The Shchukin Gallery

"As one climbs the stairs [of the Shchukin Gallery], frozen through and through, one glimpses at the top of the stairwell the famous Matisse murals, naked figures rhythmically arranged against a background of concentrated red as warm and as luminous as as that of Russian icons. Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso were the major passions of this collector. One room has twenty-nine Gauguins crammed on its walls . . . There is probably no other place in the world that provides one with such an overview of Picasso's development, from the early paintings of his twenties through 1914."

~~ from Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin

without party or profession

"When we finally left, we stopped in a pastry shop for something warm to drink. When we got back home, there was a long conversation about my position as a free-lance writer, without party or profession."

~~ from Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin

the most gifted ones

"All in all I said very little [while Asja] spoke with great animation about her work with children at the children's center. For the second time I heard the story about the child in her care who had bashed in the skull of another of her children. Curiously enough, it was only now that I understood this rather simple story (which could have had grave consequences for Asja; but the doctors were convinced that the child would be saved). This often happens to me: I barely hear what she is saying because I am examining her so intently. She expanded on her idea: that children must be divided up into groups, because it is utterly impossible to keep the wildest ones—she calls them the most gifted ones—busy with the others. They simply get bored with the things that absorb normal children. And it is very evident that Asja, as she herself says, is most successful with the wildest children. Asja also spoke of the things she was writing, three articles for a Latvian communist newspaper that appears in Moscow: this paper reaches Riga by illegal means and it is very useful for her to be read there."

~~ from Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin

streetcar travel

"Hazards of streetcar travel here. Through the iced-over windows you can never make out where you are. If you do find out, then the way to the exit is blocked by a mass of bulkily clad people. Since you get on at the rear but leave from the head of the car, you have to work your way through the crowd and your success depends on sheer luck and on the uninhibited use of physical force. On the other hand, there are conveniences here unknown to Western Europe."

~~ from Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin

Could she explain

"Could she explain how the leisure of her life—that exquisite idleness he had created by giving her everything—was driving her insane?"

~~ from Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

one of America's greatest writers

"Fred Exley was maybe the most difficult writer I ever dealt with. He was such a drinker that by nine in the morning he’d be totally drunk. He was also one of those guys who wanted to argue about every change. He wrote a piece for Inside Sports about his relationship with his high school coach. Really nice piece. You couldn’t tell if it was a short story or a reported piece and we didn’t claim it as either one. The piece comes in, it’s about 6,000 words long and Walsh tells me to cut it to four and I say, “John, this is a short story by one of America’s greatest writers. You don’t cut it.” Walsh insisted that we make the cuts.

"So in order to do the piece I had to get up at seven for a couple of months and call Exley. I could hear him getting drunk on the phone and I’d argue about the story and the cuts with him. By nine he was totally out of it."

~~ from "The Man Behind the Curtain" by Alex Belth

she felt lost and forsaken

"Why had he stood there looking? What had he been thinking? His expression had been so serious. Were there things he had never told her about himself? Who was he, really? From all the recesses of her being came the questions, questions which had never occurred to her, and there on the foreign street she felt lost and forsaken, and with great longing she began to think of Kansas City."

~~ from Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Resurrection!

And then a most catholic review of Fight for Your Long Day—"Fight for Your Long Loud Laughs"—cried out from cold and brought light to this writer.

unquestionable sources

"[Mable Ong] had a positive manner of speaking, now and then turning her head aside to cough or laugh; she spoke bitterly about capitalism and would relate stories she had heard from unquestionable sources about women dying in childbirth because they could not afford the high cost of hospitalization, or even the cost of insurance programs."

~~ from Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

"the public educational system"

"As for the public educational system, well, she could not speak of it without profanity, and at every word Mrs. Bridge inwardly flinched. Superior children, the same as Socialists, did not have a chance. The system was geared to bourgeois mediocrity."

~~ from Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

the book that he was reading

"'[Ernst Cassirer] tried to push his way through to the back of the tram, and stood there occupying as little space as possible, with one hand reaching for a support so that he didn't fall over, and in the other holding the book that he was reading. Noise, jostling, poor light, bad air—none of it got in his way.'"

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

life as a teacher

"As [Martin] Heidegger was praising the primordial wisdom and natural integrity of his Black Forest farmers, the provincial teacher saw his fellow adults only as cattle, maggots, or, at best, three-quarters human. [Ludwig] Wittgenstein loved the idea of the "simple people," but not the reality, just as he loved the idea of life as a teacher, but not the rapidly changing job of teaching in Austria under the educational reforms instituted by the Social Democrats. His revulsion at the teaching methods that were being introduced was clear[.]"

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger