Passages of prose

[WICKES]

Does anyone else out there have favourite passages of writing? I'm looking for prose perfection.

"Night and the fear of darkness. In the room at the top of the old fort Seth lay awake and alone, his eyes wild with the inherited terror of the jungle, desperate with the acquired loneliness of civilisation. Night was alive with beasts and devils and the spirits of dead enemies; before its power Seth's ancestors had receded, slid away from its attack, abandoning in retreat all the baggage of individuality; they had lain six or seven in a hut; between them and the night only a wall of mud and a ceiling of thatched grass; warm naked bodies breathing in the darkness an arm's reach apart, indivisibly unified so that they ceased to be six or seven scared blacks and became one person of more than human stature, less vulnerable to the peril that walked near them." (Evelyn Waugh: Black Mischief)

[miyako73]

This is my idea of a contemporary prose--style and substance.

"His body, floating in the Hudson, had been hooked by a Chinese fisherman. His arms, battered, open to a virginal dawn: Christlike, one blog back home reported, sarcastically. Ratty-banded briefs and Ermenegildo Zegna trousers were pulled around his ankles. Both shoes lost. A crown of blood embellished the high forehead smashed by crowbar or dock pile or chunk of frozen river."

Illustrado, Miguel Syjuco

[Silvia]

A western kinsman of the sun, Dean. Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; and a little bit of trouble or even Dean's eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down as he would later, on starving sidewalks and sickbeds-what did it matter? I was a young writer and wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me. (On the Road, Kerouac)
There are so many wonderful passages...this is one of the first that came to my mind.
I've recently finished Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin and there are some very lyrical lines I'd like to quote if I find the English copy.

[Seasider]

I wanted to put in the final paragraph of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. but it was too long and it made me cry.

[WICKES]

I wanted to put in the final paragraph of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. but it was too long and it made me cry.

Post a bit of it- I don't mind if you cry

[stlukesguild]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens- A Tale of Two Cities

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities (tr. William Weaver)


"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So."

Then turning- the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.

"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whenceso'er I came; whereso'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."

[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.]

"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling in some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"

Herman Melville- Moby Dick (chapter 119-"The Candles")


"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,- death- glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

Herman Melville- Moby Dick (chapter 135-"The Chase- The Third Day")

These visionary and poetic passages are worthy of Satan's definace of God in Milton's Paradise Lost and for these passages alone Moby Dick would earn it claim to classic status.

[Seasider]

In A Room of One's Own Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister as gifted as he was. She was not sent to school and at age 17 was going to be married off. She left home, as her brother had done, walked to London tried to get a job, any job at a theatre. Was unsuccessful in this. Caught the eye of young man who was a writer. Got pregnant, committed suicide and was buried in a common grave in that area now known as The Elephant and Castle. This is the final paragraph of Woolf's essay, given to the young women of Girton College Cambridge.

"I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister;
but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died
young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses
now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this
poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still
lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not
here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the
children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are
continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in
the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your
power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or
so--I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of
the little separate lives which we live as individuals--and have five
hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of
freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a
little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in
their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky,
too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past
Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face
the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that
we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not
only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and
the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which
she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the
unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she
will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that
effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born
again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we
cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she
would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty
and obscurity, is worth while."

Sob, sob.