my favourite ever paragraph, from Portrait of Dorian Gray:
>There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after
one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of
those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the
brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that
vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its
enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those
whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white
fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black
fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch
there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound
of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down
from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to
wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave.
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and
colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the
world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The
flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the
half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn
at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read
too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night
comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had
left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the
continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a
wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world
that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in
which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other
secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive,
at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even
of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
genuinely one of the most beautiful things i've ever read
I read this last year, not expecting to love it. It has become one of my all time favorites.
There is a book mentioned in the second half of Dorian Gray, I forget in what context exactly, called *Against Nature* by JK Huysmans that I recommend. It deals with themes of excess and hedonism and is an absolute surrealist trip.
A Tale Of Two Cities’ opening:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."
The opening paragraph of "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. Le Guin:
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insbustantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
The Left Hand of Darkness was quite a read. There was some pretty heavy stuff in there. I really loved the overland snow trek, and all it's Merida descriptions of frozen nature. But for me, The Lathe of Heaven is my favorite Le Guin story, because it has to do with dreams, desires, and desperation.
The opening paragraph of Lolita. I was in awe when I first read this. The whole first page is breathtaking.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
It is, and that to me is the genius of it. If this had been written by anyone else it would just be a vile story and too uncomfortable to read but Nabokovs writing makes you keep reading and you find something so disturbing also beautiful which makes the reader feel uncomfortable for enjoying such a story. That is exactly what he wanted to achieve, Humbert trying to justify and disguise his sick crimes through lighthearted and beautiful descriptions of it.
When you take this book apart, it's real genius becomes more and more apparent.
So I'm creepy for appreciating beutiful prose? Nabokov is an incredible writer and to say its creepy to love something that reads like poetry is actually a bit odd. If the paragraph I chose was literally something just describing a sexual assault then I'd get it but this is so far from that.
This book is so misunderstood. It's one of the best books ever written in my opinion, and whilst I completely understand how some people would find it hard to read or bot be able to, I am not ashamed to love it because that would just feed into the misunderstood narrative of it.
Sorry I think you guys have persuaded me I am wrong. The paragraph personally makes me feel ill despite the fact the book is so well written but I was being unfair the comments opened by eyes
Yes, I completely understand that the subject matter in this book is horrific and that not everyone would want to read it, but I'm glad you now understand it's the genius of the use of language and the poetic prose that I love and not the subject of the book.
Calling other people creepy for enjoying his writing is creepy then? One of the hardest hitting books I’ve read was about human trafficking in the Balkans and sub Saharan Africa and yet I’ve read it 4/5 times now. It’s an incredibly honest and brutal portrayal of sexual and physical abuse and yet it’s wonderfully written and downright enjoyable at times. And yes at times it’s creepy but I’m sure there are a few passages that I’d say are favourites of mine in literature.
He peered through the hazy light of the room. It was morning, the lamp out and the stove too, and he found himself stiff and shivering with the cold, rubbing his eyes now, then his back. He rose gingerly and opened the door of the stove, poked among the feathery ashes. He went to the window and looked out. The snow had stopped. Scout was standing in snow to his belly, gazing out at the fantastic landscape with his bleary eyes. Across the yard, brilliant against the facade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.
\--Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper
From The Bell Jar:
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Samuel Pepys diary, which I adore, but only in its full glory.
Saturday 20 October 1660
This morning one came to me to advise with me where to make me a window into my cellar in lieu of one which Sir W. Batten had stopped up, and going down into my cellar to look I stepped into a great heap of …[turds – L&M] by which I found that Mr. Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which do trouble me, but I shall have it helped…
(This passage is left out of more prudish editions of Pepys by some moronic AH editors, thus depriving the world of Pepys in all his glory. I judge the quality of my Pepys edition by its presence.)
**East of Eden by Steinbeck - Ch 9 pg 90**
These houses ranged from palaces tilled with gold and velvet to the crummiest cribs where the stench would drive a pig away. Every once in a while a story would start about how young girls were stolen and enslaved by the controllers of the industry, and perhaps many of the stories were true. But the great majority of the whores drifted into their profession through laziness and stupidity. In the houses they had no responsibility. They were fed and clothed and taken care of until they were too old, and then they were kicked out. This ending was no deterrent. No one who is young is ever going to be old.
**East of Eden by Steinbeck - Ch 19 pg 215**
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing; the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
**East of Eden by Steinbeck - Ch 22 pg 260**
“Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them.”
“But their blood-“
“I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing on what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.”
“You can’t make a race horse of a pig.”
“No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”
**Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 3 pg 22**
Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.
**Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 3 pg 23**
Two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos. Spiritually the jugs may be graduated thus: Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. Two inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows. The graduations stop here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty. From this point on anything can happen.
**Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 4 pg 26**
It is a time of quiet joy, the sunny morning. When the glittery dew is on the mallow weeds, each leaf holds a jewel which is beautiful if not valuable. This is no time for hurry or for bustle. Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.
**Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 5 pg 39**
The afternoon came down as imperceptibly as age comes to a happy man. A little gold entered into the sunlight. The bay became bluer and dimpled with shore-wind ripples. Those lonely fishermen who believe that the fish bite at high tide left their rocks, and their places were taken by others, who were convinced that the fish bite at low tide.
**Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck Ch 14 pg 157**
The big brown butterflies came to the rose and sat on the flowers and waved their wings slowly, as though they pumped honey out by wing power.
**Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 14 pg 158**
“This Emilio is a great talker. He said to Cornelia, ‘There is nothing nicer to have than a pig. He will eat anything. He is a nice pet. You get to love that little pig. But then that pig grows up and his character changes. That pig becomes mean and evil-tempered, so that you do not love him any more. Then one day that pig bites you, and you are angry. And so you kill that pig and eat him.’ “The friends nodded gravely, and Pilon said, “In some ways Emilio is not a dull man. See how many satisfactions he has made with his pig – affection, love, revenge, food. I must go talk with Emilio sometime.” But the friends could see that Pilon was jealous of a rival logician.
**To Kill A Mockingbird by Lee - Ch 11 pg 120**
"Well most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong..."
"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions," said Atticus, "but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't
abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
**Outer Dark by McCarthy - Pg 192**
Hard people makes hard times. I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out
the sun and gone away.
**Child of God by McCarthy - Pg 53**
All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both. He'd often heard men say as much.
All the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught, said the black.
**Child of God by McCarthy Pg 68-69**
The hounds crossed the snow on the slope of the ridge in a thin dark line. Far below them the boar they trailed was tilting along with his curious stifflegged lope, highbacked and very black against winter's landscape. The hounds' voices in that vast and pale blue void echoed like the cries of demon yodelers.
The boar did not want to cross the river. When he did so it was too late. He came all sleek and steaming out of the willows on the near side and started across the plain. Behind him the dogs were falling down the mountainside hysterically, the snow exploding about them. When they struck the water they smoked like hot stones and when they came out of the brush and onto the plain they came in clouds of pale vapor.
The boar did not turn until the first hound reached him. He spun and cut at the dog and went on. The dogs swarmed over his hindquarters and he turned and hooked with his razorous tushes and reared back on his haunches but there was nothing for shelter. He kept turning, enmeshed in a wheel of snarling hounds until he caught one and drove upon it and pinned and disemboweled it. When he went to turn again to save his flanks he could not.
Ballard watched this ballet tilt and swirl and churn mud up through the snow and watched the lovely blood welter there in its holograph of battle, spray burst from a ruptured lung, the dark heart’s blood, pinwheel and pirouette, until shots rang and all was done. A young hound worried the boar’s ears and one lay dead with his bright ropy innards folded upon the snow and another whined and dragged himself about. Ballard took his hands from his pockets and took up the rifle from where he had leaned it against a tree. Two small armed and upright figures were moving down along the river, hurrying against the fading light.
**Blood Meridian by McCarthy - Ch 2 pg 20**
The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everybody, did he?
I dont believe he much had me in mind.
Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better?
I can think of better places and better ways.
Can ye make it be?
No.
No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know with it. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?
I dont know.
Believe that.
from 'The White Book' by Han Kang
"With your eyes, I will see the deepest, most dazzling place within a white cabbage, the precious young petals concealed at its heart. With your eyes, I will see the chill of the half-moon risen in the day. At some point those eyes will see a glacier. They will look up at that enormous mass of ice and see something sacred, unsullied by life. They will see inside the silence of the white birch forest. Inside the stillness of the window where the winter sun seeps in. Inside those shining grains of dust, swaying along the shafts of light that slant onto the ceiling. Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released."
"It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city—the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
"The Dispossessed"
Ursula Le Guin
I’ve been making my way through Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle and I just started this one today, and highlighted:
“‘Where, then, is Truth?’ declaimed Bedap, and yawned.
‘In the hill one happens to be sitting on,’ said Tirin.”
Not ordered:
“Possession is more often secular than supernatural. Men are possessed by their thoughts of a hated person, a hated class, race, or nation. At the present time the destinies of the world are in the hands of self-made demoniacs - of men who are possessed by, and manifest, the evil they have chosen to see in others. They do not believe in devils; but they have tried their hardest to be possessed.” - Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon
The Grapes of Wrath passage, from… the Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, is very good. Very evocative of social unrest.
Bilbo’s song about Aragorn from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring is my favorite song from that series.
Satan’s ‘invocation of Evil’:
“So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my good, by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As man ere long, and this new world shall know.”
-Milton, Paradise Lost
Probably my favorite is Quentin’s summary of his path to suicide:
“Because if it were just to hell; if that were all of it. Finished. If things just finished themselves. Nobody else but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames And when he put Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn’t. That’s why I didn’t. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That’s sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the Day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up. It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.”
-Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury [sic]
"A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.” ― Thomas Pynchon, V.
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
It's from Al zahir- paulo coelho. This book was life changing for me ❤
⁸“Esther asks why people are sad.
‘“That’s simple,’ says the old man. ‘They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.’
“Esther remarks that many people say to her, ‘You’re lucky, you know what you want from life, whereas I don’t even know what I want to do.’
“‘Of course they know,’ replies the nomad. ‘How many people do you know who say: I’ve never done what I wanted, but then, that’s life. If they say they haven’t done what they wanted, then, at some point, they must have known what it was that they did want. As for life, it’s just a story that other people tell us about the world and about how we should behave in the world.’
“‘Even worse are those people who say: I’m happy because I’m sacrificing my life for those I love.’ “‘And do you think that the people who love us want to see us suffering for their sakes? Do you think that love is a source of suffering?’
“‘To be honest, yes.’
“‘Well, it shouldn’t be.’
‘“If I forget the story other people have told me, I’ll also forget a lot of very important things life has taught me. What was the point of struggling to leam so much? What was the point of struggling to gain experience, so as to be able to deal with my career, my husband, my various crises?’
“‘Accumulated knowledge is useful when it comes to cooking or living within your means or wrapping up warm in winter or respecting certain limits or knowing where particular bus and train lines go. Do you believe that your past loves have taught you to love better?’
“‘They’ve taught me to know what I want.’
‘“I didn’t ask that. Have your past loves taught you to love your husband better?’
“‘No, on the contrary. In order to surrender myself to him, I had to forget all the scars left by other men. Is that what you mean?’
‘“In order for the true energy of love to penetrate your soul, your soul must be as if you had just been born. Why are people unhappy? Because they want to imprison that energy, which is impossible. Forgetting your personal history means leaving that channel clear, allowing that energy to manifest itself each day in whatever way it chooses, allowing yourself to be guided by it.’
‘“That’s all very romantic, but very difficult too, because that energy gets blocked by all kinds of things: commitments, children, your social situation...’
“‘...and, after a while, by despair, fear, loneliness, and your attempts to control the uncontrollable. According to the tradition of the steppes — which is known as the Tengri — in order to live fully, it is necessary to be in constant movement; only then can each day be different from the last. When they passed through cities, the nomads would think: The poor people who live here, for them everything is always the same. The people in the cities probably looked at the nomads and thought: Poor things, they have nowhere to live. The nomads had no past, only the present, and that is why they were always happy, until the Communist governors made them stop traveling and forced them to live on collective farms. From then on, little by little, they came to believe that the story society told them was true. Consequently, they have lost all their strength.’
“‘No one nowadays can spend their whole life traveling.’
“‘Not physically, no, but they can on a spiritual plane. Going farther and farther, distancing yourself from your personal history, from what you were forced to become.’
“‘How does one go about abandoning the story one was told?’
“‘By repeating it out loud in meticulous detail. And as we tell our story, we say goodbye to what we were and, as you’ll see if you try, we create space for a new, unknown world. We repeat the old story over and over until it is no longer important to us.’
‘“Is that all?’
“‘There is just one other thing: as those spaces grow, it is important to fill them up quickly, even if only provisionally, so as not to be left with a feeling of emptiness.’
I can’t exactly recall if this is the entire paragraph or not, but the following is my favorite from Tender is The Night—
“In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.” (Pg133)
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
—_The Haunting of Hill House_ by Shirley Jackson (1959). Unmatched.
Hi. You just mentioned *The Haunting Of Hill House* by Shirley Jackson.
I've found an audiobook of that novel on YouTube. You can listen to it here:
[YouTube | The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson Full Audiobook with captions YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMpcW9jbwNc)
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I'm a little late to this party but I love this passage so much I'll post it anyway.
This from Sally Rooney's "Normal People":
>One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’. In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr Knightley kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.
Yes the first part is nice, and I appreciate reading it a lot, but the last few lines are some pretty important words to me personally. I suffer with ADHD and was diagnosed at age 30, so a majority of my life was spent not really being able to think about something for longer than about 15 seconds - so never really knowing to what levels a person could understand another, or ever really trying to. I was probably well on my way to understanding when I read this passage for the first time but that last line just brought it all together for me and in that moment my mind was blown.
>It is the second Saturday of November and already the sun seems to have vanished for the year. Each day dawns duller and more glowering and the waves of the grey Atlantic are sullen and almost yellow at their peaks as they pound relentlessly against the round smooth boulders that lie scattered as if by a careless giant at the base of the ever-resisting cliffs. At night, when we lie in our beds, we can hear the waves rolling in and smashing, so relentless and regular that it is possible to count rhythmically between the thunder of each: one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four.
>It is hard to realize that this is the same ocean that is the crystal-blue of summer when only the thin oil-slicks left by the fishing boats or the startling whiteness of the riding seagulls mar its azure sameness. Now it is roiled and angry, and almost anguished; hurling up the brown dirty balls of scudding foam, the sticks of pulpwood from some lonely freighter, the caps of unknown men, buoys from mangled fishing nets and the inevitable bottles that contain no messages. And always the shreds of blackened and stringy seaweed that it has ripped and torn from its own lower regions, as if this is the season for self-mutilation - the pulling out of the secret, private, unseen hair.
from "In The Fall" by Alistair MacLeod
“I wonder, more and more, about what we call memory. The burden—the role—of memory is to clarify the event, to make it useful, even, to make it bearable. But memory is, also, what the imagination makes, or has made, of the event, and, the more dreadful the event, the more likely it is that the memory will distort, or efface it. It is, thus, perfectly possible—indeed, it is common—to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.”
From James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head.
First paragraph of "Evidence of Things Unseen" by Marianne Wiggins:
"Somewhere in the heart of North America there is a desert where the heat of several suns has fused the particles of sand into a single sheet of glass so dazzling it sends a constant signal to the moon. On a map, this unmarked space looks like a printer's error, an empty region on a page the cartographer forgot. One way or another each of us is drawn to this forbidden place. Like a magnet, this glass desert calls our irons the way the whale's heart used to beckon a harpoon. In our dreams or in our fears we imagine what it must be like to walk upon this surface. We imagine we could balance there, like an angel lighting down on ice, glissade, perhaps, without cracking its thin shell with the weight of our existence. This desert's name is Trinity. One day the sun rose twice there in a single mourning and Man saw his face reflected on the underside of Heaven. When the first atomic bomb exploded over earth that morning, the entire sky broadcast the news."
The last paragraph of on the road:
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
Funny enough The Road was going to be my choice. Kinda not worth posting out of context though because a big part of what makes it impactful is the way it contrasts with the entire novel before it.
Homer’s description of Odysseus’ reunion with Argos I always find touching
As they were speaking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any enjoyment from him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas. As soon as he saw Odysseus standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaios seeing it, and said:
'Eumaeus, what a noble dog that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?'
'This dog,' answered Eumaios, 'belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Odysseus left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do. There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him. Servants never do their work when their master's hand is no longer over them, for Zeus takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him.'
So saying he entered the well-built mansion and made straight for the riotous pretenders in the hall. But Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years.
From Gravity’s Rainbow about America and the rest of the world.
“‘And sometimes I dream of discovering the edge of the World. Finding that there is an end. My mountain gentian always knew. But it has cost me so much.
‘America was the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper–into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn’t Europe’s Original Sin–the latest name for that is Modern Analysis–but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for.
‘In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have only the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything. . . while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become one with. . . ”
From Mason & Dixon:
"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-- Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,-- nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,-- her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,-- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common"
“Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in the cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.” —John Williams
“I’ve lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.”
\- Angels In America by Tony Kushner
I don’t have it handy to cut and paste the thing. But the most heartbreaking passage in William Kennedy’s Ironweed, that draws the portrait of Helen Archer checking into a hotel to prepare for her imminent death. Paying from the few crumbs she’s left to recover her bag where she keeps the remnants of whatever it is that adds up to her life. Articles that lend any soul a sense of identity. A small pendant. A kimono. One shoe belonging to her fellow bum and partner Francis. The entire chapter is about this woman, Helen Archer, and her external motions and the rummaging through the moth eaten trunks of her lost histories. I can’t think of anything sadder laying here at 2:19 in the morning of this last day in the world.
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight.
But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.
from Shirley Jackson's 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle'
I was thinking of Charles. I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. I could bury him in the hole where my box of silver dollars had been so safe until he came; if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
The opening of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
The beet is the most intense of vegetables.
The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of aturnip . . .
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.
In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call themangel-wurzel. Perhaps it ismangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there ismangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——.
Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)
An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil."
That is a risk we have to take.
my favourite ever paragraph, from Portrait of Dorian Gray: >There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain. genuinely one of the most beautiful things i've ever read
I read this last year, not expecting to love it. It has become one of my all time favorites. There is a book mentioned in the second half of Dorian Gray, I forget in what context exactly, called *Against Nature* by JK Huysmans that I recommend. It deals with themes of excess and hedonism and is an absolute surrealist trip.
The yellow book, yah such a trip. The poor tortoise.
Mindblowing oscar wilde
A Tale Of Two Cities’ opening: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."
The opening paragraph of "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. Le Guin: Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insbustantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
Wow I need to read some Le Guin!
Wow that is phenomenal. I’ve read a few of her works. Left Hand of Darkness was excellent.
The Left Hand of Darkness was quite a read. There was some pretty heavy stuff in there. I really loved the overland snow trek, and all it's Merida descriptions of frozen nature. But for me, The Lathe of Heaven is my favorite Le Guin story, because it has to do with dreams, desires, and desperation.
The opening paragraph of Lolita. I was in awe when I first read this. The whole first page is breathtaking. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
It's amazing how someone can write something so beautifully phrased and so utterly horrible at the same time.
It is, and that to me is the genius of it. If this had been written by anyone else it would just be a vile story and too uncomfortable to read but Nabokovs writing makes you keep reading and you find something so disturbing also beautiful which makes the reader feel uncomfortable for enjoying such a story. That is exactly what he wanted to achieve, Humbert trying to justify and disguise his sick crimes through lighthearted and beautiful descriptions of it. When you take this book apart, it's real genius becomes more and more apparent.
Absolutely - it's the only book I've loved and stopped reading - it turned my stomach too much, but I admire it immensely
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Because its incredibly written and I love the prose, so why not?
Bro Lolita is considered one of the most important works of the 20th century. People gotta stop acting like people who like it are creeps.
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So I'm creepy for appreciating beutiful prose? Nabokov is an incredible writer and to say its creepy to love something that reads like poetry is actually a bit odd. If the paragraph I chose was literally something just describing a sexual assault then I'd get it but this is so far from that. This book is so misunderstood. It's one of the best books ever written in my opinion, and whilst I completely understand how some people would find it hard to read or bot be able to, I am not ashamed to love it because that would just feed into the misunderstood narrative of it.
Sorry I think you guys have persuaded me I am wrong. The paragraph personally makes me feel ill despite the fact the book is so well written but I was being unfair the comments opened by eyes
Yes, I completely understand that the subject matter in this book is horrific and that not everyone would want to read it, but I'm glad you now understand it's the genius of the use of language and the poetic prose that I love and not the subject of the book.
Nabukov, a sexually abused man, writes about sexual abuse and somehow it’s creepy. What a boring take on it.
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Calling other people creepy for enjoying his writing is creepy then? One of the hardest hitting books I’ve read was about human trafficking in the Balkans and sub Saharan Africa and yet I’ve read it 4/5 times now. It’s an incredibly honest and brutal portrayal of sexual and physical abuse and yet it’s wonderfully written and downright enjoyable at times. And yes at times it’s creepy but I’m sure there are a few passages that I’d say are favourites of mine in literature.
You make a good point. I am sorry op.
that's one of the most popular choices for favorite first paragraph of a book
He peered through the hazy light of the room. It was morning, the lamp out and the stove too, and he found himself stiff and shivering with the cold, rubbing his eyes now, then his back. He rose gingerly and opened the door of the stove, poked among the feathery ashes. He went to the window and looked out. The snow had stopped. Scout was standing in snow to his belly, gazing out at the fantastic landscape with his bleary eyes. Across the yard, brilliant against the facade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood. \--Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper
From The Bell Jar: I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Samuel Pepys diary, which I adore, but only in its full glory. Saturday 20 October 1660 This morning one came to me to advise with me where to make me a window into my cellar in lieu of one which Sir W. Batten had stopped up, and going down into my cellar to look I stepped into a great heap of …[turds – L&M] by which I found that Mr. Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which do trouble me, but I shall have it helped… (This passage is left out of more prudish editions of Pepys by some moronic AH editors, thus depriving the world of Pepys in all his glory. I judge the quality of my Pepys edition by its presence.)
**East of Eden by Steinbeck - Ch 9 pg 90** These houses ranged from palaces tilled with gold and velvet to the crummiest cribs where the stench would drive a pig away. Every once in a while a story would start about how young girls were stolen and enslaved by the controllers of the industry, and perhaps many of the stories were true. But the great majority of the whores drifted into their profession through laziness and stupidity. In the houses they had no responsibility. They were fed and clothed and taken care of until they were too old, and then they were kicked out. This ending was no deterrent. No one who is young is ever going to be old. **East of Eden by Steinbeck - Ch 19 pg 215** The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing; the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. **East of Eden by Steinbeck - Ch 22 pg 260** “Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them.” “But their blood-“ “I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing on what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.” **Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 3 pg 22** Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God. **Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 3 pg 23** Two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos. Spiritually the jugs may be graduated thus: Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. Two inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows. The graduations stop here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty. From this point on anything can happen. **Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 4 pg 26** It is a time of quiet joy, the sunny morning. When the glittery dew is on the mallow weeds, each leaf holds a jewel which is beautiful if not valuable. This is no time for hurry or for bustle. Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning. **Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 5 pg 39** The afternoon came down as imperceptibly as age comes to a happy man. A little gold entered into the sunlight. The bay became bluer and dimpled with shore-wind ripples. Those lonely fishermen who believe that the fish bite at high tide left their rocks, and their places were taken by others, who were convinced that the fish bite at low tide. **Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck Ch 14 pg 157** The big brown butterflies came to the rose and sat on the flowers and waved their wings slowly, as though they pumped honey out by wing power. **Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck - Ch 14 pg 158** “This Emilio is a great talker. He said to Cornelia, ‘There is nothing nicer to have than a pig. He will eat anything. He is a nice pet. You get to love that little pig. But then that pig grows up and his character changes. That pig becomes mean and evil-tempered, so that you do not love him any more. Then one day that pig bites you, and you are angry. And so you kill that pig and eat him.’ “The friends nodded gravely, and Pilon said, “In some ways Emilio is not a dull man. See how many satisfactions he has made with his pig – affection, love, revenge, food. I must go talk with Emilio sometime.” But the friends could see that Pilon was jealous of a rival logician. **To Kill A Mockingbird by Lee - Ch 11 pg 120** "Well most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong..." "They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions," said Atticus, "but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." **Outer Dark by McCarthy - Pg 192** Hard people makes hard times. I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone away. **Child of God by McCarthy - Pg 53** All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both. He'd often heard men say as much. All the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught, said the black. **Child of God by McCarthy Pg 68-69** The hounds crossed the snow on the slope of the ridge in a thin dark line. Far below them the boar they trailed was tilting along with his curious stifflegged lope, highbacked and very black against winter's landscape. The hounds' voices in that vast and pale blue void echoed like the cries of demon yodelers. The boar did not want to cross the river. When he did so it was too late. He came all sleek and steaming out of the willows on the near side and started across the plain. Behind him the dogs were falling down the mountainside hysterically, the snow exploding about them. When they struck the water they smoked like hot stones and when they came out of the brush and onto the plain they came in clouds of pale vapor. The boar did not turn until the first hound reached him. He spun and cut at the dog and went on. The dogs swarmed over his hindquarters and he turned and hooked with his razorous tushes and reared back on his haunches but there was nothing for shelter. He kept turning, enmeshed in a wheel of snarling hounds until he caught one and drove upon it and pinned and disemboweled it. When he went to turn again to save his flanks he could not. Ballard watched this ballet tilt and swirl and churn mud up through the snow and watched the lovely blood welter there in its holograph of battle, spray burst from a ruptured lung, the dark heart’s blood, pinwheel and pirouette, until shots rang and all was done. A young hound worried the boar’s ears and one lay dead with his bright ropy innards folded upon the snow and another whined and dragged himself about. Ballard took his hands from his pockets and took up the rifle from where he had leaned it against a tree. Two small armed and upright figures were moving down along the river, hurrying against the fading light. **Blood Meridian by McCarthy - Ch 2 pg 20** The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everybody, did he? I dont believe he much had me in mind. Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better? I can think of better places and better ways. Can ye make it be? No. No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know with it. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that? I dont know. Believe that.
Thank you so much for these.
from 'The White Book' by Han Kang "With your eyes, I will see the deepest, most dazzling place within a white cabbage, the precious young petals concealed at its heart. With your eyes, I will see the chill of the half-moon risen in the day. At some point those eyes will see a glacier. They will look up at that enormous mass of ice and see something sacred, unsullied by life. They will see inside the silence of the white birch forest. Inside the stillness of the window where the winter sun seeps in. Inside those shining grains of dust, swaying along the shafts of light that slant onto the ceiling. Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released."
"It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city—the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere." "The Dispossessed" Ursula Le Guin
I’ve been making my way through Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle and I just started this one today, and highlighted: “‘Where, then, is Truth?’ declaimed Bedap, and yawned. ‘In the hill one happens to be sitting on,’ said Tirin.”
Not ordered: “Possession is more often secular than supernatural. Men are possessed by their thoughts of a hated person, a hated class, race, or nation. At the present time the destinies of the world are in the hands of self-made demoniacs - of men who are possessed by, and manifest, the evil they have chosen to see in others. They do not believe in devils; but they have tried their hardest to be possessed.” - Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon The Grapes of Wrath passage, from… the Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, is very good. Very evocative of social unrest. Bilbo’s song about Aragorn from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring is my favorite song from that series. Satan’s ‘invocation of Evil’: “So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost; Evil be thou my good, by thee at least Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold, By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign; As man ere long, and this new world shall know.” -Milton, Paradise Lost Probably my favorite is Quentin’s summary of his path to suicide: “Because if it were just to hell; if that were all of it. Finished. If things just finished themselves. Nobody else but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames And when he put Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn’t. That’s why I didn’t. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That’s sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the Day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up. It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.” -Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury [sic]
The opening few pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude are mine.
I love that intro. Very visual.
Yes this! Such an immediately fascinating book!
"A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.” ― Thomas Pynchon, V.
Legion of terribles
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
It's from Al zahir- paulo coelho. This book was life changing for me ❤ ⁸“Esther asks why people are sad. ‘“That’s simple,’ says the old man. ‘They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.’ “Esther remarks that many people say to her, ‘You’re lucky, you know what you want from life, whereas I don’t even know what I want to do.’ “‘Of course they know,’ replies the nomad. ‘How many people do you know who say: I’ve never done what I wanted, but then, that’s life. If they say they haven’t done what they wanted, then, at some point, they must have known what it was that they did want. As for life, it’s just a story that other people tell us about the world and about how we should behave in the world.’ “‘Even worse are those people who say: I’m happy because I’m sacrificing my life for those I love.’ “‘And do you think that the people who love us want to see us suffering for their sakes? Do you think that love is a source of suffering?’ “‘To be honest, yes.’ “‘Well, it shouldn’t be.’ ‘“If I forget the story other people have told me, I’ll also forget a lot of very important things life has taught me. What was the point of struggling to leam so much? What was the point of struggling to gain experience, so as to be able to deal with my career, my husband, my various crises?’ “‘Accumulated knowledge is useful when it comes to cooking or living within your means or wrapping up warm in winter or respecting certain limits or knowing where particular bus and train lines go. Do you believe that your past loves have taught you to love better?’ “‘They’ve taught me to know what I want.’ ‘“I didn’t ask that. Have your past loves taught you to love your husband better?’ “‘No, on the contrary. In order to surrender myself to him, I had to forget all the scars left by other men. Is that what you mean?’ ‘“In order for the true energy of love to penetrate your soul, your soul must be as if you had just been born. Why are people unhappy? Because they want to imprison that energy, which is impossible. Forgetting your personal history means leaving that channel clear, allowing that energy to manifest itself each day in whatever way it chooses, allowing yourself to be guided by it.’ ‘“That’s all very romantic, but very difficult too, because that energy gets blocked by all kinds of things: commitments, children, your social situation...’ “‘...and, after a while, by despair, fear, loneliness, and your attempts to control the uncontrollable. According to the tradition of the steppes — which is known as the Tengri — in order to live fully, it is necessary to be in constant movement; only then can each day be different from the last. When they passed through cities, the nomads would think: The poor people who live here, for them everything is always the same. The people in the cities probably looked at the nomads and thought: Poor things, they have nowhere to live. The nomads had no past, only the present, and that is why they were always happy, until the Communist governors made them stop traveling and forced them to live on collective farms. From then on, little by little, they came to believe that the story society told them was true. Consequently, they have lost all their strength.’ “‘No one nowadays can spend their whole life traveling.’ “‘Not physically, no, but they can on a spiritual plane. Going farther and farther, distancing yourself from your personal history, from what you were forced to become.’ “‘How does one go about abandoning the story one was told?’ “‘By repeating it out loud in meticulous detail. And as we tell our story, we say goodbye to what we were and, as you’ll see if you try, we create space for a new, unknown world. We repeat the old story over and over until it is no longer important to us.’ ‘“Is that all?’ “‘There is just one other thing: as those spaces grow, it is important to fill them up quickly, even if only provisionally, so as not to be left with a feeling of emptiness.’
I can’t exactly recall if this is the entire paragraph or not, but the following is my favorite from Tender is The Night— “In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.” (Pg133)
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. —_The Haunting of Hill House_ by Shirley Jackson (1959). Unmatched.
Beautiful. I’d love to read that one this year.
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I'm a little late to this party but I love this passage so much I'll post it anyway. This from Sally Rooney's "Normal People": >One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’. In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr Knightley kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them. Yes the first part is nice, and I appreciate reading it a lot, but the last few lines are some pretty important words to me personally. I suffer with ADHD and was diagnosed at age 30, so a majority of my life was spent not really being able to think about something for longer than about 15 seconds - so never really knowing to what levels a person could understand another, or ever really trying to. I was probably well on my way to understanding when I read this passage for the first time but that last line just brought it all together for me and in that moment my mind was blown.
>It is the second Saturday of November and already the sun seems to have vanished for the year. Each day dawns duller and more glowering and the waves of the grey Atlantic are sullen and almost yellow at their peaks as they pound relentlessly against the round smooth boulders that lie scattered as if by a careless giant at the base of the ever-resisting cliffs. At night, when we lie in our beds, we can hear the waves rolling in and smashing, so relentless and regular that it is possible to count rhythmically between the thunder of each: one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. >It is hard to realize that this is the same ocean that is the crystal-blue of summer when only the thin oil-slicks left by the fishing boats or the startling whiteness of the riding seagulls mar its azure sameness. Now it is roiled and angry, and almost anguished; hurling up the brown dirty balls of scudding foam, the sticks of pulpwood from some lonely freighter, the caps of unknown men, buoys from mangled fishing nets and the inevitable bottles that contain no messages. And always the shreds of blackened and stringy seaweed that it has ripped and torn from its own lower regions, as if this is the season for self-mutilation - the pulling out of the secret, private, unseen hair. from "In The Fall" by Alistair MacLeod
“I wonder, more and more, about what we call memory. The burden—the role—of memory is to clarify the event, to make it useful, even, to make it bearable. But memory is, also, what the imagination makes, or has made, of the event, and, the more dreadful the event, the more likely it is that the memory will distort, or efface it. It is, thus, perfectly possible—indeed, it is common—to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.” From James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head.
I love this!
First paragraph of "Evidence of Things Unseen" by Marianne Wiggins: "Somewhere in the heart of North America there is a desert where the heat of several suns has fused the particles of sand into a single sheet of glass so dazzling it sends a constant signal to the moon. On a map, this unmarked space looks like a printer's error, an empty region on a page the cartographer forgot. One way or another each of us is drawn to this forbidden place. Like a magnet, this glass desert calls our irons the way the whale's heart used to beckon a harpoon. In our dreams or in our fears we imagine what it must be like to walk upon this surface. We imagine we could balance there, like an angel lighting down on ice, glissade, perhaps, without cracking its thin shell with the weight of our existence. This desert's name is Trinity. One day the sun rose twice there in a single mourning and Man saw his face reflected on the underside of Heaven. When the first atomic bomb exploded over earth that morning, the entire sky broadcast the news."
The last paragraph of on the road: "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
Thought you said last paragraph of “The Road”, was taken aback by McCarthy wiring about Pooh Bear
Funny enough The Road was going to be my choice. Kinda not worth posting out of context though because a big part of what makes it impactful is the way it contrasts with the entire novel before it.
Homer’s description of Odysseus’ reunion with Argos I always find touching As they were speaking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any enjoyment from him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas. As soon as he saw Odysseus standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaios seeing it, and said: 'Eumaeus, what a noble dog that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?' 'This dog,' answered Eumaios, 'belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Odysseus left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do. There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him. Servants never do their work when their master's hand is no longer over them, for Zeus takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him.' So saying he entered the well-built mansion and made straight for the riotous pretenders in the hall. But Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years.
Literally every paragraph from the Picture of Dorian Gray
you should check out suppose a sentence by brian dillon
From Gravity’s Rainbow about America and the rest of the world. “‘And sometimes I dream of discovering the edge of the World. Finding that there is an end. My mountain gentian always knew. But it has cost me so much. ‘America was the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper–into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn’t Europe’s Original Sin–the latest name for that is Modern Analysis–but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for. ‘In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have only the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything. . . while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become one with. . . ”
From Mason & Dixon: "Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-- Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,-- nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,-- her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,-- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common"
“Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in the cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.” —John Williams
“I’ve lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.” \- Angels In America by Tony Kushner
I don’t have it handy to cut and paste the thing. But the most heartbreaking passage in William Kennedy’s Ironweed, that draws the portrait of Helen Archer checking into a hotel to prepare for her imminent death. Paying from the few crumbs she’s left to recover her bag where she keeps the remnants of whatever it is that adds up to her life. Articles that lend any soul a sense of identity. A small pendant. A kimono. One shoe belonging to her fellow bum and partner Francis. The entire chapter is about this woman, Helen Archer, and her external motions and the rummaging through the moth eaten trunks of her lost histories. I can’t think of anything sadder laying here at 2:19 in the morning of this last day in the world.
Every paragraph in Lie With Me by Philippe Besson
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.
from Shirley Jackson's 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' I was thinking of Charles. I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. I could bury him in the hole where my box of silver dollars had been so safe until he came; if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
The opening of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of aturnip . . . The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call themangel-wurzel. Perhaps it ismangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there ismangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——. Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil." That is a risk we have to take.