Great passages of prose

[WICKES]

Please post some great prose. It can be anything- extracts from novels, works of non fiction, even newspaper articles.

Evelyn Waugh's prose is often beautiful. Others may have had greater intellectual depth or been more groundbreaking and innovative, but if you want simple, perfect prose he is a pretty good place to start. This is one of my favourite pieces (we are in Crete during the allied retreat in WW2):

"Suddenly quite near him there was a rifle shot. He heard the crack and smack and whistling ricochet among the rocks behind him. He dropped his torch and began feebly to trot. He lost the path and stumbled from boulder to boulder until treading on something which seemed smooth and round and solid in the star light he found himself in the top of a tree which grew twenty feet below. Scattering Greek currency among the leaves, he subsided quite gently from branch to branch and when he reached ground continued to roll over and over, down and down, caressed and momentarily stayed by bushes until at length he came to rest as though borne there by a benevolent Zephyr of classical myth, in a soft, dark, sweet-smelling, empty place where the only sound was the music of falling water. And there for a time the descent ended. Out of sight, out of hearing, the crowded boats put out from the beach; the men-o' war sailed away and Fido slept

Perfect.

This next passage is from C S Lewis' masterpiece 'The Discarded Image':

"Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking OUT- like one looking out from the saloon entrance onto the dark Atlantic or from the ligted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the medieval model you would feel like one looking IN. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life."

Not many writers can make me long to be a medieval christian.

This is another piece by Lewis:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is Hell."

Isn't that beautiful?

The last bit is by Orwell, describing what it was like to be hit by a bullet in the Spanish Civil War:

"...it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock- no pain, only violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sand bags in front of me receded into immense distance."

gimme some good prose- even if it is only a single line.

[weltanschauung]

in search of lost time, proust

"I seized every pretext for going down to the beach at the hours when I hoped to succeed in finding them there. Having caught sight of them once while we were at luncheon, I now invariably came in late for it, waiting interminably upon the 'front' for them to pass; devoting all the short time that I did spend in the dining-room to interrogating with my eyes its azure wall of glass; rising long before the dessert, so as not to miss them should they have gone out at a different hour, and chafing with irritation at my grandmother, when, with unwitting malevolence, she made me stay with her past the hour that seemed to me propitious. I tried to prolong the horizon by setting my chair aslant; if, by chance, I did catch sight of no matter which of the girls, since they all partook of the same special essence, it was as if I had seen projected before my face in a shifting, diabolical hallucination, a little of the unfriendly and yet passionately coveted dream which, but a moment ago, had existed only—where it lay stagnant for all time—in my brain.

I was in love with none of them, loving them all, and yet the possibility of meeting them was in my daily life the sole element of delight, alone made to burgeon in me those high hopes by which every obstacle is surmounted, hopes ending often in fury if I had not seen them. For the moment, these girls eclipsed my grandmother in my affection; the longest journey would at once have seemed attractive to me had it been to a place in which they might be found. It was to them that my thoughts comfortably clung when I supposed myself to be thinking of something else or of nothing. But when, even without knowing it, I thought of them, they, more unconsciously still, were for me the mountainous blue undulations of the sea, a troop seen passing in outline against the waves. Our most intensive love for a person is always the love, really, of something else as well."

"When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one's dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one's dreams from one's life which so often produces good results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, to have all our appendices taken out when we are children."

Grief that is caused one by a person with whom one is in love can be bitter, even when it is interpolated among preoccupations, occupations, pleasures in which that person is not directly involved and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return to it. But when such a grief has its birth—as was now happening—at a moment when the happiness of seeing that person fills us to the exclusion of all else, the sharp depression that then affects our spirits, sunny hitherto, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging tempest against which we know not whether we are capable of struggling to the end. The tempest that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home baffled, battered, feeling that I could recover my breath only by retracing my steps, by returning, upon whatever pretext, into Gilberte's presence. But she would have said to herself: "Back again! Evidently I can go to any length with him; he will come back every time, and the more wretched he is when he leaves me the more docile he'll be." Besides, I was irresistibly drawn towards her in thought, and those alternative orientations, that mad careering between them of the compass-needle within me, persisted after I had reached home, and expressed themselves in the mutually contradictory letters to Gilberte which I began to draft.

(...)

I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed the tempest of my wrath to thunder, not however without throwing her the lifebuoy of a few words disposed as though by accident on the page, by clinging to which my friend might be brought to a reconciliation; a moment later, the wind having changed, they were phrases full of love that I addressed to her, chosen for the sweetness of certain forlorn expressions, those 'nevermores' so touching to those who pen them, so wearisome to her who will have to read them, whether she believe them to be false and translate 'nevermore' by 'this very evening, if you want me,' or believe them to be true and so to be breaking the news to her of one of those final separations which make so little difference to our lives when the other person is one with whom we are not in love. But since we are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the next persons whom we shall presently have become, and who will then be in love no longer, how are we to imagine the actual state of mind of a woman whom, even when we are conscious that we are of no account to her, we have perpetually represented in our musings as uttering, so as to lull us into a happy dream or to console us for a great sorrow, the same speeches that she would make if she loved us. When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.

(...)

I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that, at any moment, a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him the whole of his fortune. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

"There is no man," he began, "however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming that one is a painter—extracted something that goes beyond them."

[mono]

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is Hell."
Interesting quote from C.S. Lewis. ;)

Thanks for the quote from Marcel Proust, weltanschauung, very fascinating! He seems one of those authors I have neglected for some time, though I have meant to read some of his works. Perhaps that selection you posted will finally kick that desire strong enough to pick up one of his books.

From The Joyful Wisdom by Friedrich Nietzsche:

We, the generous and rich in spirit, who stand at the sides of the streets like open fountains and would hinder no one from drinking from us, we do not know, alas! how to defend ourseles when we should like to do so; we have no means of preventing ourselves being made turbid and dark - we have no means of preventing the age in which we live casting its "up-to-date rubbish" into us, nor of hindering filthy birds throwing their excrement, the boys their trash, and fatigued resting travelers their misery, great and small, into us. But we do as we have always done; we take whatever is cast into us down into our depths - for we are deep, we do not forget - and once more grow clear.

From The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway:

It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends.
"The fish is my friend too," he said aloud. "I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars."
Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought.
Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity.
I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

From Markings by Dag Hammarskjold:

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one - which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery in life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I

[Dori]

Examples of perfect prose (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36731&highlight=favorite+passage)

You started that thread yourself, WICKES, I believe. ;)

[WICKES]

T E Lawrence (lawrence of Arabia) on his rape and torture at the hands of Turkish soldiers in WW1:

"To keep my mind in control I numbered the blows, but after twenty lost count and could feel only the shapeless weight of pain, not tearing claws, for which I had prepared, but a gradual cracking apart of my whole being by some too-great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, to clash terribly together. Somewhere in the place a cheap clock ticked loudly, and it distressed me that their beating was not in time. I writhed and twisted, but was held so tightly that my struggles were useless...As the punishment proceeded the whip fell more and more upon existing weals, biting blacker or more wet, till my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. They soon conquered my determination not to cry, but while my will ruled my lips I used only Arabic, and before the end a merciful sickness choked my utterence."

(Seven Pillars of Wisdom)

I am fascinated by poet-warriors like T. E Lawrence, Robert Graves, Sassoon. People who were both intellectuals and adventurers or soldiers- Walter Raleigh, Sir Richard Burton etc etc

I do think Evelyn Waugh wrote some truly beautiful prose. He was a real craftsman who strove above all for perfection and beauty rather than innovation or impact. Here he is describing a swim after a long, stressful military retreat in the Mediterranean sun

"He stripped and dived and swam out in a sudden access of euphoria; he turned on his back and floated, his eyes closed to the sun, his ears sealed to every sound, oblivious of everything except physical ease, solitary and exultant."

(The Sword of Honour Trilogy)

Aldous Huxley is another favourite of mine. This is one of his characters, an upper class Brit/Englishman, speaking about Etruscan tombs in Italy:

"Two thousand five hundred years ago they wept here over the newly dead. You see them hunting, drinking, making love. What else could you expect them to do? Translations will tell us nothing new."

(Those Barren Leaves)

[Lokasenna]

I like the Evelyn Waugh - he's a personal favourite of mine.

How's about this? A fantastic extract from Mary Wollstonecraft's semi-autobiographical "A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark." Here, she is describing her difficult emotions upon seeing a waterfall:

"The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares - grasping at immortality - it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me - I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come."

I just love the way that the words seem to break down, but the meaning becomes so much clearer. A really transcendant piece of emotion.

[promtbr]

in search of lost time, proust


(Just curious if you read all volumes and how long ago???)

I am just reading this. (just finished volume 1..)

A shorter quote:

The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but a regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

The last sentence of Swann's Way (Moncrief/Kilmartin/Enright tr)

...a quotable sentence roughly every 4 pages ....let see, that extrapolates to 1075 quoatable sentences in The Search

One can not be in a hurry if you want to try and attempt The Search

[Jeremiah Jazzz]

beautiful Proust passages, as always.

I like this piece from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, quite a bit:

'The mouth that tells not will ever attract the unthinking tongue and so long as the obseen draws theirs which hear not so long till allearth's dumbnation shall the blind lead the deaf'

Very interpretable from a very dense book!

[mayneverhave]

Also from Joyce (Ulysses):

Mr Bloom moved forward raising troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Time ball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of Sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pikehoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks!

Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballast office. She's right after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound. She's not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was thinking, Still I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn't that wit ? They used to call him big Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at storing away number one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.

Excellent quote, Jeremiah, from Ulysses in your sig, by the way.

[mayneverhave]

From William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!):

"'Yes,' Judith said. 'Or destroy it. As you like. Read it if you like or dont read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.

[andave_ya]

...These are passages I've copied down from my reading because I especially enjoyed them...


I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha. I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a grave-yard, that's what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I'm convinced in my heart that its long been nothing but a gravek-yard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in my emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky -- that's all it is. It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's stomach. One loves the first strength of one's youth. Do you understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?
From Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, as translated by Constance Garnett.



Away! Away!
The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone -- come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.
From Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.



Certain faculties of men are directed towards the Unknown; thought, meditation, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, meditation, prayer, these are the great mysterious pointings of the needle. Let us respect them. Whither tend these majestic irradiations of the soul? into shadow, that is, towards the light.

To proffer thought to the thirst of men, to give to all, as an elixir, the idea of God, to cause conscience and science to fraternise in them, and to make them good men by this mysterious confrontation -- such is the province of true philosophy. Morality is truth in full bloom. Contemplation leads to action. The absolute should be practical. The ideal must be made air and food and drink to the human mind.
Both quotes are taken from Hugo's Les Miserables, translated by Charles Wilbour.

[weltanschauung]

Thanks for the quote from Marcel Proust, weltanschauung, very fascinating! He seems one of those authors I have neglected for some time, though I have meant to read some of his works. Perhaps that selection you posted will finally kick that desire strong enough to pick up one of his books.

you definetly should. its soooooooo good (if youre into the whole teletransport with existentialistic particles...)
the first proust i read was actually this:
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/facist_jockitch/bs/Picture002.jpg
and it only had two short stories: "the indifferent man", and "the end of jealousy", but they were like crack and i desperately searched for other things from him right away because i never thought it was so great.


(Just curious if you read all volumes and how long ago???)

i actually read the first two volumes and am now waiting for the right moment to start the guermantes' way.. proust is the kind of reading you need to be in the right mood for it, cause it consuuuuumes you, and if youre not in the right mood you just cant fully apreciate its awesomeness.

swann's way was great, specially that last chapter about how swann met odete. its just so ironically funny. or maybe im just weird..

"Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which you might decipher the question that he never dared to ask: “Do you really mean that?” He was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by, carriages, and anything that occurred with a malicious smile which absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved, if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of his own.

...

As regards figures of speech, he was insatiable in his thirst for knowledge, for often imagining them to have a more definite meaning than was actually the case, he would want to know what, exactly, was intended by those which he most frequently heard used: ‘devilish pretty,’ ‘blue blood,’ ‘a cat and dog life,’ ‘a day of reckoning,’ ‘a queen of fashion, ‘to give a free hand,’ ‘to be at a deadlock,’ and so forth; and in what particular circumstances he himself might make use of them in conversation. Failing these, he would adorn it with puns and other ‘plays upon words’ which he had learned by rote. As for the names of strangers which were uttered in his hearing, he used merely to repeat them to himself in a questioning tone, which, he thought, would suffice to furnish him with explanations for which he would not ostensibly seek.

As the critical faculty, on the universal application of which he prided himself, was, in reality, completely lacking, that refinement of good breeding which consists in assuring some one whom you are obliging in any way, without expecting to be believed, that it is really yourself that is obliged to him, was wasted on Cottard, who took everything that he heard in its literal sense. However blind she may have been to his faults, Mme. Verdurin was genuinely annoyed, though she still continued to regard him as brilliantly clever, when, after she had invited him to see and hear Sarah Bernhardt from a stage box, and had said politely: “It is very good of you to have come, Doctor, especially as I’m sure you must often have heard Sarah Bernhardt; and besides, I’m afraid we’re rather too near the stage,” the Doctor, who had come into the box with a smile which waited before settling upon or vanishing from his face until some one in authority should enlighten him as to the merits of the spectacle, replied: “To be sure, we are far too near the stage, and one is getting sick of Sarah Bernhardt. But you expressed a wish that I should come. For me, your wish is a command. I am only too glad to be able to do you this little service. What would one not do to please you, you are so good.” And he went on, “Sarah Bernhardt; that’s what they call the Voice of God, ain’t it? You see, often, too, that she ‘sets the boards on fire.’ That’s an odd expression, ain’t it?” in the hope of an enlightening commentary, which, however, was not forthcoming.

...


(...)“Take care, Master Biche,” she reminded the painter, whom it was a time-honoured pleasantry to address as ‘Master,’ “to catch that nice look in his eyes, that witty little twinkle. You know, what I want to have most of all is his smile; that’s what I’ve asked you to paint—the portrait of his smile.” And since the phrase struck her as noteworthy, she repeated it very loud, so as to make sure that as many as possible of her guests should hear it, and even made use of some indefinite pretext to draw the circle closer before she uttered it again.

...

So, stupefied with the gaiety of the ‘faithful,’ drunken with comradeship, scandal and asseveration, Mme. Verdurin, perched on her high seat like a cage-bird whose biscuit has been steeped in mulled wine, would sit aloft and sob with fellow-feeling.

...

Odette would say of some one: “He never goes to any place that isn’t really smart.”

And if Swann were to ask her what she meant by that, she would answer, with a touch of contempt, “Smart places! Why, good heavens, just fancy, at your age, having to be told what the smart places are in Paris! What do you expect me to say? Well, on Sunday mornings there’s the Avenue de l’Impératrice, and round the lake at five o’clock, and on Thursdays the Eden-Théâtre, and thé Hippodrome on Fridays; then there are the balls...”

“What balls?”

...

When he proposed to take leave of Odette, and to return home, she begged him to stay a little longer, and even detained him forcibly, seizing him by the arm as he was opening the door to go. But he gave no thought to that, for, among the crowd of gestures and speeches and other little incidents which go to make up a conversation, it is inevitable that we should pass (without noticing anything that arouses our interest) by those that hide a truth for which our suspicions are blindly searching, whereas we stop to examine others beneath which nothing lies concealed. She kept on saying: “What a dreadful pity; you never by any chance come in the afternoon, and the one time you do come then I miss you.” He knew very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so keenly distressed merely at having missed his visit, but as she was a good-natured woman, anxious to give him pleasure, and often sorry when she had done anything that annoyed him, he found it quite natural that she should be sorry, on this occasion, that she had deprived him of that pleasure of spending an hour in her company, which was so very great a pleasure, if not to herself, at any rate to him. All the same, it was a matter of so little importance that her air of unrelieved sorrow began at length to bewilder him. She reminded him, even more than was usual, of the faces of some of the women created by the painter of the Trimavera.’ She had, at that moment, their downcast, heartbroken expression, which seems ready to succumb beneath the burden of a grief too heavy to be borne, when they are merely allowing the Infant Jesus to play with a pomegranate, or watching Moses pour water into a trough. He had seen the same sorrow once before on her face, but when, he could no longer say. Then, suddenly, he remembered it; it was when Odette had lied, in apologising to Mme. Verdurin on the evening after the dinner from which she had stayed away on a pretext of illness, but really so that she might be alone with Swann. Surely, even had she been the most scrupulous of women, she could hardly have felt remorse for so innocent a lie. But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so, when she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defence, unconfident of success, she was inclined to weep from sheer exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. She knew, also, that her lie, as a rule, was doing a serious injury to the man to whom she was telling it, and that she might find herself at his mercy if she told it badly. Therefore she felt at once humble and culpable in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant, social lie its hazardous associations, and the memories which it recalled, would leave her weak with a sense of exhaustion and penitent with a consciousness of wrongdoing."

[WICKES]

"She tried to go on with her letter, reminding herself that she was only and elderly woman who had got up too early in the morning and journeyed too far, that the despair creeping over her was merely her despair, her personal weakness, and that even if she got a sunstroke and went mad the rest of the world would go on. But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative christianity, and she knew that all its divine words, from 'let there be light', to 'it is finished' only amounted to 'boum'. Then she was terrified over an area larger than usual; the universe, never comprehensible to her intellect, offered no repose to her soul..."

E M Forster: A Passage To India

[Jeremiah Jazzz]

Also from Joyce (Ulysses):

Mr Bloom moved forward raising troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Time ball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of Sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pikehoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks!

Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballast office. She's right after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound. She's not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was thinking, Still I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn't that wit ? They used to call him big Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at storing away number one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.

Excellent quote, Jeremiah, from Ulysses in your sig, by the way.

Ah! The same goes to your passage in the thread. I've been rereading Ulysses lately only aloud and it's almost a totally different book, everything is so musical. Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one growing and prospering!

P.s. all this Proust in here is glorious!

[mayneverhave]

Ah! The same goes to your passage in the thread. I've been rereading Ulysses lately only aloud and it's almost a totally different book, everything is so musical. Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one growing and prospering!

Ah. A man that enjoys his Ulysses and his King Lear - a true cosmopolitan indeed.

[dreamscape]

A couple of good ones i came across recently that moved me...

From Steven Erikson's The Devil Delivered:

What did I do wrong?
You were born, son, with the added misfortune of surviving it. You were new and helpless and you trusted, my how you trusted. You never learned the lessons of withholding that trust, of relying upon your judgments, of mastering healthy scepticism. Your gods took you in hand and led you into Hell. Regular folk, the kind that hosted parties, backyard barbecues, but to you they were gods, and like God Himself they laid a judgment upon you, that you should suffer, that you should know the anguish of a guilt you never earned. They gave you life, and you lived their definition of it.
Its a parable, in its own way. Analogous to the horror visited upon the sons and daughters by the fathers and mothers. They give you life: a world poisoned, its earth blasted and ripped open and breeding deadly diseases, its waters turgid and tossed with dead creatures, its air foul with invisible gases and holed like gauze letting the rays burn down the holy message of cancer and blindness.
We needed those cars, son, to speed up our pursuit of unachievable and unworthy dreams. We needed those forests stripped away, to plant food to feed our weeping multitudes. We needed that plastic that gave you tits and made you infertile. We needed those antibiotics, those televisions and their vital programming, those bloodless cameras that never blinked nor turned away. We needed all those wars to feed our technocratic utopia. We needed those prisonships, we needed segregation, calling in those bank loans, national lotteries, millionaire athletes, movie stars, white hoods and burning crosses, doctors gunned down outside abortion clinics, walled neighbourhoods with private armies, paedophiles, serial killers, terrorists, fundamentalists - we needed all those things, son, and you will, too. They're our gift to you, given out of love because we tried to better your lives. At least, that's what we kept telling each other. Can't you see how much better we've made your lives?


And from Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist:

The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV, and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel-chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a life-support mechanism and then hung upside-down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary's head as a punching bag.

[WICKES]

"He went. In a few moments, she blew the light out. The rain was falling steadily and the night was a black gulf. All was intensely still. Geoffrey listened everywhere: no sound save the rain. He stood between the stacks, but only heard the trickle of water, and the light swish of rain. Everything was lost in blackness. He imagined death was like that, many things dissolved in silence and darkness, blotted out, but existing. In the dense blackness he felt himself almost extinguished."

D H Lawrence

[mono]

Mr Bloom moved forward raising troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Time ball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of Sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pikehoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks!

Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballast office. She's right after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound. She's not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was thinking, Still I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn't that wit ? They used to call him big Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at storing away number one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.

Away! Away!
The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone -- come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.
Great selections from James Joyce!
While trying to read Finnegans Wake (the key word: 'try,' as it took me nearly a year and a companion), I memorized the last sentence continuing into the first sentence, which has a bit of a musical quality to it, whenever I recite it:

Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the . . . riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.



you definetly should. its soooooooo good (if youre into the whole teletransport with existentialistic particles...)
the first proust i read was actually . . . two short stories: "the indifferent man", and "the end of jealousy", but they were like crack and i desperately searched for other things from him right away because i never thought it was so great.
Thank you for the suggestion, weltanschauung, and for the effort of posting a picture. ;) I will have to take a look at it, next time I go to the bookstore (likely soon). :D

[weltanschauung]

blindness - jose saramago \m/

Has everyone told their story about the last time they could see, asked the old man with the black eyepatch, Ill tell you mine, if theres no one else, said the unknown voice, If there is, he can speak after you, so fire away, The last thing I saw was a painting, A painting, repeated the old man with the black eyepatch, and where was this painting, I had gone to the museum, it was a picture of a cornfield with crows and cypress trees and a sun that gave the impression of having been made up of the fragments of other suns, Sounds like a Dutch painter, I think it was, but there was a drowning dog in it, already half submerged, poor creature, In that case it must be by a Spanish painter, before him no one had ever painted a dog in that situation, after him no other painter had the courage to try. Probably, and there was a cart laden with hay, drawn by horses and crossing a stream, Was there a house on the left, Yes, Then it was by an English painter, Could be, but I dont think so, because there was a woman as well with a child in her arms, Mothers and children are all too common in paintings, True, Ive noticed, What I dont understand is how in one painting there should be so many pictures and by such different painters, And there were some men eating, There have been so many lunches, afternoon snacks and suppers in the history of art, that this detail in itself is not enough to tell us who was eating, There were thirteen men altogether, Ah, then its easy, go on, There was also a naked woman with fair hair, inside a conch that was floating on the sea, and masses of flowers around her, Obviously Italian, And there was a battle, As in those paintings depicting banquets and mothers with children in their arms, these details are not enough to reveal who painted the picture, There were corpses and wounded men, Its only natural, sooner or later, all children die, and soldiers too, And a horse stricken with terror, With its eyes about to pop out of their sockets, Exactly, Horses are like that, and what other pictures were there in your painting, Alas, I never managed to find out, I went blind just as I was looking at the horse. Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind, Who is speaking, asked the doctor, A blind man, replied a voice, just a blind man, for that is all we have here. Then the old man with the black eyepatch asked, How many blind persons are needed to make a blindness, No one could provide the answer.

[Emil Miller]

Here is a very moving passage from Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night:

Next day at the churchyard his father was laid among a hundred Divers, Dorseys, and Hunters. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Flowers were scattered on the brown unsettled earth. Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back. He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century.
'Good-bye, my father -- good-bye, all my fathers.'

[kelby_lake]

I love the CS Lewis quote from the beginning.

What about the Bible? Now I'm not religious but I LOVE this:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

[WICKES]

I love the CS Lewis quote from the beginning.

.


It is beautiful isn't it. I am not at all religious, but I do admire Lewis' skill as a writer. He was extraordinarily intelligent as well (one of his colleagues at Oxford described him as "the best read man in England") and was able to read Literature in Ancient Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and even obscure languages like medieval Welsh and Provencal. Here is Lewis again:

"If we cannot practice the 'presence of God', it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like a man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there...To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep."

Just as an interesting aside, did everyone know that C S Lewis was John Betjamen's tutor at Oxford? Betjamen hated him and blamed him for his eventual expulsion. I think Betjamen was a bit of an effeminate poseur as a student- he was certainly an aesthete (Evelyn Waugh got the idea of Sebastian's teddy from Betjamen).

[JBI]

My rather extensive investigations into timetables make this exactly 8:44 A.M. Poseidon, in his fright, scared two mares into the narrow lane that was choked with approaching traffic. A truck driver had the courtesy to stop while Hazard tried to calm all his fine collection of horses; they responded by pulling the milkwagon crosswise on the road. The truck driver responded by yelling at Hazard, "Get the bloody milkwagon out of the way, you little peckerhead."

"You hangnail pecker yourself," Hazard replied, throwing ff his cape from his red sleeves and white gauntlets. In his joy at having acquired four excellent mares he became exuberantly reckless. "Get that roaring truck out of the bloody way and I'll get out of the way myself."

The driver, a moose of a man, turned off his engine. "Don't ekerpa me, you pandering redcoat peter," he shouted back at Hazard.

By this time an apreciative audience of pedestrians, most of them coeds on their way to the university, had begun to collect; little did they realize the trucker was offending the very core of Hazard's being.

"You tool," Hazard said. "You faltering apparatus."

"You whang and rod and pud," the truck driver replied.

The girls all together gave a little scream, some of the clapping.

Hazard saw his chance to drive away but missed it in order to shout, "You dong." He felt he was coming off rather badly in the exchange. "You drippy dong, you Johnny and Jock."

The trucker in his excitement was beginnung to stutter. "You diddly dink. you d - you d - you d - you dink. You dick." I might add that because of this exchange and the consequent delay it had occasioned, trucks were forever banned from using the High Level Bridge. "You dofunny copper," the druck driver added.

Now the group of girls, bright in their green and gold sweaters, jumping up and down, calpping, began to chant, "Shame. Shame."

"I'm no damn copper," Hazard shouted, more to the girls than to the trucker. "Dohicky to you."

"Hey," someone yelled from the cab of another truck. "Yo schmucks, both of you get out of the way."

"You schlongs," another trucker yelled.

"Shame," the girls chanted, leaning forward over the rail that kept them off the roadway. "Shame! Shame!"



From The Studhorse Man by Robert Kroetsch.

[mono]

When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured.
From A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

[Adagio]

"The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language." - James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew; the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity" - E.M.Forster - Howards End

"Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries." Beckett - Waiting for Godot

"As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window - Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!" and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear." - Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

I'll post some more later.

[mono]

Easy as it was to cut the wet, soft grass, it was hard work going up and down the steep slopes of the ravine. But the old man was not in the least troubled by it. Swinging his scythe just as usual, he climbed slowly up the steep slope, taking short, firm steps with his feet shod in large bast shoes, and though his whole body and his loosely hanging trousers below his long shirt shook, he did not miss a single blade of grass or a single mushroom, and went on cracking jokes with the peasants and Levin. Levin, who followed him, often thought that he would certainly fall as he climbed up the steep hillock with his scythe, for it would have normally been hard to reach the top even without a scythe. He felt as if some external force were setting him in motion.
From Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

[mono]

While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear. But we have also an unconquerable faith in our own stars, and in the impossibility of anything venturing to go against us. As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things; but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other. In this way a balance is obtained.
From 'The Deluge at Norderney' of Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

[weltanschauung]

"Shrove Tuesday:

I gave Maurice Barres a spanking. We were three soldiers and one of us had a hole in the middle of his face. Maurice Barres came up to us and said, "That's fine!" and he gave each of us a small bouquet of violets. "I don't know where to put them," said the soldier with the hole in his head. Then Maurice Barres said, "Put them in the hole you have in your head." The soldier answered, "I'm going to stick them up your ***." And we turned over Maurice Barres and took his pants off. He had a cardinal's red robe on under his trousers. We lifted up the robe and Maurice Barres began to shout: "Look out! I've got on trousers with foot-straps." But we spanked him until he bled and then we took the petals of violets and drew the face of Deroulede on his backside." (sartre- la nausee)


"Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his *** to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. This *** talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventri-liquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called The Better Ole that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, "Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?" "Nah I had to go relieve myself." After a while the *** start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his *** would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and start eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the ******* would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the ******* said to him Its you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat AND ****. After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpoles tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous - except for the EYES you dig. Thats one thing the ******* COULDN'T do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldnt give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffer-ing of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes WENT OUT, and there was no more feeling in them than a crabs eyes on the end of a stalk." (w.burroughs -naked lunch)

"At lenght delay was no longer possible, and, with a heart almost bursting from my bosom, I advanced to the region of the forecastle, where my companions were awaiting me. I held ou my hand with the splinters, and Peters immedeately drew. He was free - his, at least, was not the shortest; and there was now another chance against my escape. I summoned up all my strength, and passed the lots to Augustus. He also drew immediately, and he also was free; and now, whether I should live or die, the chances were no more than precisely even. At this moment all the fierceness of the tiger possessed my bosom, and I felt toward my poor fellow-creature, Parker, the most intense, the most diabolical hatred. But the feeling did not last; and, at length, with a convulsive shudder and closed eyes, I held out the two remaining splinters toward him. It was full five minutes before he could summon resolution to draw, during which period of heart-rending suspense I never once opened my eyes. Presently one of the two lots was quickly drawn from my hand. The decision was then over, yet I knew no whether it was for me or against me. No one spoke, and still I dared not satisfy myself by looking at the splinter I held. Peters at length took me by the hand, and I forced myself to look up, when I immediately saw by the countenance of Parker that I was safe, and that he it was who had been doomed to suffer. Gasping for breath, I fell senseless to the deck.
I recovered from my swoon in time to behold the consummation of the tragedy in the death of him who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing it about. He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeeth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month. (...)

(...)August Ist.- A continuance of the same calm weather, with an oppressively hot sun. Suffered exceedingly from thirst, the water in the jug being absolutely putrid and swarming with vermin. We contrived, nevertheless, to swallow a portion of it by mixing it with wine: our thirst, however, was but little abated. We found more relief by bathing in the sea, but could not avail ourselves of this expedient except at long intervals, on account of the continual presence of sharks. We now saw clearly that Augustus could not be saved, - that he was evidently dying. We could do nothing to relieve his sufferings, which appeared to be great. About twelve o'clock he expired in strong convulsions, and without having spoken for several hours. His death filled us with the most floomy forebodings, and had so great an effect upon our spirits that we sat motionless by the corpse during the whole day, and never addressed each other except in a whisper. It was not until some time after dark that we took courage to get up and throw the body overboard. It was then loathsome beyond expression, and so far decayed that, as Peters attempted to lift it, and entire leg came off in his grasp. As the mass of putrefaction slipped over the vessel's side into the water, the glare of phosphoric light with whith it was surrounded plainly discovered to us seven or eight large sharks, the clashing of whose horrible teeth, as their prey was torn to pieces among them, might have been heard at the distance of a mile. We shrunk within ourseves in the extremity of horror at the sound." (poe, the narratives of arthur gordon pym)

[*Classic*Charm*]

From Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

I love that whole chapter where Levin is cutting with the peasants. It's so vivid!

[weltanschauung]

"There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family, pleasing presence, average education, to be "not stupid," kind-hearted, and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea of one's own--to be, in fact, "just like everyone else." To have wealth, but not that of Rothschild's; to be from an honoured family but that has never distinguished itself for anything relevant; to be goodlooking but with it, not expressing anything in particular; to have intelligence, but no original ideas; to have a good heart, but no soul grandiosity; to have good education, but not even know what to do with it etc etc..

For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person's nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine--. I think such an individual really does become a type of his own--a type of commonplaceness which will not for the world, if it can help it, be contented, but strains and yearns to be something original and independent, without the slightest possibility of being so.

Of such people there are countless numbers in this world--far more even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men can--that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer. The former of these classes is the happier.

To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put on blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they have been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they have acquired new convictions of their own. Some men have but felt some little qualm of kindness towards their fellow-men, and the fact has been quite enough to persuade them that they stand alone in the van of enlightenment and that no one has such humanitarian feelings as they. Others have but to read an idea of somebody else's, and they can immediately assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain. The "impudence of ignorance," if I may use the expression, is developed to a wonderful extent in such cases;--unlikely as it appears, it is met with at every turn." (dostoievski, the idiot)

[BlueSkyGB]

Just for today

I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them Sam, I am.....:lol:

[sixsmith]

In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. He'd got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics and out again without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo, bankrupt and ruined, because he knew they were.

"The Half-Skinned Steer" - Annie Proulx

[weltanschauung]

thought of two great quotes for today:
"now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices." (the picture of dorian gray- oscar wilde)

"im the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. its awful. if im on my way to the store to buy a new magazine even, and somebody asks me where im going, im liable to say im going to the opera. its terrible. so when i told old spencer i had to go to the gym to get my equipment and stuff, that was a sheer lie. i dont even keep my goddam equipment in the gym." (the catcher in the rye - j.d. salinger)

[Dark Lady]

Yesterday I read Virginia Woolf's The Waves and I thought there were some startlingly beautiful phrases and passages.

A few:

"I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers."

"Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle."

"To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all."

"I am like a log slipping smoothly over some waterfall."

[weltanschauung]

beyond good and evil (nietzsche)

"26

Every special human being strives instinctively for his own castle and secrecy, where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the majority, where he can forget the customary rules about "human beings" for he is an exception to them, but for the single case where he is pushed by an even stronger instinct straight against these customary rules, as a person who seeks knowledge in a great and exceptional sense.

Anyone who, in his intercourse with human beings, does not, at one time or another, shimmer with all the colours of distress green and gray with disgust, surfeit, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness is certainly not a man of higher taste. But provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon himself, provided he stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for knowledge. If he were, he would one day have to say to himself, "The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting than the exception, than I am, the exception", and he would make his way down and, above all, "inside."

The study of the average man long, serious, and requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company all company is bad company except with one's peers that constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part the richest in disappointments. But if he's lucky, as is appropriate for a fortunate child of knowledge, he will encounter real short cuts and ways of making his task easier. I'm referring to the so-called cynics and those who simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the "rule-bound" man in themselves and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses now and then they even wallow in books as if in their very own dung.

Cynicism is the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the higher man should open his ears to every cruder or more refined cynicism and think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where enchantment gets mixed into the disgust: for example, in those places where, by some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat or ape as in the Abb Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted and perhaps also the foulest man of his century, he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently a good deal quieter.

More frequently it happens that, as I've intimated, the scientific head is set on an ape's body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul among doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that's not an uncommon occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere where someone constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in human actions, in short, wherever people speak "badly" of human beings not even in a nasty way there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk without indignation.

For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that, the world, or god, or society), may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr. But in every other sense he is the more ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant man."

40

Everything profound loves masks. The most profound things even have a hatred for images and allegories. Shouldn't the right disguise in which the shame of a god walks around be something exactly opposite? A questionable question: it would be strange if some mystic or other had not ventured something like that on his own.

There are processes of such a delicate sort that people do well to bury them in something crude in order to make them unrecognizable. There are actions of love and of extravagant generosity, after which there is nothing more advisable than to grab a stick and give an eyewitness a good thrashing, in so doing we cloud his memory. Some people know how to befuddle or batter their own memory in order at least to take revenge on this single witness, shame is resourceful.

It is not the worst things that make people feel the worst shame. Behind the mask there is not only malice, there is so much goodness in cunning. I could imagine that a person who had something valuable and vulnerable to hide might roll through his life as coarse and round as an old green wine barrel with strong hoops. The delicacy of his shame wants it that way. For a person whose shame is profound runs into his fate and delicate decisions on pathways which few people ever reach and of whose existence those closest to him, his most intimate associates, must not know about. His mortal danger hides itself from their eyes and so does his confidence in life, as he regains it.

A person who is concealed in this way, who from instinct uses speaking for silence and keeping quiet and who is tireless in avoiding communication, wants and demands that, instead of him, a mask of him wanders around in the hearts and heads of his friends. And suppose he did not want that mask: one day his eyes would open to the fact that nonetheless there is a mask of him there and that that's a good thing. Every profound mind needs a mask; even more, around every profound mind a mask is continuously growing, thanks to the constant falseness, that is, the shallow interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.

43

Are they new friends of the "truth," these emerging philosophers? That seems plausible enough: for all philosophers up to this point have loved their truths. But they certainly will not be dogmatists. It must go against their pride as well as their taste if their truth is supposed to be some truth for everyman and that's been the secret wish and deeper meaning of all dogmatic efforts up to now.

"My opinion is my opinion: someone else has no casual right to it", that's what a philosopher of the future will perhaps say. One must rid oneself of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour utters it. And how could there even be a "common good"! That expression contradicts itself: what can be common always has only little value.

In the end things must stand as they stand and as they have always stood: great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and shudders for the refined, and, to sum up all this in brief, everything rare for the rare. "

[Equality72521]

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
It was propped against the collar box and I lay listening to it. Hearing it, that is. I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear. Like Father said down the long and lonely light-rays you might see Jesus walking, like. And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.



From The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. We read this passage in class and almost everyone just sat in awe. I think it is incredible.

[kelby_lake]

Faulkner's on my list of American Lit.

[weltanschauung]

how doth the little crocodile
improve his shinning tail
and pour the waters of the nile
on every golden scale

how cheerfully he seems to grin
how neatly spreads his claws
and welcomes little fishes in
with gently smiling jaws
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/facist_jockitch/tj/hmmmmmmm-1.jpg

[mono]

Technically, one could not call this prose, as this passage comes from a book of non-fiction, but I wanted to share it nonetheless, a snip of Camus' beliefs on aesthetics:

It is merely a matter of being faithful to the rule of the battle. That thought may suffice to sustain a mind; it has supported and still supports the whole civilizations. War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. 'Art and nothing but art,' said Nietzsche, 'we have art in order not to die of the truth.'
In the experience that I am attempting to describe and to stress on several modes, it is certain that a new torment arises wherever another dies. The childish chasing after forgetfulness, the appeal of satisfaction are now devoid of echo. But the constant tension that keeps man face to face with the world, the ordered delirium that urges him to be receptive to everything, leave him another fever. In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping his consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else. At the same time, it has no more significance than the continual and imperceptible creation in which the actor, the conqueror, and all absurd men indulge every day of their lives. All try their hands at miming, at repeating, at re-creating the reality that is theirs. We always end up by having the appearance of our truths. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime.
selection from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O'Brien

[PoeticPassions]

Wow, mono, that was... I have no words really. Wonderful passage, thanks for sharing.

[emily00]

How's about this? A fantastic extract from Mary Wollstonecraft's semi-autobiographical "A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark." Here, she is describing her difficult emotions upon seeing a waterfall:

"The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares - grasping at immortality - it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me - I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come."

I just love the way that the words seem to break down, but the meaning becomes so much clearer. A really transcendant piece of emotion.

I am disturbed by the fact that you think this is powerful writing, since I think it is dreadful. The words do not 'break down', because they lack cohesion in the first place, the meaning being no clearer at the end that it was at the outset. Apart from anything else, a waterfall is not an 'object'.

Wordsworth does it so much better, (although not in prose).

Please could you explain what you mean by 'a really transcendent peice of emotion'??

[emily00]

My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls, I perceived decay had made progress, even in seven months: many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms.

I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonised by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

[Final paragraphs, 'Wuthering Heights']

[mono]

Wow, mono, that was... I have no words really. Wonderful passage, thanks for sharing.
Glad to hear you enjoyed it, too. I plan to read The Myth of Sisyphus another time. Certain things one cannot understand at one point in life, sometimes never, and I doubt I understood every punctuation mark of Camus' philosophy, but I would love to give it another read; during so many times while reading it, I found myself staring into the air, then jumping back into my own skin, almost as if I had gone somewhere.


How's about this? A fantastic extract from Mary Wollstonecraft's semi-autobiographical "A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark." Here, she is describing her difficult emotions upon seeing a waterfall:

"The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares - grasping at immortality - it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me - I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come."

I just love the way that the words seem to break down, but the meaning becomes so much clearer. A really transcendant piece of emotion.
I am disturbed by the fact that you think this is powerful writing, since I think it is dreadful. The words do not 'break down', because they lack cohesion in the first place, the meaning being no clearer at the end that it was at the outset. Apart from anything else, a waterfall is not an 'object'.

Wordsworth does it so much better, (although not in prose).

Please could you explain what you mean by 'a really transcendent peice of emotion'??
Perhaps not as much as her husband, Mary Shelley took a great part in the Romantic movement, and even a lot of the prose written in conjunction with this literary movement had an aesthetic quality, despite its subject matter. As well as this passage's content having some disturbing imagery in it, the whole of Frankenstein seems very unsettling; nonetheless, just as certain prose-poetry writers, like Thomas Hardy, could express such dark elements of literature in words by similes and metaphors and with elaborate language, so could Mary Shelley.
The passage, I agree, lacks cohesion, expressing little action (yet a lot of emotion) in so much space, but nearly every European writer of this era had that trend; the plot of every one of Charles Dickens' works, I think, could get condensed into short stories, after subtracting all the fluffy language, dissecting the over-description of every item within a character's sensorium, and tossing away every unnecessary reminiscence of every fictional character, big or small. We could not do this, however, just as publishers chronically abridge many novels - it takes away from the beauty of its work, even if half, or more, of Shelley's and Dickens' words in their novels seem irrelevant.

[kelby_lake]

It is quite a convoluted way of expressing the emotion though.

[Mr Endon]

Agreed. And let's not overlook the dreadful comma placement, e.g. "Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable".

But I'm glad that it speaks to you, Lokasenna. It's just not my favourite writing style at all. I derive great pleasure from short, bare, incisive declarative sentences: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new' (opening sentence of Murphy).

See also the opening paragraph of Notes from the Underground:

'I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!'

[Jozanny]

Technically, one could not call this prose, as this passage comes from a book of non-fiction, but I wanted to share it nonetheless, a snip of Camus' beliefs on aesthetics:

selection from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O'Brien

One of the definitions of prose:
Ordinary speech or writing, without metrical structure.

So Camus' essays indeed may be called prose, although one could be more accurate with the category of critical essay.

[mono]

Weird, just weird, but genius . . .

BROD'S 613 SADNESSES
The following encyclopedia of sadness was found on the body of Brod D. The original 613 sadnesses, written in her diary, corresponded to the 613 commandments of our (not their) Torah. Shown below is what was salvageable after Brod was recovered. (Her diary's wet pages printed the sadnesses onto her body. Only a small fraction [55] were legible. The other 558 sadnesses are lost forever, and it is hoped that, without knowing what they are, no one will have to experience them.) The diary from which they came was never found.

SADNESS OF THE BODY: Mirror sadness; Sadness of [looking] like or unlike one's parent; Sadness of not knowing if your body is normal; Sadness of knowing your [body is] not normal; Sadness of knowing your body is normal; Beauty sadness; Sadness of m[ak]eup; Sadness of physical pain; Pins-and-[needles sadness]; Sadness of clothes [sic]; Sadness of the quavering eyelid; Sadness of a missing rib; Noticeable sad[ness]; Sadness of going unnoticed; The sadness of having genitals that are not like those of your lover; The sadness of having genitals that are like those of your lover; Sadness of hands . . .

SADNESSES OF THE COVENANT: Sadness of God's love; Sadness of God's back [sic]; Favorite-child sadness; Sadness of b[ein]g sad in front of one's God; Sadness of the opposite belief [sic]; What if? sadness; Sadness of God alone in heaven; Sadness of a God who would need people to pray to Him . . .

SADNESSES OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hout] release; Sadne[ess of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of anting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds; Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness . . .

INTERPERSONAL SADNESSES: Sadness of being sad in front of one's parents; Sa[dn]ess of false love; Sadness of love [sic]; Friendship sadness; Sadness of a bad convers[at]ion; Sadness of the could-have-been; Secret sadness . . .

SADNESSES OF SEX AND ART: Sadness of arousal being an unordinary physical state; Sadness of feeling the need to create beautiful things; Sadness of the anus; Sadness of eye contact during fellatio and cunnilingus; Kissing sadness; Sadness of moving too quickly; Sadness of not mo[vi]ng; Nude model sadness; Sadness of portraiture; Sadness of Pinchas T's only notable paper, "To the Dust: From Man You Came and to Man You Shall Return," in which he argued it would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed . . .
selection from Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

[kelby_lake]

Agreed. And let's not overlook the dreadful comma placement, e.g. "Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable".

But I'm glad that it speaks to you, Lokasenna. It's just not my favourite writing style at all. I derive great pleasure from short, bare, incisive declarative sentences: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new' (opening sentence of Murphy).

See also the opening paragraph of Notes from the Underground:

'I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!'

:) I like Dostoevsky.

Murphy...is that by Beckett?

[Mr Endon]

Yes, and personally, I think Notes from the Underground is a riot! The man had comic timing besides from all his other virtues.

Yes indeed, that's Beckett. I find Murphy to be very interesting because it stands somewhere between his early Joycean verbosity and his later, more mature, proper Beckettian sparsity.

[Saladin]

December 12

Dear Wilhelm, I am reduced to the condition of those unfortunate wretches who believe they are pursued by an evil spirit. Sometimes I am oppressed, not by apprehension or fear, but by an inexpressible internal sensation, which weighs upon my heart, and impedes my breath! Then I wander forth at night, even in this tempestuous season, and feel pleasure in surveying the dreadful scenes around me.

Yesterday evening I went forth. A rapid thaw had suddenly set in: I had been informed that the river had risen, that the brooks had all overflowed their banks, and that the whole vale of Walheim was under water! Upon the stroke of twelve I hastened forth. I beheld a fearful sight. The foaming torrents rolled from the mountains in the moonlight, -- fields and meadows, trees and hedges, were confounded together; and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake, which was agitated by the roaring wind! And when the moon shone forth, and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of apprehension and delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss, and cried, "Plunge!'" For a moment my senses forsook me, in the intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a plunge into that gulf! And then I felt as if I were rooted to the earth, and incapable of seeking an end to my woes! But my hour is not yet come: I feel it is not. O Wilhelm, how willingly could I abandon my existence to ride the whirlwind, or to embrace the torrent! and then might not rapture perchance be the portion of this liberated soul?

I turned my sorrowful eyes toward a favourite spot, where I was accustomed to sit with Charlotte beneath a willow after a fatiguing walk. Alas! it was covered with water, and with difficulty I found even the meadow. And the fields around the hunting-lodge, thought I. Has our dear bower been destroyed by this unpitying storm? And a beam of past happiness streamed upon me, as the mind of a captive is illumined by dreams of flocks and herds and bygone joys of home! But I am free from blame. I have courage to die! Perhaps I have, -- but I still sit here, like a wretched pauper, who collects fagots, and begs her bread from door to door, that she may prolong for a few days a miserable existence which she is unwilling to resign.

From - The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[mayneverhave]

From - The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[/B]

I'll play this game.

A warmhearted youth becomes strongly attached to a maiden: he spends every hour of the day in her company, wears out his health, and lavishes his fortune, to afford continual proof that he is wholly devoted to her. Then comes a man of the world, a man of place and respectability, and addresses him thus: 'My good young friend, love is natural; but you must love within bounds. Divide your time: devote a portion to business, and give the hours of recreation to your mistress. Calculate your fortune; and out of the superfluity you may make her a present, only not too often, --on her birthday, and such occasions.' Pursuing this advice, he may become a useful member of society, and I should advise every prince to give him an appointment; but it is all up with his love, and with his genius if he be an artist. O my friend! why is it that the torrent of genius so seldom bursts forth, so seldom rolls in full-flowing stream, overwhelming your astounded soul? Because, on either side of this stream, cold and respectable persons have taken up their abodes, and forsooth, their summer-houses and tulip-beds would suffer from the torrent; wherefore they dig trenches, and raise embankments betimes, in order to avert the impending danger.

[Eryk]

The Story of a Life - Konstantin Paustovsky

“Wait, wait, I want to show you something,” he muttered as he fumbled inside his shirt until he pulled out, at last, a little linen bag turned black with sweat, and slipped a much-creased photography out of it. He blew on it, and handed it to me. A single electric lamp was flickering high up under the ceiling. I couldn’t see a thing.

Then he cupped his hands together, and lit a match. It burned down to his fingers, but he did not blow it out. I looked at the photograph simply in order not to offend the man. I was sure it would be the usual peasant family photograph, such as I had often seen next to the icon in peasant huts.

The mother always sat in front — a dry, wrinkled old woman with knotty fingers. Whatever she was like in life — gentle and uncomplaining or shrewish and foolish — the picture always showed her with a face of stone and with tight-pressed lips. In the flash of the camera’s lens she always became the inexorable mother, the embodiment of the stern necessity of carrying on the race. And around her there always sat and stood her wooden children and her bulging-eyed grandchildren.

You had to look at these pictures for a long time to see and to recognize in their strained figures the people whom you knew well — the old woman’s consumptive, silent son-in-law — the village shoemaker, his wife, a big-bosomed, shrewish woman in an embroidered blouse and with shoes with tops which flapped against the base calfs of her legs, a young fellow with a forelock and with that strange emptiness in the eyes which you find in hooligans, and another fellow, dark and laughing, in whom you eventually recognized the mechanic known throughout the whole region. And the grandchildren — frightened kids with the eyes of little martyrs. These were children who had never known a caress or an affectionate greeting. Or maybe the son-in-law who was the shoemaker sometimes took pity on them quietly and gave them his old boot lasts to play with.

[Madame X]

Technically, one could not call this prose, as this passage comes from a book of non-fiction, but I wanted to share it nonetheless, a snip of Camus' beliefs on aesthetics

Camus, you say? Allow me to expound on the, arguably (je sais, je sais :rolleyes:), more gratifying qualities of his pure(er) prose, the sumptuous, serrated style of which is best appreciated in the following excerpt from...

La chute (don’t fret folks, the English translation, by that same talented Mr. O'Brien, follows :nod:):



Puis-je, monsieur vous proposer mes services, sans risquer d'être importun ? Je crains que vous ne sachiez vous faire entendre de l'estimable gorille qui préside aux destinées de cet établissement. Il ne parle, en effet, que le hollandais. A moins que vous ne m'autorisiez à plaider votre cause, il ne devinera pas que vous désirez du genièvre ? Voilà, j'ose espérer qu'il m'a compris ; ce hochement de tête doit signifier qu'il se rend à mes arguments ; Il y va, en effet, il se hâte, avec une sage lenteur. Vous avez de la chance, il n'a pas grogné. Quand il refuse de servir, un grognement lui suffit ; personne n'insiste. Être roi de ses humeurs, c'est le privilège des grands animaux. Mais je me retire, monsieur heureux de vous avoir obligé. Je vous remercie et j'accepterais si j'étais sûr de ne pas jouer les fâcheux. Vous êtes trop bon. J'installerai donc mon verre auprès du vôtre.
Vous avez raison, son mutisme est assourdissant. C'est le silence des forêts primitives, chargé jusqu'à la gueule. Je m'étonne parfois de l'obstination que met notre taciturne ami à bouder les langues civilisées. Son métier consiste à recevoir des marins de toutes les nationalités dans ce bar d'Amsterdam qu'il a appelé d'ailleurs, on ne sait pourquoi, Mexico City. Avec de tels devoirs, on peut craindre, ne pensez vous pas, que son ignorance soit inconfortable ? Imaginez l'homme de Cro-Magnon pensionnaire à la tour de Babel ! Il y souffrirait de dépaysement, au moins. Mais non, celui-ci ne sent pas son exil, il va son chemin, rien ne l'entame. Une des rares phrases que j'ai entendues de sa bouche proclamait que c'était à prendre ou à laisser. Que fallait-il prendre ou laisser ? Sans doute, notre ami lui-même. Je vous l'avouerai, je suis attiré par ces créatures tout d'une pièce. Quand on a beaucoup médité sur l'homme, par métier ou par vocation, il arrive qu'on éprouve de la nostalgie pour les primates. Ils n'ont pas, eux, d'arrière-pensées.

The Fall



May I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding? I fear you may not be able to make yourself understood by the worthy ape who presides over the fate of this establishment. In fact, he speaks nothing but Dutch. Unless you authorize me to plead your case, he will not guess that you want gin. There, I dare hope he understood me; that nod must mean that he yields to my arguments. He is taking steps; indeed, he is making haste with prudent deliberation. You are lucky; he didn't grunt. When he refuses to serve someone, he merely grunts. No one insists. Being master of one's moods is the privilege of the larger animals. Now I shall withdraw, monsieur, happy to have been of help to you. Thank you; I'd accept if I were sure of not being a nuisance. You are too kind. Then I shall bring my glass over beside yours.
You are right. His silence is deafening. It's the silence of the primeval forest, heavy with threats. At times I am amazed by his obstinacy in snubbing civilized languages. His business consists in entertaining sailors of all nationalities in this Amsterdam bar, which for that matter he named -no one knows why- Mexico City. With such duties wouldn't you think there might be some fear that his ignorance would be awkward? Fancy the Cro-Magnon man lodged in the Tower of Babel! He would certainly feel out of his element. Yet this one is not aware of his exile; he goes his own sweet way and nothing touches him. One of the rare sentences I have ever heard from his mouth proclaimed that you could take it or leave it. What did one have to take or leave? Doubtless our friend himself. I confess I am drawn by such creatures who are all of a piece. Anyone who has considerably meditated on man, by profession or vocation, is led to feel nostalgia for the primates. They at least don't have any ulterior motives.

Charmant! ;)

[ShoutGrace]

"I am sure there is plenty of food. It is very bad for the soldiers to be short of food. Have you ever noticed the difference it makes in the way you think?"

"Yes," I said. "It can't win a war but it can lose one."

"We won't talk of losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain."

I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression 'in vain.' We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.


-Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

[Quark]

The shocking end of Chekhov's "Sleepy:"


But now, at last, the visitors have gone; the lights are put out, the master and mistress go to bed.

"Varka, rock the baby!" she hears the last order.

The cricket churrs in the stove; the green patch on the ceiling and the shadows from the trousers and the baby-clothes force themselves on Varka's half-opened eyes again, wink at her and cloud her mind.

"Hush-a-bye, my baby wee," she murmurs, "and I will sing a song to thee."

And the baby screams, and is worn out with screaming. Again Varka sees the muddy high road, the people with wallets, her mother Pelageya, her father Yefim. She understands everything, she recognises everyone, but through her half sleep she cannot understand the force which binds her, hand and foot, weighs upon her, and prevents her from living. She looks round, searches for that force that she may escape from it, but she cannot find it. At last, tired to death, she does her very utmost, strains her eyes, looks up at the flickering green patch, and listening to the screaming, finds the foe who will not let her live.

That foe is the baby.

She laughs. It seems strange to her that she has failed to grasp such a simple thing before. The green patch, the shadows, and the cricket seem to laugh and wonder too.

The hallucination takes possession of Varka. She gets up from her stool, and with a broad smile on her face and wide unblinking eyes, she walks up and down the room. She feels pleased and tickled at the thought that she will be rid directly of the baby that binds her hand and foot. . . . Kill the baby and then sleep, sleep, sleep. . . .

Laughing and winking and shaking her fingers at the green patch, Varka steals up to the cradle and bends over the baby. When she has strangled him, she quickly lies down on the floor, laughs with delight that she can sleep, and in a minute is sleeping as sound as the dead.

[mono]

Ah, Fitzgerald, how you amaze me! :)

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light - and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes of half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shakes . . .
Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself - art politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria - he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights . . .
There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But - oh, Rosalind! Rosalind! . . .
"It's all a poor substitute at best, " he said sadly.
And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed . . .
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.
"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all."
From This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

[weltanschauung]

i personally believe that quoting the apropriate corpse at the apropriate occasion can make a considerable difference:

As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it's somewhat arbitrary, but I don't insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are /in general/ divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter /a new word/. There are, of course, innumerable sub- divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood - that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It's only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There's no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me - and /vive la guerre éternelle/ - till the New Jerusalem, of course!" (crime and punishment) and i shall quote this til i die!

[Saposcat]

A sentence from Beckett's Molloy, which wavers with a breathless distillation:

'And I note here the little beat my heart once missed, in my home, when a fly, flying low above my ash-tray, raised a little ash, with the breath of its wings. '

[kelby_lake]

Ah, Fitzgerald, how you amaze me! :)

From This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gotta love :)

[catatonic]

A sentence from Beckett's Molloy, which wavers with a breathless distillation:

'And I note here the little beat my heart once missed, in my home, when a fly, flying low above my ash-tray, raised a little ash, with the breath of its wings. '

I've been meaning to reread Beckett's trilogy. You've convinced me to do it on the double.

[Hardy Parkerson]

•"I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an' that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them. They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a _ _ d damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Everybody wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head. They're all the time talkin' about it, but it's jus' in their head."
- John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, Ch. 4

[Nissim]

Hi

I am quite confused about what is great prose. There are those who would label the kind of prose you adore as Purple Prose. I do not share this sentiment but many so called literary experts do. Have you heard the expression "murder your little darlings"? Those who hold the afforementioned prosaic point of view would certainly categorize the passages you quoted as very Purple and worthy of murder.

[ennison]

There's nothing very purple about Steinbeck - slightly red perhaps.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Old thread, but worth continuing. I vote for the chapter in Moby Dick on the whiteness of the whale. First read it in high school, and it sent shivers down my spine, and it still does so when I read it today. Particularly the description of how the waving of a buffalo skin before a domesticated young colt will cause a "frenzy of affright" by eliciting some ancestral memory of horse-ancestors being trampled to death by buffalo on the distant plains of Oregon...and of those who may at this moment being "trampled into dust" by these same buffalo... Melville's chapter on the whiteness of the whale is a tour-de-force of prose. Read it.