Whoop whoop, James Joyce action all up in here. Maybe this could be a tradition. (It was about this time last year that I was reading Ulysses). I mean, I did just buy The Dubliners... And there's only so much Joyce I can take in one sitting, I guess. It's funny, I loved almost all of Ulysses, but I found a lot of this book as fairly tiresome. Of course, it's possible that that is because Ulysses is so crazy and random and utilizes a million different techniques and spontaneous prose and all of that--actually, if I recall, I didn't like the chapters on Stephen Dedalus too much either (the first two or three). They're damned slow compared to the rest of the book, too, and a lot tougher than most of the rest of the book. This book was a lot easier--but the style is more the same. That could be because they're dealing with the same fellow, but I don't know...
Anyways, this is about Stephen's early life. Childhood through college. First of all, there is his name. For those of you unfamiliar with Greek mythology, Dedalus (Daedalus) was an incredible architect--he designed the labyrinth the Minotaur (a half man half bull beast--whole other tangent for that one) was trapped in. Anyways, he had to escape imprisonment and he made wax wings to fly away. With him was his son, Icarus. His son flew too close to the sun and his wings melted and he fell to his death--but Daedalus lived. This implies a somewhat optimistic outcome for Stephen. Apparently Stephen is named after St Stephen as well--St Stephen was stoned to death after making the local Jewish community mad.
So--before I start out still, I just want to point out that apparently HG Wells really liked this book. Or at least he thought it was great. Also, the cruelty and unfairness described in the schools is almost exactly the same as what Roald Dahl dealt with during his school days (as described in Boy, specifically the sections on the canings and captain Hardcastle). And lastly, while I'm thinking of it, I picked this up at my aunt's Cape house. The last time I went was three years ago, and I remember coming across this book and thinking that it looked incredibly boring and stupid. How foolish I was! Anyways, let's go.
First note comes from when Stephen is most likely in his elementary years--first stint in the boarding house, I'd imagine. (Are schools like that still the norm over there?) Oh, by the way--Joyce omits quotation marks and all of that, so I'll be adding them in on quoted conversations just to make life easier. "'What's up? Have you a pain or what's up with you?' 'I don't know,' Stephen said. 'Sick in your breadbasket,' Fleming said, 'because your face looks white. It will go away.' 'O yes,' Stephen said. But he was not sick there. He thought he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place" (13).
Second note is on the next page--some bigger boys tease Stephen because they ask him if he kisses his mother every night before bed he says yes, then when he tries to renege so they won't make fun they continue to laugh. Ugh, that's pretty much the worst thing ever, because he gets all confused and everything, and everybody knows how awful that situation is. Unless if you were the sort of person who enjoyed causing those situations, in which case, you are/were a terrible person.
"Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did it mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?" (15).
Ah, so I marked the page that I said was like Roald Dahl's recollections of school. Stephen, like Joyce, wears glasses (and since Stephen is supposed to be Joyce--his Kilgore Trout, if you will--there's a very good chance that this is based on an actual occurrence). He breaks them and when explaining how he very legitimately broke his glasses he is made out for a liar and his wrists are buffeted by a pandybat.
My next note comes on many pages later--Stephen's father drags him to the bars. Mr Dedalus gets very drunk, embarrassingly so. That hardly matters--an old man there drinking is "tapping his forehead and raising his glass to drain it" (95). There's something about the "raising his glass to drain it" that gets me and amazes me. I'm not sure what it is exactly, though.
Ulysses Leopold imagines that he has been turned into a woman after he has drunken far too much in the red light district (where he's going to collect Stephen!). This leads me to believe that Joyce was to some extent curious about what it was like to be female--or at least what it would be like to experience sex as a woman, judging from this scene. To be completely honest, I don't remember much from Leopold's scene other than the part where he spontaneously gave birth to eight children. (Ew ew ew ew ew ew gross EW.) I'm also going to back Joyce and say it's natural to wonder what it's like to be a member of the opposite gender. And if my interpretation is correct, I can't help but wonder what the significance of having Stephen being the female--or submissive--figure is. Perhaps saying that he is a slave to his lust or passions, cannot control them...?
My second note actually plays off from the end of the last quote: "...The cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal" (100). First, I find it impossible to find that bit about the urinal wall gross. This is thanks to the Hash-Slinging Slasher episode of Spongebob... This would be funnier if I could find the clip on Youtube, but apparently it doesn't exist? What? Okay, fine--but on a more serious note, during Stephen's chapters in Ulysses, he says that God is like a shout in the street. Perhaps it's a somewhat weak and obvious connection--but hey. I'm trying here!
His adventures with prostitutes are cut off short after he hears a sermon about the pains and tortures of hell--he is suddenly stricken with a fear for his soul and repents.
My next note is from later still--Stephen hears his surname called and he imagines he sees someone flying over the waves of the ocean in front of him (he never makes it clear whether he is actually aware of who the original carrier of the name actually was). He then realizes that he is in that body and he is soaring.
"Do you believe in Jesus? I believe in man" (198).
Stephen: "I tried to love God, he said at length. It seems now I failed. It is very difficult" (240).
"'Did the idea ever occur to you,' Cranly asked, that Jesus was not what he pretended to be?' 'The first person to whom that idea occurred to,' Stephen answered, 'was Jesus himself' (242).
"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning" (247). This is an interesting idea--we discussed it a lot in Contemporary Lit when we were reading 1984. Winston and Julia do a lot of rebelling (and by rebelling I mean having sex everywhere and anywhere possible). However, they rebel silently and quietly. Until they are sold out, no-one is aware of their rebellion. The idea that we discussed was if such a rebellion should even be considered a real rebellion. Sure, they are rebelling against the norms and thought police and government and all--but their rebellion has literally no effect on the rest of the world. Obviously they can't tell anyone about what they're doing--no-one can be inspired to join them--the society doesn't even allow martyrs to happen (what I mean is, people simply disappear, they aren't made into tragic saints or any of that)--so are their acts real rebellion? Nothing is gained, nothing real is done, and so on... They're still contributing to the world which they are trying to fight as well. So, they might as well be doing nothing... So yeah. Nothing occurs.
"I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world" (251). The last few pages take on a very different form, they become entries from Stephen's diary. This is from one of the entries.
The book doesn't end with real closure--which makes sense. Stephen's story is continued in Ulysses, and if Stephen really is supposed to be Joyce's Kilgore Trout, there shouldn't be.
A note on the text--James Joyce's curious way of writing dialogue and speech is apparently copied from the French model. It was the style which was common in France at the time of the writing, and might even still be popular, though I've never looked at a French novel (in French) dated past 1956.
It was also a little funny while reading this book--though I didn't remember much of the story (though there really isn't much) I remembered quotes that particularly struck me that I did write down (somewhere) almost instantly. For example, reading the bit about being sick in his breadbasket... Immediately I thought of the end of the quote without any real trouble at all. I don't know, I just thought that it was kind of funny. That's not usual for me, especially if I didn't own the book the first time through.
MLA citation information: Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Penguin books: Pennsylvania, 1976.
Also, since Emma is too busy to read these and because no-one else reads these, I've removed the mystery lyrics thing (unless if a song particularly jumps out at me, in which case I will simply say that it reminds me of song X). The answer to last post is If I'm Dreaming My Life by David Bowie, by the way... Well, yeah. I'm taking a brief break from all of this to catch up on my writing and to rest my wrist and all, so expect a much lighter load of posts this summer. Have a good one!
Showing posts with label Ulysses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ulysses. Show all posts
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
The Book of Mormon: 1 Nephi-Mosiah
(Note: This post includes the first two books of Nephi, the books of Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, the Words of Mormon and the book of Mosiah, obviously.)
So, I came into possession of this through my World Religions class. First of all, Mormons are nice. Like really nice. Like if you were having a bad day you would call your Mormon friend up and they would make life all better again. Second of all, that class was made up of--not exactly dummkopfs, but they might as well have been zombies. I was pretty much the only one talking, seriously. So the three Mormon representatives--teenagers, Mormons have this really cool custom of taking a year or two off for mission work--loved me, and gave me a copy of the book to take. So that was cool. Anyways, I dug the friendliness and professionalism and all of that. If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to pick a religion learned about in that class and convert to it, I would definitely be a Mormon. The only big problem I have is that using contraceptives might as well be one of the seven deadly sins. You're supposed to "be fruitful and multiply"--that would not work for me. Nope.
So! Here we go. This is going to be a long post, I'm sure, but let's start with the introduction, I guess... So the story goes that this book was found inscribed on tablets. The tablet's words were copied down, as the time wasn't quite ripe for the tablets to be revealed to the world. The books are a kind of revamped version of the old and new testaments. So... Let's go! On with 1 Nephi!
So Nephi's father was a prophet that everybody thought was mad--he also claimed Jerusalem would fall and all of that. This is probably a good time to mention that I read this about three weeks ago. I guess my point for marking this was the parallels with the Bible... Maybe.
Oh yeah, so they leave the city and flee to wilderness, pretty much like Moses and his people leaving Egypt. You know, people "murmur against" him, are punished, keep on murmuring against, don't learn, except sometimes, eventually go off the beaten track... And so on. So... Yeah.
"Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief" 1 Nephi 4:13.
Oh and they too have the commandments and the laws and Leviticus in their possession. They go ahead and mention that. Just an interesting note, since I don't actually have a sense of time or proportion.
God is also, again, referred to as the "God of Israel" 1 Nephi 5:9. Again, a note I think is interesting that probably no-one else would.
Oh, a response to those people rebelling against Nephi's father: "How is it that ye have forgotten what great things the Lord hath done for us...?" 1 Nephi 7:11. He actually goes on to list great things that God did help them achieve, but. I just thought it was interesting wording or what have you. Something about it struck me.
This too: "How is it that ye have forgotten that ye have seen an angel of the Lord?" 1 Nephi 7:9.
I notice that in 1 Nephi 10, God, when referred to as 'he', isn't capitalized. That's pretty intriguing...
Then 'he' is referring to a regular man: "For he that diligently seeketh shall find" (which can continue to) "and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them" 1 Nephi 10:19.
Nephi's father sees a mysterious tree in 1 Nephi 11, and an angel asks Nephi if he understands what the tree was. My note was just "the cross?" because the cross Jesus was put on is sometimes referred to as a tree.
Also, in most traditional versions of the crucifixion story, Judas hangs himself after he realizes what he has done. In Nephi's vision, he sees Jesus getting crucified, and then the "multitudes of the earth" rallying against the twelve apostles. So... Did Judas not kill himself? Did he repent? Are you... Are you allowed to repent after doing that sort of thing? I mean, I know it was necessary for Jesus to be resurrected and all, but still...
There's the repetition of the line so often occurring in the Bible: "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last" 1 Nephi 13:42.
Nephi also sees a vision that is like John's vision written in revelations of the false, poison church: "And that great pit, which hath been digged for them by that great and abominable church, which was founded by the devil and his children, that he might lead away the souls of men down to hell--yea, that great pit which hath been digged for the destruction of men shall be filled by those who digged it" 1 Nephi 14:3. Again. Good wording. Good way of bluntly getting the point across.
Also, they flash forward to a time when the name of God will become a "hiss and a byword, and be hated among all nations" 1 Nephi 19:14. Of course, I thought of Ulysses, when Stephen Daedalus says that God is like a shout in the street.
The first book of Nephi is ended with the promise that it is not just Nephi and his father proclaiming the God of Israel--others have been taught and have seen God in the same manner.
My first note on 2 Nephi is more for a particular word than anything else. You know, the phrase is God will smite thee, but it use the word 'smitten'. Now it makes sense--obviously there's the same root and same meaning--smite means being struck with the hand or hit with a hard blow. Smitten means the same thing, but it can also mean that someone is very much in love. I just thought it was interesting, especially in how appropriate it is (and a little odd that smite doesn't have that same definition).
Remember how in the Old Testament hell--or an equivalent to hell--is Sheol? If not, Sheol is all dark and nasty, unpleasant and so on. The darkness is like a blanket, and you may be able to hear other people crying out but you can't reach them or answer them (although that last bit doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but...) Anyways, this book characterizes hell as just being sleep--"the sleep of hell" 2 Nephi 1:13. That's interesting, the idea that you're not being tortured but you're just... not... there. I guess that would make it more of a purgatory than a hell then, though... Anyways, here's the full thing: "O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound, which are the chains which bind the children of men; that they are carried away captive down to the gulf of misery and woe. Awake! And arise from the dust, and hear the words of a trembling parent, whose limbs ye must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave, from whence no traveler can return; a few more days and I go the way of all earth. But behold, the Lord hath redeemed my soul from hell; I have behold his glory, and I am encircled about eternally in the arms of his love" 2 Nephi 1:13-15. Okay... So reason number one why I marked it: Matisyahu's debut album is "Shake off the Dust... Arise". Reason two is that it says that you can't return from the grave. But you have a second life, so wouldn't that count...? Unless if it means you can't return to the earth. Yeeeeeep.
Again, later: "Shake thyself from the dust; arise, sit down, O Jerusalem; loose thyselves from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion" 2 Nephi 8:25.
"Prepare your souls for that glorious day when justice shall be administered unto the righteous, even the day of judgment, that ye may not shrink with awful fear" 2 Nephi 9:46. /"'There are just some kind of men who--who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one'"--Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird.
"Seek the Lord, not peeping wizards" 2 Nephi 18. The phrase "peeping wizards" is the funniest thing ever. Let's move on!
Chapter eighteen also mentions the priest Uriah. If I'm not mistaken, that is also the name of one of the archangels.
"Hell from beneath thy feet is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee" 2 Nephi 24:9. I believe this is a reference to the final days when the dead will rise and walk the earth and so on.
So onto the next book, Jacob... My first note has to do with Jacob warning the people of Nephi against "fornication and lasciviousness" Jacob 3:12. That seems strange to me because of the be fruitful and multiply bit. I mean--you're supposed to procreate like crazy. Like I said, birth control in any form is looked down upon. And obviously to get babies you've got to have sex. (I almost said 'make'. Make sex?) Maybe it just means bestiality and pedophilia and stuff? (And since this would be Old Testament time, this would probably include homosexuality too.) That's my best guess, anyway.
"And now I, Jacob, am led on by the Spirit unto prophesying; for I perceive by the workings of the Spirit which is in me, that by the stumbling of the Jews they will reject the stone upon which they might build and have safe foundation" Jacob 4:15. I'm going to go ahead and say this refers to the crucifixion of Jesus. If that's the case, then that oft-repeated New Testament quote about the stone that was rejected being the cornerstone of faith makes a lot more sense now.
Hmm, those appear to be the only notes I've got on Jacob, and I didn't mark anything for Enos, Jarom, Omni, or The Words of Mormon. Sooo... On to the Book of Mosiah!
"Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just--But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God. For behold, are we not all beggars?" Mosiah 4:17-19. This is pretty much the exact opposite of Grecian/Roman/probably other ancient civilizations that I don't know about beliefs too--if you had a beggar or a leper or someone suffering in general, the gods were punishing them, and if you helped them, you ran the risk of pissing the gods off and making them torture you too. Yeeep. I also just really like that last line too.
"And I would that ye should remember, that whosoever among you borroweth of his neighbor should return the thing that he doth borroweth, according as he doth agree, or else thou shalt commit sin; and perhaps thou shalt cause thy neighbor to commit sin also" Mosiah 4:28. I LOVE this! One, it may supposed to be serious--in fact there is no may about it--but it seems like there's a bit of humour happening at the end there, along with the truism. Two, it is true. Three, I like the fact that it's being said that sometimes sinning isn't all one fellow's part--that there can be (and often is) a reason...
Oh, here's one thing that really, really bothered me: "And again: Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me" Mosiah 13:13. It's not that God 'says' that he's a jealous God. He does it often enough in the Old Testament. What bothers me is that in the old Testament, there is the line which follows: "Parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents; only for their own crimes may persons be put to death" Deuteronomy 24:16. I know that says put to death, but I took it to mean that they may not be punished for each other's sins either--I mean, by saying that he'll take it out on the latter generations... Well, he's not really saying death, but still... It could be potentially worse than death. I just don't like this bit with what I convinced myself was said, I guess. And saying it will come on to latter generations that the sinner probably won't even know isn't going to make them stop. They'll just be like, oh... I won't get in trouble for it then? Sweet! Guess I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing. Awesome. I mean, if they do live to see the suffering, they'll feel guilty then (probably), and regret it, but that would be what's known as locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.
"Unrighteous kings lead their people into sin" Mosiah 29.
So those are all of my notes! I had some more, but again, it's been a while since I picked this up so I didn't remember why pages were noted, or how my scrawled-in notes related to what I thought they related to. So, I'm going to get started on the second half (Alma-Moroni, about 320 pages) but there's going to be some in-between, especially since I've also just finished Fight Club, and I've decided to take a lot of my other books down off the 'classics' self for review. Most of them are pretty short--actually the ones that are coming down for review are the two Hermann Hesse books. But yeah. They're both pretty short.
MLA Citation Information: The Book of Mormon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: United States of America, 2010.
Ohhh, plus I'm going to be in Cape Cod for a few days in a week. I know, I know, I won't update for a whole week, eeee.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Congratulations by MGMT
This post's cryptic song lyrics: You're the son of his majesty, remember how it used to be, in the light of the day it's easy to see--Now it's nighttime, you had to leave
So, I came into possession of this through my World Religions class. First of all, Mormons are nice. Like really nice. Like if you were having a bad day you would call your Mormon friend up and they would make life all better again. Second of all, that class was made up of--not exactly dummkopfs, but they might as well have been zombies. I was pretty much the only one talking, seriously. So the three Mormon representatives--teenagers, Mormons have this really cool custom of taking a year or two off for mission work--loved me, and gave me a copy of the book to take. So that was cool. Anyways, I dug the friendliness and professionalism and all of that. If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to pick a religion learned about in that class and convert to it, I would definitely be a Mormon. The only big problem I have is that using contraceptives might as well be one of the seven deadly sins. You're supposed to "be fruitful and multiply"--that would not work for me. Nope.
So! Here we go. This is going to be a long post, I'm sure, but let's start with the introduction, I guess... So the story goes that this book was found inscribed on tablets. The tablet's words were copied down, as the time wasn't quite ripe for the tablets to be revealed to the world. The books are a kind of revamped version of the old and new testaments. So... Let's go! On with 1 Nephi!
So Nephi's father was a prophet that everybody thought was mad--he also claimed Jerusalem would fall and all of that. This is probably a good time to mention that I read this about three weeks ago. I guess my point for marking this was the parallels with the Bible... Maybe.
Oh yeah, so they leave the city and flee to wilderness, pretty much like Moses and his people leaving Egypt. You know, people "murmur against" him, are punished, keep on murmuring against, don't learn, except sometimes, eventually go off the beaten track... And so on. So... Yeah.
"Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief" 1 Nephi 4:13.
Oh and they too have the commandments and the laws and Leviticus in their possession. They go ahead and mention that. Just an interesting note, since I don't actually have a sense of time or proportion.
God is also, again, referred to as the "God of Israel" 1 Nephi 5:9. Again, a note I think is interesting that probably no-one else would.
Oh, a response to those people rebelling against Nephi's father: "How is it that ye have forgotten what great things the Lord hath done for us...?" 1 Nephi 7:11. He actually goes on to list great things that God did help them achieve, but. I just thought it was interesting wording or what have you. Something about it struck me.
This too: "How is it that ye have forgotten that ye have seen an angel of the Lord?" 1 Nephi 7:9.
I notice that in 1 Nephi 10, God, when referred to as 'he', isn't capitalized. That's pretty intriguing...
Then 'he' is referring to a regular man: "For he that diligently seeketh shall find" (which can continue to) "and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them" 1 Nephi 10:19.
Nephi's father sees a mysterious tree in 1 Nephi 11, and an angel asks Nephi if he understands what the tree was. My note was just "the cross?" because the cross Jesus was put on is sometimes referred to as a tree.
Also, in most traditional versions of the crucifixion story, Judas hangs himself after he realizes what he has done. In Nephi's vision, he sees Jesus getting crucified, and then the "multitudes of the earth" rallying against the twelve apostles. So... Did Judas not kill himself? Did he repent? Are you... Are you allowed to repent after doing that sort of thing? I mean, I know it was necessary for Jesus to be resurrected and all, but still...
There's the repetition of the line so often occurring in the Bible: "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last" 1 Nephi 13:42.
Nephi also sees a vision that is like John's vision written in revelations of the false, poison church: "And that great pit, which hath been digged for them by that great and abominable church, which was founded by the devil and his children, that he might lead away the souls of men down to hell--yea, that great pit which hath been digged for the destruction of men shall be filled by those who digged it" 1 Nephi 14:3. Again. Good wording. Good way of bluntly getting the point across.
Also, they flash forward to a time when the name of God will become a "hiss and a byword, and be hated among all nations" 1 Nephi 19:14. Of course, I thought of Ulysses, when Stephen Daedalus says that God is like a shout in the street.
The first book of Nephi is ended with the promise that it is not just Nephi and his father proclaiming the God of Israel--others have been taught and have seen God in the same manner.
My first note on 2 Nephi is more for a particular word than anything else. You know, the phrase is God will smite thee, but it use the word 'smitten'. Now it makes sense--obviously there's the same root and same meaning--smite means being struck with the hand or hit with a hard blow. Smitten means the same thing, but it can also mean that someone is very much in love. I just thought it was interesting, especially in how appropriate it is (and a little odd that smite doesn't have that same definition).
Remember how in the Old Testament hell--or an equivalent to hell--is Sheol? If not, Sheol is all dark and nasty, unpleasant and so on. The darkness is like a blanket, and you may be able to hear other people crying out but you can't reach them or answer them (although that last bit doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but...) Anyways, this book characterizes hell as just being sleep--"the sleep of hell" 2 Nephi 1:13. That's interesting, the idea that you're not being tortured but you're just... not... there. I guess that would make it more of a purgatory than a hell then, though... Anyways, here's the full thing: "O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound, which are the chains which bind the children of men; that they are carried away captive down to the gulf of misery and woe. Awake! And arise from the dust, and hear the words of a trembling parent, whose limbs ye must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave, from whence no traveler can return; a few more days and I go the way of all earth. But behold, the Lord hath redeemed my soul from hell; I have behold his glory, and I am encircled about eternally in the arms of his love" 2 Nephi 1:13-15. Okay... So reason number one why I marked it: Matisyahu's debut album is "Shake off the Dust... Arise". Reason two is that it says that you can't return from the grave. But you have a second life, so wouldn't that count...? Unless if it means you can't return to the earth. Yeeeeeep.
Again, later: "Shake thyself from the dust; arise, sit down, O Jerusalem; loose thyselves from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion" 2 Nephi 8:25.
"Prepare your souls for that glorious day when justice shall be administered unto the righteous, even the day of judgment, that ye may not shrink with awful fear" 2 Nephi 9:46. /"'There are just some kind of men who--who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one'"--Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird.
"Seek the Lord, not peeping wizards" 2 Nephi 18. The phrase "peeping wizards" is the funniest thing ever. Let's move on!
Chapter eighteen also mentions the priest Uriah. If I'm not mistaken, that is also the name of one of the archangels.
"Hell from beneath thy feet is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee" 2 Nephi 24:9. I believe this is a reference to the final days when the dead will rise and walk the earth and so on.
So onto the next book, Jacob... My first note has to do with Jacob warning the people of Nephi against "fornication and lasciviousness" Jacob 3:12. That seems strange to me because of the be fruitful and multiply bit. I mean--you're supposed to procreate like crazy. Like I said, birth control in any form is looked down upon. And obviously to get babies you've got to have sex. (I almost said 'make'. Make sex?) Maybe it just means bestiality and pedophilia and stuff? (And since this would be Old Testament time, this would probably include homosexuality too.) That's my best guess, anyway.
"And now I, Jacob, am led on by the Spirit unto prophesying; for I perceive by the workings of the Spirit which is in me, that by the stumbling of the Jews they will reject the stone upon which they might build and have safe foundation" Jacob 4:15. I'm going to go ahead and say this refers to the crucifixion of Jesus. If that's the case, then that oft-repeated New Testament quote about the stone that was rejected being the cornerstone of faith makes a lot more sense now.
Hmm, those appear to be the only notes I've got on Jacob, and I didn't mark anything for Enos, Jarom, Omni, or The Words of Mormon. Sooo... On to the Book of Mosiah!
"Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just--But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God. For behold, are we not all beggars?" Mosiah 4:17-19. This is pretty much the exact opposite of Grecian/Roman/probably other ancient civilizations that I don't know about beliefs too--if you had a beggar or a leper or someone suffering in general, the gods were punishing them, and if you helped them, you ran the risk of pissing the gods off and making them torture you too. Yeeep. I also just really like that last line too.
"And I would that ye should remember, that whosoever among you borroweth of his neighbor should return the thing that he doth borroweth, according as he doth agree, or else thou shalt commit sin; and perhaps thou shalt cause thy neighbor to commit sin also" Mosiah 4:28. I LOVE this! One, it may supposed to be serious--in fact there is no may about it--but it seems like there's a bit of humour happening at the end there, along with the truism. Two, it is true. Three, I like the fact that it's being said that sometimes sinning isn't all one fellow's part--that there can be (and often is) a reason...
Oh, here's one thing that really, really bothered me: "And again: Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me" Mosiah 13:13. It's not that God 'says' that he's a jealous God. He does it often enough in the Old Testament. What bothers me is that in the old Testament, there is the line which follows: "Parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents; only for their own crimes may persons be put to death" Deuteronomy 24:16. I know that says put to death, but I took it to mean that they may not be punished for each other's sins either--I mean, by saying that he'll take it out on the latter generations... Well, he's not really saying death, but still... It could be potentially worse than death. I just don't like this bit with what I convinced myself was said, I guess. And saying it will come on to latter generations that the sinner probably won't even know isn't going to make them stop. They'll just be like, oh... I won't get in trouble for it then? Sweet! Guess I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing. Awesome. I mean, if they do live to see the suffering, they'll feel guilty then (probably), and regret it, but that would be what's known as locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.
"Unrighteous kings lead their people into sin" Mosiah 29.
So those are all of my notes! I had some more, but again, it's been a while since I picked this up so I didn't remember why pages were noted, or how my scrawled-in notes related to what I thought they related to. So, I'm going to get started on the second half (Alma-Moroni, about 320 pages) but there's going to be some in-between, especially since I've also just finished Fight Club, and I've decided to take a lot of my other books down off the 'classics' self for review. Most of them are pretty short--actually the ones that are coming down for review are the two Hermann Hesse books. But yeah. They're both pretty short.
MLA Citation Information: The Book of Mormon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: United States of America, 2010.
Ohhh, plus I'm going to be in Cape Cod for a few days in a week. I know, I know, I won't update for a whole week, eeee.
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Congratulations by MGMT
This post's cryptic song lyrics: You're the son of his majesty, remember how it used to be, in the light of the day it's easy to see--Now it's nighttime, you had to leave
Saturday, January 15, 2011
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Well, with this I've completed both of my Christmas books. I'm a little unused to doing these awkward beginner paragraphs, so just bear with me as you always have.
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on. Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book. Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem). Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties. His partner, Jim, has recently died. George is a single man*. In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George. What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is. We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce). The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human. One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I. He's almost too much. Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him. When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him. You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too. You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.
So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be. Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9). Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style. Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play." And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament." These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.
And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative" (10). Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination? Desperation? Fear? It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing. JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'. That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost. Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism. He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically. So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old. Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one. My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).
"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face--the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man--all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us--we have died--what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed" (10-11).
"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic" (15). I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him". I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while?" (15). This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once. When my poppy died, I was six. Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind. That idea shook me, as one can imagine. My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing. What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch. Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven. In fact, it was borderline creepy. I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling. But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since. It seems impossible to me now.
"And [George's neighbours] are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth--crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese--who are nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27). Death, of course. Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death.
"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35). I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence. What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.
"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought of and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good)" (45).
So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work. On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).
"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65). He is teaching the class about Endymion.
What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it. Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism. What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life. We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany. He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).
"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause'" (70). This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic. Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation. What you perceive is what is real to you. I never quite put it together in this manner. George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point:
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70). Again, the definition of the situation. This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly. Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world. Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71). Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).
George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!). George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical. The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there. Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that. Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know. (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)
"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).
After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course). Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82). Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought. Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work. One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament. It is communion. If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important. The scene is important. It could be a turning point--but, I digress. My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list. I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament! Yes, yes! ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune. Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway. (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)
George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85). To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before. I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).
George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman. In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female. Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact. Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).
"Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive. Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing" (102). He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering? This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least. Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it. Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something. There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.
I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral. Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'. In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral. Family only.
"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138). George's friend, Charley. She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.' 'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!' 'No, Charley, I mean it. The past is over. People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums. But that's not the past. You won't find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).
The two get very drunk. In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim. ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.) Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145). Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.
"'You don't need the past, yet. You've got the present'" (156). George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.
"'What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other. How can we ever be friends?'" (158).
"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).
The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George. George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip. Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*
Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off. George of course now lives alone. "'You know something, sir? I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life! ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?' 'Sure it is!'" (167).
"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176). Possibly my favourite quote from the book...
Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator. This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down. Again, George falls prey to a heart attack. Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for. Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186). It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose. And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22. But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it. Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact. Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact. Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.
Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man. It was great. I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie. However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge. When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track. It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before. Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially. When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock. Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying. Same with the book--it took me about the same time. I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me. Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic. So... that was good in its own way. (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!) So... Where was I? Oh yeah, the book is fantastic. I love Christopher Isherwood's prose. I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today. But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.
*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it. Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas. However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book. It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships. He is also a single man in the terms of the population. He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things. As Kenny puts it--he's invisible. They're both invisible. Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible. Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications. It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.
EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it! So here we go. I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on. Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book. Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem). Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties. His partner, Jim, has recently died. George is a single man*. In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George. What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is. We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce). The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human. One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I. He's almost too much. Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him. When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him. You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too. You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.
So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be. Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9). Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style. Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play." And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament." These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.
And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative" (10). Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination? Desperation? Fear? It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing. JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'. That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost. Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism. He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically. So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old. Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one. My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).
"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face--the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man--all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us--we have died--what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed" (10-11).
"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic" (15). I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him". I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while?" (15). This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once. When my poppy died, I was six. Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind. That idea shook me, as one can imagine. My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing. What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch. Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven. In fact, it was borderline creepy. I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling. But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since. It seems impossible to me now.
"And [George's neighbours] are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth--crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese--who are nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27). Death, of course. Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death.
"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35). I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence. What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.
"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought of and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good)" (45).
So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work. On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).
"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65). He is teaching the class about Endymion.
What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it. Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism. What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life. We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany. He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).
"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause'" (70). This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic. Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation. What you perceive is what is real to you. I never quite put it together in this manner. George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point:
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70). Again, the definition of the situation. This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly. Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world. Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71). Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).
George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!). George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical. The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there. Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that. Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know. (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)
"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).
After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course). Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82). Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought. Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work. One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament. It is communion. If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important. The scene is important. It could be a turning point--but, I digress. My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list. I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament! Yes, yes! ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune. Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway. (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)
George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85). To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before. I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).
George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman. In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female. Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact. Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).
"Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive. Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing" (102). He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering? This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least. Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it. Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something. There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.
I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral. Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'. In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral. Family only.
"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138). George's friend, Charley. She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.' 'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!' 'No, Charley, I mean it. The past is over. People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums. But that's not the past. You won't find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).
The two get very drunk. In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim. ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.) Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145). Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.
"'You don't need the past, yet. You've got the present'" (156). George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.
"'What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other. How can we ever be friends?'" (158).
"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).
The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George. George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip. Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*
Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off. George of course now lives alone. "'You know something, sir? I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life! ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?' 'Sure it is!'" (167).
"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176). Possibly my favourite quote from the book...
Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator. This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down. Again, George falls prey to a heart attack. Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for. Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186). It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose. And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22. But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it. Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact. Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact. Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.
Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man. It was great. I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie. However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge. When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track. It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before. Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially. When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock. Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying. Same with the book--it took me about the same time. I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me. Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic. So... that was good in its own way. (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!) So... Where was I? Oh yeah, the book is fantastic. I love Christopher Isherwood's prose. I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today. But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.
*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it. Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas. However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book. It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships. He is also a single man in the terms of the population. He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things. As Kenny puts it--he's invisible. They're both invisible. Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible. Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications. It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.
EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it! So here we go. I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations
Well, hello there! This is a special birthday edition, whoop whoooop. My friend Ben, being awesome, gave me a book of--well, perhaps you should read the title, there. He also gave me (whilst continually being awesome) the newest rendition of Dorian Gray, the one starring the most beautiful human being on the face of this plane--ehh, Benjamin Barnes. Go on, Google him right now. Do yourself a favor! When I opened them I was all "How did you know!?" Which in retrospect is a stupid question. Guys, if there's one thing I am all about, it's Oscar Wilde, almost bordering on obsession... Just kidding, I think I've passed that boundary already. If I ever met him, I'd be to him what that creepy fat guy in Space Jam was to Michael Jordan... Well, a little less so. I don't think anyone can really be that creepy. Please don't kill me with dilophosaurs.
Anyway, there's not going to be a lot of insight because these are just some awesome things Oscar Wilde said. But I figured you deserved to bask in his awesomeness too because, uh, it's Oscar Wilde. Also, I can't remember if you (Emma) have actually ever read anything by him. I feel like you must of, or at least absorbed things through osmosis, but whatever. Let's go, shall we?
"Life is much too important a thing to ever talk seriously about it (1)." This was a given, though I have to admit I like the misquoted version better, this is very awkwardly worded. OSCAR. Gosh.
"The Book of Life begins with a man and woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations" (1). I feel like there's a sex joke in here. I mean... He would. He really would...
"One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead" (1).
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all" (1). Although this (upcoming) quote of Wilde's is nowhere in this book, I feel like these two go hand-in-hand: "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
"To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life" (1).
"Life is never fair... And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not" (2). Okay, so Emma. Why haven't you read Catch-22 yet? There's this great scene where the men are talking about their pasts, and their fathers and stuff... Like, one guy is talking about how he's rich and good things are just thrown at him for no apparent reason, which leads him to conclude that the riches must actually be someone else's, and another fellow pipes up and says, you know, perhaps it was my father's. He worked hard his whole life and only suffered from misfortune. And there are few other examples of oh, this is mine--but maybe it was meant to be for you, and vice versa. And then one guy says: "Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in the universe." (Via Wikiquote.) So... Yeah. Also, fun fact about that quote: I wrote that on a dollar and Alyssa got it and refused to spend it, to the best of my knowledge, to this day. She kept it affixed to the front of her daily planner for the remainder of the school year. It was kind of touching. ....I miss Alyssa...
"One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour" (2).
"I love acting. It is so much more real than life" (2).
"One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar" (3).
"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast" (3).
"I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written; life can only be lived" (4). PS. Oscar, I love you.
"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell' (5).
"In Paris one can lose one's time most delightfully; but one can never lose one's way" (5). I can attest to this one. Actually, this probably applies best (in my experience) to strolling in Cimitiere du Pere Lachaise... Which is sort of funny (for lack of a better word) because *someone* is buried there... No, but actually, it's a very nice place in its own right; the surrounding area is pretty lovely too.
"But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are" (5).
"Women are meant to be loved, not understood" (5).
"She'll never love you unless you are always at her heels; women like to be bothered" (6).
"The one charm of the past is that it is past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen" (8).
"There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is" (9). I want to know when Oscar said this one, for obvious reasons.
"As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied"(11). Noooot a big fan of Mrs Vane.
"There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that the past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband" (11).
"I sometimes think that God in creating man, somewhat overestimated His ability" (12). I do not like the existence of that comma at all.
"What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance" (12).
"Man, poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man belongs to a sex that has been rational for millions and millions of years. He can't help himself. It is in his race. The History of Woman is very different. We have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common sense. We saw its dangers from the first" (13).
"When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also" (13).
"Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable" (14).
"People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that is is impossible to count them accurately" (14). Goddammit Oscar, those commas.
"One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing" (14).
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious" (14).
"I like men who have a future and women who have a past" (14).
"Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications" (15).
"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing" (15).
"I like persons better than principles and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world" (15).
"It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true" (16).
"People who want to say merely what is sensible should say it to themselves before they come down to breakfast in the morning, never after" (16). I find this funny in comparison to Lewis Carrol and his practice of believing in "six impossible things before breakfast".
"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes" (16).
"The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic" (16). Good news, Oscar--love you some more.
"What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true" (17).
"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance" (17).
"...Love and gluttony justify everything" (17).
"Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the poor" (17).
"Men always want to be a women's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. Women have a more subtle instinct about things: What they like is to be a man's last romance" (17).
"Any place you love is the world to you" (18).
"...But love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent" (18). This and the above quote are actually all smushed together, but I really think that's an odd combination. I can see why they'd do it, aesthetically at least, but I just don't feel it, you know? Also, I wish there was an underline option so you could see my favourite part of the second quote, but Emma, you who apparently actually does absorb Oscar Wilde by osmosis from me, should remember, because I'm certain you commit everything I say to your memory (or at least your twitter account) because I am that awesome.
"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry" (18).
"Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring" (18). I wish blogger allowed html hearts, by the way.
"Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer" (19). I just want to point out that this is from Dorian Gray, which means Wilde had been married for at least five years when he wrote it (with the estimation that it was written a year before Lippincott's actually published it). Juuuuust saying. (Bosie makes them good boys go bad!)
"Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious; both are disappointed" (19). Again, I feel like this was a Mrs Vane line.
"Once a week is quite enough to propose to anyone, and it should always be done in a manner that attracts some attention" (20).
"I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable" (20).
"...In married life three is company and two is none" (20).
"The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding" (21).
"When a woman finds out about her husband she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for" (22).
"There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about" (22).
"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations" (23).
"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one" (23). Really, Dorian? Because I hear you're more into brutally murdering friends. I don't know, just heard that somewhere. Whatever.
"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship" (23).
"Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success" (23).
"Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die" (24).
"To lose one parent... may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness" (24).
"I fare say that if I knew him I should not be his friend at all. It is a very dangerous thing to know one's friends" (24). Ayuuuup.
"I shall never make a new friend in my life, though perhaps a few after I die" (25).
"To get back to one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies" (25).
"Youth is the one thing worth having" (26).
"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up" (27).
"...Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself" (27). Guess what? Love this guy.
"He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone" (27). There's a quote I have in one of my many other quote books that is something akin to: "She would toss her friends in a river just for the pleasure of fishing them out". Also, guess what I'm going to say again.
"The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered" (28).
"One should always be a little improbable" (28).
"Everyone should keep someone else's diary" (29).
"Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest of motives" (29).
"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal" (29).
"There is a fatality about good resolutions--they are always made too late" (29).
"One should always play fairly--when one has the winning cards" (29).
"I rely on you to misrepresent me" (29).
"A good reputation is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected" (30). I really, really, really like this one. You know how in my Junky post I complained about the praise of the bedside manner quote? This is a quote like this, except it didn't automatically click like that one did. At first I was kind of like wait, what? But then I started thinking about it, and I mean, if you're high class and you... I don't know, get caught having an affair or peddling drugs or hooking up with male prostitutes, people are going to be shocked. If you're seen as a vagabond or bum, people are just going to be like "Oh, there's that vagabum again, sleeping around and doing heroin", and... Now we've made it back to William S Burroughs...?
"It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting" (31).
"Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes" (31).
"Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime" (32).
"I can resist everything except temptation" (32).
"Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed" (32).
"...There are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to" (32).
"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it" (33).
"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future" (33).
"There is no sin except stupidity" (33).
"If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out" (33).
"It is the confession, not the priest that gives us absolution" (34).
"It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth" (34).
"Geniuses... are always talking about themselves, when I want them to be thinking about me" (34).
"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius" (34).
"I like looking at geniuses, and listening to beautiful people" (34).
"I know so many men in London whose only talent is washing. I suppose that is why men of genius so seldom wash; they are afraid of being mistaken for men of talent only!" (35).
"The worst thing you can do for a person of genius is to help him: that way lies his destruction. I have had many devoted helpers--and you see the result" (34). I'm curious about the date of when he said this.
"I think it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly" (34).
"Good looks are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in" (34).
"If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of" (36).
"The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it" (36).
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative" (36).
"All art is quite useless" (37).
"To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim" (38).
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist" (38).
"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors" (38).
"A truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected" (38).
"The Artist is the creator of beautiful things" (38). This is from the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I think shines a new, interesting light on the book. An ironic light too, since Dorian is clearly so ugly internally... And that ugly persona was partially ushered in by the artist, though it was created by Wotton, technically... And then of course the painting degenerates and becomes an ugly piece of work--but it was beautiful at one point... So the painting progresses as normal life progresses, and Basil Halward just played God, a lot more successfully than most. Then that works into his maxim, "Life imitates art" which makes sense, considering the story... Bam. (And, if you're wondering about the "new, interesting light" when it is from the preface, it is because in the infinite wisdom of Barnes & Noble publishers, they chose not to include it in that actual book--instead, it is randomly inserted into The Collected Oscar Wilde. It also deletes a fake letter by Basil altogether--it is not necessary to the story, but it is a little agitating. I could go on by the disappointment the Barnes & Noble edition leaves in me in comparison to my 1910 copy, but it's really rather pedantic. The one advantage that version may have, which I'd need to check up on, is if it includes the deleted passages that more likely than not would have remained deleted in the 1910 version.)
"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train" (38).
"Only mediocrities progress" (39).
"M Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull" (39). Loooove.
"Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure" (39).
"Whistler is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting in my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr Whistler himself entirely concurs (40).
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all" (40). He says the same thing about poetry elsewhere. I want to say it is in 'Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young', though you should not quote me on that.
"There are no real emotions left--only extraordinary adjectives" (40).
"The books that the world calls immoral books are books that show the world its own shame" (40). Good news, you're kind of the best.
"Mr James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding" (41).
"I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy" (41).
"--Can be read without any trouble and was probably written without any trouble also!" (41). This was from a review, though no clue is given to what book what just ripped to shreds.
"...A form of poetry which cannot possibly hurt anybody, even if translated into French" (41). Again, a review, but of what work exactly, who knows?
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all" (42).
"The aim of most of our modern novelists seems to be, not to write good novels, but to write novels that will do good" (42). I can't decide if he's being harshly critical or not.
"A poet can survive everything but a misprint" (42).
"Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac" (42). Though I don't know who Balzac is, that doesn't make me dig this one any less.
"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears" (43). / "How curiously it had all been revealed to me! A book of Sonnets, published nearly three hundred years ago, written by a dead hand and in honour of a dead youth, had suddenly explained to me the whole story of my soul's romance... Strange, that we knew so little about ourselves, and that our most intimate personality was concealed from us!'" ('The Portrait of Mr WH'). One: Again, you can guess my response. And also, if I may quote (for my feelings on it haven't changed in the slightest; try not to hate me for quoting myself) the last time I quoted this passage: "It's just... so lovely. This a fantastic passage, including that what the ellipses have hidden. But it was very touching, something about it touches me, it breaks my heart and makes me love it all the more fervently at the same time."
"It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it" (43). This is another 'bedside manner' quote. It sounds absurd at first, but it makes sense once you think about a little, no? Someone who has talent in the area is bound to have his own biases and ideas about the subject and how it should carry out. The only way to get a pure judgment is to get someone with a tabula rasa on the subject at hand.
"I never reply to my critics. I have far too much time. But I think some day I will give a general answer in the form of a lecture, which I shall call 'Straight Talks to Old Men'" (44).
"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about" (44).
"I may have said the same thing before... But my explanation, I am sure, will always be different" (44).
"Murder is always a mistake... One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner" (44). Oh, Oscar, you silly goose, you!
"A man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person" (44).
"I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing" (44).
"I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time and prevents arguments" (45).
"Lots of people act well but very few people talk well, which shows that talking is much more the difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also" (45).
"I like talking to a brick wall, it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me" (45). Where's that html heart at?
"I hate when people talk about themselves, as you do, when one wants to talk about oneself, as I do" (45).
"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it" (46).
"Oh, I'm so glad you've come. There are a hundred things I want not to say to you" (46). This definitely sounds like it may have lived on as a Groucho Marx quip.
"The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves" (46).
"I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never any use to oneself" (46).
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught" (47). If I was valedictorian, this is all my speech would be, I can promise you that. And then I would just walk off, while putting on my Ray-Bans, and the sun would glint off them all cool-like... I also kind of regret not making this my year book quote, as I do "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" (strangely enough, not in here), but Jack Kerouac and Carl Sagan--can you really regret either of them? Answer: No, unless if you're super lame.
"When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong" (47).
"People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depths of generosity" (48). "What they need" in this case is advice.
"The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value" (48). Fun fact, this quote made it here mainly because I find the "all monsters and dust" bit strangely adorable. Also: Good description of Leopold Bloom (because he's the sort of fellow who is well-rounded, but the people in the bar--damned if I can remember exactly who, but I'll pretend it was the Citizen--are like ugh what an egotistical jerk, he acts like he knows everything, never shuts up, always has to throw some random fact in blah blah blahhh). Anyone who would be "well-informed" too, but I thought of Leopold Bloom first. There is a flower that bloometh (in my mind).
"Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything, and when they get older they know it" (48). / "A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of"--Jane Austen
"I don't want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine" (49).
"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating" (49).
"There is only one class in the community that thinks about money more than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else" (49).
"Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less" (49).
"As for begging it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg" (49).
"I am never in during the afternoon, except when I am confined to the house by a sharp attack of penury" (49). The important note for this is that it was in a letter from 1898--that is, after the scandal and the release.
"Society often forgives the crminal; it never forgives the dreamer" (50).
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious" (50). And when used in an argument, it's a logical fallacy!
"Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read" (51).
"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular" (51).
"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it" (52).
"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language" (52).
"Somehow I don't think I shall live to see the new century--if another century began and I was still alive, it would really be more than the English could stand" (53). I can't help but be curious about the date of when he said this. Of course, it came back to bite him as he did not actually--well, he survived into the new century, but only eleven months--exactly eleven months; he died on the thirtieth.
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances" (53).
"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art" (53).
"He has nothing, but looks everything. What more can one desire?" (54).
"I have made an important discovery... that alcohol, taken in sufficient qualities, produces all the effects of intoxication" (54). Hehehehe.
Regarding his brother's fondness for the drink: "Oh, he occasionally takes an alcoholiday" (55).
"There are many things that we would throw away, if we were not afraid that others might pick them up" (55). Amen to that, brother.
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live" (55).
"Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life" (55).
"An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young" (55).
"I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex" (55).
"It is better to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under a microscope" (55).
"Work is the curse of the drinking class" (55).
"It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done" (55).
"A mask tells us more than a face" (56).
"Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt" (56). Okay. This is definitely probably my most favourite thing that Wilde has said. The context given for it is less than desirable, it completely glosses over the context I gave it (see link) with an elipses. But, that doesn't change the fact that I love this. If I could just hang out with Oscar Wilde and CS Lewis I'd be a pretty happy person.
"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again" (56). I feel like Fabrizzles alluded to this quote or joked about something similar when we learned about poetry (and subsequently were making fun of poetry) in Creative Writing.
"Cultivated leisure is the aim of man" (56).
"One could never pay too high a price for any sensation" (56). Oh Dorian, you and your opium and sex orgies and jam!
"If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world" (57).
"I am afraid I play no outdoor games at all, except dominoes... I have sometimes played dominoes outside French cafes" (57). High five!
"Moods don't last. It is their chief charm" (57).
"It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure" (58). I'm pretty sure it's Dorian that says this (which would make sense, as it sounds like something he'd say after he tells Sybil it's over) and for all his being a terrible person--I kind of dig this one. (I can't deny that Dorian acted like a jerk, though, and should have handled the situation at least 90,000 times better than he did...)
"A woman's life revolves in curves of emotion" (58).
"...A sentimentalist is someone who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it" (58). In one of his other essays (this is from "Conversation")--possibly from 'The Portrait of Mr WH' even--he talks about how reading about love or hearing ballads or what have you make you desire love, or love love, and imagine it suddenly exists, while it picks an object of affection later. (The same with sadness, or any other intense emotion.) So... Yeah. Paying for it in this sense means without being rended emotionally, not actually using money. Also, is rended actually a word?
"Punctuality is the thief of time--I am not punctual myself, but I do like punctuality in others" (58).
"I have the simplest tastes... I am always satisfied with the best" (Back cover).
Yaaay! There you have it, many, many examples of Oscar Wilde being a fantastic human being. I realize I haven't cited where all these quotes came from but guess what? It's going to be a game for you, like Where's Waldo?, except... Well, Where's Waldo? is pretty awesome, actually. But yeah, maybe this will inspire you, EMMA, who is receiving an inordinate amount of textual abuse from me in this post for some reason. But come on. I finally dared face Charles Dickens--a thousand pages worth of Charles Dickens--so I figure you can do this, which will be infinitely more enjoyable. (And that's how I ended up in the Thunderdome, fighting Charles Dickens.) All I'm saying: the most came from The Picture of Dorian Gray, the best tend to come from The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and in general, the most well-known and most oft-quoted lines come ironically enough from what is arguably Oscar Wilde's most poorly-received and unknown play--Vera, or the Nihilists. (No, I haven't read it.) So yeah, hit this up. Not like I can't lend you 85% of his works... Or multiple copies of any of those works... Or you can continue to enjoy osmosis. I think I just like having excuses to write osmosis.
MLA Citation information: Wilde, Oscar. Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations. Dover Publications: United States, 1998.
Also, Hermione Danger's cat is named Crookshanked. And speaking of cats? "Oh, so it's my job to train the cats to rollerskate? What have you got to do that's so important?"--Emma. I can't wait till I forget the context of that text message and look back on that and don't even question it.
And what else? I've yet to watch Dorian Gray, but that will happen before the weekend is done. I'll be sure to post something about it, even if that post is just "ZOMG BEN BARNES COME AND RAVISH ME!" because really, if you're expecting anything more than that you are a fool, my good... audience. (Oh my God, more than one person is going to be reading this post. This is really, really weird.) Go ahead, judge me, if you dare. Actually, the question is probably what will I find sexier, Ben Barnes dressed up (oh that Victorian era fetish of mine) or him nude. Taking bets now! Also, while I'm talking about Ben Barnes and Colin Firth: Colin Firth's beard is funnier than the eighties. Seriously.
Answer to the post before last's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Junkies Runnin' Dry by Operation Ivy
This post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Well you know November has come when it's gone away
(PS. Regarding the lyrics--it took me a good five minutes to think of a good set, so you should appreciate it. I mean, I've used the obvious already, and then I was like "Oh, Magnolia by the Hush Sound would be perfect too!" Good news, brain. It happened.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)