W.D. Clarke > Recent Status Updates

Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu...leads you in a spiral to the point where a door opens and you are invited – and find yourself able – to cross a threshold into a new life. You are able to do so because you have been trained for this purpose, much as a gymnast is trained, in the course of the three thousand pages that separate beginning and end... >
[cont'd]

No exaggeration.

... there was no avoiding a knowledge of their principal subjects: — The post-office — catching cold — fetching letters — and friendship, were long under discussion;

!

No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very “aimable,” have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him.’

Whenever he heard sounds of crying during the night, he would make his way upstairs with a lighted candle and, kneeling between his little girls’ beds, start singing:

Madeleine lived all alone in a cave
Grieving and sighing day and night...

Or:

He died a pauper and I am living as he died
And the gold
Slumbers
In the marbled palace where the king is still playing

He had some peculiar ways.

Hmm... is this how one translates ‘Il était maniaque’? Asking for a friend!

One of his pupils...declared that Ste.Colombe contrived to imitate all the inflexions of the human voice: from the sigh of a young lady to the sob of an old man, from the war cry of Henri de Navarre to the soft breathing of a child trying to draw something, from the distracted groan sometimes produced by sexual pleasure to the almost voiceless gravity, deprived of nearly all force &harmony, of a man lost in prayer

After these came a second set; among the most come-at-able of whom were Mrs. and Miss Bates and Mrs. Goddard, three ladies almost always at the service of an invitation from Hartfield...

"come-at-able" (also comeatable, derivative comeatability, from ca. 1685—OED)

As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements.

The least delightful of the books by JA that I have read so far (so far) ... And now to the sheer tediousness of listening to the main characters bring their hands about the propriety of staging a, omfg, play, of all things! for private performance in one's own house, jfc! (and yeah, I shall do this book yeoman's service, and carry on.)

A bad chance indeed, Edmund

‘Cut down an avenue! What a pity! Does not it make you think of Cowper? “Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.”’*

He smiled as he answered, ‘I am afraid the avenue stands a bad chance, Fanny.’

Delighted with her progress, & fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject [the picturesque] to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment &the withered oak [...], to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands & government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; & from politics, it was an easy step to silence.

Richard’s will was sovereign, and yet it could not be trusted not to change. He had demonstrated that he would erase history, change the statutes of the realm, rather than remit his desires. By reducing Parliament to an instrument of his will, Richard sought to make all England in the image of his court, where he was sole governor – but the country could not be run like the court.

...to question him on the subject of books; her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five and twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works...

‘I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own...the same books, the same music, must charm us both

‘Hamann’s thought is what those who do not normally think would think if they did think.’

You must try hard to imagine it, the disgusting proximity of the state, its body odor, its breath on your neck, its stupidly expectant stare.

Herder FTW

Novel twist in the 50-ways-to-[make-your-best-friend]-leave-[his]-lover department:

I shall not allow my friend to marry your sister because your mother and other siblings are embarrassingly silly

...she gave a great yawn and said, ‘How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book—When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.’

No one made any reply. She then yawned again, threw aside her book, and cast her eyes round the room in quest of some amusement

Style is not adornment, but content. (Cont'd)

Herder had derived from Hamann his notion that words and ideas are one. Men do not think, as it were, in thoughts and ideas and then look for words in which to ‘clothe’ them, as one looks for a glove to fit a fully formed hand.

A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,
Whose compass is no bigger than thy head,
And yet, encagèd in so small a verge,
The waste is no whit lesser than thy land.

Vico's autobiography... provides no more reliable and account of his early life than can reasonably be expected from the memory of a man in his later fifties....

Good thing that
1) Anthony Burgess aside, I abhor autobiography
2) with Jonathan Richman, "I'm about 17"!

Vico is a rich, suggestive and original, but scarcely a clear or coherent, thinker. One is tempted once again to quote Bizet’s celebrated comment on Berlioz that he ‘had genius without any talent’.

“Well, you could have steered this all toward some kind of revolt against us, the cronies, the owners, the masters, the oligarchs, whatever term is current in your whiny world. But you kept it apolitical. So I figured you wanted to taste the cake. Now I’m not so sure.”

“It was never about politics.”

“It’s always about politics. By which I mean economics. That’s where me and my lefty profs at Berkeley agree.”

DNF here

“In my day, [$] was a strike against you. In my day what mattered was something they used to call soul”

“That was a dumb fucking day, bro"

“Don’t you ever say ‘bro’ at my table again.”

“But is it really your table? Didn’t Grandma gift it to us when she got a new one?”

“Gift it to us? Gift it? I hate that. Where did you get that? School? What’s wrong with ‘give’? ‘Give’ isn’t good enough? Everyone has to gift?

At the marriage counselor:

“I really feel like we’re making progress,” Tovah said.

“Progress is a dangerous concept at the center of a bankrupt form of humanism.”

"Of course."

The names of her children sometimes embarrass Tovah. They were Fraz’s idea. He had declared himself the creative one, which is how people (men) describe themselves when they aren’t the competent ones.

“Canadian podcasters with precious art. There are worse neigh-
bors to have.”
“No,” Baruch said. “Neighbors like these are the worst kind.”

Literature & Class at 30,000 ft:

...his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn't...

[cont'd]

On the leading edge of card tricks, this activity being fanatically evolved, like all others [for the boy], there were hour-long spectaculars with plots as complicated as Little Dorrit (which revolves, if you recall, on someone leaving money to his nephew’s lover’s guardian’s brother’s youngest daughter: Little Dorrit) and with interplay of theme and pattern aspiring to the architectonic, the Prousto-Joycean...