That manuscript, "Illumination and Night Glare: the Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers," was published late last year.
Unlike that manuscript, which was prepared by a copyist but had Beethoven's corrections and comments on most of its pages, the quartet movement is entirely in Beethoven's hand.
The effort and resources required to make a movie dwarf the gesture of putting an afternoon aside to look at that manuscript again.
That manuscript was done by a copyist, though it included revisions and a few insults addressed to the copyist in Beethoven's hand.
For someone obliged by occupation to be perceptive about what makes people tick, during the composition of that manuscript I'd been shockingly ignorant.
But—just tell me this, David are you saying that when you finish that manuscript— KORESH: Then I'm not bound any longer.
In that manuscript, the woman's father meets a shadowy stranger at an inn, who tells him the story of a starving man on the verge of murdering his family.
But — just tell me this, David — are you saying that when you finish that manuscript — KORESH: Then I'm not bound any longer.
In this way, the publication of the book recalled Liao's ordeal in writing it, for he wrote it three times: the first manuscript was confiscated in the nineteen-nineties during a police search of his home, so he rewrote it, and that manuscript was taken from him by the police in 2001.
"But then the November revolution came, and I later threw that manuscript away -- only to remember it several years later, when I realized that the main idea of that play (a man who identifies with power to the extent that, when he loses it, his world starts disintegrating and he goes mad) had gradually gained a special meaning for me, as someone in a high political position.
More might have been said about this aspect of Potter's life in the exhibition, though one of the most moving documents shown is that manuscript from 1940, written for the American editor and founder of the Horn Book magazine, Bertha Mahony Miller, explaining the genesis of Peter Rabbit "a long time ago" and "in another world".
