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Zusatztext “Artful and intelligent . . . . Kaplan's book has made its own mark. . . I am able to feel the sense of an exotic and timeless part of the world.” — Bob Hoover! Pittsburg Post-Gazette “[Kaplan] helps the distant past resonate today. . . . [He] teaches lessons that are informative and concise.” – The Washington Post Book World “A writer of extraordinary intellect and passion . . . with a wonderfully lucid way of relating history as a living thing.” – San Francisco Chronicle “Erudite and intrepid. . . . [Kaplan] is a deft guide to wherever he chooses to lead you.” – The New York Times Informationen zum Autor Robert D. Kaplan Klappentext "Artful and intelligent . . . . Kaplan's book has made its own mark. . . I am able to feel the sense of an exotic and timeless part of the world.” — Bob Hoover, Pittsburg Post-Gazette "[Kaplan] helps the distant past resonate today. . . . [He] teaches lessons that are informative and concise.” -The Washington Post Book World "A writer of extraordinary intellect and passion . . . with a wonderfully lucid way of relating history as a living thing.” -San Francisco Chronicle "Erudite and intrepid. . . . [Kaplan] is a deft guide to wherever he chooses to lead you.” -The New York Times The Tigress Divinity exists in beautiful memories: leaves like weightless bronze, engraved with the year, falling amid the trees of Rodin's sculpture garden in Paris. For Rodin, the human body was the ultimate expression of nature, and nudity the opposite of decadence because it bore the glory and pain of the universe. Inside the artist's mansion, I recall torsos that, as Rainer Maria Rilke writes, were complete even though they lacked arms, and a haggard woman with a sagging belly and crumpled breasts who was beautiful. Rodin knew that limbs and youth are superfluous to beauty. Rodin's "Old Woman" is the true goddess of travel. Her body is the tortured ruin of a lifetime, whose memories are intimated by her downward gaze. Her knowledge and experience now have no material purpose except reflection. Indeed, the sculpture may represent a courtesan brooding over her sins: travel is where we truly meet ourselves. We remember what we must in order to endure, says the philosopher Henri Bergson. That is why so much of commonplace existence is forgotten, while our journeys never are. "The masses do not see the Sirens," Nikos Kazantzakis observes. "They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them...and royally squander their lives with her." Kazantzakis' siren is a "merciless voice-the TIGRESS." She is his companion on all his journeys. She "digs her claws into my brain, and we reflect on all we have seen and all we have yet to see." Robert Graves calls her the "White Goddess," who can appear as a "she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag." The test of any writer's vision, Graves says, is "the accuracy of his portrayal" of her. The goddess's physical beauty lies only in her eyes. Her allure is the life of the mind. For it is the yearning after comparisons and metaphors for each new object and landscape that sanctifies consciousness. Leaves falling on statues were my last memory of autumn for fourteen years. That evening I boarded a train south to Marseilles and instantly consigned Rodin's garden to the past. Like all diarists, I wrote down what I felt before moving on, while the mood of the place still dominated my thoughts. Now I travel in retrospect: excavating only the most useful fragments. Thus, I will keep personal matters to a minimum. I had recently graduated from college and was working at a small newspaper in Vermont. In the summer of 1975, I watched the civil war in Lebanon on the nightly news. In the hope of becoming a foreign correspondent, ...
