I had never heard of Julien Gracq until today when a friend sent me Gracq's obituary in The Independent newspaper. He was a famous French novelist, a private man who did not meet up with other authors or accept prizes; he even turned down the Prix Goncourt.
He wrote a sentence that struck me as interesting if not inspired. "Literature was the last of the arts to make its appearance. It will be the first to disappear."
Strange that I am at this present time reading a book by David Leavitt called "The Indian Clerk" about the mathematician G.H.Hardy's relationship with the Indian self-taught mathematician Ramanujan in which there is this quote from Hardy: "Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. 'Immortality' may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment