Word: epochally
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...surprising to find that Hesse's main dialogue was with her contemporaries in New York: the spiky or woolly boxes of Lucas Samaras, Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, Jasper Johns' borderline works between sculpture and painting. The remarkably intense exchange recalls, like a lost epoch, the temper of New York...
ONCE, THOUGH, the library was a domain that all European households boasted. Even such recent memoirs as those of Lytton Strachey, Lady Gregory, and Sartre, among innumerable others, remind us that the class which ownnd culture owned the talismans of culture. No prodigal child of our epoch will reminisce about the wood-panelled studies where idle afternoons were spent browsing through novels. In my own impoverished library, which comprises less than a thousand books, I have isolated the older works from those ephemera which are the luggage of all students. There is a volume of Swedenborg, issued in 1868, still...
...while there is in Proust a vision of incalculable significance, there is another crucial aspect to this oeuvre, which obtains even when the two volumes are left unread. It is impossible to read Proust now without a thorough deliberation beforehand on what this novel represents. In our post-historical epoch, when the world threatens to become indecipherable, when the sheer velocity of time speeds up to such an extent that entire landscapes disappear in a season, and when jet travel no longer seems a violation of natural law, these two thousand pages require a virtual suspension of existence in order...
...read and validated. Our object is to pore over this literature and revive in in our time, to deposit our sensations, which are themselves imbued with a specific social resonance, in the work. In this manner, a novel survives through time, and achieves a distinctive life in each epoch. So, if La Recherche du Temps Perdu stands neglected on the shelves, it still possesses an immense value, emblem of an irretrievable moment when such novels could be read...
...upon them in libraries, have not been taken out since 1937. Arminius Vambery's Travels in Central Asia, published in 1865, or A.S. Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World, are such examples. These works could be considered autonomous, in that their survivance is related to no specific epoch or lineage. Their titles have been handed on to me through other authors: in the case of Vambery, Arthur Koestler, in The Invisible Writing, while Eddington is quoted in Walter Benjamin's Illuminations...