Quote of the Day (Garry Shandling, on His Supposed ‘Intimacy Issue’)

“My friends tell me that I have an intimacy issue—but I don't think they know me.”—American stand-up comic, writer, director, producer, and actor Garry Shandling (1949-2016), quoted by Tad Friend, “Annals of Hollywood: The Eighteen-Year Itch,” The New Yorker, Apr. 13, 1998

The image accompanying this post, of Garry Shandling with then-girlfriend Linda Doucett, was taken Aug. 1, 1988, at that year’s Emmy Awards, by Alan Light.

Quote of the Day (David Mason, on Fiction and ‘Small Passages of Civility in Our Lives’)

“Fiction allows us to mourn with strangers. Even horrifying stories create, by virtue of their shape and their empathy, small passages of civility in our lives. Civilization is something we must choose; humanity is something we must make. Novels are particularly well-equipped to show us how social problems affect individual lives, but artists rarely envision viable solutions to the problems they dramatize. Perhaps it is easier to forgive in the imagination than in the streets and pubs and houses.”—American poet, librettist ,essayist, and memoirist David Mason, “Forgiving the Past,” The Sewanee Review, Spring 1998 (“Irish Literature Today”)

Mason’s essay appeared in the relatively early days of American polarization, as ideologically driven cable news stations and Internet sites were just starting to exacerbate real but still not unbridgeable differences in the nation. Since then, more and more people are addicted to their mobile phones and anti-social media.

Genres that require time, patience, and understanding—very much including the novel—have been increasingly falling by the wayside in the last quarter-century—and those “small passages of civility in our lives” that Mason hailed are growing increasingly narrow.

(The accompanying outdoor photo of David Mason, taken Apr. 24, 2012, was sent by the poet to Christine Mason.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Psalm 55, With Lines Influencing Henry James)

“I am distraught by the noise of the enemy,
    because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they bring[a] trouble upon me,
    and in anger they cherish enmity against me.
 
My heart is in anguish within me,
    the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling come upon me,
    and horror overwhelms me.
And I say, ‘O that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
yea, I would wander afar,
    I would lodge in the wilderness,
I would haste to find me a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest.’”—Psalm 55:2-8 (Revised Standard Version)

These biblical verses are the source of not one, but two prominent book titles. One phrase gave rise to one of the cornerstones of modern philosophy: Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 title, Fear and Trembling.

The other might not be as recognizable to those who have read a novel whose title echoes another verse here: Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.

Contemporary readers of this work from the mature period of American expatriate novelist will hear the character Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, explicitly likened to a dove because of her innocence, and leave it at that. (James, incidentally, left a clue to the real-life source of the character through the initials “MT”—Minny Temple, a vivacious, innocent cousin who died of tuberculosis at age 24.)

But readers in James’ own time, familiar as they were with the Bible—especially in the King James version—would have heard an echo in Psalm 55’s “wings like a dove,” and would think back to the entire passage—someone beset not just by the “terrors of death,” but also “the noise of the enemy” and “the oppression of the wicked.”

Milly, like the narrator of the psalm—though without knowing it (at least initially)—is at the mercy of conspirators: in this case, the cash-poor lovers Merton Densher and Kate Croy, who hope that, by Merton marrying the soon-to-die Milly, he will inherit her money, freeing him to wed Kate.

James’ personal religious beliefs appear to be unconventional, a byproduct of his father, Henry James Sr., who rejected orthodox Protestantism and became a follower of Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But traditional faith can leave an indelible imprint, and James—Junior, like Senior—would likely hear that phrase “wings like a dove” reverberate in the imagination in contemplating the object of the web spun by Croy and Densher.

Kate and Merton have committed the worst kind of transgression in exploiting the innocence of another human being. That violation will not go unpunished.

In the quest for material possession that justifies and finally undermines the love of Croy and Densher, the novelist might have found an equally apt literary allusion from Psalm 68: “The women at home divide the spoil, though they stay among the sheepfolds—the wings of a dove covered with silver, its pinions with green gold.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1997 film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, with Alison Elliott as Millie, Linus Roache as Merton, and Helena Bonham Carter as Kate.)

Quote of the Day (Amor Towles, on How Life Proceeds)

“Life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate, and our opinions evolve —if not glacially, then at least gradually.”— American novelist Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

The attached photo of Amor Towles was taken Aug. 9, 2018, by librairie mollat.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Cunk on Shakespeare,’ on School in The Bard's Day)

"School in Shakespeare’s day and age was vastly different to our own. In fact, it was far easier because he didn't have to study Shakespeare."—English actress and comedian Diane Morgan, with her favorite line as ill-informed interviewer Philomena Cunk, on the BBC mockumentary “Cunk on Shakespeare,” original air date May 11, 2016, teleplay by Charlie Brooker, Jason Hazeley, and Joel Morris, directed by Lorry Powles

Quote of the Day (Roger Ebert, on Being Inarticulate)

“Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate—to be unable to tell another person what you really feel.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert (1942-2013), review of the film Heat, December 15, 1995

(The accompanying photo, showing Ebert giving an interview at a Chicago public radio station, on the “Sound Opinions” program in 2006, comes from Flickr: Roger Ebert.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Barber and Menotti, on Why ‘Must the Winter Come So Soon?’)

“Must the winter come so soon?
Night after night I hear the hungry deer
Wander weeping in the woods
And from his house of brittle bark hoots the frozen owl.”—American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981), “Must the winter come so soon?”, from the opera Vanessa (1957), with English lyrics by Italian-American librettist Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)
 
It seems like we were just making the acquaintance of the fall of 2024 when winter began blowing its icy breath on us. A lifelong resident of the Northeast, I expect as much. But this morning, a friend now living in Florida texted me that it was only 35 degrees down there.
 
Well, no bother. I can always wear a heavy sweater and pull a blanket tighter inside when it gets cold. On the other hand, when the temperatures turn subtropical, aside from cranking up the AC and staying indoors, there’s not much you can do on those muggy summer days.
 
For now, anyway, take what comfort you can in the lovely lyrics and music from Barber’s collaboration with Menotti.
 
I took the image accompanying this post, by the way, 14 years ago this month, only a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. It’s easy to imagine both “the hungry deer” that “wander weeping in the woods” evoked by Barber and Menotti, as well as the “hazy shade of winter” that Simon and Garfunkel sang about in the Sixties.