The outside world exists like an actor on a stage: it’s there but it’s pretending to be something else. … – Mask, Ferdinand Khnopff, c.1897 Someone, more free or accursed than the rest of us, suddenly sees (though even he only sees it rarely) that everything we are is

I considered that God, because unlikely, just might exist and might therefore deserve to be adored, but that Humanity, being a mere biological idea designating nothing more than the human race itself, was no more deserving of adoration than any other animal species. This worship of Humanity, with its rituals

There is no stricter moralist than Fear; and no moralist is a stranger to Fear. – Declan Donnellan, The Actor and the Target, Theatre Communications Group, London, 2005, p. 36 – Kaloust Guedel’s All Men are Created Alike

– Isaac Ilyich Levitan’s portrait of his friend Anton Chekhov. Levitan greeted Chekhov with, Are you there, crocodile? Levitan 1860-1900 I went home and fell asleep trying to read The Brothers Karamazov. Oh dear, oh dear. He sits downstage of his desk. So long-winded and indelicate. Too pretentious.

The best tickets in town at the moment are … [Moscow, February 1998] meditations on the classics clog the vacuum into which new writing might have rushed since 1990. This lack of creative nerve is typical of what is called freedom; but while Russia waits for its new agonies to find