Wilsoniana

Se här vilken tragedi det är att våra författare och kritiker inte längre är klassiskt skolade:

"Wilson several times called himself a man of the eighteenth century, and one can hear in the balanced periods, the long semi-colons, and the finely paradoxical compression -- "plays host in the mansion where he is not long to be master"; "returned to the treasury of the Union the little that he had to leave" -- both Gibbon and Johnson. And behind them is the Latin of Tacitus and Cicero: this is how, until quite recently, if not with such eloquence, English classics teachers of the old school used to write their term reports, and Wilson, almost uniquely among American literary journalists, had a solid training in Greek and Latin, languages which he maintained throughout his life. The tendency to defer the verb and object, to wave them on to the middle or end of the line, to interrupt the shapely sentence with subordinate and prepositional clauses, is clearly Latinate: "The abstractions of German philosophy, which may seem to us unmeaning or clumsy if we encounter them in English or French, convey in German, through their capitalized solidity, almost the impression of primitive gods. They are substantial, and yet they are a kind of pure beings; they are abstract, and yet they nourish."

Vilken elegans!
Stor biografi över legenden Edmund "Bunny" Wilson ute i dagarna. Se gärna:
http://www.powells.com/review/2005_09_22

Kuriosa: Donna Tartt har i "Den Hemliga Historien" lånat smeknammet Bunny för Edmund, från just Edmund Wilson.