The Jewbird - some vocabulary explained

1) Gevalt: Yiddish interjection expressing anxiety

2) Dovening: davening ( making the prescribed daily prayers of Jewish worship

3) Tallith: a shawl traditionally worn over the head or shoulders by Jewish men during morning prayers

4) Phylacteries: two small square leather boxes containing scriptural
passages and worn on the left arm and forehead by Jewish men

5) Dybbuk: in Jewish folklore, an evil spirit which enters the body of a living person

Robert Frost

Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Philip Roth, 1933 -

Novelist Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey (1933). He grew up in a crowded Jewish neighborhood, and he always loved listening to the conversations of his neighbors. He said, "In warm weather, people sat on the stoops and on beach chairs in the driveways. [At night] you'd be sweating, trying to sleep, and you'd hear them, you'd hear their conversation all the time, and it would be very comforting."

At an early age, he began to rebel against the expectations of his community, where all the parents demanded that their kids would become successful doctors and lawyers without losing touch with their cultural roots. He said, "Newark [was] the battleground ... between the European family of immigrants ... who clung to the rigorous orthodoxy and the [American] children who wanted to be rid of all that because they sensed immediately that it was useless in this society."

He went on to the University of Chicago to study English literature, and it was there that he began to write his first short stories. He published his first book, the collection of short stories Goodbye Columbus, in 1959, and it got good reviews and won several awards. He came out with his big best seller, Portnoy's Complaint, 10 years later in 1969. He has gone on to write many more novels, including American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). His most recent novel is Everyman (2006).

Philip Roth said, "I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists."


*History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

*I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

*Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

*A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

*It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

*Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

*Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

*Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

*When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

*My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets— no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Portnoy's Complaint

Bernard Malamud, 1914 - 1986

Novelist Bernard Malamud, born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). He grew up in Brooklyn in a household where both Yiddish and English were spoken. He wrote a few stories in college, but after he graduated he was too preoccupied with finding a job to start writing seriously. It was the middle of the Depression and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. He said, "I would dream of new suits."

In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time. Eventually, he got a few stories published in magazines and he got a job as a professor at Oregon State College.

It was while he was working there that he published his first novel, The Natural (1952), about a talented baseball player who is dragged down by his own desires and obsessions. He was inspired to write the novel after reading biographies of Babe Ruth and Bobby Feller. It was a huge success and he went on to publish many more novels.

Malamud said, "I ... write a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say."

*The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

*Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go.

*We have two lives—the one we learn with and the life we live after that.

*Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

*There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through wall.

*Life is a tragedy full of joy."

*Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

*What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews"

*I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

*The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

Joseph Conrad, 1857 - 1924 - Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski

*A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

*A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

*Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

*All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

*An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

*Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

*As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

*As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

*Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

*Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

*Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.

*For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

*Going home must be like going to render an account.

*Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

*History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

*I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

*I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

*It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

*It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

*It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

*Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

*Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

*Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

*Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

*The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

*The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

*The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.
Joseph Conrad

*The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

*The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

*The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

*The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

*There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

*There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

*They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

*This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

*To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

*Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

*Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

*Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

*Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

*You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

*You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Marshall McLuhan

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, 1911, the writer and critic MARSHALL McLUHAN – said, "It is the medium that is the message because the medium creates an environment that is indelible and lethal." In the mid-1960s came out with his books Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage. He believed that the way we acquire information affects us more than the information itself; since TV involves more of our senses than reading, he believed the printed book to be doomed.

Ernest Hemingway, 1899 - 1961

Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). He gave us the novels The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He went off to fight in World War I when he was just seventeen years old. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. His job wasn't very glorious: One of his main duties was to give away chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops. One day, just a month after he had arrived in Italy, he got hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then returned to his parents' home in Oak Park.

He dreamed of becoming a writer, and he wrote a few short stories while he was recovering from his wounds, but he was frustrated that he wasn't able to convey the intensity of his emotions about the war. He spent weeks lying around his parents' house, reading and talking to his sisters. He was one of the first American soldiers to return from Italy, and that made him a kind of celebrity in Oak Park. He gave talks about the war at places like the Oak Park High School, for ten dollars each. But his parents wanted him out of the house; they accused him of wasting his youth and not thinking seriously about his future. They suggested he go to the University of Wisconsin, but Hemingway said that he got all the education he needed in the war.

In 1920, when he was twenty years old, Hemingway started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines. The next year, he offered to be the foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, to be paid by the word. They agreed, and a few months later he left for Paris with his wife Hadley.

He moved into an apartment in the Latin Quarter, in a neighborhood full of drunks, beggars and street musicians. Rent was 250 francs a month, or about eighteen dollars. He wrote to his friend John Dos Passos, "[My apartment] is on top of a tall hill in the oldest part of Paris and directly above a fine place called the Bal du printemps .... The noise of the accordion they dance to you can hear if you listen for it, but it doesn't intrude." Hemingway liked to give the impression that he was a bohemian, struggling just to get by, but he actually had plenty of money. He and his wife could afford to travel around Europe, go to the horse races and eat dinner at nice restaurants.

Paris was full of well-known expatriate American and British writers in the '20s, and Hemingway became friends with most of them, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. Hemingway liked to meet writers at Sylvia Beach's English-language bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and talk to them about the classics. His friend Gerald Murphy called Hemingway "an enveloping personality, so physically huge and forceful, and he overstated everything and talked so rapidly and so graphically and so well that you found yourself agreeing with him."

Hemingway wrote every day, perfecting his writing style, following his motto, "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." Sometimes he wrote in his apartment and sometimes in cafés. He wrote in a letter to his father: "I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to."

In 1925 Hemingway published the collection of short stories In Our Time, and the year after that he published his first big success, The Sun Also Rises (1926), about a group of Americans living hedonistic, directionless lives in Europe. In one of the epigraphs to the novel Hemingway quoted Gertrude Stein's comment, "You are all a lost generation," and Hemingway became known as the leading spokesman for the disillusioned post-World War I generation.

By the time Hemingway came out with A Farewell to Arms in 1929, he was one of the best-known writers alive. Strangers would approach him at cafés, and he moved with his second wife to Key West. Young American men tried to act like "Hemingway heroes," speaking in staccato sentences from the sides of their mouths. In 1952, when Life magazine published The Old Man and the Sea in a single issue, it sold more than five million copies in two days.

The Secret Sharer

Adam Schlesinger

(born October 31, 1967) is a songwriter, composer, and record producer. He is the bassist for the bands Fountains of Wayne and Ivy. He is an owner of Scratchie Records and Stratosphere Sound, a recording studio in New York CIty.
Schlesinger was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for writing the title track of the Tom Hanks-directed film That Thing You Do!. Fountains Of Wayne was nominated for two Grammy awards in 2003.
Schlesinger composed and produced several original songs for the 2007 film Music and Lyrics, starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. His music has also been featured in films such as Robots; There's Something About Mary; Me, Myself and Irene; Josie And The Pussycats; Scary Movie; Art School Confidential; Insomnia; Fever Pitch; Orange County; Two Weeks Notice; and others.

Adam Schlesinger

I never thought that I could be so satisfied,
Everytime that I look in your angel eyes.
A shock inside me that words just can’t describe,
And there’s no explaining.
There’s something in the way you move, I can’t deny,
Every word from your lips is a lullaby.
A twist of fate makes life worth while,
You are gold and silver.

I said I wasn’t gonna lose my head, but then
POP! Goes my heart.
I wasn’t gonna fall in love again, but then
POP! Goes my heart.
And I just can’t let you go,
I can’t lose this feeling.

These precious moments, we have so few,
Let us go far away, where there’s nothing to do but play.
You show to me that my destiny’s with you,
And there’s no explaining.
Lets fly so high, will you come with me tonight?
In your dress, I confess, you’re the source of light.
The way you shine in the starry skies,
You are gold and silver.

A twist of fate makes life worth while,
You are gold and silver.

I can’t lose this feeling.

Bret Easton Ellis, 1964 -

Novelist Bret Easton Ellis, born in Los Angeles (1964). He grew up in California, but he went to college in Vermont, as far away from California as possible. And it was there, at Bennington College, that he took a creative writing class with true crime writer Joe McGinnis, and wrote a series of stories about substance abuse and the sex lives of California teenagers.

McGinnis loved the stories and showed them to his agent, and the result was Ellis's first book, Less Than Zero (1985) which came out when he was only 21. The book became a best-seller, and Ellis went on to write many more novels, including American Psycho (1991) and Glamorama (2000).

Robert Frost

Nothing Gold Can Stay


Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Joseph Conrad, 1857 - 1924

*I had to work like a coal-miner in his pit quarrying all my English sentences out of a black night.

*Not only does each customer differ from each other, but each customer differs from himself or herself over time. The customer who in 1981, weighed 190 pounds and had a 38 inch waist may, in 1991, weigh 220 pounds and have a 44 inch waist. A good tailor will take into account such changes over time and measure as necessary each time the customer calls. (p. 138)

from Drive yourself Sane by Susan Kodish

*All statements referring to reality should be dated since the reality to which they refer is always changing. John Smith[.sub.1968] is certainly not John Smith[.sub.today]. Our parents ten years ago are not the same as our parents today. They have changed and perhaps they haven't changed as much as we would want them to; they nevertheless have changed and our attitudes toward them should likewise change.

from: Joseph DeVito, in his audio lesson Static Evaluation

Carl Sandburg, 1878 - 1967

Journalist, poet, novelist and biographer Carl Sandburg, born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). As a hobo he collected and learned a number of folk songs and published them in a collection called The American Songbag (1927).

Eventually, he attended college and a professor, Phillip Green Wright, was the first to publish a book of Sandburg's verse, In Reckless Ecstasy, in 1904. He went on publishing poems along with articles about the labor movement but he didn't have any real financial success until a publisher suggested that he write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, published in 1926, was Sandburg's first bestseller. He moved to a new home and devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, for which he won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.

His Complete Poems won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

Carl Sandburg said, "[Poetry is] the successful synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."



Mill-Doors

You never come back.
I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,
The hopeless open doors that call and wait
And take you then for—how many cents a day?
How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?

I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,
In the dark, in the silence, day by day,
And all the blood of you drop by drop,
And you are old before you are young.
You never come back.


At a Window


GIVE me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan (1908). Was influenced by psychological theories of Jung and Freud. He believed that when he opened up his private life, he was describing basic human nature. It took him ten years to publish his first book of poetry, Open House (1941). Thirteen years later he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Waking (1954). Roethke battled bipolar disorder his entire life, and spent a lot of time in mental hospitals. But he said he used these periods of depression to gather material for his poetry, and many of his poems are about his own mental struggles.

Roethke said, "Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

William "Bill" McGuire Bryson, born December 8, 1951

Travel writer Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa (1952). As a young man he settled in England and supported himself with a series of jobs as a copy editor, and then he began writing about books lexicography, including The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984). He had been living outside of the United States for more than a decade, when he got the idea go back to America and write about how the country had changed in his absence. He borrowed his mother's Chevy and began driving to all the places he'd visited with his family on vacations as a child. He ultimately covered almost 14,000 miles, and visited 38 states.

The result was his book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989), in which Bryson poked fun at his home country, while reminiscing about his Iowa childhood. He wrote, "Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines."

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

*The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.”

*What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.

*He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.

*There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

*I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted -- stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

*And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?

*Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.

*When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

*I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

Youth, a Narrative (written in 1898)

*THIS could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak — the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.

* “Yes, I have seen a little of the Eastern seas; but what I remember best is my first voyage there. You fellows know there are those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.

*I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more -the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort-to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires-and expires, too soon, too soon-before life itself.

*And for me there was also my youth to make me patient. There was all the East before me, and all life, and the thought that I had been tried in that ship and had come out pretty well. And I thought of men of old who, centuries ago, went that road in ships that sailed no better, to the land of palms, and spices, and yellow sands, and of brown nations ruled by kings more cruel than Nero the Roman and more splendid than Solomon the Jew. The old bark lumbered on, heavy with her age and the burden of her cargo, while I lived the life of youth in ignorance and hope. She lumbered on through an interminable procession of days; and the fresh gilding flashed back at the setting sun, seemed to cry out over the darkening sea the words painted on her stern, 'Judea, London. Do or Die.

*I was amazed to see the ship still afloat, the poop-deck whole--and, most of all, to see anybody alive. Also the peace of the sky and the serenity of the sea were istinctly surprising. I suppose I expected to see them convulsed with horror. . . . Pass the bottle.

* Others, of the watch below, awakened by being shot out from their collapsing bunks, shivered incessantly, and kept on groaning even as we went about our work. But they all worked. That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It's my experience they always have. It is the sea that gives it--the vastness, the loneliness surrounding their dark stolid souls.

*What? They had no professional reputation — no examples, no praise. It wasn’t a sense of duty; they all knew well enough how to shirk, and laze, and dodge — when they had a mind to it — and mostly they had. Was it the two pounds ten a month that sent them there? They didn’t think their pay half good enough. No; it was something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting. I don’t say positively that the crew of a French or German merchant-man wouldn’t have done it, but I doubt whether it would have been done in the same way. There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful like an instinct — a disclosure of something secret — of that hidden something, that gift, of good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations.

*I did not know how good a man I was till then.

*“Ah! The good old time — the good old time. Youth and the sea. Glamour and the sea! The good, strong sea, the salt, bitter sea, that could whisper to you and roar at you and knock your breath out of you.”

He drank again.

“By all that’s wonderful, it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself — or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here — you all had something out of life: money, love — whatever one gets on shore — and, tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks — and sometimes a chance to feel your strength — that only — what you all regret?”

And we all nodded at him: the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone — has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash — together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.

*The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

*All a man can betray is his conscience.

* One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader.

* It 's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the Narcissus

by Joseph Conrad

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colors, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential--their one illuminating and convincing quality--the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts--whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism--but always to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious aims.
It is otherwise with the artist.
Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities--like the vulnerable body within a steel armor. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring--and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition--and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
It is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which follows, to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless. For, if any part of truth dwells in the belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of splendor or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity. The motive then, may be held to justify the matter of the work; but this preface, which is simply an avowal of endeavor, cannot end here--for the avowal is not yet complete.
Fiction--if it at all aspires to be art--appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the color of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music--which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to color, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.
The sincere endeavor to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fullness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus:--My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm--all you demand--and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its color, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its color, reveal the substance of its truth-disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or birth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.
It is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions expressed above cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary formulas of his craft. The enduring part of them--the truth which each only imperfectly veils--should abide with him as the most precious of his possessions, but they all: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial sentimentalism (which like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to get rid of), all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him--even on the very threshold of the temple--to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times and faintly encouraging.
Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the begin to wonder motions of a laborer in a distant field, and after a time, movements of his languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may -bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength--and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way--and forget.
And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim--the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult--obscured by mists. It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult.
To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and color, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile--such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished And when it is accomplished--behold!--all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile--and the return to an eternal rest.
-- Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad, 1857 - 1924

Joseph Conrad ( Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was born in Berdichev, Ukraine (1857), in a region that had once been part of Poland. His father was a poet and translator of English and French literature. Joseph and his father read books written in both Polish and French. By the time he was 12 years old, both of his parents had died of tuberculosis. He went to Switzerland to live with his uncle, but after a few years he decided he wanted to go off and see the world. He joined the French merchant marine, and began a long career as a sailor. He sailed to Australia, Borneo, Malaysia, South America, the South Pacific, and Africa. He joined the British merchant navy, and in 1886 became a citizen of Great Britain.

In the fall of 1889, Conrad settled in London for a few months. One morning, after he finished his breakfast, he told his maid to clear away all the dishes immediately. Normally, he would sit by the window and read from a book by Dickens or Hugo or Shakespeare. But on this morning he felt unusually calm and perceptive. He later wrote, "It was an autumn day . . . with fiery points and flashes of red sunlight on the roofs and windows opposite, while the trees of the square with all their leaves gone were like tracings of an Indian ink on a sheet of tissue paper." He began to write his first novel, Almayer's Folly, which would be published six years later. It's about a man from the Netherlands who trades on the jungle rivers of Borneo. Conrad said, "The conception of a planned book was entirely outside my mental range when I sat down to write." He said he felt "a hidden obscure necessity, a completely masked and unaccountable phenomenon."

Conrad went on to write many more novels, including Lord Jim (1900), The Secret Agent (1907), and Nostromo (1904). But he's most famous for Heart of Darkness (1902), about a man's journey down a river into the middle of Africa. Conrad wrote, in Heart of Darkness, "It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence,--that which makes its truth, its meaning-its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone."

Conrad said the task of the writer is "to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see. That-and no more, and it is everything."