from 'The Dead'

by James Joyce

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes [and] in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

On Language

by Stephen Fry

There's language, and there's speech. There's chess, and there's a game of chess. Imagine a piano keyboard: eighty-eight keys, only eighty-eight! And yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone. Our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: 'Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.'

Perfectly ordinary words, but never before put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a unique mother. And yet, oh and yet! we all of us spend our days saying the same things, time after weary time: 'I love you', 'Don't go in there', 'Get out', 'You have no right to say that', 'Stop it', 'Why should I?', 'That hurt', 'Help', 'Marjorie is dead'. That surely is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my mistress, my checkout girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or a handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple. It's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from an old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair. It's a sputtering match held to a frosted pane. It's a half-remembered childhood birthday party. It's the warm, wet trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

Language circumscribes beauty, confirms, confines, limns, and delineates; it colours and contains. Yet language is only a tool — a tool that we use to dig up the beauty that surrounds and is, we take, our only and absolute real. So I'm finding myself with some surprise and no little alarm hurling a paradox at you. Beauty is our only reality, and yet it is an ideal. It is the surface-tension of the membrane that stretches between us and the vision of beauty that language seeks to disperse, as a detergent might dissipate or dissolve a droplet of oil.

Let me explain, expound, expand, and exposit. I find you beautiful. But you are not beauty. Therefore you contain a property of beauty. Therefore the substance of which you exhibit a property must exist. Where is it? That is language's task.

Language pursues beauty, harries it, hounds it, courses it across the roughlands of enquiry and in so doing can itself be beautiful. Ripple on ripple, image on image, wheel within a wheel like the circles that we find in the windmills of our mind.

Language can be beautiful. 'And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.' Plenitude, dishes, martita, tumble, emolument, forage, smitten, plenum: words that have their own sonority and beauty which is extrinsic to their connotational or denotational referends.

So I'll leave you with a thought, a breath, a fruit that drops from the boughs of my imaginings. Think beauty, but be beautiful. Say beauty, but say it beautifully. Beauty is duty, and duty beauty. So there. Goodnight.

Epilogue from On Fairy-Stories

by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality.' There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be 'primarily' true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the 'turn' in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.

But in God's kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the 'happy ending.' The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.

Well, I Never Did

by Dame Victoria Bennett
AKA Stephen Fry

Oh yes, I'll never forget that one! That was taken before they pulled down the gasworks and built that Netto Superstore. Oh, he looks good in his Littlewood's Keynote cardie, does our Alan! I said at the time, I said, 'Alan, if you want to get on in the world, you'd be wise to write down everything I say, because it's gold, is what I say. And don't hog the Peak Freenes, lad. Pass them 'round.'

Lovely boy, he was. Teeth weren't his strong feature, of course, and his hair wasn't what you might call Leslie Howard, but I always say, 'Teeth is teeth. What does it matter so long as you've got your wealth?'

He said, 'I can't wait to get out of here, Auntie Ivy, and make my fortune down south.'

I said, 'Alan,' I said, 'I may not be as cabbage-looking as my tongue is a fisherman's doily, but what's London got that you won't find in the Arndale Centre in Todmorden?' Well, he was stuck for a reply. I said, 'You want sophistication, you stick with us up here, love.' He knew I was right, bless him. I mean, we've got a body shop in the parade now. You can't move for Volvos in the autumn months. But then he's always had his head in the clouds, has our Alan.

Caught him trying to scour a milk pan with a tea bag once. I said, 'It's all very well knowing long words, but if you can't tell the difference between a box of brillo pads and a packet of Typhoo One-Cup, you'll never get on.' I'll go to the back of our fridge....

He did leave, though; got a scholarship to Oxford. I said, 'You make sure as there's somewhere as you can buy Kendall Mint Cake and a good bar of Wright's coal tar soap, because they've no idea, down there.' Well, I mean fancy ideas and tropical mix croutons are all very well, but they don't get the Vimto buttered, do they? For all your fine Italian red lettuce — which to my mind tastes as bitter as a Skipton wind.

He said, 'Auntie, I'll be fine.'

Well of course, I didn't know him when he came back. Green corduroy jacket and duffle coat, horn-rimmed spectacles you could eat parsley out of, and a head crammed with I don't know what. And books, you've never seen so many! Some of them that dirty I blushed to the roots of my Playtex. I said, 'Those books are going straight into the Hotpoint and no buts.' Came up lovely, they did. Amazing what a bit of Lenor can do if you've a mind.

No, but that Oxford and his smart friends, they've changed him. Ideas, that's what it is. I said, 'What use is ideas when you've a capon to baste and the tally-man's due any minute? Name an idea,' I said, 'that can get the front steps scrubbed, the sausages pricked, and the navel oranges squeezed in time for a meat tea and finger buffet.' Well, he didn't know which way to look.

These Oxford types, they're all apricot facial scrub and yesterday's suet turnover: to look at them you'd think a packet of Bachelor's Savoury Rice wouldn't melt in their Vosene Medicated, but they've no savvy. I could take a Black & Decker nose drill to the pack of them and still have change left over for a bag of peanut brittle.

Left home, of course. Got involved with the BBC, all party eggs and tomato chutney. Next thing I know, he's got a damehood and a brand new hostess trolley to show for it. They'll fall for anything, them Londoners.

Well, I'm off down to Morrison's for a jar of melon lip balm and a four-pack of interuterine devices. Got that Pat Routledge 'round for elocution lessons at twelve. Tarra!

from The Catcher in the Rye

by J.D. Salinger

Lawyers are all right, I guess — but it doesn't appeal to me. I mean they're all right if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn't.

from Ulysses

by James Joyce
from Episode 18 — Penelope

[...]the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharans and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Meditation XVII

by John Donne
from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris

Perchance, he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is.

The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that this occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

from Perelandra

by C.S. Lewis

from Chapter Four

[Editor's Note: I find this illustration by C.S. Lewis of God's providence and human response to be particularly insightful.

As a matter of context, for better understanding the passage, this is from the second book in Lewis' 'Space Trilogy'. Ransom has been sent from Earth to Venus (called Perelandra) for an unknown purpose. When he arrives he finds a world analogous to Eden before the Fall, complete with Adam and Eve personae (here called the King and the Lady; Maledil is their name for God). Lady is an especially curious person, eager to learn from Ransom. This passage proceeds from a discussion where Ransom refused to explain the meaning of death.]

'You could never understand, Lady,' [Ransom] replied. 'But in our world not all events are pleasing or welcome. There may be such a thing that you would cut off both your arms and your legs to prevent it happening—and yet it happens: with us.'

'But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us which Maledil is rolling towards us?'

Against his better judgment Ransom found himself goaded into argument.

'But even you,' he said, 'when you first saw me, I know now you were expecting and hoping that I was the King. When you found I was not, your face changed. Was that event not unwelcome? Did you not wish it to be otherwise?'

'Oh,' said the Lady. She turned aside with her head bowed and her hands clasped in an intensity of thought.

[....]

'What you have made me see,' answered the Lady, 'is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before—that the very moment of the finding is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.'

Ransom interrputed. 'That is hardly the same thing as finding a stranger when you wanted your husband.'

'Oh, that is how I came to understand the whole thing. You and the King differ more than two kinds of fruit. The joy of finding him again and the joy of all the new knowledge I have had from you are more unlike than two tastes; and when the difference is as great as that, and each of the two things so great, then the first picture does stay in the mind quite a long time—many beats of the heart—after the other good has come. And this, O Piebald, is the glory and wonder you have made me see; that it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One can conceive a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good.'

[....]

'And have you no fear,' said Ransom, 'that it will ever be hard to turn your heart from the thing you wanted to the thing Maledil sends?'

'I see,' said the Lady presently. 'The wave you plunge into may be very swift and great. You may need all your force to swim into it. You mean, He might send me a good like that?'

'Yes—or like a wave so swift and great that all your force was too little.'

'It often happens that way in swimming,' said the Lady. 'Is not that part of the delight?'

'But are you happy without the King? Do you not want the King?'

'Want him?' she said. 'How could there be anything I did not want?'

There was something in her replies that began to repel Ransom.

'You can't want him very much if you are happy without him,' he said: and was immediately surprised at the sulkiness of his own voice.

'Why?' asked the Lady.

Rejection

by Franz Kafka

When I meet a pretty girl and beg her: 'Be so good as to come with me,' and she walks past without a word, this is what she means to say:

'You are no Duke with a famous name, no broad American with a Red Indian figure, level, brooding eyes and a skin tempered by the air of the prairies and the rivers that flow through them, you have never journeyed to the seven seas and voyaged on them wherever they may be, I don't know where, so why, pray, should a pretty girl like myself go with you?'

'You forget that no automobile swings you through the street in long thrusts; I see no gentlemen escorting you in a close half-circle, pressing on your skirts from behind and murmuring blessings on your head; your breasts are well laced into your bodice, but your thighs and hips make up for that restraint; you are wearing a taffeta dress with a pleated skirt such as delighted all of us last autumn, and yet you smile — inviting mortal danger — from time to time.'

'Yes, we are both in the right, and lest we become irrefutably conscious of it, we wish — isn't it true? — to instead go each to our own home.'

from This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
from Book Two, Chapter One

[Editor's Note: Another unusual post for this blog, which I can't resist posting. And again it's Fitzgerald. And again a scene from the night streets of New York. Either Fitzgerald captures the essence of the New York night so perfectly, or his nocturnal prose especially resonates with me, or both.]

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his—the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets . . . it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing—he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner . . . How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkeness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air.

from The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald
from the coda of chapter three

(Editor's Note: Being prose, this isn't a usual post for this blog, but I just had to post this, after reading it last night. Fitzgerald truly has a knack for painting beautiful impressions of the romanticism of both New York and the Jazz Age; and then putting his finger to the wounds which lay within - and which would soon birth themselves. All particularly accentuated by my own anticipated move to New York.)

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.