In an attempt to clear off my desk and get rid of clutter - I'm going to record what I wrote on a piece of paper that's been laying around here for months. How many times (!!) have I picked this up to throw it out, and then read it and not been able to.
A few months ago I found an interesting (to me) book at the Pembroke library. It was the diaries of Thomas Mann, one of my favourite writers/artists. I jotted a few things down as I read. Among them, this quote (by Mann) of Tolstoy from his "diary of old age." (So - this is me quoting a quote in a diary from another diary. Got that?):
"The main purpose of art . . . is this, that it tell the truth about the soul, revealing and giving expression to all the secrets that one cannot say in simple words . . . Art is a microscope that the artist focuses on the secrets of his own soul, and that then reveals to men the secrets common to them all."
Thomas Mann - he liked it.
[Also on this piece of paper: Hamsun - "Growth of the Soil", Schumann, Balzac, Oswald Spengler - "Decline of the West", Arthur Schopenhauer - "The World as Will and Idea".]
