Flit Lit

From the arts-sports [like ice-dance] I took heart [about my possible triviality]. They proved that creativity is indivisible. The skaters, the divers and the gymnasts reminded me that what I read in books, saw in pictures and heard in music had all started in a fundamental human compulsion to give dynamism shape. […] There are moments in Shakespeare when he sets three or four ideas all travelling at once through each other’s trajectories. He couldn’t have been thinking of Bach, who wasn’t born yet. But he might well have been thinking of a juggler he stopped to watch on the way to work. — from “Souls on Ice: Torvill and Dean”, Postscript (ii), in Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James, Picador 2001.

He Say, He Sigh, He Sow #39

— Croyez-vous aux idées dangereuses ?
— Qu’entendez-vous par là ?
— Croyez-vous que certaines idées soient aussi dangereuses pour certains esprits que le poison pour le corps ?
— Mais, oui, peut-être.

  Guy de Maupassant, « Divorce » (1888)


“Do you believe in dangerous ideas?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Do you believe that certain ideas are as dangerous for some minds as poison is for the body?”
“Well, yes, perhaps.”