Books & Authors

 This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in The Feast of Love with a note of reference.

“You remember Kathryn, my ex? My first ex? When Kathryn called me a toad, which she did sometimes to punish me, I’m sure she choose that metaphor carefully . . . After awhile it became her nickname for me, as in ‘Toad, my love, would you pass the potatoes?’ They were always about me, these metaphors, as it turned out. She got that one from The Wind in the Willows, her favorite book. You know: Mr. Toad?

“Oh you know,” I say. “The waning moon was shining down on them. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or something of the sort.”

“Have you ever read Schnitzler’s La Ronde?”

“Yes, sure.”

“Then you remember what it’s about. Changing partners. You should reread it. I acted in it once as a sophomore.” She waits for a moment, as if imagining it. “I played a housemaid. There was a pantomime lovemaking scene on stage between me and ‘the young gentleman.’ That was fun.”

“Oh. The thing is, you’re appealing to my vanity. I suppose I always wanted to appear in someone’s book, and I guess this is my chance. I can be a literary entity. Up there with Mrs. Danvers and Huck Finn and imaginary people like that.

To be more romantic than we were, you’d have to kill yourself in the middle of the street and then write about it. Shakespeare did that.

As a Jew, I am drawn in a suicidal manner toward the maddest of Christians. Kierkegaard, being one of the craziest and most lovable of the lot, and therefore, dialectically, 

possibly the most sane of them all, is of compelling interest to me.

At first sight, each time they arrived, they were fine, scrubbed American pragmatists you might see photographed in a glossy magazine. Blond, blue-eyed Rotarians, fresh owners of real estate, Hemingway readers, they would unload their cheerful sunny furniture from U-Haul vans.

The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up—wordless, inarticulate —by denying their existence altogether, and pffffft, they die. (They can, however, come back. Because God is a god, when He is dead, He doesn’t have to stay dead. He can come back if He chooses to. Nietzsche somehow failed to mention this.)

Kafka: A false alarm on the right bell once answered--it cannot be made good, not ever.

The sun shone its burning rays on the landscapes of my life, the real world that made Plato so unhappy.

(BEGINNINGS) Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be.

Every positive attracts a negative and must contend with it. I mentioned The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Freud and de Sade, the mingling of the angelic and the demonic, the control of these forces by means of ritual, of which her official marriage was one. I was prepared to speak of Spinoza and Plato, the Symposium and Phaedrus, but she asked me to dance just as I was about to pontificate.

Symposium (Plato)

Phaedrus (dialogue)

Afternoons, I worked in the garden, planting snapdragons and petunias, or weeding, and while I did so, I thought about my son. These thoughts were tormenting, buzzing gnatlike around my head, because they had no content except by way of the images they presented. I added fertilizer to the soil. Aaron on a swing set, Aaron playing touch football, Aaron slouched in a chair reading Churchill’s ghostwritten history of World War Two.

This is paradise, to read a newspaper containing matters of no consequence written by vainglorious prose stylists. A woman has her purse stolen in a leather shop, all this reported in a fashion that would have done honor to Gibbon if the great man had written in Portuguese.

A man falls off a balcony, breaking a bone or two, and the account has the melancholy wit of Saint/Simon.

In another section of the paper, a cat is reported missing, but the story has been written by G.W.F. Hegel, and one can barely discern the cat. Well no one admires Hegel’s prose style, but it is pleasing and relaxing to imagine Hegel, humbled at last, having to write for a newspaper. Hegel also reports on the doings at the racetrack.

Elsewhere, a soccer match is narrated by Proust, an apartment is offered for sale by Heine, a quarrel between to neighbors is accounted for by Colette.

Heinrich Heine

Colette

Virginia Woolf has control of the financial columns, which, in this newspaper of mine, detail how money should be spent, and on what items, not how it should be invested.

“He who knows how to keep silent discovers an alphabet that has just as many letters as the ordinary one.”

She reads Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, watches television, goes to work, listens to music, sleeps, and prepares for her delivery.

I (Harry) brought back her (Chloe’s) books —Edgar Cayce and the prophecies of Nostradamus.

Nostradamus

Love makes those young whom age doth chill, And whom he finds young keeps young.