the École Polytechnique,
but in reality to escape from Grenoble and from
paternal rule. His secret ambition on
arriving in Paris was to become a successful playwright. But some highly placed relatives of his, the
Darus, obtained an appointment for him as second lieutenant in the French
military forces stationed in Italy. This
led him to discover Piedmont, Lombardy, and the delights
of Milan. The culture and
landscape of Italy were
the revelation that was to play a psychologically and thematically determining
role in his life and works. In 1802 the
19-year-old Henri Beyle was back in Paris and at work on a number of literary
projects, none of which he completed. During Stendhal’s lifetime, his reputation was
largely based on his books dealing with the arts and with tourism (a term he
helped introduce in France), and on his political writings and conversational
wit. The uncompleted Lucien
Leuwen (1894) is perhaps the most autobiographical of
Stendhal’s novels. The
Charterhouse of Parma is Stendhal’s other masterpiece. It fuses elements of Renaissance chronicles,
fictional and historical sources, recent historical events (the Napoleonic
regime in Italy, the Battle of Waterloo,
the Austrian occupation of Milan), and an imaginative, almost dreamlike
transposition of contemporary reality into fictional terms. The
novelist Honoré de Balzac, in a famous article on The Charterhouse of Parma published
in La Revue parisienne in 1840, was the only one to
recognize his genius as a novelist. Stendhal’s
literary fame came late in the 19th century, and this posthumous fame has
steadily grown since then, largely because of the devotion of “Beylistes” or
“Stendhalians” who have made of him a true cult. Stendhal has now come to be recognized as one
of the great French masters of the novel in the 19th century. Victor Brombert https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stendhal-French-author
“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a
pie.” Boston Marriage https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/491350-boston-marriage
"I enjoy cooking with wine.
Sometimes I even put it in the food . . . " "People who love to eat are always the
best people. "Find something
you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it." Julia Child
https://www.today.com/food/15-julia-child-quotes-inspire-wannabe-chef-all-us-t101848
Eye-Opening Short Stories Everyone Should Read bJuly 2014
Recently, a friend said to me, "Hey, George, if a space alien
beamed you up to his ship and demanded that you explain what being human is
like, what would you say?"
"Well," I said, "I'd advise the alien to spend a few days
reading short stories." Stories are
the deep, encoded crystallizations of all human knowledge. They are rarefied, dense meaning machines,
shedding light on the most pressing of life's dilemmas. http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/george-saunders-short-stories-to-read/all
January 5, 2018 The
discovery of legible text on paper pulled from the cannon of Blackbeard’s
flagship paints a picture of the sailors.
Work by conservationists from North Carolina’s Department of Natural and
Cultural Resources shows that Blackbeard and his crew got a kick out of reading
“voyage narratives”—a popular form of literature in the late 17th and early
18th century that chronicled the true accounts of maritime expeditions. Specifically, Blackbeard kept a copy of
Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World,
Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711, detailing the British
naval officer’s participation in a global expedition aboard the ships Duke and Dutchess. The conservators made the discovery while
working on artifacts pulled from the wreckage of Blackbeard’s flagship,
the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which ran aground near Beaufort Inlet,
North Carolina in 1718. Blackbeard stole
the ship from the French in 1717, when it was being used as a slave ship (the
French had stolen the merchant ship from its original British owners in 1711,
when it was called the Concord).
The dreaded pirate gave the vessel a new name, added 40 guns, and made
it his flagship. The wreck was
re-discovered in 1996, and most of the ship’s 27 known cannons have been raised. The researchers found 16 tiny fragments of
paper in a mass of wet sludge crammed inside the chamber of a breech-loading cannon
(how it got there is anyone’s guess).
The largest piece was only the size of a quarter, but it’s exceptionally
rare to find paper in a submerged wreck—particularly one that’s 300 years old. Paper tends to deteriorate rapidly under
water. Working with specialist paper
conservators and scientists from the department’s Division of Archives and
Records, along with the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art
Conservation, the Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Lab researchers worked to
preserve and study the fragments. As
work progressed, it became clear that some of the fragments still contained
traces of legible printed text. After
months of research, the bits of paper were sourced back to the first edition of
Cooke’s book, published in 1712. As
noted, voyage narratives were a popular genre at the time, often inspiring both
real and fictional voyages. Cooke’s book
describes the rescue of Alexander Selkirk, who had been marooned on an island
for four years—an account that inspired Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson
Crusoe. George Dvorsky See graphics at
Lawrence Martin-Bittman (1931–2018), formerly known as Ladislav
Bittman, was an American artist, author, and retired professor of disinformation at Boston University. Prior to his defection to the United States in
1968, he served as an intelligence officer specializing in disinformation for
the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service. The
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent end to the Prague Spring became a driving force behind his decision to
leave for the United States in 1968. Defectors
at this time, most particularly those fleeing the Soviet Union and/or those
formerly in positions of government or intelligence are considered "a
valuable source of information" by the US government; the government as
such spends at least a year's time debriefing defectors and helping them settle
down to their new life. As part of this
process, he changed his name from Ladislav Bittman to Lawrence Martin (and
later, Lawrence Martin-Bittman) shortly after his debriefing concluded. He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1974
by the Czechoslovak government for treason by way of his defection, a sentence
that was not lifted until 20 years later. In 1972, 4 years after his defection to
the United States, Bittman was given a teaching position at Boston University,
primarily teaching classes about international media, particularly the press. He began to incorporate classes on
disinformation, propaganda, and international intelligence to make use of his
former career. In 1986, this led to him
founding a new center in Boston University's school of journalism specifically
about disinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Martin-Bittman
Anger: an acid that can do more harm to the vessel
in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured. Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65), fully Lucius Annaeus
Seneca and also known simply as Seneca, was a Roman Stoic philosopher,
statesman, dramatist, and—in one work—humorist of the Silver Age of Latin
literature. https://www.hoopoequotes.com/quotes/item/18756-anger--an-acid-that-can-do-more-harm-to-the-vessel-in-which-it-is-stored-than-to-anything-on-which-
also attributed to Mark Twain
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1960
September 28, 2018
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