Another proud member of the irony-based community.
Eudora Welty -- a ___________ fan, friend, and influential booster -- described his novels as stories of "the absence of love." His signal, said Welty, is "simple and undisguised: find the connections; recognize what they mean; thereby, in all charity, understand."Fill in the blank; the answer's at the link to this article (which liberally splashes spoilers, dammit).
"Mysterious Jackson area lawyer's blog about history, literature, and whatever irks him." -- NMC
"Just a hypersensitive pantywaist probably of Gallic descent who still suffers nightmares over what Gaius Julius did to your people 2,000 years ago." -- Kingfish
And therefore, reader, I myself am the subject of my book; it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.
-- Montaigne, Essays, "To the Reader.""I shall see myself, I shall read myself, I shall go into ecstacies, and I shall ask -- Is it possible that I have so much ésprit?"
-- Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.... the torturer has become – like the pirate and slave trader before him – hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind.
-- Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, 630 F.2d 876, 890 (2d Cir. 1980)
Well, I never. That kind of obliges one to start canvassing the used book shelves at Amazon.com, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteChoctaw has some. Macdonald is surprisingly hard to find used around here. The Chill is said to be his masterpiece, but I'm going to take a stab at reading the Archer books in sequence. The Moving Target and The Drowning Pool are the first two.
ReplyDeleteMacdonald's stories may have been of or about the absence of love, but what's interesting to me is how they would still seem immersed in love anyway. Because to suspend judgment in a willingness to "find the connections; recognize what they mean; thereby, in all charity, understand" is a pure, potent, and rare love of the truth. As man is subsumed in truth, a charitable understanding extends to humankind a love of every person, just as they are, through the vagaries of every moment.
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