Mariner Books

Perhaps only this echo of material interest can counterbalance the instinctive gesture of contemporary man: that of throwing things away.

[1980]

The sense of realism was so intense that the painting effortlessly achieved the effect sought by the old Flemish masters: the integration of the spectator into the pictorial whole, persuading him that the space in which he stood was the same as that represented in the painting, as if the picture were a fragment of reality, or reality a fragment of the picture.

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories

Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

While your body is always fixed at a particular point in space-time, your mind is always free to ramble in lands of make-believe. And it does.

The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it.

While our bodies are always locked into a specific here and now, our imaginations free us to roam space-time.

The brain is not designed for story; there are glitches in its design that make it vulnerable to story. Stories, in all their variety and splendor, are just lucky accidents of the mind’s jury-rigged construction. Story may educate us, deepen us, and give us joy. Story may be one of the things that makes it most worthwhile to be human. But that doesn’t mean story has a biological purpose.

‘The discovery of popular culture,’ writes Peter Burke,

took place in the main in what might be called the cultural periphery of Europe as a whole and of different countries within it. Italy, France and England had long had national literatures and a literary language. Their intellectuals were becoming cut off from folksongs and folktales in a way that Russians, say, or Swedes were not . . . It is not surprising to find that in Britain it was the Scots rather than the English who rediscovered popular culture, or that the folksong movement came late to France and was pioneered by a Breton, Villemarqué, whose collection, Barzaz Braiz, was published in 1839. Again, Villemarqué’s equivalent in Italy, Tommaseo, came from Dalmatia, and when Italian folklore was first studied seriously, in the later nineteenth century, the most important contributions were made in Sicily . . . In Germany too the initiative came from the periphery; Herder and Von Arnim were born east of the Elbe. (pp. 13–14)

the rest of you can’t remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full—nights as bright as day, but with a butter-coloured light—it looked as if she were going to crush us; when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind;