This is typical Tony Judt, a commitment to an idea of public good and community, laced with nostalgia. He recalls the Green Line buses of his childhood in 1950s London with equally deep fondness: “They made of me an English boy, perhaps just as much as school did.” Recounting the sad story of the decline of public transport that connected boys like him to the public lives of their countries, Judt hoped, “might be an instructive way to think through what has gone wrong in countries like America and Great Britain.”
...The other option was Zionism, especially in its socialist form. Judt was keenly attracted to Zionism at a time when he actually seemed to be comfortably settled in a corner of British society. He was the product and beneficiary of postwar educational reforms in Britain. Along with the welfare state came excellent free schools for gifted children from low-income families. Bright grammar school boys, such as Judt, were usually the first in their families to go to Oxford or Cambridge. As he explains: “We were thus the very epicenter of a great sociological shift and yet we did not, I think, feel like outsiders.” Judt was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, where John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster had taught. “I felt and behaved, I think, as though this were my Cambridge, and not the Cambridge of some alien elite that I had been mistakenly permitted to enter.”
Go came to Japan from China. Real Go, however, developed in Japan. The art of Go in China, now and three hundred years ago, does not bear comparison with that in Japan. Go was elevated and deepened by the Japanese... It is clear that in Go the Japanese spirit has transcended the merely imported and derivative.
Perhaps no other nation has developed games as intellectual as Go and Oriental chess. Perhaps nowhere else in the world would a match be allotted eighty hours extended over three months. Had Go, like the No drama and the tea ceremony, sunk deeper and deeper into the recesses of a strange Japanese tradition?
... That this extraordinary man was born in China and lived in Japan seemed symbolic of a preternatural bounty. His genius had taken life after his remove to Japan. There had been numerous examples over the centuries of persons distinguished in one art or another in a neighbouring country and honoured in Japan. Wu is an outstanding modern example. It was Japan that nurtured, protected, and ministered to a genius that would have lain dormant in China.
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The Master was fond of eels
At the Blink beauty bar, I felt anew the relevance of the traditional religious call to seriousness voiced in Bach's Cantata 106:
Set thy house in order,
For thou shalt die,
And not remain alive.
My publisher, you reply, of course knows that I'm not composing anything anymore, and has therefore commissioned me to make the most detailed notes of all my analytical thoughts about both the future of music and the music of the future, by describing how and why I no longer compose anything; he thinks that by writing down all my thoughts about a music that is, at least today, still not able to be composed, I will at some time start composing again of my own accord, without noticing it myself, and someday I will suddenly be in the position to compose that music that has not yet even touched the farthest reaches of the imagination, which is why until then he has commissioned me to write the definitive account of all my thoughts about the world of sound, and thus to write nothing more or less than my theoretical life’s work, for whose closing, final completion, however, I intend to need all the time remaining to me until the end of my life.
'That's one of the problems with reincarnation: who is being reincarnated if there are more people now than the sum of the people who have ever existed?' said Henry. 'It doesn't make any sense.'
'It only makes sense if lumps of raw humanity are raining down on us for their first round of civilization.'
What else is there to do but read too much into things? What a poor, thin, dull world we'd live in if we didn't. Besides, is it possible? There's always more meaning than we can lay our hands on.
... Doubtless none of these was a book which had been translated from English, however, where I have the largest familiarity with writers, but had been written in German to begin with.
Which is scarcely to say that I am not familiar with certain German writers also, on the other hand.
Certainly I am familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance.
Well, or with Goethe.
Although by saying I am familiar with either of these writers I do not necessarily mean that I am extraordinarily familiar with them.
As a matter of fact by saying that I am familiar with them I do not even necessarily mean that I have read a solitary word that either one of them ever wrote.
Actually the sum total of that familiarity may well extend no further than to my reading of the backs of the jackets of phonograph records.
Such as the back of the jacket on Thus Spake Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, for instance.
