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Nadezhola Mandelstam 1899-1980 by Joseph Brodsky

New York Review of Books - March 5. 81 p. 3-4

If there is any substitute for love, it's memory. To memorize, then is to restore intimacy. Gradually the lines of those poets became her mentality, became her identity. They supplied her not only with the plane of regard or angle of vision; more important, they became her linguistic norm. So when she set out to write her books, she was bound to gauge - by that time already instinctively - her sentences against theirs.

By itself reality per se isn't worth a damn. It's perception that promotes reality to meaning. And there is a hierarchy among perceptions (and, correspondingly, among meanings), with the ones acquired through the most refined and sensitive prisms sitting at the top. Refinement and sensitivity are imparted to such a prism; by the only source of their supply: by culture,

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by civilization, whose main tool is language. The evaluation of reality made through such a prism - the acquisition of which is one goal of the species - is therefore the most accurate, perhaps even the most just.

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deadens, ruins, and often kills... They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history.

...love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in the bed.

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You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. William Blake