Double Day… August 2, 2002
“Time cannot exist without a soul (to count it).” — Aristotle
The above quotation appears in my journal note of August 2, 1995, as an epigraph on the reproduced title page of The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode (Oxford University Press, 1967).
August 2, 1995, was the fortieth anniversary of Wallace Stevens’s death. On the same date in 1932 — seventy years ago today — actor Peter O’Toole was born. O’Toole’s name appears, in a suitably regal fashion, in my journal note of August 2, 1995, next to the heraldic crest of Oxford University, which states that “Dominus illuminatio mea.” Both the crest and the name appear below the reproduced title page of Kermode’s book — forming, as it were, a foundation for what Harvard professor Marjorie Garber scornfully called “the Church of St. Frank” (letters to the editor, New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1995).
Meditations for today, August 2, 2002:
From page 60 of Why I Am a Catholic, by Gary Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 2002):
“Was Jesus teasing Peter when he called him ‘Rocky,’ naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person Einstein?”
From page 87 of The Third Word War, by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978):
“Two birds… One stone (EIN STEIN).”
From “Seventy Years Later,” Section I of “The Rock,” a poem by Wallace Stevens:
A theorem proposed between the two —
Two figures in a nature of the sun….
From page 117 of The Sense of an Ending:
“A great many different kinds of writing are called avant-garde…. The work of William Burroughs, for instance, is avant-garde. His is the literature of withdrawal, and his interpreters speak of his hatred for life, his junk nihilism, his treatment of the body as a corpse full of cravings. The language of his books is the language of an ending world, its aim… ‘self-abolition.'”
From “Today in History,” by The Associated Press:
“Five years ago: ‘Naked Lunch’ author William S. Burroughs, the godfather of the ‘Beat generation,’ died in Kansas City, Mo., at age 83.”
Part of the above statement is the usual sort of AP disinformation, due not to any sinister intent but to stupidity and carelessness. Burroughs actually died in Lawrence, Kansas. For the location of Lawrence, click on the link below. Location matters.
From page 118 of The Sense of an Ending:
“Somewhere, then, the avant-garde language must always rejoin the vernacular.”
From the Billie Holiday songbook:
“Good mornin’, heartache.”
From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:
“Birthday, death-day — what day is not both?” — John Updike