Posted on: February 26, 2009
Storm in the Rockies, by Albert Bierstadt. 1866
We have some new fiction on tap, by Nels Hanson: In Pace Requiescat. Persectivalism, elective affinities and religious sensibilities. What is a hero? Why do some of us view the same people in such radically different ways? Your comments about the story are welcome.
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I’ve been a part of the flu crew for more than a week now. Still can’t kick it. It’s a strange time, and brings on feelings of pure selfishness and self-pity unlike few other states. Being sick also seems to create infinite loops and obsessions while caught between sleep and wakefulness. I’ve spent more than a few recent nights thinking I had discovered deathless prose and wonderful scenes…
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Posted on: February 23, 2009
In Pace Requiescat
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
—W.B. Yeats
To Poe’s so acute, so prophetic meditation of 150 years ago — that the truly extraordinary mind or spirit would necessarily find itself isolated, hated, and misunderstood by the society in which it appeared, and, especially, that news of the eminently great should not be sought in biographies but in “the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows” — the life of Joseph Clifton Case bears haunting testimony.
In all of recorded history, who but Case so intimately sensed the dread duality of all things, and so personally suffered this jarring collision of opposites, with less rancor or self-pity, less sorrow or hope?
Because he understood those emotions were barred to him, by himself from himself, for our better good…
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Posted on: February 19, 2009
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke. 1910
Rilke’s one and only novel is a mysterious, beautifully written, baffling modernist stew. Reading it for the third time, I was struck again by its yearning and incompleteness, its meditative and incantatory qualities, and the sense it gives us of loneliness and despair, without removing hope and the potential for redemption.
The protagonist is a struggling young poet, living in Paris, poverty stricken, seemingly quite alone. He is neither successful at his craft, nor completely defeated. Rilke presents Malte in the present, lets him take us back in time into his childhood, and also much further back, into the Middle Ages. This is done in a seemingly random fashion, but works. Fits. Amplifies what comes before and after. The voice of Malte is erudite, extremely…
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