Aciman's Cornetto semplice

 A fine romance for the 60+ readership.  A perfect cornetto.  A Room by the Sea.

"A cornetto on the other hand isn’t so assiduously laminated, and can even be made with lard, not butter. The dough also contains more sugar. The result is a pastry that is just a lot sweeter than a proper French croissant, and can have a more enriched bread or cake-like texture, more like a French brioche. Some cornetti are very flaky and like croissants, but many others are more cakey; there’s a lot of variation."  

Naples and mother figure in good measure in the tale of lovers thrown together by surprise.

"Indeed, cornetti are sometimes called brioche in some northern parts of Italy, though in Naples, Sicily and parts of south with a historical French influence, the name brioche is used for a pastry more like the Gallic version. But that’s another story."  

last pages in Aciman's memoir

 shame gets mentioned a number of times throughout, here close to the end . . .

That shame had never gone away; shame never does, it was there on every corner of the street. Shame, which is the reluctance to own up to who we are, could end up being the deepest thing about us, deeper even than who we are, as though beyond identity are buried reefs and sunken cities teeming with creatures we couldn’t begin to name because they’ve been there since our earliest infancy and never went away. All I really wanted, as we began walking to the other end of Via Clelia, was to put the experience behind me now—We’ve done Via Clelia—knowing, though, that I

he gives the finale, however, the greatest of endings --  

I thought I'd learned to tolerate this city.  Instead, it was love.

    Now you know, says Via Clelia.

    Now I know, I want to say, now I know.  

lines from Aciman's Roman Year

 I was nursing a secret, other life.  It did not make me more reticent than I usually was when others described their real or proclaimed exploits; instead, my secret made me surer of myself.  806 Kobo

Having a separate life gave my old bookish aloofness a new cast.

I love the ease it gave me to revisit all my private corners with the space of a few hours without having to tell anyone.  824

But I also needed this book to know who I was now and what stood behind me, as if Durrell's novel allowed me to intuit things that weren't in his book at all, but in me, except that I needed his voice and its cadence to draw closer to myself.  841

Maybe this was what I was after, not the city as I remembered it, but traces of a city that might never have iexisted but was reinvented and in a strange way more real on paper for me that night than was my memory of it.  Maybe this was why I liked books:  they were not as real as life; they offered an altered, transposed, and stylized version of the real that I liked better because it was more persuasive.  It had radiance; real life never did.  854.  

our surest glory

 "To the people of the dead, Giacometti's work communicates the knowledge of the solitude of each

being and each thing, and that this solitude is our surest glory."   Genet 

Rilke's passage on marriage and solitude

 When did I first read Rilke's great lines about what makes a good marriage?  It was perhaps in C S Lewis's The Four Loves?  which we read at Elkins Park for a course or because it was very popular in Catholic circles then?  For sure I read it sometime in college.  I think I read it the book about notes to a yung poet.  Or Letters to a young poet.   The passage "It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow."  

McGregor cites the passage in his book a number of times.  His book on solitude is well researched in a kind of researchy sort of way.  hmm am I finding fault?  

lines from Separate Rooms

 lines from the novel  by Tondelli    consonances going on with "solitude" in McGregor's book and other ones too 

In some ways he had managed to get by by remaining aloof, as he had in his boyish love affairs. The years of apprenticeship were important in this respect too. Because he did not achieve anything concrete, be it something accomplished, or some kind of a relationship. He did not realize that the suffering was enriching him and that he was developing in an inward direction as a person

He would rather have made love, had fun, and branched out into emotional experiences and political quests, but instead he ended up tense and repressed, working on the mystery of his own solitude and aloneness, unaware that in so doing he was getting closer to the most palpable seam of that other reality that we call art.

Leo realizes that his need for solitude cannot cut him off altogether

He is trying to find an answer to the need he feels to be with himself. He wants to carry on being generous and available and open, even if he is aware that it is not easy to reconcile such different demands. The fact is that solitude is changing him. He says: “You’re thirty-something, Leo. Your body does not react to things like it used to. You don’t have that constant desire to find things out any longer. You don’t have  

Pier Vittorio Tondelli  Separate Rooms   Fine Preface by André Aciman and soon to be a film

adaptation by Luca Guadagnino.  

Aciman's passages about writing letters, did I already post some passages from that?  

Genet

 The brilliance of Genet's mind hit me many times while in Our Lady of the Flowers.  Here is one such passage from a few days ago.  " Hateful nature, anti-poetic, ogress swallowing up all spirituality. As ogrish as beauty is greedy. Poetry is a vision of the world obtained by an effort, sometimes exhausting, of the taut, buttressed will. Poetry is willful It is not an abandonment, a free and gratuitous entry by the senses; it is not to be confused with sensuality, but rather, opposing it, was born, for example, on Saturdays, when, to clean the rooms, housewives put the red velvet chairs, gilded mirrors, and mahogany tables outside, in the nearby meadow. "

17000+ Letters

Charlie Louth	11:34 AM (5 hours ago)
to me

Dear Bob,

I’m afraid i don’t recognize that quotation, and don’t think it very likely he can have said exactly that. but it would be from a letter, i suppose, of which there are as many as 17000, and translation can garble quite a bit, so it perhaps is based on something. it certainly doesn’t ring any bells.

Good wishes

Charlie

Oxford UK  

Bottom of one's trunk

'Such things--one's way of meeting, morally, the mystery of the universe--lie very deep down, a the bottom of one's trunk.  One can't always put one's hand on them in a moment.' . . . Isn't it true, rather, that the deeper they are the more they take the colour of one's general disposition?  I'm not aggressive, and certainly I'm not eloquent."   Henry James, Roderick Hudson (1875)  Oxford Classic 208.