A few notes on current reading:

• Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unsconscious. Assertions sparsely supported by evidence; or, wishful thinking. Allusive, sometimes unconvincing, but an enjoyable romp through the murk of someone’s unconscious, even if it isn’t necessary ‘collective’.
• Richard Butterwick’s Lithuania: A History. Chatty history, with more minute parenthetical digressions than even I care for, and also more references to video games than I expected (for a chapter on medieval/early modern history).
• Christmas Humphreys’s Buddhism. In addition to a name that is always surprising to see, Humphreys has a peculiar tone to his writings that combines sparks of keen insight with a wide-ranging, self-contented blindness.
• Dorothy Sayers’s translation of the Song of Roland. I don’t think the Song of Roland is very good; in this it is much like Beowulf. Roland also appears to have deserved the whupping he got.
• Eileen Chang’s Time Tunnel. Acute images interlarded with tedium. I cannot tell, writing that, if I mean the stories as experienced by the characters or the reader.
• D.C. Lau’s translation of The Analects. I think I still prefer the Daodeching, as what the Master says usually seems to be a bit tiresome and irritable, as though interrupting a secretary, currently on the phone with some remote VIP, with a banal question about the napkins for a small party to bid farewell to the latest batch of unpaid interns. But you know the secretary would be mad if you got the wrong ones, even though it isn’t at all important.
• A short biography of Michelangelo, with some of his poems and letters. The politics of education has not, apparently, changed all that much in spirit.
• Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King. The closest comparison I can think of is Wendy Walker’s The Secret Service, and I mean that as a high compliment, even though the books are not at all alike in their details.

The changing of the seasons is making itself felt. There is some relief, because the air is getting colder and smells of future rain rather than wildfire smoke – and the rain is desperately needed. A sense of uncertainty still keeps watch over passing moments, though – waiting, patient. What is awaited is itself uncertain. So one is tempted to linger, wrapped up in thought, in the pause before the day begins, until it’s time to sweep through to the next thing.

‘Eating too much cabbage may be a form of gluttony, but it doesn’t carry much moral opprobrium or significance beyond that’ —Paul Freedman (Out of the East, p. 159)

‘It isn’t necessarily the great and famous beauty spots that we fall in love with. As with people, so with places: love is unforeseen, and we can all find ourselves affectionately attached to the minor and the less obvious’ —Muriel Spark (‘Tuscany by Chance’, in The Informed Air, p. 63)

It is not easy to put the right interpretation on Spinoza’s desire for independence. He wished to think and to live nothing other than the truth […] He was not concerned with his own person. This man, who was so entirely himself, was without self-seeking. He was free from pride and violence and seemed never to think of himself. He wished his Ethics to appear only after his death and without his name. For the truth is impersonal. It does not matter who first formulated its propositions. He did not claim to possess the truth (it is a very different matter with scientists and mathematicians who justifiably claim priority for their achievements as mere achievements).

—Karl Jaspers (Spinoza, trans. Ralph Manheim, p. 6)

André Fraigneau. — Parmi ces objets il y en a bien certains auxquels vous tenez particulièrement? Si par exemple, je ne sais pas, enfin, s’il y avait le feu chez vous, quel est l’objet que vous préféreriez et que vous emporteriez ?

Jean Cocteau. — S’il y avait le feu chez moi ?

AF. — Oui.

JC. — Je crois que j’emporterais le feu. 1

1. Relatively well known bit from the end of the seventh interview in a collection of interviews.

‘We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of’ —Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge, 60%)

‘RC: What is your feeling now about the use of music as accompaniment to recitation (Persephone)?
IS: Do not ask. Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.’ —Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft (p. 38)

‘Some people achieve a kind of immortality just by the totality with which they do or do not possess some quality or characteristic. Rachmaninov’s immortalizing totality was his scowl. He was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall scowl’ —Stravinsky (Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, p. 55)

‘Most artists are sincere anyway and most art is bad – though of course, some insincere art (sincerely insincere) is quite good. One’s belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous, however, as one’s conviction that one is right’ —Stravinsky (Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, p. 120)

‘After fifty years it is quite impossible to discriminate between memories personal and impersonal; all memories are personal, yet mine are removed so far from the person that they cannot be told otherwise than impersonally’ —Stravinsky (Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, p. 187)

Any advance into new territory is always attended by certain dangers, for the pioneer has to rely in all his undertakings upon the equipment he happens to take with him. […] the pioneer must always bear in mind that another explorer, setting foot on the new continent at another place and with other equipment, may well sketch quite another picture.

—C.G. Jung (‘Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy’, in The Practice of Psychotherapy, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 113)