LIONEL TRILLING
503
be adjusted as to time. The whole business he had thought would be
a warning not a dismissal: nonsense .
There remains to see Steeves and tell him what I now know and
to insult Weaver, publicly if possible .
Note that Mark concurs with Steeves about Emery's position
and intention!
June
13 (1936)
Going through change of life and acquiring a new dimension.
Principally a sense that I do not have to prove anything finally and
everlastingly. A sense of life- of the past and present. Am no longer
certain that the future will be a certain-Marxian-way. No longer
measure all things by linear Marxian yardstick. But this is symbolic.
A new emotional response to all things . New response to people, a
new tolerance, a new interest. A sense of invulnerability . The result
of my successful explosion at Columbia? The feeling that I can now
write with a new illumination, getting rid of that rigid linear method
that has irritated me in my reviewing for so long. ... -An easier
understanding of poetry and painting- and of opinion . -Less re–
sponsibility put on people. -Sense of my own stature
&
less concern
with it. -Effect visible in O'Neill essay.
(1936)
To tell students: In reading poetry do not assume that you are in an
audience listening to music; assume rather that you are yourself the
musical performer-the poem is your score and you have to make
someone understand it- as we say, you have to
interpret
it.
(1936)
An essay on the "ambivalent moments"- those moments in our
reading when we neither hate nor love what the author is saying but
hate and love together : when our mind is poised over a recognition
of a truth which attacks other truths, or when the author has
brilliantly caught half the truth, and denies the other half. These are
the most fertile moments . They are the moments of the critic:
Santayana, Arnold, Carlyle: Nietzsche, etc.
(1936)
Story of a teacher and his student: the boy has just graduated:
transformation of the teacher's rather sentimental regard : the change
from a false charming relationship to a real disagreeable one. The
student's rivalry seen, etc.
Story of a university teacher who had never got to write, meeting the
