Document: The Symbolism Survey, Sarah Funke Butler

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind? McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. The pages here feature a number of the surveys in facsimile: Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer.

erin's emporium of discount dreams & well-worn wonders Where to Begin | Online Only Following on from our How to Write About Pakistan feature yesterday, Nadeem Aslam, whose novella Leila in the Wilderness opens our Pakistan issue, reflects on the same questions with a focus on his own work. Imagine an area of darkness. We don’t know the time, we don’t know the place. It could be the year of Aeschylus’s birth in Greece, or it could be 19 November 1942 in the town of Drohobycz, or the day after tomorrow in Lahore. Now imagine a circle of light within this darkness and a middle-aged woman standing in it. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that as artists, as writers, as thinkers, and as human beings, we can all fill a number of pages about what that woman is going through. How to write fiction about Pakistan ? Pakistanis are as complex as any other people on the planet. This is not to say that these are not tourist clichés – but they must remain available to the artist as well as the non-artist. To me Urdu is always the first point of reference. See also...

Philosophical Quotes, Thought-Provoking Sayings Related Quotes Hmmm Philosophy Truth Wise Words We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation. ~François VI de la Rochefoucault A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure. Begin at the beginning... and go on till you come to the end: then stop. Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying. I am a part of all that I have met. There's more to the truth than just the facts. The obscure we see eventually. Even a clock that does not work is right twice a day. Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth. If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky? We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. The obstacle is the path.

Great Books Index - List of Titles An Index to Online Great Books in English Translation To obtain an index of an author's works, including any known online editions of each work, and online articles about that author, select the author's name. To obtain an index of online editions of a particular work, select the name of that work. Then you will be able to scroll up and down to see other works by that author and articles about the author. Authors are listed here in order of their birthdates (insofar as known). To obtain an alphabetical listing of authors, go to the Author Index . The Bible -- Homer -- Aeschylus -- Sophocles -- Euripides -- Herodotus -- Thucydides -- Hippocrates -- Aristophanes -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Euclid -- Archimedes -- Apollonius -- Lucretius -- Virgil -- Tacitus -- Epictetus -- Nicomachus -- Plutarch -- Ptolemy -- Marcus Aurelius -- Galen -- Plotinus -- St Augustine -- The Quran -- St Thomas Aquinas -- Dante -- Chaucer -- Erasmus -- Machiavelli -- Copernicus -- Rabelais -- John Calvin -- Montaigne -- William Gilbert -- Cervantes -- F.