^ btw, Orson Scott Card used the Tolkien quote as proof of Tolkien being a literary master of the English language
^ btw, Orson Scott Card used the Tolkien quote as proof of Tolkien being a literary master of the English language
Orson Scott Card is a homophobic moron...with all due respect.
Nice choice!Originally Posted by Lykren
I'll go for a shorter one today from the great Robert Burton:
"What physic, what chirurgery, what wealth, favor, authority can relieve, bear out, assuage, or expel a troubled conscience? A quiet mind cureth all them, but all they cannot comfort a distressed soul: who can put to silence the voice of desperation?"
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
In keeping with the theme of psychological discomfort we have going on here:
“Love can thus be responsible for veritable geological upheavals of the mind. In that of M. de Charlus, which a few days earlier had resembled a plain so uniform that as far as the eye could reach it would have been impossible to make out an idea rising above the level surface, there had suddenly sprung into being, hard as stone, a range of mountains, but mountains as elaborately carved as if some sculptor, instead of quarrying and carting away the marble, had chiselled it on the spot, in which there writhed in vast titanic groups Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror and Love.” - Proust
,^ who did the Proust translation, Lykren?
I'm reading (and quoting from) the Enright revision of the Kilmartin revision of the Moncrieff translation
You could easily fill the whole thread with Proust! (And I hope you keep posting more Lykren) Every line is beautiful, even in translation.
Yasunari Kawabata's 'Snow Country'
"In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it."
Seidensticker translation.
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
Oh wow that's fantastic! I've been meaning to read him for some time. May very well make him my next purchase now.
'So - this is where we stand. Win all, lose all,
we have come to this: the crisis of our lives'
Your wish is my command, Pierre!
“I had never seen the dawn of so beautiful or so sorrowful a morning. And thinking of all the indifferent landscapes which were about to be lit up and which, only yesterday, would have filled me simply with the desire to visit them, I could not repress a sob when, with a gesture of oblation mechanically performed and symbolising, in my eyes, the bloody sacrifice which I was about to have to make of all joy, every morning, until the end of my life, a solemn renewal, celebrated as each day dawned, of my daily grief and of the blood from my wound, the golden egg of the sun, as though propelled by the rupture of equilibrium brought about at the moment of coagulation by a change of density, barbed with tongues of flame as in a painting, burst through the curtain behind which one had sensed it quivering for a moment, ready to appear on the scene and to spring forward, and whose mysterious congealed purple it annihilated in a flood of light.” — Proust
And Poetaster, please do read Snow Country! You won't regret it.
Yes, Poetaster, definitely read Snow Country, it's a wonderful book. Like a lot of Japanese art, it's sparse but full of beauty.
Another wonderful choice Lykren, I love the way Proust paces his sentences, they're long and windy but very controlled and assured at the same time, always leading somewhere and literally leaving you breathless at the crescendo.
I'm gonna go with some Beckett today, one of my favourite writers:
"To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don't torment me, but one sometimes forgets. And of that life too I shall tell you perhaps one day, the day I know that when I thought I knew I was merely existing and that passion without form or stations will have devoured me down to the rotting flesh itself and that when I know that I know nothing, am only crying out as I have always cried out, more or less piercingly, more or less openly. Let me cry out then, it's said to be good for you. Yes let me cry out, this time, then another time perhaps, then perhaps a last time."
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
I'll take Tolkien's writing over McCarthy's any time.
There's a point where prose becomes hilarious because it's so bad. That McCarthy line is a fine example of horse **** masquerading as chocolate.
well it's a good thing you're here to set us easily duped readers straight, vota
from stella benson's this is the end (1913): Jay suddenly saw the whole world as a thing running away from its thoughts. The crowd that filled the pavement was fugitive, and every man felt the hot breath of fear on the back of his neck. One only used one's voice for the drowning of one's thouhts; one only used one's feet for running away. The whole world was in flight along the endless streets, and the lucky ones were in trams and donkey carts that they might flee the faster.
I read the sentence below months ago, but remembered it recently. Its logic is labyrinthine, mirrorlike and diverse, curving back on itself and ending in the center of things:
“Is it because we relive our past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory focused upon the coolness or sunshine of some morning or afternoon suffused with the shade of some isolated and enclosed setting, immovable, arrested, lost, remote from all the rest, and thus the changes gradually wrought not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving character (changes which have imperceptibly carried us through life from one time to another, wholly different) are eliminated, that, if we relive another memory taken from a different year, we find between the two, thanks to lacunae, to vast stretches of oblivion, as it were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two divergent qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration?
And yes, thanks Vota! But for you I would have mistaken the pleasure I found in reading Cormac McCarthy for pleasure.
'Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'
James Joyce - The Dead - the last paragraph.
'So - this is where we stand. Win all, lose all,
we have come to this: the crisis of our lives'
the entirety of the dead (but especially the last few pages) just kills me
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