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Book: What W. H. Auden Can Do for You
Quotes of Book: What W. H. Auden Can Do for
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  1. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    His particular insight was that we need to be at home; all his concerns with division within ourselves, with the tragic flaws in our nature, with the thwarting of love-all these point to the need that he felt we had within us to locate ourselves in a place we could live in with love, with people with whom we could share.
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  2. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    There are countless other instances of Auden's delight in using words on the cusp of that damning dictionary verdict archaic. Never does one get the impression that these words are being used in a showy way: they are there deliberately, and sometimes, no doubt, they are chosen not only for their pleasurable quality but because they have the right number of syllables for the line, but they are never used to impress. Rather, they are used to express and share the poet's delight in the sheer richness of the English language.
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  3. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    Alain de Botton has written a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, a title that I suspect was devised with at least some tongue in cheek but that speaks, nonetheless, to a very real possibility of personal transformation. The title of this book is in a way lighthearted homage to de Botton's remarkable book.
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  4. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    Addressing his friend, he draws attention to what she brings to the world through her therapeutic calling: We fall down in the dance, we make The old ridiculous mistake, But always there are such as you Forgiving, helping what we do. O every day in sleep and labour Our life and death are with our neighbour, And love illuminates again The city and the lion's den, The world's great rage, the travel of young men. These lines are about the person to whom the poem is addressed but when we read them today could be about Auden himself. He
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  5. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    There may be no book on the mothers of poets, or artists in general, but it might one day be written and would be, I think, an enlightening read.
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  6. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    To be free Is often to be lonely. He would unite The unequal moieties fractured By our own well-meaning sense of justice Would restore to the larger the wit and will The smaller possess but can only use For arid disputes, would give back to The son the mother's richness of feeling …
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  7. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    he was sent off to boarding school. Gresham's School is in a small town called Holt, in Norfolk, a remote part of rural England. Unlike many boarding schools of the day, the regime in this school was reasonably liberal and did not involve the cruelties in which the English educational system of the time excelled. These could be profoundly distorting: how many lives were ruined by a harsh regime of relentless conformity, enforced by physical punishment; how many young men were sent out into the world emotionally crippled by a system designed to produce a stiff upper lip and an acceptance of hierarchy. The English were unwittingly cruel to their children, which is something the Italians, to think of one example, have never been.
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  8. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    It is considerably more than that, though: it is an acceptance that in the face of meaninglessness or indifference it is still possible to be engaged in the world-it is still possible to love. These are the first two stanzas of this curious little poem: Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
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  9. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    Auden returns to one of his most important themes-that of repairing the tragic division in our lives, of making us whole again: While, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, So many long-forgotten objects Revealed by his undisclosed shining Are returned to us and made precious again; Games we thought we must drop as we grew up, Little noises we dared not laugh at, Faces we made when no one was looking. But he wishes us more than this.
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  10. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I wandered. Inside the shed was a large art nouveau typesetting machine. I was being called, and I turned away from my discovery of the typesetting machine to make my way back to the house and to our hostess. People in dreams do not always have names, but she did. She was called Mrs. MacGregor.
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  11. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    Let's go back to the lines at the end of "In Praise of Limestone": "What I hear is the sound of underground streams / What I see is a limestone landscape." Close your eyes and try to imagine the shape of these lines. I see a falling, a descent, a softening, with the gentlest of landings at the end. And I feel resolution, calmness, and forgiveness."
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  12. Alexander McCall Smith _ What W. H. Auden Can Do for

    And then I awoke, and just as Auden did when he awoke from his dream of the croquet match, I felt that I had been vouchsafed a vision. It was a feeling of utter elation and goodwill-in other words, a feeling of agape. I felt bathed in the warm, golden glow of this feeling. Some year later my wife and I were having dinner with psychiatrist friends in an Edinburgh restaurant. The talk turned to dreams, and I recounted my dream. Unfortunately, as I did so, there was a lull in the conversation at nearby tables, with the result that others heard what I had to say. At the end there was silence. Then one of the psychiatrists said: "I know what your dream is about." A pin could have been heard to drop. "Mrs. MacGregor is your mother.
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