John Middleton Murry Quotes

The Dream of a Queer Fellow I write the words again and they appear doubly pregnant with meaning. It is a true and terrible phrase : true, because we are all queer fellows dreaming ; and we are queer just because we dream ; terrible, because of the vastness of the unknown which it carries within itself, because it sets loose the tremendous and awful question : What if we are only queer fellows dreaming ? What if behind the veil the truth is leering and jeering at our queerness and our dreams? What if the queer fellow of the story were right, before he dreamed ? What if it were really all the same? What if it were all the same not once but a million times, life after life, world after world, the same pain, the same doubt, the same dreams? The queer fellow went but one day's journey along the eternal recurrence which threatens human minds and human destinies. When he returned he was queer. There was another man went the same journey. Friedrich Nietzsche dreamed this very dream in the mountains of the Engadine. When he returned he too was queer.

In literature there is no such thing as a pure thought; in literature, thought is always the handmaid of emotion.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.

En 1896, Marcel Proust publica su primer libro de relatos, Los placeres y los días. Entre esta fecha y 1913, cuando aparece Por el camino de Swann, escribe toda suerte de crónicas, pastiches, trabajos de crítica literaria y textos narrativos breves. El trabajo más considerable de aquella época es la traducción anotada de Sesame and Lilies, de John Ruskin, con un importante ensayo sobre la lectura, intitulado simplemente así: “Sur la lecture”. Paralelamente, se embarca en un proyecto novelístico que, insatisfecho, acabará abandonando; texto inconcluso que se publicará de manera póstuma con el título de Jean Santeuil. Así, Proust busca, en esos años, no sólo el tiempo perdido sino la forma de su voz: un proyecto de gran envergadura, un proyecto de vida. Incluso en un cuaderno de notas anterior a 1908 (cf. Carter, 2000, 289 ss), vacila entre propuestas diversas: no sabe si quiere escribir un extenso ensayo filosófico, un estudio sobre la homosexualidad, otro sobre la mujer; una novela o un estudio de crítica literaria. De hecho, emprende la escritura de un largo ensayo crítico que intituló Contra Sainte-Beuve. Cuando finalmente, en 1908, Proust encuentra la forma que buscaba e inicia la escritura de En busca del tiempo perdido,16 la obra acabará incorporando todos los géneros y formas entre los cuales había vacilado durante tantos años, porque la monumental obra proustiana es crónica implacable de la sociedad de su tiempo, pero también estudio socio-psicológico incisivo de la conducta humana, ensayo filosófico y recreación poética del sentido de la vida. Más aún, se trata, sin duda alguna y de manera radical, de una obra que sólo podríamos llamar filosofía en el tiempo, es decir, filosofía narrativamente encarnada. Como dice John Middleton Murry (1924, 194), “En busca del tiempo perdido es al mismo tiempo una justificación filosófica de su existencia y la historia de su propia creación (…) será el primer libro del mundo que constituya la historia psicológica de su propia creación y la justificación filosófica de su propia necesidad”.