Peter Brook Quotes

A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.

Reality' is a word with many meanings.

A word does not start as a word – it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictates the need for expression.

Time, which is so often an enemy in life, can also become our ally if we see how a pale moment can lead to a glowing moment, and then turn to a moment of perfect transparency, before dropping again to a moment of everyday simplicity.

Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.

The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved.

There are prophets, there are guides, and there are argumentative people with theories, and one must be careful to discriminate between them.

A large part of our excessive, unnecessary manifestations come from a terror that if we are not somehow signaling all the time that we exist, we will in fact no longer be there

I am ready to disclaim my opinion, even of yesterday, even of 10 minutes ago, because all opinions are relative. One lives in a field of influences, one is influenced by everyone one meets, everything is an exchange of influences, all opinions are derivative. Once you deal a new deck of cards, you've got a new deck of cards.

Wisdom not only comes with suffering: when it comes, it is radically unusable. (Brooks' comment on the Oedipus tragedy)

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all is for an act of theatre to be engaged.

You become a director by calling yourself a director and you then persuade other people that this is true.

Truth in theatre is always on the move. As you read this book, it is already moving out of date. it is for me an exercise, now frozen on the page. but unlike a book, the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is myth, we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre, the slate is wiped clean all the time. In everyday life, "if" is a fiction, in the theatre "if" is an experiment. In everyday life, "if" is an evasion, in the theatre "if" is the truth. When we are persuaded to believe in this truth then the theatre and life are one. This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work. To plays needs much work. But when we experiences the work as play, then it is not work anymore. A play is play.

#3. Meditate on God's many commands demanding that we love one another. When you feel your heart begin to turn against another Christian, this is the time to turn to the many commands to love one another-commands found in places such as John 15:12, Romans 13:8, Hebrews 13:1, 1 John 4:7, 1 Peter 1:22, and so on. Allow God's Word to convict you of love's necessity.

Of course, it is most of all dirt that gives the roughness its edge; filth and vulgarity are natural, obscenity is joyous: with these the spectacle takes on its socially liberating role, for by nature the popular theatre is anti-authoritarian, anti- traditional, anti-pomp, anti-pretence. This is the theatre of noise, and the theatre of noise is the theatre of applause.

It's easy to give up, and that's the one thing we cannot do. That's what gives me a reason for working: to leave people with a little more courage, with a little hope that has been nourished. Even if, of course, it's going to disappear, whatever touches one isn't lost forever.

Because if one starts from the premise that a stage is a stage -not a convenient place for the unfolding of a staged novel or a staged poem or a staged lecture or a staged story- then the word that is spoken on this stage exists, or fails to exist, only in relation to the tensions it creates on that stage within the given stage circumstances.

everything,” Balzac claims, “is a mosaic.

I think Peter Falk had one real eye and one glass eye, and having one eye was probably better for shooting pool than having two.

Once a computer was asked, "What is the truth?" It took a very long time before the reply came, "I will tell you a story…

Theatre is always a self-destructive art, and it is always written on the wind.

Everywhere in Balzac desire is an urge to find out, to know (Freud’s epistemophilia), which is to say that the drive to know is itself sexualized.

Cognitive psychologists have confirmed what we already knew: that readers of complex novels show a greater capacity for understanding the complexities of human interaction.8

İnsan yalnızca kelimenin tam anlamıyla insan olduğu zaman oyun oynar ve yalnızca oyun oynadığı zaman insandır. Friedrich Schiller

Dünyada iyi bir hikayeden daha güçlü bir şey yoktur. Hiçbir şey onu durduramaz. Hiçbir düşman onu yenemez. Taht Oyunları filminden

Iš teisybės, režisierius niekada negali pripažinti, kad tai jo pirmasis pastatymas. Girdėjau, jog pradedantis hipnotizuotojas niekuomet neprasitaria pacientui hipnotizuojąs pirmąkart.

Peter looks up again, though he doesn't seem to see what's truly in front of him. No, he's watching something from years ago, watching another boy being taken away like the one I watched today.

(...) "anlatı" sözcüğünün Hint-Avrupa kökeni "bilmekten" gelir ve bu nedenle anlatı aslen bize kökenlerimizi, dünyanın ve bizim nereden geldiğimizi anlatan "bilgelik edebiyatı" olarak görülebilir.

Aktorius (ir bet koks menininkas) - nelyginant sodas: beprasmiška stengtis išravėti visas piktžoles vieną kartą ir visiems laikams. Piktžolės auga visada, tai natūralu, ir jas reikia rauti - tatai irgi natūralu, ir, be to, būtina.

The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts. This is the only place for our Dream. No form nor interpretation is for ever. A form has to become fixed for a short time, then it has to go. As the world changes, there will and must be new and totally unpredictable Dreams.

To possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others: this I think captures our love of and our need for novels, for fictional accounts of the world that let us experience it beyond the limits of our own pair of eyes, to imagine it, provisionally, as it is seen and felt by someone else, however different that person may be.

The weavers I’ve met are extremely relational. They are driven to seek deep relations with others, both to feed their hunger for connection and because they believe that change happens through deepening relationships. When they are working with the homeless or the poor or the traumatized, they are laboring alongside big welfare systems that offer services but not care. These systems treat people as “cases” or “clients.” They are necessary to give people financial stability and support, but they can’t do transformational change. As Peter Block, one of the leading experts on community, puts it, “Talk to any poor person or vulnerable person and they can give you a long list of the services they have received. They are well serviced, but you often have to ask what in their life has fundamentally changed.

Sigmund Freud finished what was to be his final reading. “Freud did not read at random,” Schur tells us, “but carefully selected books from his library.”8 His final choice fell on Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. When he finished the book—the day before he called for the fatal injection—he remarked to Schur: “This was the proper book for me to read; it deals with shrinking and starvation.” Not only with shrinking and starvation but with all that precedes the final outcome of human desire: wanting, having, possessing, devouring.

Community is also under assault because we’ve outsourced care. As Peter Block and John McKnight argue in their book, The Abundant Community, a lot of the roles that used to be done in community have migrated to the marketplace or the state. Mental well-being is now the job of the therapist. Physical health is now the job of the hospital. Education is the job of the school system. The problem with systems, Block and McKnight argue, is that they depersonalize. These organizations have to operate at scale, so everything has to be standardized. Everything has to follow rules. “The purpose of management is to create a world that is repeatable,” they write. But people are never the same.

The Drunken Fisherman" Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief to wave away The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm Pouching a bottle in one arm; A whiskey bottle full of worms; And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms To mete the worm whose molten rage Boils in the belly of old age? Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools. Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls Its bloody waters into holes; A grain of sand inside my shoe Mimics the moon that might undo Man and Creation too; remorse, Stinking, has puddled up its source; Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage. This is the pot-hole of old age. Is there no way to cast my hook Out of this dynamited brook? The Fisher's sons must cast about When shallow waters peter out. I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.

Peter Block is an author and consultant who writes about community development and civic engagement. He is a master at coming up with questions that lift you out of your ruts and invite fresh reevaluations. Here are some of his: “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?…What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?…What forgiveness are you withholding?…How have you contributed to the problem you’re trying to solve?…What is the gift you currently hold in exile?” Mónica Guzmán, the journalist I quoted in the last chapter, asks people, “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who felt a responsibility to run for the school board? A few years ago, I met some guys who run a program for gang members in Chicago. These young men have endured a lot of violence and trauma and are often triggered to overreact. One of the program directors’ common questions is “Why is that a problem for you?” In other words they are asking, “What event in your past produced that strong reaction just now?” We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. I try to compensate for that by asking questions about the positive sides of life: “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” “What’s working really well in your life?” “What are you most self-confident about?” “Which of your five senses is strongest?” “Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?” or “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?

Then Beverley Brook stepped onto the footplate and pointed a shotgun straight at the Queen’s head – I recognised the Purdey from my trunk. It was nice to see it getting an airing. Beverley herself was wearing an oversized leather jerkin and jeans. Her dreads had been tied into a plait down her back and a pair of antique leather and brass goggles were pushed up onto her brow. ‘Put your hands on your head,’ she said, ‘and step away from the boyfriend.’ The Queen hissed and gripped the rope harder.

Peter Brook’s production with Laurence Olivier as Titus was one of the great theatrical experiences of the 1950s

La plus belle expression du vide est le silence. ils sont très rares au théâtre, les moments où un sentiment profond, partagé par les acteurs et les spectateurs, les emmène tous ensemble dans un silence vivant. C'est alors le rare, l'extrême espace vide, au-delà duquel nul ne peut aller.

She was sitting there one afternoon in early June. The sun was coming in at the window warm and bright; the orchard on the slope below the house was in a bridal flush of pinky-white bloom, hummed over by a myriad of bees. Thomas Lynde—a meek little man whom Avonlea people called “Rachel Lynde’s husband”—was sowing his late turnip seed on the hill field beyond the barn; and Matthew Cuthbert ought to have been sowing his on the big red brook field away over by Green Gables. Mrs. Rachel knew that he ought because she had heard him tell Peter Morrison the evening before in William J. Blair’s store over at Carmody that he meant to sow his turnip seed the next afternoon. Peter had asked him, of course, for Matthew Cuthbert had never been known to volunteer information about anything in his whole life.

Esos innovadores del teatro, Jerzy Grotowski, el director polaco de teatro experimental y autor de Hacia un teatro pobre, Peter Brook, el director inglés, y el Living Theater, el grupo de teatro experimental fundado por Julian Beck

When have cops not asked for more men, better gear, more training hours, or "community outreach program funds"? Those pussies are almost as bad as soldiers, always whining about never having "what they need", but do they have to risk their jobs by raising taxes? Do they have to explain to Suburban Peter why they're fleecing him for Ghetto Paul?

I had a knife fixed in my dress in case I needed it but my hopes were to somehow manage this without getting blood on my hands. I'd prefer Peter get to make the ultimate decision of what to do with the Mouse King.

The influence of the mid-to-late-Sixties English counterculture is clearer in The Beatles’ music than in that of any of their rivals. This arose from a conflux of links, beginning with their introduction by Brian Epstein to the film director Richard Lester, continuing with McCartney’s friendships with Miles and John Dunbar, and culminating in the meeting of Lennon and Yoko Ono. Through Lester and his associates - who included The Beatles’ comedy heroes Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers - the group’s consciousness around the time of Sgt. Pepper was permeated by the anarchic English fringe theatre, with its penchant for Empire burlesque (e.g., The Alberts, Ivor Cutler, Milligan and Antrobus’s The Bed Sitting Room). This atmosphere mingled with contemporary strains from English Pop Art and Beat poetry; the ‘happenings’ and experimental drama of The People Show, Peter Brook’s company, and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre; the improvised performances of AMM and what later became the Scratch Orchestra; the avant-garde Euro-cinema of Fellini and Antonioni; and the satire at Peter Cook’s Establishment club and in his TV show with Dudley Moore, Not Only . . . But Also (in which Lennon twice appeared). From the cultural watershed of 1965-6 onwards, The Beatles’ American heroes of the rock-and-roll Fifties gave way to a kaleidoscopic mélange of local influences from the English fringe arts and the Anglo-European counterculture as well as from English folk music and music-hall.

Anyway, we animals always settle our own quarrels without dragging Mr. Bean into it. Now if Peter were here, he could take that boy in hand without any fuss. A bear is about the only animal that his stones wouldn’t hurt. But as you know, Peter is spending some weeks with relatives in Herkimer County. “Now of course we can keep out of trouble by staying away from the side of the farm by the

I have money Peter received when he sold the farm.” Davis shook his head, his lips tight. “Forget that money. Put it aside. If we need supplies, or if you need anything for yourself, I’ll give you money.” She drew back, staring at him. “Don’t be silly. Why shouldn’t I use my own money?” “Emma.” His tone brooked no argument. “I am your husband, and I will feed and clothe you. Now I don’t want to hear any more about it.

Phillips Brooks, an Episcopalian pastor in Boston a hundred years ago, caught the spirit of Peter’s counsel to pastors: I think, again, that it is essential to the preacher’s success that he should thoroughly enjoy his work. I mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its idea. No man to whom the details of his task are repulsive can do his task well constantly, however full he may be of its spirit. He may make one bold dash at it and carry it over all his disgusts, but he cannot work on at it year after year, day after day. Therefore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate pleasure, count it an essential element of your power, if you can feel a simple delight in what you have to do as a minister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow of speaking, in standing before men and moving them, in contact with the young. The more thoroughly you enjoy it, the better you will do it all. This is all true of preaching. Its highest joy is in the great ambition that is set before it, the glorifying of the Lord and saving of the souls of men. No other joy on earth compares with that. The ministry that does not feel that joy is dead. But in behind that highest joy, beating in humble unison with it, as the healthy body thrills in sympathy with the deep thoughts and pure desires of the mind and soul, the best ministers have always been conscious of another pleasure which belonged to the very doing of the work itself. As we read the lives of all the most effective preachers of the past, or as we meet the men who are powerful preachers of the Word today, we feel how certainly and how deeply the very exercise of their ministry delights them.8

Peter Brooks' formulation the tableau in melodrama gives the `spectator the opportunity to see meanings represented, emotions and moral states rendered in clear visible signs'.

For Peter Brooks, melodrama emerged in the nineteenth century as a form which spoke of a post-sacred universe in which the certainties of traditional meaning and hierarchical authority had been displaced. The melodramatic narrative constantly makes an effort to recover this lost security, but meaning comes to be increasingly founded in the personality. Characters take on essential, psychic resonances corresponding to family identitites and work out forbidden conflicts and desires. In the process, the social dimension collapses into the familial and, indeed, the family itself becomes a microcosm of the social level.

As he watched the creatures that had stolen his world for another night, Arlen dreamed of bringing those wards back. He dreamed of traveling beyond Tibbet's Brook, and resolved that he would leave one day, even if it meant spending a night outside. With the demons.

Balzac, very much like Freud in his most speculative essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, discovers that the pleasure principle is inextricably bound up with its opposite, the death drive.

Yet when Raphaël envies their life of wild abandon, Aquilina’s response is sobering: “ ‘Happy!’ said Aquilina with a smile of pity, or terror, in giving the two friends a horrible look. ‘Oh! You don’t know what it’s like to be condemned to pleasure with death in your heart.

Journalism, it turns out, is just so much hot air, hot type rather, that has an extraordinary importance at the moment but leaves nothing behind. It is the very opposite of the true poetic word that endures—what Lucien originally aspired to but betrayed

In his last incarnation, Collin sees only one position for himself: to serve the power that weighs on us all. He proposes to replace Bibi-Lupin as head of the Sûreté. “I have no other ambition than to be an instrument of law and repression instead of corruption. . . . I am the general of the underworld and I surrender.

Collin, the man who cannot be killed off, whose identity is both branded on him and rendered illegible, challenges, or defies, the very coherence of such an entity, suggesting the possibility that the very subject of The Human Comedy, human society itself, is at bottom an illusion if not a fraud.

Here we sense a parallel: Facino’s conviction that his power to “see” gold has blinded him sounds very much like the narrator’s fear that his preternatural insight into the lives of others, allowing him passage into their very bodies and souls, may be an abuse of his mental faculties—the word “abus” is used in both these instances.

Blindness and madness punish the hubris of the man who possesses and employs a faculty for knowledge not given to other men.

Facino’s vision of vast riches and the novelist’s vision of the motives of human behavior are both attuned to the hidden, the dramatic, that, like Freud’s analyses, suggest an erotic charge that animates the world. They may speak also of a power beyond what is permitted to humankind

This is why Rastignac’s and Lucien’s tailor thinks of himself as a “hyphen” between a young man’s present and his future. Given the right outfit, a young man may be able to make a marriage that will put a reality behind his social appearance.

Balzac’s semiotics is all about detection, the need to discover who people really are.

Henry James in “The Lesson of Balzac” praised his precursor for giving his characters “the long rope,” for acting themselves out. That grant of freedom to his created life was for James crucial to Balzac’s success in representation of persons in the world. James saw Balzac’s creation of character as ultimately motivated by love: “The love, as we call it, the joy in their communicated and exhibited

As might also be suspected, there are equally conflicting absolute certainties about the precise timing of the Rapture. The choice here is between the unarguable certainty that the Tribulation will precede the Rapture and the equally unarguable certainty that the opposite is true and that the Rapture will precede the Tribulation. Historically, compromise has usually been far from theological debate, where hands typically have been found to lie itchingly closer to swords, but so important are Last Things that happily one is available here, for it is also held to be absolutely certain by some that the Rapture will take place exactly in the middle of the seven-year Tribulation. Spoiling for a fight, though, equally certain to others, brooking no dispute, is the fact that the Rapture will come close to the end of the Tribulation, with a rump of the latter still to run. Happily for the Born Agains, it is also absolutely certain that for them, but not for the unprescient chumps who have not got themselves Born Again, the Rapture will enrapt true believers just in the nick of time at the start of the Tribulation leaving the erstwhile chumps the chance of quickly getting Born Again and being rapt at the end of the Tribulation.

Mr Peters gave me a maths problem to solve in detention today. Bernard has 130 balloons. 2/3 of the blue balloons burst. 2/5 of the red balloons burst. There are now 36 more red balloons than blue ones. How many balloons are left in total? It made my head want to explode! WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS: Why did Bernard have such an excessive number of balloons in the first place? How did Bernard manage to burst so many of them? He sounds very careless. Is Bernard not aware of the damaging impact balloons have on the environment? And most importantly …

Me too,” Mela said. “I remember it too.” “Some memories shape a heart forever,” Peter said. “So that nothing else can ever quite fit it.

Today the theatre of doubting, of unease, of trouble, of alarm, seems truer than the theatre with a noble aim.

And then I had the sinking realization. If Peter was nowhere to be found, he must have been found by the soldiers.

Good. I've been so worried about you. It took four days of searching to find you and when I did, your heart was barely beating. I thought you were going to die.

Alice." I sighed. She glared at me. Could I truly trust this girl? "I didn't know if I could trust you. The throne will be yours, you know." "I don't want the throne! It's so much work and pressure. I just want to be free to lead my own life." "Then, let's try and warn Peter.

I have intel on where to find that wretched Peter. I want him staked out and eliminated as soon as possible. It is only a matter of time before he comes for my crown but I won't give up as easily as he did. . .

We're all Naaman, lepers reborn. We're all iron sinking toward Sheol until the wood and water save us. We're all Elijah, led to brooks in the wilderness. We're all Elisha, baptized into Jesus' Jordan baptism to share his Spirit. By the Spirit of Jesus, the baptized become a prophetic community, given the words of God to speak and sing to one another, qualified by the Spirit to stand in the Lord's council. Preachers aren't the only prophets in the church. Preachers lead and train a community of prophets. Wherever the Lord calls us to labor--whether we're at work, hoe, out in the neighborhood, or at the kids' baseball game--he fills our mouths with words of fire to kill and make alive (1 Sam 2:6; Jer 1:9-10). Prophets must keep up a steady diet of God's word so that our words give life rather than spread death. When we drink the Spirit, our words drop like rain and drip like dew (Deut 32:2). Clothed with the Spirit of prophecy, we intercede for the world. Faithful prophets must be and remain filled with the Spirit. You're baptized: walk in step with the Spirit. You've been soaked in the Spirit: don't quench or grieve him, and you will prophesy, you will see visions, you will dream dreams.

My kingdom doesn't want me. They'd rather have that tyrant than me. I couldn't find the Sugar Plum Princess. I'm beginning to think she doesn't exist. My father was sure she did. That's why I have been searching still but I think it's time I admit defeat.

From an economic perspective, cities are good for business. In 2016, the Brookings Institute examined the 123 largest metro economies in the world. While housing only 13 percent of the planet’s population, they produced almost one-third of its economic output.

I flinch. I suppose the words only hurt because they're coming from him. I turn away and get out of the truck. As I make my way up the yard, I hear Peter calling me. I hear the passenger door slam and his hurried footsteps behind me. I feel his touch on my arm as he stops me before I can climb the three steps of the porch. I don't turn to face him. I can feel the stupid tears welling up in my eyes.

Laszlo Bock, Work Rules (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015) David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011) Arie de Geus, The Living Company (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Perseverance and Passion (New York: Scribner, 2016) Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012) Amy Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer, 2012) Adam Grant, Give and Take (New York: Viking, 2013) Richard Hackman, Leading Teams (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (New York: Broadway Books, 2010) Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: HarperCollins, 2016) James Kerr, Legacy (London: Constable & Robinson, 2013) Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002) Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Portfolio, 2015). Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012) Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009) Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013) Edgar H. Schein, Helping (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009) Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013) Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday Business, 1990) Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)

The people and institutions who leave a mark provide you with better things to love, a new field of knowledge or a new form of carpentry or auto repair, or a new vision of social change. Leadership, Peter Drucker wrote, “is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, of building a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Antoinette cannot believe she has uttered the words “I love you” in vain. She must either be loved or else abdicate her place in the world. “Feeling then the solitude of her voluptuous bed where lust had not yet placed its warm feet, she rolled about restlessly, repeating to herself: ‘I want to be loved!’ . . . the true woman glimpsed happiness, and her imagination, avenger of time lost by nature, pleasured itself in stoking the inextinguishable fires of pleasure.

From now on, have your passions; but as for love, you need to know where to invest it wisely. It’s only a woman’s final love that can satisfy a man’s first love.

Androgyny was a subject of some interest in Balzac’s time. The Girodet painting of Endymion for which the castrato Zambinella served, in Balzac’s fiction, as a far-off model offers a visual androgyny. And perhaps androgyny is a metaphor for the artist who creates life from his sole self and body.

newspapers are “poison shops,” and Vignon piles on: The newspaper, instead of being a sacred mission, has become an arm for the political parties; and from that it became a commercial enterprise; and like all commercial enterprises it knows neither faith nor law. Every newspaper, as Blondet puts it, is a shop where one sells to the public words in whatever color it likes . . . all newspapers will in due course be cowardly, hypocritical, shameless, mendacious, murderous; they will kill ideas, systems, men, and will thrive from doing so.

And by attempting to explain everything, even as it recognizes that this is impossible since the very principles of explanation are themselves obscure. Balzac necessarily ends up like Scheherazade, telling stories night after night to stave off the silence of the end.

if you don’t desire anything, the world is without appeal, it loses its beauty. You lack for everything, yet nothing now triggers the need to devour, to incorporate, to make the beautiful object one’s own. If the self ’s relation to the external world no longer is subtended by desire, it loses all meaning. Raphaël’s life is a kind of vegetation, a life without movement or meaning.

Rastignac’s story speaks to an age of revolution and counterrevolution, of blurred and reasserted class boundaries, a turbulent age in which the pursuit of wealth has taken on stark new importance. Success requires learning to read subtle distinctions of class and the meanings embodied in the Paris cityscape. In this bourgeois century where everyone looks alike you are going to have to find out for yourself who’s who. If you are ambitious and if you are out for love, you will need to choose wisely to advance your career. You need to understand both the social hierarchy and the economic substratum that lies hidden beneath it.

Your Paris is only a mudhole.” To which Vautrin responds with a new generalization: “And a very strange mudhole,” he says. “Those whose carriage gets muddy in its streets are respectable, those who get muddy on foot are crooks. Have the misfortune to snatch some trifle and you are put on display in the law courts. Steal a million, you’re noted in the drawing rooms as a man of honor.

the polite and polished superstructure of society must never be seen in relation to the substructure of money-grubbing and exploitation that allows it to exist.

Goriot was “a grease spot in his daughters’ drawing rooms.” Once they squeezed the money out of him he’s discarded “like a lemon peel” in the gutter. The moral drawn by the Duchesse: “Society is a mudhole. Let’s try to remain up on the heights.

You came back here that day with a word written on your forehead that I could read: ‘Succeed! Succeed at any price.’ ” To which Vautrin responds: “Bravo! That’s the kind of fellow I like.” (SC 111/P 3:139) To revolt is to take destiny into your own hands by a decisive act.

It’s possibly, in the manner of Facino Cane, one more allegory of the novelist: the abuse of the power to enter others’ lives, to animate them and tell their stories, leads to disaster. Humans have to be accorded a greater freedom, perhaps, even when that freedom means nonconformity to human definitions of reason and relationship.

No woman, believe me, will want to rub elbows with the dead woman you keep in your heart.” (CG 254/P 9:1127) Félix, she understands, cannot detach himself from the dead Henriette. And also from himself: she accuses him of an incurable egotism. If he continues to unburden himself to other women as he has to her, they will perceive “the aridity of your heart, and you will always be unhappy

We need novels in order to enter the minds of others. But that project can run up against the opacities of other minds and spirits. When a man tells us of a woman’s desiring, we should beware of blindness.

Like Raphaël de Valentin, recounted in his brief, flaming trajectory between desire and death, Chabert, the specter of the suppressed past, is one of the key mythic presences in The Human Comedy. His life story represents more than itself.

Perhaps Balzac’s crazed philosopher Louis Lambert, another loner, identifies a corresponding vulnerability of the social world when he posits what he calls the “law of disorganization,” according to which the more complex a society becomes, the more differentiated in role and function, the more it loses cohesion. Lambert states: “When the effect produced is no longer related to its cause, there is disorganization.” That disorganization calls for heroic gestures in response, but they are doomed to succumb to social inertia.

Not to be taken in is something Père Goriot as a whole teaches: it’s about learning to see the world as it is, not as it claims to be.

If Paris may itself be compared to a battlefield, in the post-Napoleonic, proto-capitalist Restoration the way you win in its struggles is not by arms—despite Vautrin’s rigged duel—but by insinuation, charm, gathering information, possessing social secrets.

Balzac clearly is haunted by these Faustian figures, who seek to go beyond what is permitted to ordinary humans, only to reach an impasse where their very medium of expression is blocked or destroyed.

Do they have to explain to Suburban Peter why they’re fleecing him for Ghetto Paul?

RECOMMENDED READING Brooks, David. The Road to Character. New York: Random House, 2015. Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. Damon, William. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. New York: Free Press, 2009. Deci, Edward L. with Richard Flaste. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006. Emmons, Robert A. Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Ericsson, Anders and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Heckman, James J., John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz (eds.). The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Kaufman, Scott Barry and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. New York: Perigee, 2015. Lewis, Sarah. The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Matthews, Michael D. Head Strong: How Psychology is Revolutionizing War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. Oettingen, Gabriele. Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Renninger, K. Ann and Suzanne E. Hidi. The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2015. Seligman, Martin E. P. Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Tetlock, Philip E. and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Crown, 2015. Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.

It was not easy for Paul to stand as a mirror and confront Peter's bias towards the Gentiles. He even had to address Barnabas as well, who got swept up in group-think. The majority of the members, including Peter, were satisfied with the way they treated Gentiles. Paul, however, advocated strongly against the evident injustices. Being a Paul and addressing difficult topics on race is what the Church needed then and still needs today. Generally, as a church, we are comfortable with the Peters but feel somewhat awkward around the Pauls because the Pauls push us into an uncomfortable realm. The Pauls are rare but are more precious today than silver and gold.

The nonliteral uses of literally are quite traditional, of all things. Literally had gone past meaning “by the letter” in any sense as early as the eighteenth century, when, for example, Francis Brooke wrote The History of Emily Montague (1769), which contains this sentence: “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.” One cannot feed among anything “by the letter.” Or, in 1806, when the philosopher David Hume wrote, “He had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger,” in his signature history of England, despite the fact that there are no letters via which to starve. Yet this was an authoritative and highly popular volume, more widely read at the time than Hume’s philosophical treatises, equivalent to modern histories by Simon Schama and Peter Ackroyd. The purely figurative usage is hardly novel, either: the sentence I literally coined money was written by Fanny Kemble in 1863. Kemble, a British stage actress, hardly considered herself a slangy sort of person.

As Baudelaire remarked, even Balzac’s concierges have genius; everyone in his world is “stuffed with willpower from head to toe.

Balzac knew intuitively the need for invented persons to represent life for us, with an enhanced sense of the odds and stakes of life. Representation for Balzac always touched on the theatrical, offering life bathed in starker, more revealing light.