Monday, February 22, 2010

words of love from a mind being disembodied



“…remember Rilke's admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish…,” Tony Judt, ”Historian’s Progress,” The New York Review of Books, March 11 issue.

Maybe Salinger read Rilke.

Judt is an esteemed intellectual historian who has written for the NYRB for years. He’s writing a lot these days, and each of his articles have the narrative smoothness and lucidity one might expect of NYRB. His present one is on love of trains. There’s no hint of the growing ALS “imprisonment,” which he recently wrote about matter-of-factly.