My Pleiade edition of Gérard de Nerval’s works is inscribed “en toute sympathie” from its French editor to Enid Starkie, the noted Oxford eccentric and biographer of Baudelaire and Flaubert. I found the slightly worn volume in a secondhand bookshop in Arlington for $6, and have often wondered how it got there.
The most restful place in the world is the periodicals reading room of any public library.
In eleventh grade we studied Oedipus the King in a translation for students by Bernard M. W. Knox. Fifteen years later I became friends with Knox, then director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies here in Washington. It was almost like meeting Sophocles.
From the essay Talismans, in the book Readings, by Michael Dirda
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