FOR FIFTY YEARS a painter, Ernst Benkert, kept notebooks in which he recorded the passages that had struck him in his reading.  From the writings of Meister Eckhart and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robertson Davies and Thomas Bernhard, Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche, Abram Tertz and Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag and Thomas Merton, from proverbs Rumanian and Haitian, from graffiti and the Upanishads, from the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, from the pages of the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books, and above all from a library of books about art, Benkert culled an extraordinary set of assertions, propositions, opinions, and definitions.  “This activity became the other side of my art.”  On each of these passages he cast a steady gaze, asking if it were true and useful, a basis on which to build an artistic practice.  From each he extracted a title, as if it were a painting.  Occasionally he follows up with a comment:  to a crack by Wilfred Sheed that people “talk about sports from morning to night for fear something else might get in,” he remarks:  “Stuart Davis used to watch baseball on TV while painting.”  Still more occasionally he adds a  second-thoughts comment, to confirm or contradict his own first one.

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