Repost: 25 Famous Authors’ Poetic Descriptions of Paris

http://flavorwire.com/404021/25-famous-authors-poetic-descriptions-of-paris

 

by Alison Nastasi

July 14, 2013

 

Happy Bastille Day! It’s the 224th anniversary of the storming of the famous Paris prison, which helped dismantled France’s repressive monarchy. If you can’t dance along the Champs-Élysées, but want to spread the Parisian pride, head past the jump for a few eloquent and adoring words from famous writers that celebrate the City of Light.

 

Image credit: Ernest Hemingway Collection.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Ernest Hemingway

 

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

 

“Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”

 

“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”

 

Charles Dickens

 

“I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!”

 

Henry James

 

“The great merit of the place is that one can arrange one’s life here exactly as one pleases… there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.”

 

“Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes.”

 

Honoré de Balzac

 

“Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.”

 

Victor Hugo

 

“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”

 

 

Oscar Wilde

 

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris.”

 

Willa Cather

 

“Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.”

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe

 

“At last I have come into a dreamland.”

 

Katherine Anne Porter

 

“Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time.”

 

Henry Miller

 

“When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.”

 

Gaston Leroux

 

“In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.”

 

 

Gertrude Stein

 

“Paris, France is exciting and peaceful.”

 

“America is my country, and Paris is my hometown.”

 

Anaïs Nin

 

“Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous. Here it is the cocktail hour.”

 

“In Paris, when entering a room, everyone pays attention, seeks to make you feel welcome, to enter into conversation, is curious, responsive. Here it seems everyone is pretending not to see, hear, or look too intently. The faces reveal no interest, no responsiveness. Overtones are missing. Relationships seem impersonal and everyone conceals his secret life, whereas in Paris it was the exciting substance of our talks, intimate revelations and sharing of experience.”

 

Katherine Mansfield

 

“I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city… It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.”

 

Edmund White

 

“Paris… is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.”

 

Allen Ginsberg

 

“You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.”

 

 

Alexandre Dumas

 

“I came to Paris with four écus in my pocket, and I’d have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.”

 

Jean Cocteau

 

“In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.”

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.”

 

James Thurber

 

“The whole of Paris is a vast university of art, literature and music… it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in Everything”

 

Molière

 

“Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.”

 

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older — intelligence and good manners.”

 

Angela Carter

 

“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”

 

James Joyce

 

“There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. It is a racecourse tension. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once.”

 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

 

“Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect.”

 

François Villon

 

“Good talkers are only found in Paris.”

 

The Poetry of Lisel Mueller

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
... the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.




Why We Tell Stories

1

Because we used to have leaves
And on damp days
Our muscles feel a tug,
Painful now, from when roots
Pulled us into the ground
And because our children believe
They can fly, an instinct retained
From when the bones in our arms
Were shaped like zithers and broke
Neatly under their feathers
And because before we had lungs
We knew how far it was to the bottom
As we floated open-eyed
Like painted scarves through scenery
Of dreams, and because we awakened
And learned to speak

2

We sat by the fire in our caves,
And because we were poor, we made up a tale
About a treasure mountain
That would open only for us
And because we were always defeated,
We invented impossible riddles
Only we could solve,
Monsters only we could kill,
Women who could love no one else
And because we had survived
Sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
We discovered bones that rose
From the dark earth and sang
As white birds in trees

3

Because the story of our life
Becomes our life
Because each of us tells
The same story but tells it differently
And none of us tells it
the same way twice
Because grandmothers looking like spiders
Want to enchant the children
And grandfathers need to convince us
What happened happened because of them
And though we listen only
Haphazardly, with one ear,
We will begin our story
With the word and

 
Lisel Mueller Bio - http://www.lakeforest.edu/library/archives/mueller/

 

Poetry Foundation Bio - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lisel-Mueller

 

More Poems from Lisel Mueller - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lisel-mueller#about

 

Repost: 9 Things You Can Learn from Shakespeare's Hamlet

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-critchley/9-things-you-can-learn-fr_b_3529453.html

 

by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster

Posted: 07/01/2013

 

Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster are the authors of

the new book Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine.

 

 

The main reason why Hamlet is Shakespeare's most enduring play is that it requires the most endurance. Contrary to centuries of Shakespeare scholarship on Hamlet's quintessential modernity, this requirement is first and foremost factual: Hamlet is the Shakespeare character with the most lines in a single play and Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, clocking in at over 4 hours onstage. Hamlet in its entirety might be thought of as Hamlet in its eternity. Hamlet is a king of infinite space.

 

Hamlet also requires our endurance for he is a consummate philosopher, which is why he thinks so much and at such great length and ultimately acts so little. It is difficult for us to peer through centuries of romantic fog that whirl around his character. We tend to imagine the play as lofty, overblown, the pinnacle of Western literature. But the fact is, Hamlet was a revival of an earlier play also called Hamlet- which had been a big hit- and was thus a kind of box-office sequel by London's most successful dramatist: WS. Commercially, Shakespeare never put a foot wrong. Hamlet was a blockbuster. It remained a blockbuster in the decades and centuries that followed.

 

Here we reach a conundrum: Hamlet is a revenge drama. Everyone loves a revenge drama, right? But the play consists of Hamlet's inability to take revenge. The audience would have thought they were going to watch a Tarantino-esque Elizabethan action movie with a few good sword fights. But instead of bloody acts, they get endless bloody thoughts. Hamlet soliloquizes on the meaning of life, dithers and feigns madness, tying himself up in the most exquisite dialectical knots, doubting everything, even the ghost who demands revenge. When he concocts the play within the play, to catch the conscience of the king, and it works- Claudius confesses his guilt- still he doesn't do it.

 

If Hamlet is Shakespeare's most enduring play, then the paradox is that there is something unendurable about it. The play goes on and on. Hamlet goes on and on. Spinning out words, words, words that lose the name of action. The weirdest thing is that having been a crowd pleaser from the very beginning, it seems to do so little to please the crowd. Our expectations about tight, coherent, fast-moving, well-executed plot unravel in scene after scene, spiraling down into Hamlet's infinite jest and perspicuous melancholia.

 

Hamlet is not a version of our best self, let alone our authentic humanity, but what is worst and most selfish in us. His failure of commitment, his radical inhibition, his suicidal melodrama, and his violent misanthropic and misogynistic cruelty, are some of the rather unappealing aspects of our selves. Shakespeare forces us to stare at that which we do not want to look; to see what Uncle Teddy Adorno felicitously called our Hamlet Syndrome.

 

Hamlet is a kind of camera obscura that presents us with a true picture of the world in its inverted form. What if the modern depressive Dane Lars Von Trier was right and some malevolent meteor obliterated the entirety of human civilization in a flash? If somehow after that apocalyptic devastation a single copy of Hamlet remained, a faithful record of our culture could be reconstructed on its basis. It's not a pretty picture.

 

So, what life lessons can Hamlet teach us? Here are a handful:

1. "The world is a prison," Hamlet sighs. This is not just a statement of his mental state. Shakespeare's play is also a drama of surveillance in a police state. Everyone is being watched. This once required expensive and expansive networks of spies. Now it simply requires the use of the internet.
"To thine own self be true"- NOT. People tend to forget that this line was put in the mouth of the Daddy of all windbags, Polonius, and was heavily laden with irony. Polonius's self-serving drivel is an endless source of amusement.




"Were you not sent for?" Never trust your friends. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they might have been sent for by your ever-loving parents and be secretly plotting your execution.




"Mother, you have my father much offended". Hamlet doesn't know if his mother was in on the murder of his father. The Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, felt that Gertrude's guilt functions like a dark spot in the play. The lesson seems to be - you'll never figure out what your mother wants. Leave her to heaven, as the Ghost says.




"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." In other words, believe in ghosts. In a world where time is out of joint and the air is filled with war and rumors of war, the dead are the only creatures courageous enough to speak the truth.




"I did love you once... I loved you not." Let's just say that Hamlet has commitment problems, while the ever-faithful and naïve Ophelia is the one labeled a Janus-faced whore. It's good to remember that this war between the sexes has gone on for hundreds of years and men cannot tolerate the question of what a woman wants.




"Tender yourself more dearly." Polonius's seemingly affectionate paternal advice circles around the valuation of his daughter Ophelia as a commodity to be brokered on the marriage market. Lessons on money abound. Here and everywhere in Shakespeare, the language of love degrades into the language of commerce.




"O shame, where is thy blush?" Hamlet accuses his mother of acting shamelessly in marrying his Uncle in rude haste after the death of his father. But the truth is everyone in Hamlet acts shamelessly and for us the moral of the play is the production of shame in its audience. Not too much, just enough.




"Stay, Illusion!" Illusion is the only means to action. The only thing that can save us in this distracted globe is theater. The only truth is found in illusion.