Welcome to Hands on Books! This is a project meant to share my favorite hobby-book collecting. Each episode, I'll open a book (or several) from my ever-growing stack of unopened packages. I particularly love used books that have some character, so I never know exactly what I'll get. We'll discuss topics, authors, and the books themselves, and hopefully pass along some interesting suggestions. If you're a fellow book-lover, I think you'll grasp intuitively the experience I'm trying to share. Happy reading!
"That young black Brazilian, from humble origins, would thus achieve consecration for his commitment, for his struggle, in overcoming poverty through study and dedication to the art of writing. All of his work is revered and current to this day, and is in the public domain, available for free digital reading. He left, for our delight, the enigmatic love relationship between Bentinho and Capitu, the exploits of an Alienist who, out of fear for himself, ends up being hospitalized, the adventures of a certain Quincas Borba, the dark skepticism of Brás Cubas" antigo.bn.gov.br/acontece/noticias/2020/06/genial-machado-assis#:~:text=Do%20Romance%20ao%20Realismo%2C%20suas,leitor%20as%20peculiaridades%20da%20Cidade.
" Rabindranath Tagore is the very heart of this country. He is the most contemporary man, and yet the most ancient too. His words are a bridge between the modern mind and the ancient most sages of the world. In particular, GITANJALI is his greatest contribution to human evolution, to human consciousness. It is one of the rarest books that has appeared in this century. Its rarity is that it belongs to the days of the UPANISHADS - near about five thousand years before GITANJALI came into existen It is a miracle in the sense that Rabindranath is not a religious person in the ordinary sense. He is one of the most progressive thinkers - untraditional, unorthodox - but his greatness consists in his childlike innocence. And because of that innocence, perhaps he was able to become the vehicle of the universal spirit, in the same way as the UPANISHADS of old are. He is a poet of the highest category, and also a mystic. Such a combination has happened only once or twice before - in Kahlil Gibran, in Friedrich Nietzsche, and in Rabindranath Tagore. With these three persons, the whole category is finished. In the long history of man, it is extraordinary…. There have been great poets and there have been great mystics. There have been great poets with a little mysticism in them, and there have been great mystics who have expressed themselves in poetry - but their poetry is not great. Rabindranath is in a strange situation.” “Rabindranath never went to any temple, never worshiped any God, was never, in a traditional way, a saint, but to me he is one of the greatest saints the world has known. His saintliness is expressed in each of his words.” “Rabindranath Tagore, although he belongs to this century, echoes thousands-of-years -old longings and dreams of the East. He belongs to the seers of the UPANISHADS. He is the only man this century has produced whose words can be compared to the five-thousand-year-old UPANISHADS. Those UPANISHADS were songs of the first seers of humanity, but it is a strange fact that truth remains the same. Everything changes, but the truth is eternal. Five thousand years of distance, but whatever Rabindranath sings, appears to be coming from the days of the UPANISHADS, of those days of humanity’s childhood - so innocent and so pure.”
My favorite Vidal novel. GW Bowersock has a bio of Julian, which is good but also like 150 pages. It is pretty expensive I think (I read it from the library).
