To love …

One doesn’t love in order to do what is good or to help or to protect someone. If we act that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons. This has nothing to do with love. To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God.

*****

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

*****

I could have. What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have happened but didn’t. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.

But love is much like a dam: if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

*****

I’m going to fight for your love. There are some things in life that are worth fighting for to the end. You are worth it.

From By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept.

For Annie.

Alice in Wonderland

Alice and her sister

rabbit

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

– Lewis Carroll

Probably the most famous opening lines in English literature, the opening lines from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written for Alice Liddell. She and her two sisters, Lorina Liddell and Edith Liddell, were on a boat trip on the river near Oxford, with Reverend Robinson Duckworth and the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. To keep the girls from getting bored, Charles Dodgson told them a story about a little girl called Alice who followed a White Rabbit down a rabbit hole.

• And what is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?

For Annie, with love.

Real wisdom

Jean-Jacques Rousseau by by Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1753)

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.

– Jean Jaques Rousseau, cited in A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism of French expression. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological, and educational thought.

Best known works: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his On the Social Contract.

Rousseau was a successful composer of music, who wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and made contributions to music as a theorist. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club.

The Count of Monte Cristo

seaman Edmond Dantès

The effect of the serials, which held vast audiences enthralled … is unlike any experience of reading we are likely to have known ourselves, maybe something like that of a particularly gripping television series. Day after day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else. — Carlos Javier Villafane Mercado

At the age of nineteen, seaman Edmond Dantès has a charmed life – about to be promoted to Captain, and engaged to the beautiful Mercédès. But Marseilles in 1815 is a dangerous place, and three of Dantes’ acquaintances set in train a chain of events that will lead Edmond to fourteen years of solitary confinement in the notorious Chateau D’If.

Our story starts at Chateau D’If, with a body being tipped into the sea. Edmond Dantès has managed to escape by exchanging places with a dead man.

Just at the moment his escape is discovered, a bloated body of a dead Maltese seaman floats by. Dantès quickly exchanges his prison garb with that of the seaman. From now on, he will be known as Maltese.

The reason for his escape, revenge, revenge on those who betrayed him and caused him to be cast into prison.

Lucky for Dantès, a passing ship rescues him, thinking he is a survivor from the Maltese ship wrecked on the rocks. The passing ship are smugglers.

Fourteen years earlier, Dantès has brought a ship home as First mate after the Captain died. The dying wish of the Captain, was to divert to Elba and deliver a package to Napoleon. It is this act that leads to his betrayal, this is France, with a restored king post-revolution.

Brilliant 4-part dramatisation of The Count of Monte Cristo by BBC Radio 4.

Alexandre Dumas was born in 1802. His father, the illegitimate son of a marquis, was a general in the revolutionary armies, but died when Alexandre was four years old. His most successful novels were The Count of Monte Cristo (serialised between 1844-1846) and the Three Musketeers (1844).

The Count of Monte Cristo (French: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) was originally published in the Journal des Débats in eighteen parts. Publication ran from 28 August 1844 to 15 January 1846.

Dumas wrote that the idea of revenge in The Count of Monte Cristo came from a story in a book compiled by Jacques Peuchet, a French police archivist, published in 1838 after the death of the author. Dumas included this essay in one of the editions from 1846. Peuchet told of a shoemaker, Pierre Picaud, living in Nîmes in 1807, who was engaged to marry a rich woman when three jealous friends falsely accused him of being a spy for England. Picaud was placed under a form of house arrest, in the Fenestrelle Fort where he served as a servant to a rich Italian cleric. When the man died, he left his fortune to Picaud whom he had begun to treat as a son. Picaud then spent years plotting his revenge on the three men who were responsible for his misfortune. He stabbed the first with a dagger on which were printed the words, “Number One”, and then he poisoned the second. The third man’s son he lured into crime and his daughter into prostitution, finally stabbing the man himself. This third man, named Loupian, had married Picaud’s fiancée while Picaud was under arrest.

To coincide with the broadcast of The Count of Monte Cristo, the Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 Tom Reiss’s account of the life of Alexandre Dumas’s father – General Alex Dumas, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.

• Alexandre Dumas Society (English)
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• The Count of Monte Cristo – Paris Walking Tour
• The Count of Monte Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) By Alexandre Dumas

The Pilgrimage 25th Anniversary Edition

The Pilgrimage 25th Anniversary Edition

I was not aware there was a special 25th anniversary edition of The Pilgrimage (2012) with a special introduction by Paulo Coelho until I spotted one on display in Waterstone’s in Farnham today on a cold winter afternoon.

Most people think The Alchemist was the first book written by Paulo Coelho. It wasn’t, the first was The Pilgrimage.

It was walking El Camino de Santiago that inspired Paulo Coelho to write The Alchemist.

Many of his early books have their origins somewhere along El Camino de Santiago.

When he walked El Camino de Santiago, it had fallen into disuse, maybe 400 pilgrims a year. Since publication of the Pilgrimage, the numbers have risen exponentially, with peaks in Holy Years, such that by 2005 there were 400 a day passing a bar on the halfway point.

El Camino de Santiago is medieval pilgrim’s route that runs along northern Spain. The destination is Santiago de Compostela where lies the remains of Apostle James the Greater, St James.

• The History of the Pilgrimage to Compostela
• Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela today
• El Camino de Santiago

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

Weirdstone journey

Weirdstone Edge

A wonderful dramatisation by BBC Radio 4 of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, a book first published in 1960. Narrated by Robert Powell.

Based upon a local legend. A farmer takes a white mare to market, on the way he meets a tall thin man with a beard, unbeknown to him a wizard. The wizard offers to buy the white mare. The farmer declines the offer, believing he will get a better price at market. The wizard says not, and he will await his return. With no sale, the farmer returns to find the wizard still willing to buy the white mare. The wizards taps a large rock with his stick, which reveals an iron gate. He taps the gate, which in turns opens to reveal a passage leading into the cliffs. At this point the farmer is afraid, says take the horse, but the wizard says no, you must be paid. He leads him into a cave full of sleeping knights, each with a white mare, bar one. He then takes him into a second cave full of gold and jewels and says help yourself. Next day the man tries to find the iron gate, but in vain. In time, even the location is lost.

This is the tale a man tells to children who have come to stay. Next day, they set off to try and find the iron gate.

Alan Garner used a local legend as the starting point for his book The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and the story is firmly set in the part of Cheshire that he knew so well, Alderley Edge.

This was a tale that had been passed down within his family, part of the family oral history.

Sir William Collins published The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, this was when Collins was a real publisher, not part of HarperCollins, part of the Evil Murdoch Empire.

Wonderful use of language.

The usual crass stupidity of the BBC, a wonderful dramatization, only available on-line for seven days.

• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

Dracula

Bram Stoker Dracula doodle

… her breast heaved softly … And then insensibly there came the strange change which I had noticed in the night … the mouth opened, and the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever … and said in a soft voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips: ‘Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!’ — Bram Stoker, Dracula

He was deadly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew too well … — Bram Stoker, Dracula

Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat … I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with a beating heart. — Bram Stoker, Dracula

Dracula is the classic Gothic novel by Bram Stoker.

There are two creatures of horror that are known to everyone – Dracula and Frankenstein – though in popular misconception neither bear much resemblance to their original creations.

Both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have led to a whole genre of horror movies, though none bear much resemblance either to the original characters or to the novels in which they first appear.

Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) was not the first novel to bring to the attention of the public the nature of vampires, but it was the one that gripped the public imagination, possibly because of its barely suppressed strong sexuality.

Lucy’s vampire tendencies were associated with strong sexuality, the New Victorian Woman who longed for sexual freedom and liberty. Lucy had the desire to be had by at least three men, which she expressed with the thought ‘Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her?’. She then quickly represses the desire reminding herself, ‘But this is heresy, and I must not say it.’ But once she becomes a vampire, she is free to indulge her sexual fantasies.

BBC has dramatized Dracula, and in doing so, has brought out the sexual nature of the original work.

• Dracula (part one) (part two)

Dracula starts with Jonathan Harker on his way to Dracula’s castle, where three female vampires feast upon him. The description of the journey to the castle is very much akin to the writing of Ann Radcliffe.

BBC once again shoots itself in the foot and is only holding Dracula on-line for a couple of weeks.

Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was born in Dublin, the third of seven children. He was a sickly child and didn’t gain his strength until he was about seven. He studied at Trinity College, then worked for a short time as a Civil Servant. As president of the university Philosophical Society, he introduced Oscar Wilde. He travelled to London where he became a close friend of Henry Irving. He was secretary to Irving, also manager of the Lyceum Theatre and Irving’s theatre company. He met the American poet Walt Whitman (1884). He died in 1912 at the age of 64, possibly from syphilis.

Today Bram Stoker’s 165th birthday.

• Happy Birthday, Bram Stoker
• Free Bram Stoker Books for His Birthday

A modern retelling of Dracula is The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

The film clip is from the 1922 silent film Nosferatu. It depicts when Dracula came ashore at Whitby, only gets it slightly wrong, the ship ran ashore at full speed, the crew all dead.

Top Story in QuoteLit scr*@*pbook (Friday 9 November 2012).

The Martin Beck Killings: Roseanna

Roseanna is the first in the Martin Beck series, written over a period of ten years 1965-1975 by the husband and wife writing team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

A body is found in a canal. No clues. Eventually a breakthrough, she is found to be an American tourist, a librarian on holiday in Sweden.

Detective Inspector Martin Beck is a detective in the newly formed National Homicide Squad based in Stockholm. He is helped by his colleague Detective Sergeant Lennart Kollberg.

The series give a very good picture of Sweden in the mid-1960s, can be seen as the forerunner of the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larssen.

In an ambitious project, BBC Radio 4 are dramatizing the entire Martin Beck series.

An interesting narration by the husband and wife team, it is distant, as though witnessing from afar, very much the style Kafka uses when observing Joseph K in The Trial.

The next book in the series, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, Martin Beck carries out an unofficial investigation in Budapest, in search of a missing journalist.

Unusual for the BBC these dramatisations are being kept on-line for a year, not seven days. Though does beg the question why not keep indefinitely?

• From Stockholm to Motala, journey through Beck’s Sweden accompanied by quotes from the books

In parallel BBC Radio 4 has a series Foreign Bodies looking at European Detective Fiction, only they could not have chosen a worst presenter than the ghastly Mark Lawson if they had tried. True to form, this series is only being kept on-line for seven days.

• Scandinavian fiction

Appeal for a Worldwide Reading for Pussy Riot on 12 December 2012

The International Literature Festival Berlin has launched a worldwide reading for Pussy Riot to take place on 12 December 2012.

In the past weeks the Russian judiciary has missed the chance to end the infamous prosecution of Pussy Riot. The sentence in the first instance as such, and the fact that there was a trial at all, is a disgrace! It is another example of how Putin’s system is trying to shut up a whole generation of artists and keep them from expressing themselves in art, culture and civil society.

The international literature festival berlin, writers and intellectuals from the whole world pay reverence to Nadeshda Tolokonnikova, Jekatarina Samuzewicz, and Maria Alechina, whose artistic initiative in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour has shown that there is another Russia, a country that does not tolerate bans on freedom of opinion and the ways these manifest themselves in and are imposed by the church or the ruling classes. In view of the dictatorial traits of Putin’s regime, evidenced by Russia’s permanent veto in the UN Security Council in association with China, which shows the country’s particular understanding of democracy and humanity, we need to express our solidarity with the punk band and the civil society institutions, who are being criminalized by a new law. This is a European and an international necessity!

In August 2012 the ilb launched an appeal and invited artists and intellectuals, schools and universities, radio and TV stations, theatres and other cultural institutions to join us for a worldwide reading in solidarity with Pussy Riot and the democratic groups in Russia on 12th December 2012. It was the 12th of December when, in 1993, in a general referendum, the constitution of the Russian Federation was adopted by the DUMA. It is not Pussy Riot who is undermining Russian democracy, but those who are trying to kill the achievements made by the soft revolution at the end of the last century.

We will read parts of the statements of Pussy Riot at court. The ilb will publish the texts in English, German, Russian, and other languages on its website http://www.literaturfestival.com from 15 November 2012.

All those who want to join us for the reading, please send your proposal for a performance until 30/11/2012 to:

worldwidereading@literaturfestival.com

So far this appeal is being supported by:

Hector Abad, Zsuzsa Bánk, Jeanne Benameur, Mirko Bonné, James Byrne, Amir Hassan Cheheltan, Bora Cosic, Marie Darrieussecq, Dorothea Dieckmann, Arnd, Gretel & Beatrice Dossi, Reimer Eilers, Peter Faecke, Dieter M. Gräf, Gintaras Grajauskas, Lars Gustafsson, Alban Nikolai Herbst, Uwe Herms, Hendrik Jackson, Willi Jasper, Elfriede Jelinek, Lidija Klasic, Peter Kleiß, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ekke Maaß, Norman Manea, Alberto Manguel, Sonja Margolina, Amanda Michalopoulou, Bart Moeyaert, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Tim Parks, Elisabeth Plessen, Martin Pollack, Santiago Roncagliolo, Annika Scheffel, Robert Schindel, Jenny Schon, Raoul Schrott, Sjón, Rebecca Solnit, C.K. Stead, Antje Rávic Strubel, Hans Thill, Ted van Lieshout, Vladimir Vertlib, Herbert Wiesner, Oksana Zabuzhko and Jenni Zylka.

Призыв ко всемирным чтениям в поддержку «Pussy Riot» 12-го декабря 2012

Aufruf zu einer weltweiten Lesung für Pussy Riot am 12. Dezember 2012!

Please ensure this worldwide appeal is widely circulated.

Last week, the two members of Pussy Riot still in prison were sent to penal colonies, the modern-day Gulags, leading to fears for their safety.

• Russia sends Pussy Riot women to camps east of Moscow
• Russian women’s prison camps: An ex-inmate’s account

Russian opposition leaders are being arrested.

• Moscow detains top opposition leaders
• Q&A: Russian opposition plot allegations

Give us this day our daily miracle

Give us this day, Lord, our daily miracle even if we are incapable of noticing it because our mind is focussed on great deeds and conquests.

And when we open our mouth, may we speak not just the language of men, but the language of angels too and say:

Miracles do not go against the laws of nature; we only think that because we do not know nature’s laws.

– Paulo Coelho

Manuscript found in Accra (Manuscrito encontrado em Accra) by Paulo Coelho, published in UK Spring 2013