The Last Samurai

designed to be lost 30 or 40 times a day.

I say to L: Kurosawa won a prize for a film he made before this one, called Rashomon, about a woman raped by a bandit

The fight begins. A raises his pole and pauses. B holds his pole over his head and shouts.
A draws back his pole in a beautiful sweeping movement, and pauses. B runs forward.
A raises his pole suddenly and brings it down.
B says it was a draw.
A says he won. He’d have killed him with a real sword. He walks away.
B wants to fight with swords.
A says he’d kill him, it’s stupid.
B draws his sword and insists.
A draws his sword.
He raises it and pauses.
B holds his sword above his head and shouts.
A draws back his sword in a beautiful sweeping movement. B runs forward.
A raises his sword suddenly and brings it down. B falls down dead.

No one had ever asked me if he was boring me who wasn’t, and I never knew what to say, or rather it always seemed as though the only possible answer was No

I then thought of a priceless line I’d read somewhere or other: It is my duty as a mother to be cheerful. It is my duty as a mother to be cheerful, & so it is clearly my duty to watch a work of genius & abandon Advanced Angling & composition.

Liberace talked on and on and on. Gradually as we drank more drinks Liberace talked more and more and more and asked more and more if he was boring me, and as a result it seemed less and less possible to leave, because if he wasn’t boring me why would I want to leave?
Then I thought, there must be some other way not to listen to all this, and of course there was a way. Surely Liberace had brought me back here to pick me up. It would be rude to put a hand over his mouth, but if I were to put my mouth on his mouth this would stop him talking just as well without being rude. His eyes were large, a clear glass green, rimmed with black like the eyes of a nocturnal animal; it seemed as though, if I only kissed him, not only would I not have to listen to him, but I would somehow be closer to the animal with these beautiful eyes.

He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, & being unable to combine the two had settled for the one he could be sure of

Gradually they would approach the level of the other branches of the arts which are so much further developed. Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes, & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese.

so often it was much easier to come with the plan of leaving after 10 minutes than to leave after 10 minutes,

The overtone series, which led the ear to it, still contains many problems that will have to be faced. And if for the time being we still manage to escape those problems, it is due to little else than a compromise between the natural intervals and our inability to use them—that compromise which we call the tempered system, which amounts to an indefinitely extended truce