Beautiful, thanks for this post Naomi. Pride and ambition to live up to one's values is important for most of us. It's also quite common once we reach older age and let go of certain things and accept other things about the world and ourselves. Most people who are not fooled by fear and vanity eventually become proud of the things they cherish most about their life - often, it has to do with loving rather than writing.
Thank you! Yes I think you're right. There is also a terrible degeneration that can happen tho as people get older tho, where some people lose their beliefs or become overcome by bitterness and become incomparably worse
I was always a fan of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra, which includes several travel essays and other materials about a trip to Greece that was the novel’s genesis. I haven’t read Christa T.
She talks a bit about Christa T. in this interview from the aughts. But the thing that stuck in my head from when I first read it was her line “A hundred zeros doesn’t make a number.” It sounds semi-profound, like an idiom that’s just out of reach.
This was great! Thank you so much. Learned so much about her. I think this quote puts the political background of christa T in more context for me: "No. It refers basically to life. All of my books we're now talking about, all those that appeared in the GDR, that is, came into being in the context of the GDR. They're a result of those times, and above all of the intense atmosphere of conflict I experienced there. That's what I was saying before, I felt that in writing I was opening myself up to conflict, and producing new conflicts with every new publication. But I couldn't do otherwise. The sentence "When, if not now" is the compressed expression of the knowledge that every day is precious. It colours the entire book, which I wrote after the death of my close friend. The GDR continuously postponed everything, the realisation of a perfect society, of new, contented people. We missed out on the present for the sake of a shining future. The sentence also refers to that."
Beautiful, thanks for this post Naomi. Pride and ambition to live up to one's values is important for most of us. It's also quite common once we reach older age and let go of certain things and accept other things about the world and ourselves. Most people who are not fooled by fear and vanity eventually become proud of the things they cherish most about their life - often, it has to do with loving rather than writing.
Thank you! Yes I think you're right. There is also a terrible degeneration that can happen tho as people get older tho, where some people lose their beliefs or become overcome by bitterness and become incomparably worse
I was always a fan of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra, which includes several travel essays and other materials about a trip to Greece that was the novel’s genesis. I haven’t read Christa T.
She talks a bit about Christa T. in this interview from the aughts. But the thing that stuck in my head from when I first read it was her line “A hundred zeros doesn’t make a number.” It sounds semi-profound, like an idiom that’s just out of reach.
http://www.signandsight.com/features/417.html
This was great! Thank you so much. Learned so much about her. I think this quote puts the political background of christa T in more context for me: "No. It refers basically to life. All of my books we're now talking about, all those that appeared in the GDR, that is, came into being in the context of the GDR. They're a result of those times, and above all of the intense atmosphere of conflict I experienced there. That's what I was saying before, I felt that in writing I was opening myself up to conflict, and producing new conflicts with every new publication. But I couldn't do otherwise. The sentence "When, if not now" is the compressed expression of the knowledge that every day is precious. It colours the entire book, which I wrote after the death of my close friend. The GDR continuously postponed everything, the realisation of a perfect society, of new, contented people. We missed out on the present for the sake of a shining future. The sentence also refers to that."