Through the Window

" На этой земле есть только два рая - Прованс и читальный зал Британского музея".

"Форд, со свойственной ему безаппелляциозностью, убедил Джеймса Джойса буквально в том, что " главная обязанность вина - быть красеым".

A friend whose long-term lover had died of Aids told me, ‘There’s only one upside to this thing: you can do what you fucking well like.’ The trouble is, that when you are in sorrow, most notions of ‘what you like’ will contain the presence of your lost love and the impossible demand that the laws of the universe be repealed.

Most of the grief-struck suffer – especially in the first months – from a terror of forgetting their lost one. Often the shock of death wipes out the memory of earlier times, and there is a morbid fear that it will never be recovered: that the lost one will now be twice lost, twice killed.

But good jokes are the sign of a certain control over the world, or at least of a settled vision, the sort of vision a writer has. Good jokes are finally just jokes; whereas bad jokes are more revelatory of character and situation.

Novels consist of words, evenly and democratically spaced; though some may acquire higher social rank by italicisation or capitalisation. In most novels, this democracy spreads wider: every word is as important as every other word. In better novels, certain words have higher specific gravity than other words. This is something the better novelist does not draw attention to, but lets the better reader discover.

Even punctuations have different weights: thus the English exclamation mark is shoutier than the French.

The first translation we read of a classic novel, like the first recording we hear of a piece of classical music, ‘is’ and remains that novel, that symphony. Subsequent interpreters may have a better grasp of the language, or play the piece on period instruments, but that initial version always takes some shifting.