"Prague Pictures"

[fiefoe]

It's really just a collection of three or four essays. John Banville appears a bit hapless and bewildered in his own account. The Prague I saw was much sunnier.

• All fiction is invention, and all novels are historical novels.
• .. for the space of a page or two an implied world comes to creaky life. It is all a sleight of the imagination, a vast synecdoche. And yet one goes on doing it, spinning yarns, trying to emulate blind Fate herself.
• Ripellino's vast effort of recuperation is an attempt not so much to express the city as to ingest it, to make that metamorphosis of world into self that Rilke tells us is our task on earth.
• that grave, elaborate, central European way that makes it seem one is being not greeted for the first time but already being bade farewell.
• to all subjugated people, this tongue-tied, apologetic shame before the eyes of strangers.
• How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea/ Whose action is no stronger than a flower?Shakespeare.. asks.
• Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Arcimboldo, Janacek, Josef Sudek
• The great church reared above us, 'ornate and mad' (Philip Larkin)
• he would propel himself back and forth (on the rocker) with steadily increasing speed until, just when it seemed the madly rearing chair would tip him forward on to the floor, he would grasp the armrests and pitch himself stiffly back against the headrest and go suddenly still, queasily smiling, like Dr. Strangelove in his wheelchair, pinioned by a gravitational force all of his own.
• Henry James's rebuke: art 'makes life, makes interest, makes importance'.. the work of art singles out, .. the essential matters, the essential moments, in the disordered flux that is actual, lived life, while ever acknowledging the unconsidered but sustaining dross left behind.
• (Sudek) would kneel down on the spot,... crawl with his camera into the lightless sack and, working by touch, insert the new film.
• A ray of sun had entered the darkness (in the catacombs) and both of us were waving cloths to raise mountains of ancient dust 'to see the light'.. Obviously he had known that the sun would reach here perhaps two or three times a year and he was waiting for it.
• During the Nazi occupation cemeteries were the only green spaces allowed to those wearing the Jewish star.
• 'The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.' Heidegger
• Thinking historically, like giving a story ah happy ending, is a matter of deciding where to stop.
• His silence seemed not rudeness so much as a kind of consideration, as if everything that he had to say had been said already, to everyone, and he was too kindly to think of burdening us with repetition.
• Tycho: this precious (gold and silver blended to a flesh colour) nosepiece was, it seems, reserved for 'dress occasions, while a copper one was used for ordinary daywear.
• Kepler.. suffered from double vision, a grave handicap, surely, for an astronomer.
• He somehow contrives to fill with extraordinary exactitude the space that he inhabits; compared to him, most people seem to be rattling around in the ill-fitting envelope of themselves, like astronauts in their space suits.
• Mme de Stael's identification of the predicament of the tourist - 'What I see bore me, what I don't see worries me'