Over this past week, I've planned to write about Hemingway and Babel, about Walter Benjamin and Derrida, and about some performances I admire of classical music. I'll try in these next weeks to offer comments on each (though they'll be curtailed due to added commitments which have arisen).
I'm hoping to comment on the issue of how Hemingway and Babel differently portray ways of surviving in a hostile universe - and, with regard to the former, I'm struck by the bearing of two quotations on his work. One is Lawrence's remark the Hemingway fearlessly reveals what it feels like to lose all hope. The other remark is more obliquely relevant; it's W. C. Williams' idea in introducing the little magazine he edited in the early 1920s: "Contact" is a man without abstract analysis, parody, abstract ethics - with nothing but immediate contact with his world.
And I'm interested in how the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has made use of Walter Benjamin's thinking about repairing the broken world, attending to what disappears into its cracks and fissures, and defining the role of hope in human life. The link I'll try to explore is between Derrida's Spectres of Marx and Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations.
Finally, I intend to comment on some of the musical performances which I've found most moving and illuminating - there are performances of Beethoven I'm tempted again to cite, but I'll let a single example about Schuber suffice for now: Sviatoslav Richter's performance of Schubert's last piano sonata (D. 960 in B-flat), playing the first movement at an unusually slow tempo which allows him to convey with great force the beauty in every phrase. [Here's a link to the cd: Schubert: Piano Sonatas D.958, D.960 ~ Richter .]
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