Sandy Klein sent:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2011/03/stoppards-favorite-lines.html Stoppard’s Favorite Lines:: "In this week’s issue, Mark
Singer writes about the revival of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” on Broadway....A
director who has staged several of his plays told me the other day, “You have to
be foreign to write English with that kind of hypnotized brilliance.” An
obvious comparison is with Vladimir Nabokov, whom Stoppard extravagantly
admires. Stoppard said to me not long ago that his favorite parenthesis in world
literature was this, from 'Lolita': 'My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic,
lightning) when I was three.'.”
JM: HH's description of his photogenic mother's death (picnic,
lightining), brings to my mind another succint description.
In HH's case it is not a
report of an actual grief but, nonetheless, it remains emblematic for other
real and unbearable sorrows. A writer's
genius...
In his book "Jenseits des Lustpprinzips" Freud
describes the adventures of his favourite daughter's son while he
was playing with a spool with an attached thread. The child threw it
away from his cradle exclaiming o-o-o ("Fort") and next
he retrieved it with an exultant "a-a-a" ("Da"). Freud
interpreted his grandson's effort to cope with his mother's
absence:o-o-o ("Gone") a-a-a ("Back") as an attempt to gain symbolic control
over an unfavourable loss. However,
while Freud was in the process of writing his article, his
daughter died from the flu. He acknowledged this fact in a
pungent footnote, with its almost nonsensical parenthesis, and
it still haunts me. "Now that she was really 'gone' ('o-o-o'), the little boy
showed no signs of grief. ..."