More and more frequently I am drawn to examine the words that I carry within myself; they occur to me singly, coming from different languages, and then I wish for nothing more than to reflect on a single such word for a long time. I hold it before me, turn it around; I handle it like a stone, but a marvelous stone, and the earth in which it was embedded is myself.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, March 28, 2014
Like a Marvelous Stone
Elias Canetti (1905-1994), The Secret Heart of the Clock: Notes, Aphorisms, Fragments, 1973-1985, tr. Joel Agee (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 37: