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Reading Elias Canetti's Auto da Fe (Penguin Modern Classics, 1935; 522)* after Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment  is like travelling on an underground railway connecting two cities in different countries - the transition is seamless and without notice. Not only were both books translations - one from Russian, the other from German - but they both address identical issues: introducing new elements into a hyper-functioning cognitive process leading to an imbalance that bothers on insanity. Again, both books discuss matters of knowledge or ideas, albeit in different forms; whereas Canetti discusses an intelligent bibliomania, Dostoevsky discusses a deductive theorist hoping to practicalise his theories. Finally, both books make references to ideas in other important books. It was therefore a unique privilege to have read these books in succession.* Professor Kien is a Sinologist, the best of his time. He has an extraordinarily boundless memory and can read several Ea...

Occasional collisions unexpectedly encountered determine the direction of a lifetime. [16] A bookseller is a king, and a king cannot be a bookseller. [16] The greatest danger which threatens a man of learning, is to lose himself in talk. [20] He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digesting happen of themselves. [32] The man who has frittered away the strength of his eyes is a worth companion of the beast that leads him. [35] Martyrs do not cry out, saints do not cry out. [45] [I]t is easy to be self-possessed when you have been dead for centuries. [51] Man alone was master of his fate. [64] Blindness is a weapon against time and space; our being is one vast blindness, save only for that little circle our mean intelligence - mean in its nature as in its scope - can illumine. The dominating principle of the universe is blindness. It makes possible juxtapositions whi...