Joseph Epstein, Alice Munro 를 뒤로 하고

매일 밤 잠들기 전 몇 쪽씩 읽곤 하던 Alice Munro 의 단편집

"Family Funishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014" (2014) 와

낮에, 처음에는 다른 책들 읽는 사이사이 나중에는 주로, 읽은

Joseph Epstein 의 에세이집 "A Literary Education and Other

Essays" (2014) 를 며칠 전에 다 읽었다.

 

"Family Furnishings" 는 어느 모임의 송년회 때 누구에게 선물로

주려고 샀다가 그 해 송년회가 없고 다른 기회도 없어서 그냥 내

책이 됐다. 실린 단편 24편 중에는 그전에 읽은 Munro 의 단편집

"Runaway"와 "Dear Life"의 표제작과 그밖에 몇 편씩이 들어 있다.

얼마 전에 이 두 책은 도서관에 기증했고, 이제 Alice Munro 가

생각나면 "Family Furnishings" 에서나 다시 읽어야겠다.

 

"A Literary Education"은 Epstein 의 또 다른 에세이집 "The

Ideal of Culture" (2018)를 재밌게 읽은 때문에 더, Smoky Hill

Libray 라운지에서 발견하고, 얼른 2불 주고 산 책인데, 서른 여덟

편의 에세이 중 몇 편 말고는, 그 책 만큼 재미가 없다. 문학이나

정치적 성향 등에 관한 저자의 어떤 견해는 한 번 읽은 거로 됐는데

여기저기 반복해서 만난다. 어쨌든 Epstein 은 충분히 읽었다.

 

Epstein 의 책에서 몇 구절 인용한다 (이 불로그에서 'Epstein'을

검색하면 그의 에세이에서 몇 구절씩 인용한 다른 포스트의 목록이

나온다):

 

   "The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity," Milan

   Kundera writes. "The novelist says to the reader: things

   are not as simple as you think."

 

   "A man is more complicated than his thoughts," wrote

   Valery, which, if you think about it, is happily so.

 

   The lesson boredom teaches, according to [Joseph]

   Brodsky, is that of one's own insignificance, an

   insignificance brought about by one's own finitude.

 

   This was the age of deconstuction ... and other, in

   Wallace Stevens's phrase, one-idea lunatics.

 

   I stressed that correctness has its own elegance, and

   that, in the use of language, ... close isn't enough;

   precision was the minimal requirement, and it was

   everything.

 

   [T]he most useful to me in my own writing has been

   [F. L.] Lucas's assertion that one does best always to

   attempt to use strong words to begin and sentences.

 

   Theodor Adorno felt that the essay was well suited

   to the modern spirit because it shied away from

   what he called "the violence of dogma."

 

   I have always been impressed by a remark of Robert

   Frost to the effect that whenever he knew the ending

   of a poem in advance of writing it, the poem turned

   out to be a damn poor one.

 

   All the strong personal essayists -- from Montaigne

   through Hazlitt through Beerbohm through George

   Orwell have had a clear and strong and often subtle

   point of view.

 

   Like the painter Vermeer, the personal essayist is

   most profound, at least for me, when his intentions

   are most modest.

 

   Without strong intellectual journalism, the culture

   is all the more likely to lapse -- actually, it long ago

   lasped -- into what Santayana called "a second-class

   standard of firstness."