University Diaries » “[I]n college I was learning that Dostoyevsky, James, Proust, George Eliot—as well as novelists as different as Jane Austen and Laclos—were major texts for secular moral instruction. We used to think that, at any rate, if you’d read enough French novels, you had no right to whimper, in the middle of some erotic, social, and spiritual catastrophe you’d prepared for yourself, ‘How could this happen to me?’”

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“[I]n college I was learning that Dostoyevsky, James, Proust, George Eliot—as well as novelists as different as Jane Austen and Laclos—were major texts for secular moral instruction. We used to think that, at any rate, if you’d read enough French novels, you had no right to whimper, in the middle of some erotic, social, and spiritual catastrophe you’d prepared for yourself, ‘How could this happen to me?'”

John Hollander, a clever poet who has died, at the age of 83, said this clever thing in a 1985 Paris Review interview.

Margaret Soltan, August 19, 2013 6:35AM
Posted in: poem

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