LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I will love it if sometime soon you find or create an opportunity to speak words similar to what novelist D. H. Lawrence once wrote to a lover: You seem to have knit all things in a piece for me. Things are not separate; they are all in a symphony. In other words, Libra, I ll be ecstatic if you experience being in such synergistic communion with an empathic ally that the two of you weave a vision of life that s vaster and richer than either one of you could summon by yourself. The astrological omens suggest this possibility is now more likely than usual.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): A fan once asked composer Johann Sebastian Bach about his creative process. He was so prolific! How did he dream up such a constant flow of new music? Bach told his admirer that the tunes came to him unbidden. When he woke up each morning, they were already announcing themselves in his head. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, Taurus, a comparable phenomenon may very well visit you in the coming weeks not in the form of music, but as intuitions and insights about your life and your future. Your main job is to be receptive to them, and make sure you remember them.
Hurst and Company, 2020, $29.53, 184 pp.
After Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus was perhaps France’s most prominent philosophical writer of the 20
th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and producing masterpieces such as
The Stranger and
The Plague, as well as actively contributing to the moral and political issues of the day.
Camus died on January 4, 1960, when the car he was in swerved at high speed on a highway leading towards Paris and slammed into a plane tree. Camus, in the front passenger seat, was killed instantly, and the driver, his publisher Michel Gallimard, died a few days later in hospital. Fortunately, Gallimard’s family, sitting in the back, escaped relatively unharmed.
13.
“I remember arguing with you about John Ashbery, whom I couldn’t stand when I was in my thirties and forties. It might even have been during our first conversation in Paris, when I said I’ve never read a good Ashbery poem, and you answered by telling me a joke the comedian George Burns used to say about his friend and fellow comedian, Jack Benny.”
“That I don’t remember,” Charlie said. “Remind me.”
“Benny said to Burns, ‘In my whole life I’ve never had a good cup of coffee.’ And Burns replied, ‘Then how would you know?’”