The Demons
Jun. 13th, 2006 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryLately I've been reading The Demons of Heimito von Doderer: a 1500 page monster in two volumes.
In Earthly Powers Toomey plays some role in getting him safely out of Austria to England after the Anschluss; I vaugely recall that Burgess mentions something about it too in his memoirs. That is how I came to know of him.
As far as I can tell the book is not about anything. Just as well.
Here are a few excerpts:
A man who studies a science is like a man in search of a bride. The whole of medicine or the whole of zoology or the whole of archaeology is rife with many and diverse objects of love, but the choice of field is not made until by and by out of the almost inscrutable roots of biography an emergent Eros fastens itself upon once such topic: carcinomas, Lepidoptera, or brachiata. It is part of the thrill that ordinary people cannot even know what the whole topic is. Dwight himself could not say exactly when his own special Eros leaped to life inside him. He could only reason that it must have been either when he was leafing through an old book—Scudder’s The Butterflies of the Eastern United States (three volumes)—or while he was looking at showcases of butterfly collections. At any rate, it became apparent to him that these fragile, flighty things out in the garden could also be put in order in just as fundamental a manner as the cellar.
Without free dialectic there is no Greece.
(in somewhat the fashion that a painter engaged on a still life completely forgets the concrete purposes of the objects lying before him, seeing in them only the dynamics of color, curvature, and planes, no longer knowing that the pipe on the table can be used for smoking—such a process lies behind those paintings so disagreeable to the autocrats of culture)
In Earthly Powers Toomey plays some role in getting him safely out of Austria to England after the Anschluss; I vaugely recall that Burgess mentions something about it too in his memoirs. That is how I came to know of him.
As far as I can tell the book is not about anything. Just as well.
Here are a few excerpts:
A man who studies a science is like a man in search of a bride. The whole of medicine or the whole of zoology or the whole of archaeology is rife with many and diverse objects of love, but the choice of field is not made until by and by out of the almost inscrutable roots of biography an emergent Eros fastens itself upon once such topic: carcinomas, Lepidoptera, or brachiata. It is part of the thrill that ordinary people cannot even know what the whole topic is. Dwight himself could not say exactly when his own special Eros leaped to life inside him. He could only reason that it must have been either when he was leafing through an old book—Scudder’s The Butterflies of the Eastern United States (three volumes)—or while he was looking at showcases of butterfly collections. At any rate, it became apparent to him that these fragile, flighty things out in the garden could also be put in order in just as fundamental a manner as the cellar.
Without free dialectic there is no Greece.
(in somewhat the fashion that a painter engaged on a still life completely forgets the concrete purposes of the objects lying before him, seeing in them only the dynamics of color, curvature, and planes, no longer knowing that the pipe on the table can be used for smoking—such a process lies behind those paintings so disagreeable to the autocrats of culture)
