42

...he performs the classical function of art. He offers no solution to problems and reveals no order in the universal pattern, but again and again as he shows us bits and pieces of it we say, "Yes! Yes, that's just how it is," not in the pleasure of simple recognition but in the delight of finding an idea sharpened...

John Canaday - New York Times book review Sunday April 1 73.

[arrow pointing in from previous page] place find his image strangely simplified and summarized. The hand of death, in passing over it, has smoothed the folds, made it more typical and general. The figure retained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. We cut the silhouette, in a word, out of the confusion of life, we save and fix the outline...

Henry James

43

May 11 73

It is amusing to catch another's room by surprise. The furniture froze in amazement when I switched on the light.

p67,68

It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously resolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly, he hires a punctilious Phillistine [sic.] to act as Clio's clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u's, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily not such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel and insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance...

p37,38

The Eye - Vladamir Nabakov

New York Times Friday May 11. 73 p43

Five human fetuses were discovered in a vacant lot in the Fort Green section of Brooklyn by a passer-by who notified the police. Homicide detectives were investigating.