John Cheever (1912-1982)

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John Cheever (1912-1982) The Country Husband
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John Cheever, The Country Husband
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John Cheever, The Country Husband
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John Cheever, The Country Husband
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John Cheever, The Country Husband

• Francis Weed
• The plane crash
• The suburbsShady Hill
• Julia Weed
• The House
• Ann Murchisonthe babysitter
• The kissa relationship with the world that was
  mysterious and thrilling
• Mrs. Wrightons windowsand angering Shady Hill
  society
• Gertrude, the wandering child the untrainable
  Jupiter
• Lostthe last paragraph
• Then it is dark it is a knight where kings in
  golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

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Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) The Garden of
Forking Paths
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Jorge Luis Borges Greatest Hits
Title Description
The Library of Babel Exploration of a universal library which contains every possible book, including another book just like it but one word longer.
Funes the Memorious After falling off a horse, a man develops a perfect memory. To remember, say, last Tuesday, requires an entire day.
The Aleph The narrator discovers a point in which all space and time can be seen at once.
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote A pedantic Cervantes scholar sets out to rewrite Don Quixote and produces an identicalbut infinitely better version of the novel.
Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius A country is discovered which exists only in an aberrant edition of an encyclopedia.
The Secret Miracle A Jewish writer facing a Nazi firing squad is granted time to finish his magnum opus and writes the novel in the split second before he dies.
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Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Imaginary Beings
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Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
Once the idealist argument is accepted, I
understand that it is possibleeven inevitable
to go even further. . . . The Cartesian "I
think, therefore I am" is thus invalidated to
say I think is to postulate the I, and is a
petito principii. In the eighteenth century,
Lichtenberg proposed that in place of I think, we
should say, impersonally it thinks, just as one
could say it thunders or it flashes
(lightning). Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation
of Time The greatest sorcerer writes Novalis
memorably would be the one who bewitched himself
to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias
for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be
true of us? I believe that it is. We (the
undivided divinity that operates within us) have
dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong,
mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and
secure in time, but we have allowed tenuous,
eternal interstices of injustice in its structure
so we may know it is false. Jorge Luis Borges,
"Avatars of the Tortoise
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Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
The first texts of Buddhism relate that the
Buddha, under the fig tree, perceived by
intuition the infinite concatenations of all the
causes and effects of the universe, the past and
future incarnations of each being. The last
texts, written centuries later, reason that
nothing is real and that all knowledge is
fictitious and that if there were as many Ganges
Rivers as there are grains of sand in the Ganges
and again as many Ganges Rivers as grains of sand
in those new Ganges Rivers, the number of grains
would be smaller than the number of things not
known by the Buddha. Jorge Luis Borges, "From
Someone to Nobody Why does it make us uneasy to
know that the map is within the map and the
thousand and one nights are within the book of A
Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disquiet us
to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the
Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I
believe I have found the answer those inversions
suggest that if the characters in a story can be
readers or spectators, then we, their readers or
spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833 Carlyle
observed that universal history is an infinite
sacred book that all men write and read and try
to understand, and in which they too are
written. Jorge Luis Borges, "Partial Enchantments
of the Quixote
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Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
The odd thing is that the Secret has not been
lost long ago despite the vicissitudes of the
world, despite wars and exoduses, it extends, in
its tremendous fashion, to all the faithful. One
commentator has not hesitated to assert that it
is already instinctive. Jorge Luis Borges, "The
Sect of the Phoenix"
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Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
The Cabalists thought that a work dictated by
the Holy Spirit was an absolute text in other
words, a text in which the collaboration of
chance was calculable as zero. This portentous
premise of a book impenetrable to contingency, of
a book which is a mechanism of infinite purposes,
moved them to dispute the scriptural words, add
up the numerical value of the letters, consider
their form, observe the small letters and the
capitals, seek acrostics and anagrams, and
perform other exegetical rigors which it is not
difficult to ridicule. Their excuse is that
nothing can be contingent in the work of an
infinite mind. Leon Bloy postulates this
hieroglyphical character, this character of a
divine writing this character of a divine
mystery, of an angelic cryptography at all
moments and in all beings on earth. Jorge Luis
Borges Once the idealist argument is accepted, I
understand that it is possibleeven inevitable
to go even further. . . . The Cartesian "I
think, therefore I am" is thus invalidated to
say I think is to postulate the I, and is a
petito principii. In the eighteenth century,
Lichtenberg proposed that in place of I think, we
should say, impersonally it thinks, just as one
could say it thunders or it flashes
(lightning). Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation
of Time" The greatest sorcerer writes Novalis
memorably would be the one who bewitched himself
to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias
for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be
true of us? I believe that it is. We (the
undivided divinity that operates within us) have
dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong,
mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and
secure in time, but we have allowed tenuous,
eternal interstices of injustice in its structure
so we may know it is false. Jorge Luis Borges,
"Avatars of the Tortoise" The first texts of
Buddhism relate that the Buddha, under the fig
tree, perceived by intuition the infinite
concatenations of all the causes and effects of
the universe, the past and future incarnations of
each being. The last texts, written centuries
later, reason that nothing is real and that all
knowledge is fictitious and that if there were as
many Ganges Rivers as there are grains of sand in
the Ganges and again as many Ganges Rivers as
grains of sand in those new Ganges Rivers, the
number of grains would be smaller than the number
of things not known by the Buddha. Jorge Luis
Borges, "From Someone to Nobody" Why does it make
us uneasy to know that the map is within the map
and the thousand and one nights are within the
book of A Thousand and One Nights? Why does it
disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader
of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of
Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer those
inversions suggest that if the characters in a
story can be readers or spectators, then we,
their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.
In 1833 Carlyle observed that universal history
is an infinite sacred book that all men write and
read and try to understand, and in which they too
are written. Jorge Luis Borges, "Partial
Enchantments of the Quixote" In time, only those
things last which have not been in time. Jorge
Luis Borges, "Quince Monedas" They say Ulysses,
wearied of wonders, wept with love on seeing
Ithaca, humble and green. Art is that Ithaca, a
green eternity, not wonders. Art is endless, like
a river flowing, passing yet remaining, a mirror
to the same inconstant Heraclitus, who is the
same and yet another, like the river
flowing. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Art of
Poetry" Around 1930 Paul Valery wrote that the
history of literature should not be the history
of the authors and the accidents of the careers
of their works, but rather the history of the
Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature.
He added that such a history could be written
without the mention of a single writer. Jorge
Luis Borges, "The Flower of Coleridge" The
greatest sorcerer writes Novalis memorably
would be the one who bewitched himself to the
point of taking his own phantasmagorias for
autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of
us? I believe that it is. We (the undivided
divinity that operates within us) have dreamed
the world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious,
visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time
but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices
of injustice in its structure so we may know that
it is false. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Partial
Enchantments of the Quixote" The odd thing is
that the Secret has not been lost long ago
despite the vicissitudes of the world, despite
wars and exoduses, it extends, in its tremendous
fashion, to all the faithful. One commentator has
not hesitated to assert that it is already
instinctive. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Sect of the
Phoenix"
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Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

• Written in 1941
• First translated into English
• The first imagining of hypertext
• Dr. Tsun
• Captain Richard Madden
• Viktor Runeber
• Dr. Stephen Alberta sinophile
• Tsui Pencreating a novel and a labyrinth

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D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) "The Rocking Horse
Winner"
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D. H. Lawrence , "The Rocking Horse Winner"
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D. H. Lawrence , "The Rocking Horse Winner"
Kafka by David Levine
Lawrence by David Levine
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D. H. Lawrence , "The Rocking Horse Winner"
Books Short Stories/Novellas
Sons and Lovers The Virgin and the Gypsy
Women in Love St. Mawr
Lady Chatterleys Lover The Horse Dealers Daughter
Kangaroo The Odour of Chrysanthemums
The Plumed Serpent The Fox
The Rocking-Horse Winner
Studies in Classic American Literature
Apocalypse
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D. H. Lawrence, Snake
Snake A snake came to my water-trough On a hot,
hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink
there. In the deep, strange-scented shade of the
great dark carob-tree I came down the steps with
my pitcher And must wait, must stand and wait,
for there he was at the trough before me. He
reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in
the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness
soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone
trough
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D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, And
where the water had dripped from the tap, in a
small clearness, He sipped with his straight
mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums,
into his slack long body, Silently. Someone was
before me at my water-trough, And I, like a
second comer, waiting. He lifted his head from
his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me
vaguely, as drinking cattle do, And flickered his
two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a
moment, And stooped and drank a little
more, Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the
burning bowels of the earth On the day of
Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
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D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
The voice of my education said to me He must be
killed, For in Sicily the black, black snakes are
innocent, the gold are venomous. And voices in
me said, If you were a man You would take a stick
and break him now, and finish him off. But must
I confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had
come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my
water-trough And depart peaceful, pacified, and
thankless, Into the burning bowels of this
earth? Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill
him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to
him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured? I felt
so honoured.
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D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
And yet those voices If you were not afraid, you
would kill him! And truly I was afraid, I was
most afraid, But even so, honoured still
more That he should seek my hospitality From out
the dark door of the secret earth. He drank
enough And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who
has drunken, And flickered his tongue like a
forked night on the air, so black, Seeming to
lick his lips, And looked around like a god,
unseeing, into the air, And slowly turned his
head, And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice
adream, Proceeded to draw his slow length curving
round And climb again the broken bank of my
wall-face.
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D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
And as he put his head into that dreadful
hole, And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his
shoulders, and entered farther, A sort of horror,
a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole, Deliberately going into
the blackness, and slowly drawing himself
after, Overcame me now his back was turned. I
looked round, I put down my pitcher, I picked up
a clumsy log And threw it at the water-trough
with a clatter. I think it did not hit him, But
suddenly that part of him that was left behind
convulsed in undignified haste. Writhed like
lightning, and was gone Into the black hole, the
earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, At which,
in the intense still noon, I stared with
fascination.
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D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
And immediately I regretted it. I thought how
paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised
myself and the voices of my accursed human
education. And I thought of the albatross And I
wished he would come back, my snake. For he
seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in
exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be
crowned again. And so, I missed my chance with
one of the lords Of life. And I have something to
expiate A pettiness. Taormina, 1923
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D. H. Lawrence , "The Rocking Horse Winner"

• The mother
• Paul
• Uncle Oscar Cresswell
• There must be more money.
• Getting there.
• 80,000