COSMOS WITOLD GOMBROWICZ We now provide you the technology to get the Cosmos Witold Gombrowicz not in a thick printed file. Yeah, reading by on-line or getting the soft-file only to read can be one of the ways to do. You may not feel that reading a book will be useful for you. But, in some terms, May people successful are those who have reading. Witold Marian Gombrowicz (August 4, 1904 – July 24, 1969) was a Polish writer and playwright.His works are characterised by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and absurd, anti-nationalist flavor.
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Witold Gombrowicz quotes Showing 1-30 of 146
“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.”
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“Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.”
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Cosmos Witold Gombrowicz Pdf Printer 2017
“Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.”
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“Great! I've written something stupid, but I haven't signed a contract with anyone to produce solely wise and perfect works. I gave vent to my stupidity...and here I am, reborn.”
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“For Kierkegaard, for Heidegger, for Sartre, the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence. They measure honesty and the essence of experience by the degree of awareness. But is our humanity really built on awareness? Doesn't awareness--that forced, extreme awareness--arise among us, not from us, as something created by effort, the mutual perfecting of ourselves in it, the confirming of something that one philosopher forces onto another? Isn't man, therefore, in his private reality, something childish and always beneath his own awareness? And doesn't he feel awareness to be, at the same time, something alien, imposed and unimportant? If this is how it is, this furtive childhood, this concealed degradation are ready to explode your systems sooner or later.”
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“Rzecz prosta, im mądrzejszy czytelnik, tym i książka okaże się mądrzejsza; im zaś czytelnik głupszy i bardziej jałowy, tym i książka będzie głupsza.”
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“Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.”
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“We say 'forest' but this word is made of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unencompassed. The earth. Clods of dirt. Pebbles. On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.”
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“I placed no trust in faiths, doctrines, ideologies, institutions. Thus I could stand only upon my own feet. But I was a Pole, molded by Polishness, living in Poland. And so I needed to look deeper for my ‘self,’ in the place where it was no longer Polish but simply human”
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“Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.”
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Witold Gombrowicz Ferdydurke
“Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.”
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“Wielka Poezja będąc wielką i będąc poezją nie może nie zachwycać nas, a więc zachwyca!”
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“Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.”
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“I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.”
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“You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!”
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“I am a collection of the family's body parts.”
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“Joey, it's high time, dear child. What will people say? If you don't want to be a doctor, at least be a womanizer, or a fancier of horses, be something... be something definite...”
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“Isn't it true (I thought), that one is almost never present, or rather never fully present, and that's because we have only a halfhearted, chaotic and slipshod, disgraceful and vile relationship with out surroundings.”
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“I even stopped walking to give some thought to the fact that everyone, after all, wants to be himself, so I too want to be myself, for example who would love syphilis, of course no one loves syphilis, but after all, a syphilitic man also wants to be himself, namely a syphilitic, it is easy to say 'I want to be well again,' and yet it sounds strange, as if to say 'I don't want to be who I am.”
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“I could have protested of course, who says I couldn't--I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and--no matter how difficult it would have been--made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have--yet I couldn't because I didn't want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy!”
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“Dzieje kultury wykazują, ze głupota jest siostrą bliźniaczą rozumu, ona rośnie najbujniej nie na glebie dziewiczej ignorancji , lecz na gruncie uprawnym siódmym potem doktorów i profesorów. Wielkie absurdy nie są wymyślane przez tych, których rozum krząta się wokół spraw codziennych. Nic dziwnego zatem, że właśnie najintensywniejsi myśliciele bywali producentami największego głupstwa. / The history of culture shows that foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom. It does not flourish on the fields of pure ignorance but on the fields tirelessly plowed by doctors and professors. Great absurdities do not flourish where one is busy with everyday life. No wonder that sometimes most vigorous thinkers come up with utmost stupidities. (Dziennik 1956, XIX, Thursday)”
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“A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed. ”
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“To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today. ”
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“W polowie drogi mojego zywota posrod ciemnego znalazlem sie lasu. Las ten co gorsza byl zielony.”
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tags: ferdydurke, green-forest, middle-age-crisis
“Don't change the beggar into a conqueror, because it was the beggar who led you to conquest.”
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“Many a beauty in her own room behaves repulsively till one splits one's sides.”
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“If you were to stare at this box of matches, you could extract entire worlds out of it. If you search for tastes in a book, you will certainly find them because it was said: seek and ye shall find. But a critic should not rifle, search. Let him sit back with folded arms, waiting for the book to find him. Talents should not be sought with a microscope, a talent should let people know about itself by striking at all the bells.”
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tags: literary-criticism, talent, writing-philosophy
“Why, my man is created from the outside, that is, he is inauthentic in essence- he is always not-himself, because he is determined by form, which is born between people. His 'I', therefore, is marked for him in that 'interhumanity.' An eternal actor, but a natural one, because his artificiality is inborn, it makes up a feature of his humanity-to be a man means to be an actor-to be a man means to pretend to be a man-to be a man means to 'act like' a man while not being one deep inside-to be a man is to recite humanity.”
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COSMOS
By Witold Gombrowicz.
Translated by Danuta Borchardt.
189 pp. Yale University Press. $25.
A Polish student, seeking peace and quiet to study for his exams, and his friend, desperately needing a vacation from his oppressive office job, leave the city to board for a time with a rural family. Afflicted with anomie and a strange laziness, Witold and Fuks don't suspect what's ahead. Little by little, they find themselves drawn into a mystery hidden deep in the boarding house and the pretty summer countryside. But it is a mystery -- and they are detectives -- unlike any others.
The first sign of trouble is real enough: a sparrow is found hanging by the neck on a wire in a tree, 'its little head to one side, its beak wide open.' The second, while more troubling, is less clearly the work of a malefactor: wandering alone in the garden that evening, Witold begins to think there's a troubling connection between the sparrow and the 'slithering,' 'slippery' lips of two of the women in the house. 'A tiresome game of tennis evolved, for the sparrow sent me to the mouth, the mouth back to the sparrow, and I found myself between the sparrow and the mouth, one hiding behind the other.' The third sign is even more tenuous: there is a line on the ceiling of Witold and Fuks's room that may or may not resemble an arrow, pointing at something. Who put it there? What might it mean? The two young men, increasingly worried, venture outside to confer. 'Did one of the windowpanes look at me with a human eye?' Witold wonders. 'It was conceivable that the one watching us was the same person who sneaked into our room, most likely during the morning hours, and gouged the line that created the arrow.'
Lips, lines, arrows, sparrows. With the addition of these elements, the plot -- although it may be about absolutely nothing -- seems to thicken. There is a broken farm tool lying on a pile of rubbish in the door of the garden shed. Is it pointing somewhere deliberately, like the arrow? Fuks finds the evidence overwhelming: 'There is a track where the wood scraps have been moved, as if the whiffletree lay in a different position before.'
So progresses the investigation in Witold Gombrowicz's sly, funny, absorbing fourth novel, published in Polish in 1965 and lovingly translated by Danuta Borchardt. The two neurotic detectives single-mindedly interrogate the meaning of their surroundings, seeking in the most mundane objects and events the solution to a mystery only they can see, their suspicions growing and growing until we begin to fear for their sanity -- or ours.
Writing in the online magazine Words Without Borders, Benjamin Paloff calls Gombrowicz 'probably the most important 20th-century novelist most Western readers have never heard of.' Praised by Sontag, Updike, Kundera, Sartre and Milosz, he is the underdog in late modernism's literary competition -- perhaps, in part, because he left Poland in 1939, just before the German invasion, and remained in exile in Argentina for the next 25 years. He died in France in 1969, but since then his fiction and plays and his renowned three-volume diary have stubbornly refused to be forgotten, not only in Poland but throughout the world.
Critics have tended to treat 'Cosmos' as a fictional reflection on the nature of meaning: a novel that asks whether we impose meaning on reality or discover it there. Is something truly amiss in the lips, the tree, the sparrow? Or is their portentous symbolism just a product of the nervous, erotic imagination of the characters? But if Gombrowicz's 1937 novel, 'Ferdydurke,' can be called a philosophical novel, then 'Cosmos,' published roughly 30 years later, strikes me as a novel about language.
Whether or not there's any substance to Witold's suspicions is up to the reader to decide. But each of the book's clues seems to have a linguistic counterpart: the association of the sparrow with the women's lips is an example of metonymy, and as for the various signs and arrows, there's surely a Ph.D. dissertation somewhere documenting -- correctly -- how they add up to a virtual catalog of the forms of deixis, the ways in which language relays spatial and directional information. And that's no surprise. Throughout the book, there are faint resonances of the intellectual prepossession with language that marked the era when 'Cosmos' was written: the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson, semiotics, the echo of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of 'linguistic relativity' (which posits not consciousness but language itself as the human capacity that creates and organizes reality).
I don't know whether Gombrowicz was deliberately playing with the intellectual currents of his day or whether he was one of those seminal artists who give voice to questions scholars will later rationalize. It doesn't really matter. What's important is that the insight in these remarkable pages is creatively captivating and intellectually challenging. Perhaps Gombrowicz's break-out attempt from the Nietzschean 'prison house of language,' in which postmodernism so blithely accepts its life sentence, feels a bit quaint today. But it's also true that in the 40 years since 'Cosmos' was published, no one has done any better.
'Cosmos,' by Witold Gombrowicz Neil Gordon is chairman of the writing program at Eugene Lang College of New School University, literary editor of Boston Review and the author, most recently, of a novel, 'The Company You Keep.'